by Rob McCarthy
Whitacre’s face dropped in surprise, the same way Lahiri’s had when Harry had told him he knew about the cannabis, and he slapped the desk with the palm of his hand. Harry watched the particles settle back down to the bottom of the snow globe and waited for Whitacre to speak.
‘A lot of people have worked very hard for the Saviour Project,’ he said. ‘Not least James Lahiri.’
And look how he ended up being repaid, Harry thought but didn’t say. Wilson’s phone started vibrating in his pocket, but he ignored it. He had Whitacre alone now, and the way he’d reacted when Harry had brought up the money told him he was onto something.
‘Solomon was difficult,’ Whitacre said. ‘He’d told us that the only way he was ever going to be able to start anew was if he got out of London. Maybe he was right. But the council wouldn’t rehouse him on account of his age. So he asked James for money, and James came to me, and we said no. Because if we did it for him, we’d have to consider others, and we just don’t have the budget.’
‘So Solomon came back, and he said that if you didn’t give him the money, he’d tell the press that you were prescribing kids weed?’ Harry said.
Whitacre nodded. Pulled an e-cigarette from his desk drawer and sucked from it, the tip glowing purple.
‘I don’t need to tell you, Harry, that the NHS is under attack from all sides,’ he said. ‘That kind of leak would be certain death for the project. One story in the papers and the commissioning board would shut us down. Ten thousand was worth it.’
‘You made that decision, then?’
‘I did,’ Whitacre said. ‘And I’d do it again. I took it out of my own bloody savings so it wouldn’t show up on the accounts. I kept James out of it, though I’m sure he worked it out.’
Harry looked at him, seeing the pride. Shook his head, and tried to look as disapproving as possible.
‘You covered it up.’
‘Yes, I covered it up,’ Whitacre said. ‘I won’t pretend I didn’t. Refer me to the GMC. Call your friends down here and arrest me. Sometimes you’ve got to do something bad so that something worse doesn’t happen. I would have thought you would have known that.’
‘Something worse?’ Harry said.
‘These kids,’ Whitacre said, an arm outstretched to the window, the sleet and concrete towers outside. ‘For some of them, the Saviour Project is the only hope they’ve got. Everybody else has given up. They don’t have families, the education system sees them as failures, the police see them as criminals. If we go under, then eight years of hard work gets wasted, and what do you think would happen to the patients? Society has given up on these people. We’re all they have.’
The preacher was back. Whitacre’s face was as red as his eyes, and Harry saw the righteousness he’d first seen in the assembly hall of Solomon Idris’s school. It reminded him of the fanaticism of some of the locals they’d met in Helmand Province, human beings so committed to a cause that it had utterly consumed them, to the point where their goals trumped anything else. That worried Harry, because it made him wonder if there was a limit to what this man would cover up to protect his project. As much as it had riled Whitacre, Harry knew this wasn’t about a few joints of cannabis. It centred on a much more unspeakable horror than that.
‘Well?’ Whitacre said.
‘Idris was keen to get out of London, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, he was.’
‘Any idea why?’ Harry said. He had no idea whether his feigned ignorance was convincing or not.
Whitacre shrugged. ‘I wish I’d known more about him, Harry. You think I don’t regret that? We failed Solomon, both me and James. And it appears he’s paid a price for that.’
‘There was no one else in his life, other than Keisha Best?’ Harry said. ‘Nothing romantic? Nothing sexual?’
He watched Whitacre intently, waiting for the giveaway, that initial micro-expression of shock that would come with the last question, but it didn’t. Whitacre stared at him hard and said, ‘I don’t know. If anyone would have known, it would’ve been James.’
Six frantic knocks on the door.
‘Come in,’ said Whitacre.
Another man with a haunted face entered the room. This one belonged to Charlie Ambrose, and he was out of breath and sweating hard. The youth worker had on a heavy coat, scarf and hat, which were wet from the sleet outside. His eyes looked wet, too, and had the look of a child seeking reassurance.
