by Rob McCarthy
‘Call it an operational expense,’ Noble said. ‘No one wants to end up wearing Primark after the day you’ve had, do they?’
She tapped the pizza boxes and slid them towards Harry.
‘Tuck in,’ she said. ‘Two-for-Tuesdays; we might as well.’
He was suddenly starving, the smell of hot food trumping his nausea, making him feel like he’d not eaten for a week. When he’d finished getting changed, Wilson had left. He caught his reflection in the mirror and resisted a desire to go and wash his face again, as if there were microscopic traces of Lahiri’s blood that he could remove. He opened a pizza box and wolfed a slice down in one bite.
‘Thanks,’ he grunted. Noble had the news on; recorded footage of the inauguration of the US president for his second term. Underneath the video, the headline ticker ran. Harry read, Police confirm that a 35-year-old man has died following a shooting at a marina in Rotherhithe, South London.
‘Turn that shit off before the headlines come on,’ Harry said. ‘Please.’
Noble reached for the remote. The book said to use the silences, and they did, staring at a blank TV and eating pizza.
‘You guys got anything?’ Harry said after a while.
‘Trying to trace a black Fiesta seen in the area going at high speed. Forensics are tough, obviously, with the weather.’
‘What about the USB?’ Harry said.
Noble shook her head.
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means they’re still working on it,’ she said. ‘Christ knows what’s on there.’
Harry closed his eyes and saw Lahiri again, holding that cigarette. Just before the hole had appeared in the back of his head. Harry felt the tears well up and inhaled deeply to try to hold them in. Noble broke the silence.
‘Is there anyone I can call for you, any friends you’d like to speak to?’
Harry shook his head.
‘Parents?’
‘My mum’s dead, and I haven’t spoken to my dad in twenty years.’
Noble turned back to the window.
‘Do you want a drink?’ she said.
Harry looked down slowly. There was a half-litre bottle of vodka at her side, which had appeared from nowhere. It was supermarket brand, Marks & Spencer. Wilson evidently knew her too well. Noble had fetched two glasses from the hotel room’s coffee table and filled them both half full. She had read his mind.
‘I shouldn’t,’ he said. ‘My old shrink told me I shouldn’t drink when I’m feeling fragile. Something about making dark places darker.’
‘You think it can get much darker than this?’ Noble said.
Harry picked up the tumbler and emptied half of it into his mouth. The vodka burned down his throat, and the sensation reminded him of the way the vomit had burned up after he’d come out of the water. He shivered and smelt shit again, scrunched his eyes shut. Noble rose and reached into the plastic bag at her side, pulling out a packet of condoms. Durex Extra Safe. Harry shuffled in his seat, and she caught his eye and winked.
Once she was finished wrapping the condoms over the room’s two smoke detectors, she sat back down opposite Harry, and lit up. The smoke swirled over towards him and he inhaled a little of it, hoping for a little passive nicotine. Looked back down at the drink.
‘To James,’ he said, raising it.
Noble touched his glass with hers, and each of them drained their tumbler in one long pull; two experienced imbibers getting to know one another. She reached to refill the glass, and Harry looked at her and wondered if alcohol was something more, filling a gap in her life that bereavement had created. She looked far too young to be a widow.
‘I couldn’t help but notice,’ she said. ‘Your back, when you came out of the shower . . .’
She was talking about the criss-cross of scars across Harry’s right flank, all tributaries joining to the main track that ran across the right side of his chest and round to his back.
‘Those are from the day James Lahiri saved my life,’ he said.
‘Oh, Christ, I’m sorry,’ Noble said, covering her face with one hand. ‘I’m a stupid—’
‘No, you should know,’ said Harry. ‘I feel like I should tell you. He and I were MOs at a forward operating base in the valley above the Musa Qala river. Four hours by road from the next nearest base. We were the only doctors, with a company from the Anglians and a few dozen locals. We only had a skeleton kit – if anyone got seriously hurt we’d fly them back to Bastion, but it kept us busy enough. Weeks before, we’d had a bad job – five of the boys injured in a rocket attack a mile from our front door. Four of them made it. After that, Tammas, our boss, came up to visit, see how we were doing. We were sitting out in the main courtyard, having a brew. Lahiri went for a piss.
