by Rob McCarthy
He decided to do a lap of the playground, spotting that one of the teachers was by the gate anyway. As he reached a corner, he saw Junior Idris in an Arsenal shirt, dribbling away from two of his schoolmates, both of whom were body-checking him, trying to dispossess him in any way they could. One of them succeeded, and the ball bounced along the ground, coming to a rest at Harry’s feet. Harry stopped it and looked up. Junior was standing right in front of him, If he recognised Harry, then he didn’t show it.
‘Ball.’
Said with no emotion. Harry was struck again by the family resemblance, and kept his foot on the ball, waiting for Junior to approach.
Once he did, Harry said, ‘How are you, Junior? You remember me?’
‘Don’t talk to feds,’ Junior said, the same venom in his voice. ‘I don’t talk to po-lice.’
‘I’m not police,’ Harry said. ‘We talked at the hospital. I’m one of the doctors treating your brother.’
Junior looked behind him and feinted forward. The kids he’d been playing with had formed a line underneath one of the hoops, arms folded, shoulder to shoulder, all eyes fixed on their friend and the unknown man with his foot on the basketball.
‘Don’t talk to doctors, neither,’ Junior Idris said. ‘They’s just as bad. Sol said they’s worse.’
Those words made Harry’s chest burn, and he rolled the basketball back to him. Junior picked it up, but kept looking at Harry, until one of his mates broke the line, ran forward and grabbed it from his hands.
‘Excuse me!’
Harry turned to find a burly PE teacher in an off-white tracksuit, one hand on his phone, evidently suspicious of the stranger who’d wandered into his class. Harry showed his ID, explained he was one of the Saviour Project doctors, and the teacher walked him to the gate. He was starting to realise that lying got easy once you believed it yourself.
Wilson and Gardner were parked up on the road, far enough out of sight that they wouldn’t seem suspicious. It was one of the Met’s unmarked fleet that was deliberately poorly maintained in order to fit in around places like the Old Kent Road, an old BMW 1-series with peeling paint and a smashed brake light. Harry knocked on the windscreen, disturbing Gardner from the emails on her phone and Wilson from the psychology textbook he was reading. Wilson reached back and opened the back door, and once Harry was inside, he pulled out and started heading south.
‘How’d it go?’ Wilson said.
‘Good,’ Harry said. ‘Idris was blackmailing someone for the money. Dawson doesn’t know who. All he knows was that Idris said there was a rich doctor who was giving him grass. Those exact words.’
‘Well, shit me,’ said Wilson. ‘That it?’
‘No,’ said Harry, trying not to sound proud. ‘Idris gave this to him. Just in case anything happened.’
Gardner turned around, and Harry dropped the USB into her waiting hand.
‘Jesus,’ she said.
‘Let’s get that up to the station right now,’ said Wilson. ‘If we can’t open it there we’ll courier it down to Technical. Christ, that’s mental. That’s great work, Doc.’
Harry didn’t know what to say. He was thinking about the look in Junior Idris’s eyes and the scar running down Shaq Dawson’s neck.
‘You want us to drop you home?’
‘Sure,’ said Harry. He was drumming his fingers on his thigh. This was progress. This was good.
They got onto the Walworth Road and Harry felt the car rattle as Wilson put his foot down.
‘Good job, Dr Kent,’ Gardner said. ‘Bloody good job.’
Wilson dropped him off outside his apartment block and walked him to his door in silence. Harry guessed that Noble had told him about the events of yesterday evening. They’d gone via Walworth station, where Gardner had gotten out of the car with the USB. Wilson had said that the Technical Services Unit for the South London region was all the way down in Sutton, so they’d have to organise a courier. Noble had to sign off on the funding. Best-case scenario, they’d know what was on it by the following morning.
Harry thought about that as he rode up in the lift. How the information wasn’t the important thing. It was all about how the individual pieces of fact interacted. Solomon Idris was getting money off a doctor, possibly something to do with the supply of cannabis and whoever was willing to pay to keep that information quiet. Harry wondered how many doctors Idris knew. He wandered through his kitchen, putting on the kettle, running a hand through his hair. Thinking about James, and the way they’d spoken together the night before. Not mended yet by any means, but going in the right direction. Two lonely men who’d been through so much together.
