by Rob McCarthy
Noble’s palm slammed against the car’s steering wheel as she swung the car off the main road, heading through a residential area now, the new Brixton – old Victorian terraces home to professionals who cycled to their City jobs and ate at the start-up restaurants in the covered market. Harry tried to picture Charlie Ambrose as one of them, to remember every detail of their conversations.
‘Any family?’ Noble said.
‘Yeah,’ said Wilson. ‘Seven years old. She’s at school. His wife’s a secretary; she’s at work.’
‘We’re coming up,’ Noble said. ‘I’ll see you in a bit, Mo. Good work.’
She hung up and slowed the car right down, the blue lights off now. Harry looked up at the satnav near the hands-free phone and spotted Pulross Road, running at right angles to them. They were coming up to the junction, and Noble crawled along and parked right at the bend.
‘Number twenty,’ she said, pointing. ‘That’s him.’
They were lucky, as the junction allowed them to watch Ambrose’s house from the next road while blending in among the other parked cars. The house was in a terrace in the shadow of an elevated railway arch across which commuter trains rumbled. The kerb outside the house was empty, so if Ambrose had a car, maybe he was out. The living-room lights were on, though.
Noble picked up the radio.
‘This is DI Noble,’ she said. ‘Am at target location. Trojan please update.’
‘We’ve hit traffic,’ the reply came. ‘Accident on London Bridge. Should be there in one-five.’
‘Shit,’ Noble said. An upstairs light came on, and she looked over at Harry, who looked back at the house. He was still processing what they’d found. Ambrose was good for everything. He’d been abusing Idris and Keisha Best, and he’d grown tired of the blackmail. The weekly payments, not the lump sum that Whitacre had paid at Christmas. So he had followed Idris, looking for the right moment, and when he broke down and went into the Chicken Hut, he’d decided to make sure Idris stopped talking to the police. But even that hadn’t worked, so he’d gone onto the computer system in A&E using James Lahiri’s log-in and deleted the penicillin allergy. It didn’t explain why he’d killed Lahiri, but there would be plenty of time for that.
‘Eyes up,’ Noble whispered.
Harry looked up. Charlie Ambrose had opened his front door, and stood staring at the winter’s evening in a grey tracksuit. His hands were empty apart from a set of keys. To Harry’s right, Noble drew her gun, finger wrapped around the trigger. There was nowhere on the tracksuit Ambrose could conceal a weapon, so they were probably safe. For the minute, at least.
‘If you can get down slowly, do.’
Harry slid back in his seat and watched Ambrose walk to the sheet-metal garage door set into the house, unlock it, and pull it up. It was dark inside the garage and Ambrose didn’t turn on a light, but Harry could still make out the vehicle inside. A blue-and-silver motorbike, sparkling clean, recently washed.
‘Bastard,’ he whispered.
‘We’ve got him,’ Noble said. ‘We’ve got this pervert, don’t you worry.’
Ambrose left the garage, not bothering to close the shutter. He was carrying something large and heavy, and Noble got one hand on the car door, ready to go out and challenge him. It was only when Ambrose turned his back to them to open his front door that they could see it was a red plastic jerrycan. Then Ambrose stepped inside his house and shut the door behind him.
‘He’s destroying evidence, isn’t he?’ Harry said.
‘Why the hell else would he bring petrol inside?’ Noble snapped. ‘Fuck!’
She grabbed the radio from the central console with one hand, reaching into the back of the car with the other and retrieving a Kevlar vest identical to her own, throwing it to Harry.
‘All units, all units,’ she said. ‘Male suspect Charlie Ambrose wanted in connection with murder and sex offences, in process of destroying evidence at 20 Pulross Road, Brixton. I repeat, all units please assist at 20 Pulross Road, SW9. Suspect is believed armed and dangerous.’
Harry fed his arms into the vest, not bothering to clip it tight. Blinked and saw the open door of the Chicken Hut on the Camberwell Road, Solomon Idris with his pleading, haunted eyes – first in the takeaway as he fell to the ground, and then again looking at the camera attached to the man who’d made him rape his girlfriend. Lahiri, mouth open in surprise, the back of his head missing. He opened his eyes and unlocked the car door.
‘You’re staying here!’ Noble yelled, opening her side.
