The Hollow Men: A Novel

by Rob McCarthy

  ‘Sorry?’ he said. Noble repeated her question. Harry just shook his head. Tried to picture Ambrose’s prostrate, writhing figure, and calculate the surface area which had been burned. It had to be at least three-quarters, maybe even eighty per cent. Harry had heard of survivors with that degree of injury, but they were notable exceptions. He thought about his phone call to Tammas, crying in the rain outside the hotel the previous night. About the promise he had made, to find the man who’d killed Lahiri and make the bastard pay.

  Well, Charlie Ambrose was paying now and he’d pay for the rest of his life, however short it was. Whether that was justice or not, Harry didn’t know.

  They arrived at the hospital barely seconds after the ambulance, jumping out of the car as the trolley carrying Ambrose disappeared into A&E. Harry followed them through at a run, sprinting into Resus. The team were arranged as normal, except that they had two consultant anaesthetists present, one rushing to the face mask, the other checking the vital signs. A burns victim was an anaesthetist’s worst nightmare, especially if the patient had inhaled hot gases. Ambrose’s burns meant his tissues would fill with fluid and swell, and if that happened in his throat it would obstruct his windpipe. In some cases, it was impossible to secure an airway at all. Harry glimpsed Josh Geddes, checking the lines in Ambrose’s wrist and neck, and getting another one in the other side. The trauma team leader, an A&E consultant, stood with gloved hands resting on the lectern at the end of the bed, shouting out orders. Wallace the porter stood beside him, ready to run.

  The team, together, working as something more than just a group of individuals. Just as the department had done for Solomon Idris three nights ago. It didn’t matter who the person on the trolley was, old or young, rich or poor, abused or abuser.

  They set up more infusions and the anaesthetists agreed on a tracheotomy, which they started to set up for. They gave Ambrose more morphine and sedation, too. Harry stood outside the bay and watched. Normally, with a burns victim or anything similarly graphic, they would close the curtains to spare the other patients having to see, but there were so many people working on Ambrose that there simply wasn’t room to do it.

  Harry kept watching, his eyes darting between the doctors, the vital signs monitor and the patient. Time had stopped. He had no idea if seconds had passed, or minutes, or hours. He didn’t notice the hand on his shoulder for a while. He turned, his head heavy, his vision greying. It wasn’t Noble – it was Dr Kinirons, the A&E consultant who’d treated Idris.

  ‘Harry,’ Kinirons said. ‘It’s Charlie Ambrose, isn’t it?’

  He tried to form the words to reply in the affirmative, but he lacked the strength. There was something wrong.

  ‘Harry?’

  He focused his vision on Kinirons’s face, her hands coming around to his side, fumbling at the buckle on the police vest he was still wearing. She looked concerned, and he could imagine why. Something wasn’t right. He looked down at the floor, and saw the three drops of blood, dark red against the yellow-white linoleum.

  ‘Oh, Christ!’

  That was Noble’s voice, Harry thought, but he couldn’t see her. Kinirons unclipped his vest and the blood which had gathered between it and his sodden shirt poured out, slapping onto the floor.

  ‘I need some help over here!’ Kinirons roared as Harry slumped, feeling Noble’s hands around his back.

  ‘Come on, stay with me!’

  Everything else was dark. He thought about how the hearing was the last sense to go, and the first to come back, and let the darkness take him.

  Saturday, 26 January

  The winter evening sun looked good over London. It always did.

  Harry sat in his living room looking out of the window, his arm in a sling, a half-eaten plate of steak and salad on the table beside him. That was one of the things the junior doctor who’d discharged him yesterday lunchtime had told him, that he was mildly anaemic owing to the blood he’d lost. Only two units, so they’d not needed to transfuse him, but he ought to be careful. Not much exertion, and plenty of bed rest and red meat.