Harry scolded himself after thinking that. It would be easy, wouldn’t it, if it turned out that Lahiri had been paying Idris off. He’d often tried to do this, search for flaws in his friend, as if it justified what he’d done. But even then, a bit of weed seemed too little to kill someone over.
The kettle clicked but Harry ignored it. Looked at the bottle of Jameson’s on the coffee table and then the clock on the wall. Sat looking out of the window for about ten minutes before he pulled a tumbler from the kitchen cupboard and picked up the bottle, then the phone. Got the Marigold House switchboard and dialled the extension for Tammas’s room.
‘Afternoon.’
Tammas sounded well, like he sometimes did after a good physio session, which were necessary to stop his muscles wasting.
‘Boss,’ said Harry. ‘How’s it going?’
‘As ever. So you’re. Alive, then?’
‘I’m alive,’ said Harry.
‘Only. Last night. One minute. We’re. Talking and then. The next the. Line just. Goes.’
Harry had completely forgotten. He’d been talking to Tammas, when the deliveryman had attacked him.
‘Sorry about that,’ said Harry.
‘What happened? The. Battery just die?’
Harry said nothing, and drank whiskey as Tammas’s ventilator cycled. Tammas liked the stuff, so now and then Harry brought a bottle of a nice single malt down, and one of the nurses would let him drink it through a straw. Tammas’s brother was a naval lieutenant and his parents still lived in his native Dumfries, and the mother was getting old. Osteoarthritis, and now a stroke as well, so the family visits were few and far between.
‘A man attacked me,’ said Harry.
Tammas made a noise that was somewhere close to the word ‘no’, and Harry thought he could hear the tube rubbing against Tammas’s neck, the kind of noise that would be made if he was shaking his head. That was one of the few movements still intact.
‘Harry. I warned. You.’
‘Boss, he tried to warn me off this kid. They wouldn’t do that unless there was something going on. Something serious. Whoever’s behind this has tried to kill him. Twice. And they’ll do it again.’
‘Well the. Police. Will protect. Him. That’s their. Job.’
‘I know, but I need to—’
‘Harry!’
It was the loudest that Harry had heard Tammas’s voice in a long while, and from the tone he knew that Tammas had come close to calling him ‘Lieutenant’. He said nothing and waited for the rebuke to come.
‘You’re. Getting obsessed. With something. That doesn’t. Concern you,’ Tammas said. ‘It’s just. Like the girl. With the pink. Hair. All over again.’
Harry sat back in his chair and wanted to spit and shout, but resisted. Maybe it was a little bit like Zara, but that was because she and Solomon Idris had one thing in common – they were two human beings who had slipped through the cracks in society, two people who the rest of the world had decided didn’t matter. And Harry had to fight for them, because if he didn’t, then nobody would.
‘And I’ll. Tell you why.’ Tammas continued, ‘You. Speak to James. You’re. Close to. Admitting. What you did. And. Worse than that. He’s close. To. Forgiving you. And you. Can’t deal. With that. You stubborn. Bastard. So you’re. Going to run. Like you. Always do. Go and. Care abo
ut. A stranger who. Has nobody. Because you can’t face. Caring for. Someone you love.’
Harry let those words echo around his mind and wondered how true they were. Ten cycles passed before he spoke.
‘Speak,’ said Tammas.
Harry took a deep breath and finished off the whiskey.
‘We know that Solomon was blackmailing a doctor. Something involving drugs, apparently. Lahiri was his GP.’
‘It would. Be quite. Like him. To try and. Solve. A problem by throwing. Money at it.’
Harry said nothing. There was a lot of distance, though, between paying someone money and trying to get them killed. He felt a buzzing in his chest, a pain in that place. Lahiri had been in A&E; he couldn’t have fired a gun behind Wyndham Road. It couldn’t have been him there. But he’d been in A&E, so he could have been the one who changed the medical record. It had been done at 7.20, and the shifts changed at eight. Christ, he thought. Jesus Christ. Lahiri had been cagey the previous night, like there’d been something he’d been holding back.
