by Rob McCarthy
A muted chime filled the empty walls, another part of the usual hospital chorus. A lift, arriving.
The lift. That’s where he’d do it. Alone, no witnesses. Solomon Idris would be wheeled into the lift alive, Traubert would inject him with something while they were inside, and he’d arrest in the corridor, or in the CT scanner. Harry willed his muscles to find any extra speed they could. The lactate in his legs burned, and his chest filled with fury and rage, his head cloudy with adrenaline.
He turned the corner, and there they were, waiting for the lift. Solomon Idris, the tubes and wires from his body attached to portable ventilators and monitors strapped to the chassis of the trolley, feet pointing towards the open lift. Beside him was George Traubert in raspberry scrubs. He looked up as Harry charged towards him. Briefly Traubert’s face changed, as he recognised Harry. The mask of the genial, bumbling consultant was gone, and for a split second Harry saw the man with the mechanical voice, the one who had ordered Solomon Idris to hit his drugged girlfriend harder.
‘Harry?’ Traubert said, trying to sound surprised. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
From the wobble in his voice, Harry could tell even he didn’t think he would get away with that one.
‘Get away from him, George,’ Harry said. ‘It’s over.’
He’d meant to shout, but it came out hoarse, defeated.
He heard Noble arrive behind him but kept his eyes locked on Traubert.
‘Police!’ she called. ‘Show me your hands, now!’
Traubert’s hands came up from by his side, and Harry stepped forward, his eyes darting towards them, focusing on the white plastic in Traubert’s left hand, the growing dark patch on his trousers. He charged forward, all of his weight behind the tackle, pinning Traubert against the trolley. Went for the arm, wrapped his hand around Traubert’s wrist.
‘He’s got something!’ Harry yelled.
His fingers scrabbled as he pulled Traubert’s hand up, revealing the twenty-mil syringe he was holding, finger and thumb over the plunger, doing his best to empty it into the fabric of his scrubs so they didn’t find it on him. Harry threw his other hand onto Traubert’s wrist, levering all of his weight onto the consultant. Noble was there now too, her hands on the scruff of Traubert’s neck, lifting him up, her face red, screaming.
‘Hands behind your back! Drop it! Drop it now!’
Harry’s grip loosened for a second, and Traubert lashed out with an elbow, catching him right on the bridge of the nose. He fell back, crashing onto the floor. The momentum was enough, though, and Harry brought the syringe with him, watching it bounce across the vinyl and disappear under Idris’s trolley. Harry tasted blood but came up anyway as Noble got an arm around Traubert’s neck. He managed to stay on his feet this time, delivered a kick between Traubert’s scrabbling legs. Traubert squealed and doubled over, and Noble took the advantage, flipping him forward and pulling his hands behind his back.
‘What’s in the syringe, you fucker?’ Harry screamed.
‘Hold him,’ Noble said, her knees digging into the small of Traubert’s back. Harry did so, holding the consultant’s hands in place as she slid on the cuffs, clicking them into place. He leant down, his face right by Traubert’s, smelling sweat and his stupid fucking cologne.
‘You’re gonna rot, you know that, George?’
‘George Traubert, I am arresting you on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder. You do not have to say anything but it may . . .’
More footfalls behind them, Valdez arriving with one of the FY2s, faces aghast at the commotion. Harry continued to spit, getting to his feet.
‘Everyone’s gonna know what you are, George, you hear me? Everyone’s gonna know what a pervert you are.’
His hand went to his shoulder, sore from the stitches, from Ambrose’s bullet. He moved it up to his face and it came away with blood on it, just a split lip, nothing serious. Noble was coming to an end.
‘. . . rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’
Harry was suppressing the instinct to kick Traubert again. Behind him, Valdez and the junior doctor were joined by Tammy Shelton, whom Harry assumed was the day registrar.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ she demanded.