  The bleeding had stopped by itself, but they’d needed to go in to remove the bullet. One of Abe Gunther’s registrars had performed the operation and Gunther had explained it all to him on the ward on Thursday evening. He’d been so out of it that he hadn’t taken anything in, so he’d found his notes in a quiet moment on the ward and read them. The vest Noble had hurriedly thrown him had saved his life, by directing the bullet upwards, away from his vital organs, sending it into his shoulder, over his collarbone and out of the meat of his trapezius muscle. Most of the damage was to his musculature, thankfully, so he’d not been on the table for long, just enough to clip the single vein that had been caught, and make an attempt at restoring some aesthetics to the exit wound. His shoulder and back would likely be stiff for some months, but there was little chance of any lasting damage.

  They had been kind enough on the ward to take the remaining splinters from the Time and Tide out of his face, and he’d been discharged on the Friday with antibiotics to prevent infection and tramadol for the pain, which had the advantage of making him tired. The first thing he had done on returning home was to fall into his mattress and sleep for fifteen hours; a deep slumber interrupted only by vague dreams of burning men.

  On Saturday the snow arrived for good, though the predicted blizzard that would close the airports, shut down London and cause a mini-apocalypse never materialised. With the snow came the detectives: faces Harry didn’t recognise from a case review team at Scotland Yard entrusted with going over the entire investigation, starting with the shooting at the Chicken Hut and ending with the fiery destruction of a house in Brixton. The detectives had taken statement after statement, asking few direct questions but writing endless notes, enough scribbles and scrawls to fill a thick book. The interviews had been conducted in his flat and had taken most of the day, as well as using up all the coffee he had in the kitchen. Harry told them everything, even what had happened at Fitzpatrick’s apartment on the Heygate estate, and how he’d got the address. If the GMC wanted to come for him, they could. He’d take his punishment.

  He opened his eyes and got up, his shoulder stinging, music playing. He thought about all of the lives irrevocably altered by what happened that week, not least his own. Outside, the city was constant, pulsing, unchanging. The Eye was close enough for him to make out its rotations, still turning, as it had been even when the whole city was on fire. Anarchy reigning on the streets, but there’d still been tourists to be fleeced. One of the nurses at the hospital had been caught stealing a pair of headphones from a branch of PC World during the disorder. Someone had made the usual comments about never really knowing anyone.

  But it hadn’t just been anyone who said it, it had been James Lahiri, in the pub as he mulled over whether to go back to Afghanistan. That was the irony Harry mused over as he poured a glass of Jameson’s, looking over the only city he had ever known. Tom Waits was finishing ‘Burma-Shave’ when the doorbell rang.

  Harry answered it in a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, his hair and face a mess.

  ‘You’re looking better,’ said Frankie Noble.

  It was she who was looking better, Harry thought but didn’t say. She had a smart office dress on underneath a fur-lined coat, and he suspected that she too had spent the day being interviewed by senior people. He stepped aside and led her into the kitchen. In the sink was a pan of tomatoes he’d been cooking when Lahiri had called on Tuesday evening. He’d not been back since.

  ‘Drink?’ he said.

  Noble nodded. ‘Just the one,’ she said. ‘I’m the duty inspector nine-to-five tomorrow.’

  Harry brought the bottle and two tumblers into the living room, remembering five days ago when he’d done the same after Ambrose had attacked him. Noble sat down and made a face at the music.

  ‘Sorry it’s not Beethoven,’ Harry said.

  ‘He sounds like he’s just woken up from a coma,’ Noble said. />
  Harry thought of the girl with the pink hair, lying in a bed on Tennyson Ward. He hadn’t been to see her in over a week now. Probably the longest such interval in a good while.

  ‘Any news on Ambrose?’ he said.

  ‘He’s still alive,’ said Noble. ‘And he’s conscious. But you know what doctors are like. They won’t tell us anything. No idea if or when we’ll get to talk to him.’

  ‘And the investigation?’

  ‘We recovered a nine-millimetre Luger from Ambrose’s house,’ she said. ‘It’s a match for both the Wyndham Road shooting and Lahiri’s murder, and he doesn’t have an alibi for either of them. We’ve got the motorbike in his garage, we’ve got the fact that he burned his computer hard drive to pieces – that’s where he started the fire. Basically, if he ever gets out of hospital then he’ll go straight to prison for the rest of his life.’