Harry ignored her and got out of the car.
‘I’m doubling the odds,’ he said.
There was a siren loud in the air, from the direction they’d come in. Harry hoped it was Trojan, or at least a nearby patrol unit who’d heard the request for assistance. He followed Noble towards the house. She led with her Glock out and held low, aiming for the front door. It was a crisp, clear evening, the kind which in the countryside might be accompanied by smells of firewood and pine needles. But it was the stench of petrol which filled Harry’s nostrils as he assumed a position beside the door.
Noble knocked three times, and the whole frame shook.
‘Charlie Ambrose!’ she shouted. ‘Armed police! Open up, now!’
Nothing. Harry leant down and moved to lift the letterbox with his fingers, but Noble batted him away.
‘Look through that and he’ll blow your head off,’ she whispered. ‘There’s a crowbar in the boot. Go on!’
Harry sprinted back towards the Volvo, his unfastened vest bouncing against his shirt. The sirens were getting much louder, but still it felt as if they were alone. Two against one. He pulled the boot open, grabbed the crowbar, ran back towards the house. Just a little further, James, he said to himself, just a little further.
At the door, he looked up at Noble, who nodded. He dug the crowbar into the gap between the door and the frame and levered it forward, pushing down with his weight. Noble stepped behind him, readjusting her stance, her gun still trained on the door. When the first gunshot came, it split the air. The hole which appeared in the door drew Harry’s eye, the blue paint cracking around the wound in the wood, just as the fuselage on Lahiri’s boat had.
He knew what came next. Threw himself backwards as the next shot sounded, his eyes closed. The world moved in slow motion. He knew this place. The brain’s evolved survival mechanism, the ability to decelerate time in those milliseconds between life and death, when the senses become hyperattentive, every muscle group working in tandem to fight or flee. Harry knew he was falling, despite the fact all he saw was darkness. In that moment, he felt Tammas fall to his right, and was sure that somewhere, within the stench of petrol, was the smell of lavender.
The punch came to the top of Harry’s left shoulder, completing his fall backwards, and as he rolled to the ground, bouncing down the concrete steps that led up to Ambrose’s house, he assessed the pain. Rounded, cascading through his torso as the shock wave dissipated. He knew what a gunshot wound felt like. Sharp, incisional, like a tunnel of fire. It wasn’t like that. The vest had done its job.
Harry opened his eyes. He was on the floor, the door gaping open above. His backwards motion as he’d fallen had levered the crowbar and broken the lock. Noble came into view, her body hunched, shaking twice as she returned fire, three shots directed into the hallway.
Her hand on the scruff of his neck, dragging him back behind the safety of the low wall in front of Ambrose’s drive. Screaming into her radio with one hand, the other holding the gun up.
‘Shots fired, shots fired! Shit, Harry, are you hit?’
‘I’m good,’ Harry said, scrabbling to his feet. Hugging the wall for cover, peeking up at the house. The open door, a dark corridor behind it. No sign of Ambrose.
‘Did you get him?’ Harry said.
‘No idea,’ said Noble. A patrol car pulled up at the T-junction next to Noble’s Volvo, and she yelled at the officers to get down. They got out, rolling for cover behind their car, one of
them losing his hat. Harry risked another look at the house. The hallway was no longer dark. A bright glow of orange burned from deep inside the building, the heat carried by the wind, registering on Harry’s skin. There was no pain, just adrenaline and fear.
‘Shit,’ he whispered. Beside him, Noble was yelling on her radio again, demanding an ETA on the Trojan units. One of the uniformed officers joined them by the wall.
‘Fire and Rescue on their way, guv,’ he said. Noble was about to reply when Harry saw movement in the periphery of his vision, coming out of the house. He looked up, and in that moment, he knew what he saw would stay with him for the rest of his life. Like so many things he’d seen that week, it would haunt him forever.
Charlie Ambrose exploded from the front door, fire burning from his chest and face, arms cruciform. He spun onto the pavement, his screams drowned by the roar of sirens and the burning blaze behind. Harry jumped up, turning his face from the heat, and sprinted to Noble’s car. Went to the boot, still open, and grabbed the fire extinguisher that had been next to the crowbar. Ambrose was on the floor, writhing, while a copper beat him with a rolled-up high-vis jacket. Harry pulled the pin on the extinguisher as he ran. Squeezed the levers together, covering Ambrose with powder, screaming until the canister ran dry. Another copper arrived beside him with his own extinguisher, letting off blasts of water.