‘I take it you’ve heard, Charlie,’ Whitacre said.
‘They told me when I turned up for work at the Ruskin,’ Ambrose said. ‘I went straight to my church, I couldn’t . . .’
‘Sit down,’ Whitacre said. ‘We’ll talk. Dr Kent was just leaving.’
‘That’s not it,’ Ambrose continued, and now Harry got worried. The look on his face wasn’t just shock, it was panic. ‘There’s a police car outside. Two of them in reception, asking for your office. They told me not to come upstairs and warn you, but I—’
Whitacre bolted to his feet. For a brief moment Harry braced himself, expecting a punch, but it never came. Just a meaty finger, aimed right at his chest.
‘You bastard!’ Whitacre shouted. ‘You self-righteous arsehole.’
What have they found? Harry thought as he stared at Whitacre. Tried to picture him as the man in the video, imagine his voice as the mechanical one of the man who’d raped one teenager and forced another to do the same. The thought made him instantly furious. He felt Ambrose step closer to him at one side, turning for the door. There was noise in the corridor outside, and before Harry could speak two uniformed coppers entered, one male, one female, hands on their belts.
‘Arsehole!’ Whitacre repeated, jabbing his finger at Harry again, before turning to the officers. ‘You’re arresting an innocent man! This is bullshit!’
Ambrose going to Whitacre’s side. ‘Don’t give them an excuse, Duncan!’
‘I will tear you guys apart!’ Whitacre continued as the police officers approached. Harry backed away from him, looking straight at the coppers. The female one, older by a few years, stepped forward.
‘Sir, calm down!’ she bawled. ‘We’re not here for you.’
Whitacre stopped, his rant terminated mid-sentence, his mouth hanging open in confusion. Harry was confused, too, but when the male copper turned around, everything fell into place. He closed his eyes and waited for the copper to speak.
‘Harry Kent, I have received a request for you to attend Lewisham police station for questioning in relation to the murder of James Lahiri. You are not under arrest—’
‘Good,’ said Harry, bursting for the door. But the male officer got there first, holding his waist with a thick arm.
‘What the fuck?’ Harry said. ‘Let go of me!’
The copper gripped harder, and Harry had to restrain himself. The officer didn’t have a good hold, and with a well-placed headbutt Harry would have been free, but he stopped himself. When he looked forward, the female officer was in front of him.
‘Harry Kent, I am arresting you on suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’
Despite the arrest, he wasn’t put in a cell or processed, just taken straight to an interview room at Lewisham. In the car, he’d said nothing other than repeatedly demand to be put in touch with Noble, but the uniforms had just used the usual bullshit about being the people who executed the warrant, not the people who wrote it. On the journey, the man had asked him if he was the doctor who’d been at the Camberwell Road shooting, and then the woman had told her partner to keep his mouth shut. They’d put him in a cold and small room and told him that people were coming down to speak to him. He knew how this worked. They’d be going through his house, and his locker at work. Silently, he congratulated himself on switching the labels on the aspirin and amphetamine bottles. A drugs charge w
ould be a gift for the police, letting them remand him in custody and giving them even more time to trump up charges, when they should be out finding the bastard who’d killed his friend and raped two teenagers.
On the drive, he’d come to a few conclusions. Tammas had told them about the affair with Alice Lahiri, which he’d neglected to mention when the two detectives had questioned him yesterday evening. They had to. Maybe, if the police had nothing, it would make sense to interview him, to push him a bit, but not when everybody knew the reason Lahiri had been killed. He remembered walking into the interview room that morning, looking around at the people whose job it was to find justice for his friend, and going through the hell of watching that video. Twenty-odd people who were scarred together, like soldiers who’d fought side by side. No one who hadn’t been in that room could really understand what it had been like.
And it made him fucking furious that the man responsible was walking around London while they came after him. His pain, his anguish at the death of his friend, could wait – had to wait. The hell that Keisha and Solomon must have gone through eclipsed it completely.