‘You’re. Thinking, Harry. Aren’t you?’ Tammas said after a minute or so of silence. ‘It’s always. Dangerous. When you’re thinking.’
Harry couldn’t help it.
‘Not the time, Boss.’
‘Just. Pretend you’re. In medical school. Again. And think of. Horses. Not of. Zebras. Make the right. Calls. I always. Trusted. You to. Do that.’
Tammas hung up. The old, clichéd aphorism, imploring doctors to consider common diagnoses ahead of rare, unusual ones. But the horse in this case didn’t feel right. He just needed to wait, to find something to occupy his time while the police did their work. Soon, they’d know what secret Idris had almost died for. And Noble’s people running through the IT system at the Ruskin would find out who’d deleted the allergy. And then they’d unleash hell on them. They’d get a result on this, they wouldn’t give up, not like they had with the girl.
Tammas’s warning had been right, he realised. Lahiri had taunted him about it, too, on the boat. The whole hospital talks about Dr Kent’s little obsession. He’d just brushed that off, but somehow hearing it from Tammas made him think a little more. At the start, when the police started losing interest, he’d been making phone calls every day to various departments and detectives, with little yield. Then he’d got in touch with missing-persons charities, newspapers, websites. The Standard had run a little feature about it, but the rest of the nationals, and the TV networks, were only interested if they had police cooperation. And the police wouldn’t fund a media campaign over a case that had such a minuscule chance of being solved.
Now, he took a less concerted approach. Taking the job with the police had been a good decision – every now and then there was the odd promised favour, or a midnight coffee shared with some detective he would try and interest. But so far he’d had the same chorus of shrugged shoulders. It’s London, mate. People vanish all the time. Hopefully, when all this was over, and the person who had tried to get Idris killed was behind bars, he could buy Frankie Noble a drink and persuade her to take up Zara’s case.
She was someone’s daughter, and presumably she’d disappeared from their life. Maybe she’d been gone already, so they didn’t notice. These thoughts, and many others, had gone through his head a million times already.
Tammas had once asked him why he didn’t just leave everything, move on. He hoped it was a stubborn, self-righteous refusal to be another person who just gave up. He didn’t like to consider the fact that it was because he had nothing else to move on to. Apart from a career that was going nowhere, and a membership form for a dating website waiting in his inbox.
Harry didn’t think about Tammas’s words again. He needed to think about something else. The winter sun was coming in low through the living-room window, his view of the city obliterated by its light. He tried turning on the TV. Reading one of the research journals he tried to keep up with. None of that worked, so he went to the kitchen and decided he’d try cooking something, even though he wasn’t hungry. Put some tomatoes in a saucepan and reboiled the kettle. There was pasta in a cupboard, and some sausages in the fridge.
Maybe Tammas was right. He’d got too involved, forgotten that he was meant to be a doctor, and that his duty of care was to his patients, not to the police, not to anyone else. He thought about Solomon Idris again. The fragile, emaciated figure, sitting in the yellow light of a chicken shop. The hard look in his bloodshot eyes still struck Harry to the core. He walked back into the living room, picked up the tumbler and the whiskey bottle on the way. When he got there, his phone was vibrating against the glass table.
Lahiri.
‘Hello?’ Harry said. For some reason he was already nervous.
‘Harry, where are you?’
He stood rooted to the spot, aware his heart was racing. There was an alien timbre to Lahiri’s voice, one Harry couldn’t quite figure out.
‘My flat.’
‘You wouldn’t mind coming over, would you?’ said Lahiri. ‘I think we’d better talk.’
‘What about?’
‘Solomon. I wasn’t completely honest with you last night.’
Harry ran out of the living room with the phone still pressed to his ear, searching for his keys. He’d worked out what was bothering him about Lahiri’s voice, the emotion he’d never heard in his friend before. Lahiri was scared.
‘I’m on my way,’ he said.
He got his coat on and headed out at a run, the door slamming behind him.