Noble, on her knees, her voice breaking as she held down the radio’s transmit button. ‘Ambulance request at 20 Pulross Road. Category A. I need LAS here now!’
Around him, more police cars screeched to a halt, officers spilling out to seal off the roads. Ambrose’s arms and legs were flexed, the way burns victims’ often were when the muscle tendons contracted, but his lips were moving. Harry leant in, trying to hear what he was saying.
‘. . . who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .’
‘Charlie!’ he shouted. ‘Can you hear me?’
Half of Ambrose’s face was white, where the powder from the fire extinguisher had hit him, and the other was his natural dark colour, but blistered and red, with areas of yellow fat where the skin had burned away.
‘. . . be done, on earth as it is in heaven . . .’
‘Charlie, listen to me!’ Harry yelled. ‘Is there anyone else in the house?’
‘. . . our daily bread, and forgive us our . . .’
‘Charlie!’
Harry grabbed the front of Ambrose’s jaw and tried to put his face in front of his mouth, but his right eye had burned closed and his left darted across the sky. He was expecting Ambrose to recoil with the pain, but he didn’t, because the fire had burned through all of the nerve endings in his face. He looked up and around, hoping that paramedics would have materialised from somewhere, but there were just more police officers, rolling tape between trees and holding back terrified residents. Noble appeared beside him.
‘Is he alive?’
‘For now,’ Harry said. ‘Where’s that ambulance?’
‘On its way. Are you alright?’
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Fuck.’
Both of them spoke through heavy, laboured breathing. Harry paused to wipe sweat off his face. Somehow, he still felt cold. He looked back down at Ambrose, his lips still moving. The man couldn’t just die here. Even if it was like this, it was too easy. He deserved to sit in front of Frankie Noble and answer her questions, face the choices he’d made. In the house, something exploded, and everyone ducked down. The blaze had spread, the front room and hallway now well alight, the glass in the windows popping.
Harry looked down at Ambrose. You’ve treated bastards and murderers before, he told himself. You can do it again. But without kit, there was little he could do. Ambrose needed fluid resuscitation, pain relief, and an endotracheal tube to stop the swelling in his tissues crushing his windpipe. Ambrose came to the end of the Lord’s Prayer and Harry took his moment and leant down.
‘Charlie, you listen to me,’ Harry whispered. ‘If you want your God to forgive you, then how about you tell me something. Help us out. Tell us why you killed James, Charlie. What did he know?’
Ambrose’s good eye flickered towards Harry, and then back to the sky.
‘Our father, who art in heaven . . .’
Harry swore. Heard the sound of a large vehicle pulling up behind him, and turned, hoping to see an ambulance. Instead, a bulky fire engine roared into the cordon, blasting its horn to scatter the crowd of police out of its way. Firefighters leapt out, rushing to unravel hoses. One ran over to him.
‘Just the one casualty?’ he shouted.
‘Yeah,’ Harry replied. ‘I’m a doctor. You got a medical kit on that thing?’
The firefighter nodded and returned from the engine holding a first-aid bag, but it was only very basic, no drugs or fluids. Harry switched on the oxygen cylinder and fitted a mask over Ambrose’s face. Most of his tracksuit top had melted into his flesh, but on the legs, where the petrol had only splashed rather than soaked, it hung off in strips, which Harry cut off with shears. As he cut, he tried to assess the damage. Practically all of Ambrose’s face, neck, chest and back were burned, the shoulders and upper arms, too. He swore under his breath. He needed to put a line in, start some fluids, if only to feel like he was doing something, futile as it might be.
Harry put on a pair of gloves – better late than never – and looked up. Two of the firefighters were standing in front of the house’s front room, a hose team directing water inside, while another pair fought through the hallway. When he turned back, Noble was at his shoulder again.
‘Frankie, where the hell’s that ambulance?’ he demanded.
