by Rob McCarthy
‘Anyway,’ Wilson said. ‘After that, Princess said that Idris and Dawson packed it in. Kept their heads down around the estate, started going to school. Around the start of last year, Idris stopped picking up from Santos. Previously he’d been a regular, just for skunk, nothing serious. But apparently he just stopped coming.’
The time that the mentoring scheme would have kicked in, Harry reasoned.
‘And in the summer, he started being seen with Keisha Best,’ Wilson said. ‘Together.’
‘More evidence for the happy couple?’ said Noble.
‘Well, that’s where it gets interesting,’ said Wilson. ‘Our friend used some colourful language to describe her. The first time Princess mentioned her it was And then he started gettin with that sket Keisha.’
Harry and Noble shared a look and shook their heads, and Wilson kept talking.
‘Turns out Keisha had been one of the girls that Martin Santos had on the go, and he considered her his property. That fact that she was going out with Solomon Idris pissed him off big-time. Santos wanted Keisha tagged. Know what that means?’
‘I don’t think I want to, do I?’ Harry said.
‘I’m surprised you haven’t seen it,’ said Wilson. ‘Basically, these monsters cut girl’s faces to “mark” them as dirty, having slept around. So then the other members of a gang know not to go there.’
‘Fucking hell,’ Harry said, a memory returning of one of his first shifts at the Ruskin, when he’d been an SHO in A&E. A fourteen-year-old girl with a V-shaped cut in her cheek. ‘I did know that, but I think I deliberately forgot.’
‘Yeah, well, thank God, Princess wouldn’t do it. Says he doesn’t hurt kids and he doesn’t hurt women, neither.’
‘Small mercies,’ said Noble.
‘But he said that in September, Martin Santos slept with Keisha Best on at least one occasion. He was sure about that.’
‘She cheated on Solomon?’ said Harry.
‘Probably not with malice,’ Wilson said. ‘It was probably closer to gang rape. Kids like Santos will organise house parties, where there’s lots of drink, lots of drugs – GHB’s a favourite – and then they and their mates take advantage of whoever they like.’
‘Christ . . .’ said Harry. It was another sad chapter in a sad story, most of which was missing, but which ended in front of a commuter train and in the mortuary at the Ruskin. Harry was about to ask whether Santos could’ve been the source of Keisha and Idris’s HIV infection, but then remembered that the numbers suggested Idris had been infected a good few years ago, and Keisha more recently.
‘That’s all he had on them, though,’ Wilson finished. ‘Didn’t even know that Keisha was dead. Hadn’t seen either of them since at least last October.’
‘Who’s in the third file?’ Noble said.
‘Shaquille Dawson,’ said Wilson, moving the file out from underneath the other two. The police mugshot had bloodshot eyes, lip curled downwards to reveal stained, yellow teeth. If it was taken at the same time as Idris’s, then Dawson was fifteen in the photo. He looked at least five years older.
‘He’ll know what was going on between Keisha and Idris,’ Harry said. ‘What would have driven him to do what he did. I take it you guys are speaking to him?’
Noble and Wilson looked at one another, before Wilson broke into resigned laughter. Harry tightened the muscles in his face to try and stop his cheeks flushing red.
‘In an ideal world, yes, we would,’ Noble started. And then Harry realised why Wilson was laughing. Even if Dawson was no longer criminally active, a former gang member would sooner turn on a family member than speak to the police. The potential consequences were too great. He guessed that it was exactly the kind of problem that the Saviour Project had been set up to deal with.
‘No chance,’ said Wilson. ‘Even if he’s gone straight, no kid from that estate will ever speak to a copper.’
‘What if it wasn’t a copper who interviewed him?’ Harry said.
Noble looked up at Harry. Finished chewing her mouthful.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I could do it.’
Noble shook her head and reached for her drink.
‘No, no, no—’
‘Hang on, hear me out,’ said Harry, raising a hand. ‘I spoke to the GP who runs this Saviour Project today. He said they do assemblies in schools. And the school that Idris and Dawson go to, it must have its fair share of problems with gangs, violence, stuff like that?’