‘First thing we heard was an explosion in the officers’ mess, which was right behind us. Sounded like a grenade. We got up, and one of the local Afghan police ran out of the mess, rifle in his hand. He shot Tammas, then he shot me. Next thing I knew I was on the ground, groping in my pocket for a field dressing. I could feel my own blood coming through my fingers. That’s one of the last things I remember. That’s when the real fighting started. They’d been up in the hills above the base, waiting for this bastard to go before they attacked.’
Noble’s glass was empty. Her eyes, widened by the alcohol, were fixed on him. He was waiting for the lump to rise in his throat, but it never did any more. He’d left out the part he always did, turning to see the policeman running out of the mess, one hand already unbuckling his holster. Shaking so much that he dropped his pistol, scrabbling to pick it up as Tammas fell beside him, and taking one in the chest before he could reach it. It would have been a clean shot, centre mass, if he hadn’t fucked it up.
‘He shot two more guys before they took him down. Four of our boys emptied their rifles into him. Lahiri was on us fairly quickly. Apparently he heard the shooting but he couldn’t come out ’cause he couldn’t stop pissing. He was just standing there holding his dick while the fucking Taliban were running around our FOB.’
Noble’s face was strained, like she wasn’t sure whether to laugh or not. Harry looked down and realised he was holding the tumbler hard enough to make his knuckles go white.
‘Anyway, I had two collapsed lungs and my liver ended up split in two. The crappy Russian bullets they use fall apart the moment they hit you. Tammas took one through his spine, he was paralysed from the neck down. Still is. They flew in a Chinook to evacuate both of us, and two of the other injured guys. Saved my life for sure. James put two chest tubes in me, six units of blood, carried me up the valley to where they touched it down. There was lavender growing in the fields around the base. I remember that.’
‘Christ,’ she said after a long silence. The vodka was gone.
‘Yeah. Three Afghan National officers dead in the mess, along with two of our lads. Tammas gone from the neck down. Everyone else made it. A shitty fucking awful day. Five for one, six if you count Tammas.’
‘Thanks.’ Noble said. ‘You didn’t need to tell me all that.’
‘I know,’ Harry said. ‘But I wanted you to know what kind of man James Lahiri is. We were out in the open like sitting ducks, our perimeter was compromised, there were snipers and rockets in the hills. And he just knelt down, and got his kit out, and got to work. Like he was in A&E on a quiet Sunday afternoon, and it was just another job. That’s the kind of man he is.’
Noble looked at him with a patronising smile, and Harry realised the tense he’d just used, and then stood up. He froze for a moment.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought I needed to be sick.’
Noble nodded, and went into the bathroom. Harry sat back down again, slowly. The alcohol was beginning to get into his system, blunting the edge of his pain. He felt a sudden lust for sleep he knew wouldn’t come. Looked out of the window and wondered how many other people were lonely and getting drunk in a hotel room in this city, and wished he could just be one of them. At least h
e wasn’t getting drunk on his own, he thought as Noble came back into the room, took her blazer off, and put her gun in the top drawer of the bedside table. The holster straps cut into her shirt, framing the defined, muscular shoulders.
‘I might put on some music,’ she said. Harry nodded and looked across at the bottle. Between them they’d emptied it in half an hour. James would have been proud of that. He went back to staring. Outside the window, streams of motorway light merged like rainwater along a cobbled street, and the sparse opening chords of a Beethoven sonata pierced the room.
‘Oh, what’s the fucking point!’ Harry said.
He swivelled out of the seat and stood up but she was right there. His tumbler hit her shirt and the liquid spilled out onto the floor, his arm lurching to catch it. When he righted himself they were close.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
He looked down at her, nodded slowly, and she arched her neck backwards, pushing her face close into his, one hand pressed flat against his shirt. When it came, the kiss was desperate, it and the alcohol mixing in Harry’s brain, summoning an army of chemicals to replace the fear and the grief. The pair of them stumbled backwards towards the bed, Noble pulling him down with her.