‘It’ll get here when it gets here,’ Noble said. At the cordon, an unmarked car pulled up, Fairweather and Marsden getting out and running towards them. Harry grabbed Ambrose by the hand and tried one last time.
‘Come on, Charlie, speak to me!’
Ambrose was silent, the movement in his lips desperate, and when Harry listened to his chest it was obvious he was struggling to breathe. He grabbed a bag-valve mask from the first-aid kit and pulled it open, sealing it over Ambrose’s face, feeling the waxy skin beneath his fingers. He looked at Noble and nodded down at the bag.
‘Connect the oxygen up to that,’ he said. ‘Squeeze it every six seconds.’
Noble did so, connecting up the tubing and pumping the bag between her hands, panicked.
‘Slower than that,’ Harry told her. ‘Nice and easy.’
He felt movement behind him and looked up to see Fairweather kneeling beside them both, his face contorted with fury. He was staring up at the house, watching the firefighters advance into the hallway. Then he turned to Noble and hissed in her ear. ‘What the hell were you thinking, going in without back-up?’
As the detectives argued, a paramedic car arrived behind the fire engine, followed quickly by an ambulance. The first medic to him took over holding the mask on Ambrose’s face, and Harry turned to the second and demanded a half-litre of saline and the biggest cannula they had.
‘He was destroying evidence, sir,’ Noble protested. Another medic relieved her of the task of squeezing the rescue bag. Harry found a vein in Ambrose’s wrist, that part of the body having been relatively spared by the flames, and placed the line.
‘Did you fire your gun?’ Fairweather barked. ‘Give it to me, now!’
Harry administered a shot of morphine and connected a fluid infusion, standing. Tapped Fairweather on the shoulder, who spun, mid-rant, his coat flapping in the wind.
‘What?’ he demanded.
‘Hold this up as high as you can,’ Harry ordered, handing him the bag of fluid. Fairweather almost dropped it, but as he caught the bag his gaze settled on Ambrose’s half-burned, half-whitened face, and the blood slowly drained from his own. Above them, a helicopter circled. Harry looked up, wondering if the air ambulance had been scrambled, but it was the police chopper. Another paramedic fixed a second line in Ambrose’s neck and started another bag of fluids, while a fourth r
etrieved the trolley from the ambulance.
‘Do you want to intubate him here?’ one of the paramedics asked. Harry did indeed, before the fluid leaking into the burned tissues swelled and obstructed his airway, but he didn’t have the necessary drugs.
‘Sats?’ Harry asked.
‘Ninety-six per cent on O2.’
Holding. Harry looked around, trying to localise himself among the mass of emergency vehicles, chaos and destruction. They were just behind Brixton Road, no more than five minutes from the hospital.
‘Just get him to the Ruskin, fast.’
The paramedic nodded, and together they loaded Ambrose up, still squeezing oxygen into his lungs, fluid into his veins. Harry watched as they wheeled him towards the ambulance, one of them taking the fluid bag from Fairweather. He thought about Solomon Idris, crying as the man with the mechanical voice told him to hit his girlfriend, again and again, until the teenager’s protestations dissolved into sobs, and the man moved to finish it himself. He kept thinking about that until the ambulance was out of sight, and Noble grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him away.
The Professional Standards team at the crime scene wouldn’t let Noble take her own car, so they chased the ambulance in a patrol car driven by one of the uniforms, Noble and Harry in the back. The journey to the Ruskin was a blur of scenery in the windows, lit up by blue lights. The hexagonal tower blocks of Shakespeare Road, the railway bridges at Loughborough Junction, the terraced houses on Coldharbour Lane. For most of it, Harry was in a daze, his body recovering from the metabolic effort of the last few hours. He looked down at his hands, his knuckles scabbed over from punching walls.
He glanced at his vest, and saw the wisps of fibre where the bullet had caught it. Fingered it, feeling for the metal. Its brother, the one three places higher in the magazine, had passed through James Lahiri’s skull and out the other side. That was a sobering thought. He had another still to add to his collection of images that would never leave him, the macabre dance of a burning man as he burst from a burning house.
‘What are his chances?’ Noble asked as they turned up Denmark Hill. This was the end of the same journey Harry had made with Solomon Idris, trying to stem blood flow, place lines, save a life. All rivers flowed to the sea, he thought.