‘Albany Road Academy,’ said Wilson. ‘Thirty per cent of the upper school has a record.’
‘So why don’t I speak to him and see if we can organise an assembly at the school? Dawson’s year. Short notice, maybe, but it could work. Get the docs in, and then take the kids one by one to chat in some rooms or something, and fix it so Dawson’s in with me. It’ll be a good cover, especially if all the kids have to do it.’
Even as the words came out of Harry’s mouth, the idea was still forming in his brain. Dawson knew Keisha, knew Solomon, might know why one of them had climbed down onto the track and stared a commuter train in the face, and the other had walked into a chicken shop with a loaded gun and waited for the police to kill him after he’d told his story to the world. Again Harry thought about a story with blank pages. They knew the beginning and the end, they just had to figure out the middle.
‘You think this GP would cooperate?’ Wilson said.
‘He told me he’d help in any way he could,’ Harry said. ‘He seemed to take what happened to Idris personally. He’ll help.’
‘I like it,’ said Noble. ‘We’ll do it tomorrow. If it works out.’
Harry tried to stop a smile forcing its way onto his face. Couldn’t work out whether he was happy that what had happened to Solomon Idris and Keisha Best was being investigated properly, or that it would be him who got to do it. There was something to be said for not relying on the promises of others.
‘Get this doctor on board and get back to me,’ Noble said, looking at Harry. ‘If we go ahead, you’ll be the one sitting down with Dawson, so I’ll brief you beforehand. Mo, I take it you can’t go in there as a body in the room?’
Wilson shook his head. ‘Too many kids at that place know me. But we could use Hannah.’
‘OK,’ said Noble. ‘You and me can be in a car outside with a couple of uniforms, near enough to get inside if there’s any trouble.’
‘You think there’ll be trouble?’ said Harry.
Wilson stood up and pulled his coat around his broad frame.
‘You ever been inside one of these schools?’
‘I went to Deptford Green,’ said Harry.
‘Then you know exactly what I mean,’ said Wilson.
Harry conceded the point.
‘Thanks for the food, guv,’ Wilson said. ‘I’ll do the paperwork to get the bodies for tomorrow. Be in touch.’
‘Just you and me,’ Harry muttered once Wilson was gone. Noble had finished her meal, and was wiping her hands on a sheaf of napkins.
‘Well, piss off and make phone calls, then,’ Noble said. ‘I’m gonna tie up this clusterfuck as best I can so I have the time free to work on this.’ She tapped the personnel files, gathering them together, then stood up and fixed Harry with hard eyes.
Harry got up from his seat, energised. Headed for the automatic doors and the cold night outside, pulling his phone from his pocket. Examined Duncan Whitacre’s business card in the light of a street lamp, and started to dial the number.
The Overground was busy with late-night commuters, and he had to wait for ten minutes on the platform at Peckham Rye. As he stood there, an express train passed, the livery blurred. He thought about only 468g of brain being present for examination, owing to distribution at the scene.
After he left Canada Water it took a while to get his bearings. He wasn’t familiar with the territory, but he asked one of the people waving copies of the Standard outside the station. The marina was five minutes away on foot, through
the old shipyards named after countries that had long since ceased maritime trade with London, the glass leviathans of Canary Wharf leering from across the river at their undeveloped neighbours, One Canada Square lit up like a prehistoric obelisk calling to religious followers.
The wharf behind him, Harry passed over a canal and headed in a three-quarter circle around one of the quays. Small grey flakes were drifting down from above, landing on his shoulders and in his hair, and he dug his hands deep into his pockets to avoid the biting cold. The marina was spread out in front of him, the boats ranging from luxury motor yachts with jet-skis moored on the stern to barges which looked as if they had rooted into the water and would never leave.
As he approached the gates, his phone buzzed.
The text was from Whitacre, confirming that everything was in place for tomorrow. They’d spoken at length, and Whitacre had jumped at the chance to assist. Solomon Idris was his patient, he’d said, and he felt duty bound to help in any way he could. Whitacre would meet him tomorrow at twelve, along with another doctor and Charlie Ambrose, the youth worker who ran the scheme day to day.