  Harry didn’t expect Ambrose to survive, and if he did, it would feel like one hell of an injustice. He’d seen boys and men burned that badly out in Afghanistan who’d succumbed, usually not in the hours after their injuries, but in the days and weeks after. It gave them time to suffer, time to appreciate their imminent mortality, to say goodbye. He didn’t know how he felt about that.

  ‘It looks like there are more,’ Noble went on. She’d drunk her whiskey, so she poured herself another glass.

  ‘More?’ said Harry, finishing his own drink and offering his tumbler up for a refill.

  ‘More kids,’ said Noble. ‘We’ve passed the case over to the Child Abuse Investigation Team, and they’re looking for any other kids who went through the Saviour Project and worked closely with Charlie Ambrose, who might have been abused. They’ve found one already, I think they’re planning an interview next week. It’s turning into a big operation.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Harry. ‘How old?’

  ‘Seventeen,’ said Noble. ‘A kid called Jerome Vincent; he’s in a Young Offenders Institution. Ex-gang member, but he got arrested last year after he indecently assaulted an eleven-year-old boy at a swimming pool. The child psychologist said it was the behaviour he’d expect from a teenager who’d been sexually abused himself. Textbook, apparently. Ambrose worked with Vincent for two years, 2009 to 2011.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Harry.

  ‘Olujide Okiniye,’ Noble went on, reading from notes. ‘Sixteen years old, spent a year with the Saviour Project in 2010. He made a complaint about being sexually abused to a schoolteacher, who thought he was just trying to get out of going to parole meetings. His parents took him back to—’

  ‘Stop it,’ Harry said. ‘I don’t need to know. I don’t want to know.’

  Noble nodded, looking down at the floor.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, moving closer. ‘I didn’t mean to sound like I don’t care. I do, you know I do. It’s just . . .’

  He trailed off, drank more whiskey, felt it burn.

  ‘I’ve heard enough shit like that this week,’ he said. ‘We both have.’

  He moved closer to her, to put his hand on her shoulder, but she pulled her head away and he retreated to his chair. The music kept playing, and they looked out of the window as the snow started again, the lights of invisible landmarks blurred and pixellated. Both of them drank slowly, looking across at each other, then back out at the sky. Eventually, Noble broke the deadlock.

  ‘Tell me about Alice Lahiri.’

  Harry looked up at her slowly, the screws in his heart tightening, ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I need to know what happened.’

  He watched her face, tried to work out whether her need was professional or personal, then he looked into the glass, and started talking.

  ‘James met her at a mess party when he was an SHO down in Portsmouth. It was a bit of a whirlwind, they’d moved in together after six months, married after a year. I didn’t really get to know her until what happened with me and Tammas. James got flown back on the plane after ours, and he’d come up to visit us at the Queen Elizabeth, and then at Headley Court, and she’d come with him. After he went back to Afghan, she kept popping in to see me. Bringing me cakes and shit like that, keeping an eye on me. One night she brought a bottle of wine.’

  Harry left the story unfinished, aware he was now probing a place in his memories he rarely visited, mostly because of the guttural sensation it produced in his stomach. He couldn’t even really remember how or exactly when it had started, but he knew that this was how it ended. Lahiri’s corpse about to be cremated, and Harry on the verge of tears, hand shaking around a glass of whiskey.

  ‘I’ve got to tell you something,’ Noble said.

  Harry looked at her, and nodded. Her face had fallen, an expression he recognised from doctors whose patients had a fatal diagnosis. A mixture of dread and pity.

  ‘We recovered Ambrose’s phone intact,’ she said. Harry’s mind raced as he tried to anticipate the hit, to work out what truth would shatter over his head. She paused, as if she too was hoping that Harry would realise what was about to come. But he didn’t.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘There were about twenty calls between Charlie Ambrose’s phone and James Lahiri’s made since November.’

  Harry stared at her, paralysed. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t have moved.

  ‘There were six calls made this week,’ Noble went on. ‘Including one which took place in the early hours of Monday morning, shortly after Solomon Idris was brought in to the Ruskin. And another on Monday evening, after you visited him on the—’

  ‘Stop!’ Harry shouted. ‘You’re wrong!’