The door opened, and the same two detectives who’d interviewed Harry after Lahiri’s death came in, the older one, Deakin, in a stained white shirt with a mustard-coloured jumper and a paisley tie, and Bambrough, the younger one, in a royal blue suit, open-collared shirt. Harry looked past them and saw the woman standing in the doorway in the same blood-red dress she’d worn to the meeting that morning. DCI Marsden darted away once she met Harry’s eyes, but he didn’t buy it. She’d wanted him to know that she was the one directing this interview, that she would be just the other side of the one-way mirror set into one wall of the room.
DC Bambrough inserted a fresh CD and flicked on the recorder. Deakin was chewing gum, working it all around his mouth. He leant back in his chair, staring straight at Harry. He had a pink-coloured folder on the desk in front of him, which he opened and started to file through. Bambrough started talking, identifying himself and Deakin and stating the time and location, and as he spoke Deakin picked up a rollerball from his shirt pocket and scrawled something on a piece of paper, which he held up to show Harry.
Harry felt his face burn. When he spoke, it was more like a hiss.
‘For the tape, Detective Constable Deakin has just held up a piece of paper on which he has written: Frankie said you were a crap shag.’
Bambrough looked across at his colleague, laughed and shook his head.
‘Worth a try,’ he said.
Noble sat at the back of the antechamber adjacent to Interview Room Three, watching the two DCs from Homicide & Serious go through the motions with Harry. DCI Marsden was in front of her, watching with her face up close to the window, condensation forming on the glass. As if she didn’t have better things to do, a fucking murder investigation to command. No, she was turning the knife, relishing watching them break a man who was already broken. Noble was still furious that they’d arrested him at all, as there was no way in hell the CPS would even consider pressing charges. An omission in an interview was a long way from a lie to a direct question by a police officer, and any half-competent solicitor could get the charge thrown out. So she sat, cross-legged, and thought about what she’d done since her meeting with Marsden.
She’d spoken to the officers who’d searched Lahiri’s office at Burgess Park. He’d written his passwords on a Post-it attached to his computer monitor. That gave pretty much anyone in the Saviour Project access to his log-in, so she’d tasked Wilson and a couple of other DCs with some basic police work. Interviewing all male Saviour Project staff systematically, checking their alibis for Sunday night, Monday morning and Tuesday night, and running full background checks. The tasks which should have been directed by the woman in front of her.
Harry started speaking, the intercom distorting his voice, and Noble looked up from the floor to listen.
‘For the tape, Detective Constable Deakin has just held up a piece of paper on which he has written: Frankie said you were a crap shag.’
Noble was up, the stool she was sitting on crashing to the ground, as she stormed to the front of the room, got into Marsden’s face.
‘You self-righteous cunt!’
Marsden, spinning around, for a split second genuinely afraid, until her face returned to stone.
‘Face the consequences of your actions, Detective Inspector.’
‘You fucking bitch!’
‘I didn’t tell them, Frankie,’ Marsden said. ‘You know what coppers are like. Gossip spreads, doesn’t it?’
Noble threw the door open and slammed it behind her, running for her car, trying to stop the tears building up.
Harry was wearing a woollen jumper and his Met Police fleece, and the interview room was still cold. The detectives seemed to be suffering too, Deakin with his hands tucked into his armpits, leaning back, Bambrough rubbing his hands together as he kept on talking.
‘As you know, Dr Kent, you have been arrested on suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice. I’m sure this is just a misunderstanding, but information has come to light indicating that you gave a false answer to a question my colleague asked you on Tuesday, 22 January. Is there anything you’d like to say to that?’
Harry said nothing. Deakin had started writing on a notepad in the folder, taking notes, and Harry wondered what the need was given that the entire thing was being recorded. Then he passed Bambrough a sheet of paper, which he read from.
‘Last night, my colleague asked you the question, What was the nature of your relationship with James Lahiri? And you replied, We met in medical school, we served in the army together. We were friends. I then asked you, Were you close friends? And you replied, Yes. We were.’