Back to school, Harry thought. He wondered what question he’d ask Shaquille Dawson first. So far, everything he’d found out about Idris had just made the picture murkier.
They killed Keisha, and the feds didn’t give a shit.
The marina was surrounded by wrought-iron black fencing, the single gap occupied by a gate and a guard hut.
‘Can I help you?’
The watchman was dressed in a turtleneck fleece and a woollen hat, his booth heated only by a three-bar electric fire. There was a book lying face down on the bench entitled How to Pass the UK Citizenship Test.
Harry produced his hospital ID. ‘Can you call through to James Lahiri, please? Tell him Harry’s here to see him.’
‘You’re Harry? Mr Lahiri tells me you were coming,’ the guard said, releasing the gate. ‘Go on through. Berth twenty-nine. Turn left, second jetty on your right.’
Harry went through the gate and followed the guard’s instructions. He caught sight of the Dome between the blocks of flats, a vague memory rising, a visit with his mother just after his eighteenth birthday, a few weeks after his interview at medical school.
Lahiri’s boat was called the Time and Tide, a forty-three foot motor yacht whose sleek design reminded Harry of a sports car, two glass doors leading into the main cabin, with leather sofas and mood lighting. There were a couple of feet of clearance between the dock and the aft deck, and Harry made the jump with no difficulty. The boat had probably cost at least half a million, he thought, and Lahiri still had a hefty mooring rent to pay. Few other outgoings, though. No mortgage. No wife. Not any more, anyway.
‘This a boarding party or something?’
The voice came from the side deck on the other side of the boat. Lahiri, wearing a diamond-patterned wax jacket, was just finishing a cigarette, flicking the ash over the side into the water.
‘You started again?’ Harry said, genuinely surprised.
‘Yeah.’
‘You’re the only person I know who managed to give up in Afghanistan.’
‘Thing is,’ Lahiri said, looking out across the river, ‘when I got back, I found out some bastard had been shagging my wife.’
Harry’s heart hit the floor. Lahiri threw the butt over the side and headed down into the boat’s lounge, which held two sofas, one looking out through the doors onto the aft deck, the other facing a plasma-screen television and a satellite phone on an asymmetrical carbon-fibre table.
‘Take a seat,’ Lahiri said. He went to a cupboard in the galley. Beyond it were two half-flights of stairs, which looked like they led down to a living area and up to the helm. Harry settled into the sofa and Lahiri picked up an open bottle of wine from the side and two glasses. ‘You drinking tonight?’ he asked.
Harry hadn’t planned to – he tried not to drink if he was working the following day, but tonight could be an exception. ‘Go on, then.’
Lahiri passed him a glass, and Harry took a sip. It was acid sharp. Probably the first glass of wine he’d had since the hospital’s Christmas party.
‘I saw that face,’ Lahiri said. ‘Looks like none of Alice’s more cosmopolitan tastes rubbed off on you.’
Harry said nothing. Lahiri raised up the glass and spun it between his fingers.
‘This is good stuff. Macon-Villages Sauvignon Blanc, the 2012 vintage. Feels bad to be wasting it on you, really . . .’
Lahiri laughed and Harry pretended to join him. Those kinds of jokes used to be second nature, more often than not going in the other direction. Jokes about Lahiri fucking ponies while Harry drank jellied eels by the pint glass.
‘I’ll happily take a Stella if you’ve got one,’ Harry said.
‘Afraid not,’ said Lahiri. ‘Anyway, what are Solomon Idris’s chances? Fifty-fifty?’
Harry sipped more of the acid wine.
‘If that,’ he said.
The silence rolled over them with the spray of the wind, blowing droplets of sleet against the windows. Harry regarded his friend in the quiet, London’s light blurry through the wet glass behind him.
‘Be a damn shame to lose him ’cause of a bloody clerical error, after fighting so hard to get him through last night. Shouldn’t happen in the twenty-first century, should it?’
Harry opened his mouth, ready to voice his suspicions. But then he decided against it.
‘Systems work through people,’ he said instead. ‘People fuck up.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lahiri, finishing his wine. ‘They do.’