  Noble continued, unflinching. ‘CAIT are investigating Lahiri to see if they can find anything else, but the current line of inquiry is that he was involved in the abuse of those kids. His log-in made the change on the hospital computer system. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Harry said, crying now. ‘You’re just fucking wrong. Anyone could have had access to that log-in, you said it yourself, the stupid arse wrote his password on his desk.’

  ‘Harry, I know—’

  ‘What’ve you got on him?’ Harry demanded. ‘Some phone calls? That doesn’t prove a thing. You couldn’t convict him if he was alive, so how the hell can you do it now he’s dead?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Noble asked. ‘He’s dead. Ambrose is going to be punished, one way or the other. Does it matter, at the end of it?’

  ‘Of course it matters!’ Harry said. ‘They’re cremating that man tomorrow, and I need to know what kind of man they’re burning.’

  His voice echoed around the room and back to him. Tom Waits had run out of songs, and the silence rolled in between them. He wondered how much evidence it would take for him to concede, to accept even the suggestion that Lahiri had been the man responsible for the video he’d forced himself to watch on Wednesday morning. Stuff on his hard drive? DNA? Remaining convinced by one’s opinions in the face of overwhelming proof to the contrary was the definition of fanaticism, the very thing he and Lahiri had fought against, side by side. Tammas couldn’t know, Harry thought. He’d see him at the funeral tomorrow, and he wouldn’t tell him about the police’s theories. It would destroy the man.

  ‘What if you’re wrong?’ Harry said. ‘What if you’re missing something?’

  ‘It’s not my investigation any more,’ said Noble. ‘CAIT have the case now. They’ll rip apart anyone who even came close to Solomon Idris and Keisha Best. Our best hope is that Idris wakes up and starts talking.’

  Harry nodded. He’d requested regular updates on Idris from his hospital bed, and as of Friday afternoon, he was stable and making good progress. The plan was to take him off the ventilator on Monday morning, and if all went to plan he could potentially be awake by that afternoon.

  Noble said she needed the toilet, and Harry thought about her while she was gone. Remembered the night they’d spent together, a night when it had felt like the world was crashing down around them, and every moment of pleasure that could be taken had
to be, as if it was their last opportunity.

  ‘I guess I should thank you,’ Harry said when she came back.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For trusting me when the rest of you bastards were trying to put me in the frame.’

  She laughed and threw her hair back.

  ‘I think Marsden just wanted to rule you out,’ she said. ‘And establish herself as the alpha in the investigation. Perhaps I’d have done the same in her shoes. But Fairweather’s a nasty piece of work. All he cares about is the politics. Didn’t matter if you were guilty or not, he just wanted another scalp on his way to the top.’

  ‘And what about your scalp?’ Harry said.

  Noble smiled. ‘I’ve not heard anything else. I have a feeling Marsden put in a good word, given that they’d have tipped off Ambrose if we hadn’t got to him. I probably have you to thank for that. Fingers crossed it’ll go away, and I’ll get off with a written warning.’

  ‘Here’s hoping,’ Harry said.

  They clinked glasses.

  ‘Whose investigation is it now? Fairweather’s?’

  ‘No way,’ said Noble. ‘Homicide & Serious are handing over the files on Idris and Lahiri to the CPS, and they’ll prosecute Ambrose if he makes it. CAIT have the rest. All Professional Standards get to do is investigate whether we did anything wrong at the Chicken Hut. I suspect they won’t do anything. Excessive force isn’t the flavour of the month any more, not when we’ve got DCIs selling information to the News of the World.’

  She finished her glass and Harry watched her again. Outside, an ambulance coursed along the street, heading for Waterloo. It was both a comforting and a sad thought, that whatever hell his life became, whatever happened to lost souls like Solomon Idris, or Keisha Best, or the girl with the pink hair, the city would keep going.

  ‘I know that James was a good man,’ he said. ‘If he did what you think he did, then those were despicable acts. But that doesn’t change what he did for me.’