Harry thought about that. He could hardly remember being interviewed after James had been killed. He knew that it had happened, but his memories of the previous night were a series of vignettes, jumbled, disordered. Noble putting a blanket around him on the boat. Driving through the City. Calling Tammas, and hearing him cry through his tube on the end of the phone. But worse was the fact that, even if he’d said that, he’d been telling the truth. Were you close friends? They were. They had been, before Harry had fucked things up.
And the horror, the shadow between the idea and the reality, was that if it hadn’t been for the affair, then Lahiri would have told him what he’d hidden on Monday night, if not before, and he wouldn’t be dead. The weight built in the hollow space in his chest, and the more DC Bambrough talked, the less Harry listened.
‘We have received information that you and James Lahiri had not spoken to one another in almost a year before this week. The reason being that you had embarked on a sexual affair with his wife, Alice Lahiri. Is this true?’
‘No comment,’ Harry said quietly. Fuck you. He’d been held once by the police, fifteen years old, on suspicion of criminal damage. Some kids had trashed a cop car when the officers had been inside the Co-op, getting lunch. Harry’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, wearing the wrong clothes. He’d been young, but wise enough to answer no comment to everything then, just as he would now.
Deakin spoke for the first time: ‘It would be pretty bizarre for you to forget that you’d shagged your best mate’s wife, wouldn’t it?’
‘No comment.’
‘Or that he had broken off all contact with you? You wouldn’t forget that, would you?’
‘No comment.’
‘So the obvious conclusion is you deliberately misled us last night, didn’t you?’
‘No comment.’
Deakin shook his head and passed the pink folder over to Bambrough, who pulled out a plastic wallet and started thumbing through the papers. Deakin kept talking.
‘It’s clear to me you hid the fact you shagged your mate’s wife. Who wouldn’t, eh? But then that got us wondering what else you might’ve left out, and Jamie did a bit of digging, didn’t you, Jamie?’
Harry ducked his head lower, diggi
ng his knuckles into his temples, imagining himself sixteen again, in his tracksuit, blocking out the sound. But he couldn’t do it, not when Bambrough pulled out the top sheet of paper and slid it across the table to him. Harry tried not to look at it, but he did when he saw the army crest on the top of the document. He couldn’t read it from where he was, but he saw that it had come from the Defence Medical Services.
‘How do you pronounce that, Dr Kent?’ Bambrough said. ‘Heed-ley Court? Head-ley?’
He looked around the room, driving his fingernails harder into the palms of his hands. Settled his eyes on the recorder, as if reminding himself that he was being recorded would in some way make it less likely that he would blow up.
‘Nice place, was it?’ Bambrough said, looking up at him. ‘As good a place as any to do your rehabilitation, I suppose. And all those injuries, I had no idea you’d been through so much! I mean, I don’t have a clue what a pulmonary contusion or a haemothorax is but it sounds pretty nasty to me. Mind you, I do know a bit about post-traumatic stress disorder.’
Look at the floor, Harry told himself, just look at the floor. Don’t give them the satisfaction.
‘One of my best mates from Hendon was the first officer into the tunnel at Edgware Road,’ Bambrough went on. ‘He was never the same afterwards. But you get a very different take on it, y’know, when it’s a shrink’s words.’ The detective picked up another sheet and read. ‘The patient harbours an intense feeling of survivor guilt over the serious injuries sustained by his colleagues, but has managed to adapt well to civilian life. Observed sleep and patient self-reporting indicates paranoia, hypervigilance and delusions consistent with moderate PTSD.’
Harry slammed a fist on the desk. ‘Those are private and confidential medical records!’ he shouted. ‘How the fuck did you get those?’
Bambrough smiled and cocked his head to one side the way a teenager who’d just won an argument might.
‘You gave them to us,’ Deakin said. ‘When you applied for a job as a Force Medical Examiner.’