He pushed the car fast through the rain and the rush-hour traffic, using back roads to avoid the big roundabouts. If he got pulled over, he could always try the doctor-on-call line. He was trying not to think about the tone of Lahiri’s voice – it was the kind of voice junior doctors used when they were calling him up about patients they thought were about to crash. The voice of men on the edge.
He checked his watch as he moved down Greenland Road. He was a minute away, not far at all. He tried not to think about Tammas’s words, about his thoughts. Tried just to concentrate on the road. A light ahead turned amber and Harry sped up to catch it, only for a cyclist to change lanes and brake, forcing him to stop. The deceleration threw him forward in his seat, and he was about to swear when he felt his phone vibrating against his thigh.
To his surprise, it wasn’t Lahiri.
‘Frankie, I can’t talk now, I’m driving.’
‘Yes, you can,’ said Noble. ‘Pull over.’
He swerved left and pulled up against the side of the road. Kept the engine running. His heart was racing. Noble sounded agitated, too. Shouting in the background, like she was outside.
‘What is it?’
‘I need James Lahiri’s address.’
‘Why?’
‘We audited all the accounts of people working in the East Wing on Monday morning. It was Lahiri’s log-in which made the change. He deleted the penicillin allergy, Harry.’
Harry balled his right hand into a fist and slammed it down on the dashboard, feeling the whole seat shake.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Look, I don’t want to get into—’
‘Are you sure, Frankie?’
‘It’s all there in black and white. I’m sorry. Technical Services got the data and we’ve got a warrant for his arrest. We’re at the address the Ruskin had on file for him, the one in Dulwich Village, and there’s some Russian family living here now. They say they moved in last October.’
Harry scrunched his eyes closed. Maybe the world would vanish. All he saw was Solomon Idris. The thin, hopeless figure, sitting in the yellow light of a restaurant. And then his body jerking in the ICU as Harry shocked his heart.
‘The fucking bastard!’
‘The address, Harry.’
Tightness spreading through his chest, his head sore like he’d just taken three amphetamines instead of his normal two.
‘He lives on a boat. South Dock Marina, Surrey Quays. It’s called the Time and Tide. Berth twenty-nine.
’
‘OK,’ said Noble. Harry heard her shout to whoever else was there. ‘Surrey Quays! Let’s move!’
He waited for her to move the phone back to her ear. Heard the clicks of car doors closing and the background noise disappear.
‘Frankie?’
‘What?’
‘I’m on my way there. To Lahiri’s.’
‘What? Why?’
‘He called me,’ Harry said. ‘Fifteen minutes ago. Said we needed to talk.’
‘Shit,’ Noble said. ‘You don’t need me to tell you, Harry, that if you warn Lahiri we’re coming for him, I’ll throw your arse in prison for obstructing an investigation. Is that absolutely clear?’
‘Yes.’
‘Keep him on the boat,’ said Noble. ‘Preferably inside. I’ll see you in a bit.’
Harry hung up and threw the phone to one side. It bounced off the passenger seat and landed in the footwell, and he swerved out into the traffic and earned himself a horn blast and a torrent of verbal abuse from the Honda he’d cut up.
The road ahead was fairly clear for evening rush hour. Lahiri’s old house in Dulwich was a fair way south, probably half an hour’s drive. Maybe less if they used lights and sirens.
He wondered why he was angry, why he was even surprised. On reflection, he should have known the moment Shaq Dawson had said the word ‘doctor’. Lahiri was the man with the secret. Solomon Idris had found out. And when the money wasn’t enough to keep him quiet, he had to die. Harry just prayed Lahiri was naive, out of his depth, that he hadn’t realised what he was getting into. That could be forgiven, if not excused.
The light ahead turned amber again. Harry put his foot to the floor.
Outside, the air felt heavy with rain, the twilight full of clouds as Harry parked his car by the marina’s entrance. It was almost dark. Behind the security fence, the boats had their lights on, projecting silhouettes of masts and beams onto the old dock walls at one side of the quay. The same harbour watchman was there, the same book open. Chapter Five: British History. He smiled in recognition. Opened the gate, waving.