He rose and switched off the music, silencing the piano before the introduction was even over. She was waiting for him on the bed, the leather straps where the gun usually sat still cutting into a shirt one size too small. He pulled the holster off her, then the shirt, and then she took off his, and wrapped her legs around him, pushing his erection into her body. Harry glanced up at the door.
‘It’s locked,’ said Noble. ‘Anyway, I’m waiting.’
She tapped the bedside table on which the holster and the gun rested. ‘Fuck it, Harry,’ she said. ‘If someone’s coming, we may as well die like this.’
The sex was how sex should be, Harry thought. Unexpected, ambushing, intense. But the thoughts it left him with, alone in the bed as she showered, were bitter and unwelcome. He’d never felt this sick after sex before. He’d never cried afterwards either.
The last woman he’d had in bed had been Alice Lahiri, and at the moment Detective Inspector Frances Noble had wrapped her legs around his and brought him to climax he had thought of her. Once they were done, he heard Lahiri’s voice, not condescending, but speaking in pained sympathy. You know how it feels, right? Same reason funerals make you want it. When you survive something like that, you just want to shag the living daylights out of anything you see, so you can prove you’re still alive.
Sex with Alice had always been routine, cold, without anything that could be called passion, as if it were a necessary part of what they were doing, of their joint betrayal of the man they’d both supposedly loved. Harry was lying on the bed, listening to the hum of the shower as it pumped water over Noble’s body. The sex had been primal, a path of least resistance to expunge the wrath that all the gods Harry didn’t believe in had hurled down on them that day.
Four hours ago, he had seen his best friend die. And now he lay naked on a bed in a hotel room, with a drunken, grieving widow in the shower, thinking about his dead friend’s wife.
Fuck that. Fuck it all.
He walked naked to the coffee table and tried to pour vodka from the bottle, but it was empty. His eyes scanned the room, running over the door, the line of light glowing beneath it, coming to rest on the bedside table. He thought about the gun on top of it, and the round in its chamber. Then he collapsed onto the bed and sat back up again, exhaling forcefully. He’d not had thoughts like that in a while. In fact, this was the first one this year and, though fleeting, it scared him to the core. They came at times like this, when he was staring into the unimaginable, face to face with his own weaknesses and the consequences of the decisions he’d made.
All the arguments against flooded into his head at once. Chief among them was one voice.
You can’t let James down. You let him down before, and now he’s dead, you can’t do that. You owe him that much. Maybe you couldn’t save him, like he saved you, but you can make sure that the bastard who did it rots in the closest thing they can find to hell.
He went over to the carrier bag that Noble’s colleague had brought in with the pizza, and rooted for anything he could sleep in. He didn’t want to be naked when she came in from the shower, even if they weren’t sharing a bed. She emerged wrapped up in a towel, moving gingerly, the polar opposite of her professional bravado.
‘You OK?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘Yeah, I’m good.’
The water from the shower had covered it up, but from the red in Noble’s eyes Harry was sure she’d been crying, too. She put her underwear on underneath her towel and pulled a sleeveless vest from her rucksack, letting the towel fall to the floor.
‘I’m sorry,’ Harry said as she climbed into her bed.
‘Don’t be,’ Noble said, pulling the covers over her.
He looked across at her and wondered if she’d thought of Jack. She reached up and turned off the light, a thin sliver of orange still filtering in through the window from the city outside. The sheets were damp with their sweat.
After a few minutes, she sat up. ‘I need to smoke,’ she said. ‘Want one?’
Harry said he didn’t. The lights went back on. She took the empty vodka bottle to use as an ashtray and lit up, her face bathed in an orange glow. She was sitting on the end of her bed, facing the desk. He wondered if she’d planned it. While he’d been washing Lahiri’s blood off his face, perhaps.
Harry lay in his bed, smelling her smoke, thinking of how stupid it all was. A rising anger that he’d let himself be seduced so easily. He knew why, too.