Harry wished there was music or television in the background. Something to dull the oppressive edge of the silences.
‘Such a relief that you turned up in that ambulance,’ Lahiri said after a while. ‘I mean, Kinirons is a safe pair of hands in Resus, but George bloody Traubert . . .’
Harry laughed. He was glad to know he wasn’t the only one who thought of Traubert that way. ‘Tell me about it,’ he said. ‘He’s my boss.’
‘Even I was getting nervous,’ said Lahiri, ‘and I’m a bloody GP.’
Harry laughed. It was the first self-deprecating joke of the night. A glimpse of the old James. Another silence.
‘How did it feel?’ said Harry. ‘When you recognised Solomon, in A&E?’
Lahiri poured himself another glass of wine and scratched at the hair he had left above his right ear. He did that when he was thinking, or nervous. Harry remembered that during their surgical rotation, he’d had to keep his fingers interlocked so he didn’t scratch his hair with his sterile gloves.
‘Just the same as how it felt when I came into the sick bay and saw you and Tammas lying on the floor,’ said Lahiri. ‘Perhaps a little less acute, granted. But still the fear. I felt like every single experience in my life had been training me for those few minutes. In A&E, I had you, I had the rest of the team. Back then, I was on my own.’
‘You saved my life,’ Harry said. ‘If Idris lives, you’ll have helped saved his, too.’
‘Yeah, well, you did the hard work,’ said Lahiri. ‘You and Mr Gunther.’
Harry shuffled on the seat, trying the wine a third time, and managing a decent enough gulp. If he didn’t hurry up, Lahiri would drink the whole bottle. Maybe that would be a good thing.
‘How well did you know Idris?’ said Harry.
‘I’d already set up the job at Burgess Park,’ said Lahiri, resting back on the sofa, hands behind his head. ‘Duncan even let me postpone it after I decided to go back to Afghan. When I got back, he introduced me to the Saviour Project. Idris started with us in 2009, but he only really engaged after he got attacked in 2011. Duncan did his initial sessions, then he got put on my list when I joined. I kept on seeing him, about once a month.’
‘What do you see him for?’
‘Check-up,’ said Lahiri. ‘That’s how the project works. They come in for a clinic, they talk to me, Duncan or Lisa for ten minutes, then they go chat to
a youth worker.’
‘Tell me about him,’ Harry said. He didn’t care how the wine tasted any more, just wanted it down him.
‘Why do you want to know?’ said Lahiri.
‘Because I have no idea why a seventeen-year-old kid would try and get himself killed like he did last night,’ Harry said. ‘And why someone would want to make sure of it.’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘The police recovered a spent shell casing from an alleyway off Wyndham Road, behind the Chicken Hut. Someone fired a gun hoping that the police would storm the restaurant and kill Idris, and they almost succeeded. And today his penicillin allergy disappeared from the hospital system. Somebody wants this kid dead.’
Lahiri said nothing. Just spun an empty wine glass between his fingers and looked at Harry. Another memory rose. The Maudsley, third-year psychiatry. A young student had walked into the consulting room, sat down and told them both that MI5 were beaming thoughts into his head. James had looked at that man in exactly the same way.
‘Just tell me what you know,’ Harry said. ‘And then I’ll leave you alone.’
Outside, a particularly vicious wind had started, and occasionally a handful of sleet would pound against one of the windows. Lahiri took a deep breath, refilled his glass, topped up Harry’s, and began.
‘As far as I know, Sol had a pretty crap start in life. His dad pissed off back to Nigeria when he was about seven, left his mum to bring him and his brother up. He started getting involved with gangs from when he was about ten, because sometimes his mum’s benefits couldn’t cover them. He wanted new clothes, and an Arsenal shirt, and football boots for school, and the older kids on the estate would pay him a fiver to deliver bags of weed to their customers. Police don’t search the young ones.
‘Before he knew it, he was involved in the Wooly OC. Four years ago, he had to initiate himself by attacking a member from a rival gang. Waited for him outside his school in Loughborough Junction, stuck a knife in him as he came out.’
‘Solomon Idris stabbed someone?’ Harry said, voice cracking.