‘You remember me, don’t you?’ he said.
‘I remembered you the moment I saw you,’ Noble replied. ‘When you came through the cordon on Camberwell Road.’
The Ruskin, last April. Forty-one-year-old Detective Chief Inspector Jack Noble lay brain-dead in the ICU, his body an empty shell. Long since sunk into a coma for his own good, he was not in any pain, but there was no hope left. His wife, serene, professional, not a tear in sight, held his hand as the nurses switched off first the monitors, then the machines. The rest of the team, Harry included, stood silent at the back of the room, a guard of honour in pink scrubs. No drugs, no electric shocks, no one breaking ribs in an attempt to restart his heart. Just a man ceasing to be, forty years too soon.
‘Did you remember me?’ Noble said, lighting another. ‘You persuaded me to donate his organs. I always felt guilty about that. Jack would have hated me for it.’
‘Yes, I did.’ Harry now sat up in his bed. ‘And don’t say that. I hope that it helped you. Knowing that some good came of it.’
‘Someone got his kidneys, his liver. And his lungs and his heart. You wanted his eyes too, but I wouldn’t let you have them. I couldn’t stand the thought of walking along the street one day, and seeing someone with Jack’s eyes. Even if that sounds ridiculous, I’d just think it was them.’
Harry remembered the full conversation now. He’d used all the usual lies. Instantly. Painless. He wouldn’t have suffered. In fact, Jack Noble had likely been alive for a few minutes after his pushbike had disappeared beneath the Sainsbury’s delivery truck at Vauxhall Cross. It had taken time for an extradural blood clot to squeeze his brain out of the hole between his skull and his spine. Harry hadn’t told the grieving widow those details back then, and he had no intention of rectifying that omission now.
‘There’s been no one since him, has there?’ he said.
Noble shook her head.
‘Is that why you wanted me? Because I was there, at the end? Because I was connected to him?’
She threw the half-smoked fag into the vodka bottle and turned to him. She was sullen, upset, probably the closest Frankie Noble ever came to crying. ‘Fuck you,’ she said.
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘Why do you even give a shit?’
‘I—’
‘Why can’t y
ou just accept what happened and forget about it and move on? Why can’t you be a typical fucking man, and do that?’
Harry took a long deep breath. ‘I can do that,’ he said. ‘I can not give a shit if you don’t want me to.’
Noble looked across at him, her eyes hurt.
‘I think it’d be for the best,’ she said.
‘OK.’
‘You know, there aren’t enough people in this world who do give a shit,’ Noble said, tucking herself under the covers. Harry heard her words blend into one another and realised she was probably still a little under the influence.
‘You give a shit, don’t you?’ she continued. ‘I know that you give a shit about your girl from the riots. Zara, or whatever you call her. I did some research on you. I pulled the file. Since August 2011 you’ve made fourteen separate enquiries to the Met in relation to her. All different units. Missing Persons, Homicide & Serious, Sapphire, Special Projects, Major Case Review, Vice & Organised, Narcotics. Even Fairweather’s gig, Professional Standards. That’s giving a shit, isn’t it?’
‘You could call it that,’ Harry said. He could close his eyes and picture Zara’s fragile body, the hair, the T-shirt, the paralysed look of fear in her unresponsive eyes right at the start. The same dead look he’d seen on his friend’s face in the rain, that very evening.
‘Will she ever wake up?’
‘Professor Niebaum’s a world expert, and even he doesn’t know,’ Harry answered. ‘There have been people where she is now who’ve woken up after weeks, months, even years. If she does, the chances are she’ll have brain damage.’
‘What’s the difference between her and what happened to Jack?’
Harry felt his skin go cold. ‘Jack was brain-dead,’ he forced himself to tell her. ‘He couldn’t breathe for himself, or control his blood pressure, or anything like that. Zara can do all those things. Her body functions just fine, her brain is functioning, too. It’s just her mind that we have to rescue.’
His words rang around the room, echoing off the glasses and the vodka bottle with the dead cigarette butts and ash.