Harry ignored her, going to the head of the trolley to examine Idris from top to toe, checking over each and every port, line and tube. He checked the monitors and the ventilator settings, the portable oxygen supply, everything, making sure that in the few minutes Traubert had been alone with Idris he had done nothing else. Two more figures ran into the lobby, but not doctors, police; Noble’s back-up. To be there so quickly, Harry guessed they’d already been in A&E, usually a safe bet at the Ruskin.
Harry looked over at Traubert, watched the coppers drag him to his feet, his body half vertical, hands cuffed behind his back, head bowed. As they did, his face came into view of the gathering crowd, who reacted with shock, disgust, disbelief. Valdez kept saying Traubert’s name, over and over again. Shelton repeated her earlier question, and Harry snapped a reply.
‘What does it look like?’ he said. ‘Go and ring Dr Fairbanks. Get her down here.’
Fairbanks was the most senior consultant on the unit, had held Traubert’s job before him, and was now on the hospital’s board. She would arrange for another consultant to cover the rest of the day, which would no doubt be the least of the board’s worries after the news got out.
Noble stepped out from behind Traubert, shaking her hair free from her flushed face.
‘Been a while since I’ve been in a scrap,’ she said.
‘You got an evidence bag?’ Harry said.
‘No.’
‘I do,’ said one of the uniforms. Noble took it from her and Harry nodded to beneath the trolley. Noble put gloves on, got down on her knees and reached underneath, retrieving the syringe and holding it up inside the polythene bag. Traubert hadn’t managed to empty it all – there was at least three or four millilitres left, enough for forensic testing. Traubert, silent, couldn’t resist looking up at it, and bowed his head again when he was done. Harry walked over to Traubert, grabbed his jaw with his hand, looked into his eyes.
‘Look at that, George,’ he said. ‘That’s a fucking slam dunk. You’re finished.’
Traubert said nothing, and Noble swept Harry’s arm away, folding up the evidence bag and calling in on her radio.
‘Let’s get him out of here,’ she said, leaning into Harry and continuing under her breath: ‘Before you do anything stupid.’
‘I’m staying,’ said Harry. ‘They’ll need all the help they can get.’
Valdez looked across at him, her face still paralysed with horror. Noble nodded, and they watched as she helped the police drag Traubert into the lift, hitting the button for the ground floor. Harry turned to Valdez and the FY2, taking his position at the head of Idris’s bed. The teenager had remained unconscious and unaware throughout the entire ordeal. He would have no idea, until they told him, how close the man who had hurt him for years had come to taking his life.
‘Let’s get him back to the unit,’ Harry said, wiping his lip with the fabric of his suit jacket. Valdez nodded, and they started to wheel the trolley back into the ICU.
As they did so, Harry looked down at Idris, lying supine on the trolley, eyes taped closed, tube in his throat, wires in his arteries, lines in his veins, heart beating. Chest rising and falling, weak muscles between his ribs, but stronger than they had been. The numbers on the screens merged into one another, but what they all meant was that the person they were attached to was alive, and that was all that really mattered. He thought about all the promises that had been made over the last two weeks, and in his head he heard the echo of the words he’d said to Traubert, two of them repeating.
It’s over.
Friday, 1 February
The snow had come and gone and January was over, but London was still held in the crisp, melancholy half-light of winter. It was as dark as midnight
as Harry got off the bus, though it had only just gone five. He’d just got a new haircut and a new phone, and the police had returned his car, which they’d gone to the trouble of cleaning, so in some ways he felt like a new man. He hoped that below the surface things were renewing as well. His shoulder hurt less, and he didn’t need the tramadol. The scars on his cheek and his knuckles were beginning to pale, no longer turning heads when he went out.
The pub was just off Camberwell Green. It wasn’t the closest to the hospital, but that was why he liked it, the fact that it wasn’t swamped with healthcare staff. He went inside, ordered a coffee and sat at the bar. There was a folded-up copy of the Evening Standard there. Page five carried the story, a picture of the Ruskin’s distinctive Victorian edifice and the headline disgraced consultant faces rape charges.
He folded the paper up and went to the back pages and read about football. Noble arrived after he’d been waiting for about ten minutes, dressed in the same black leather jacket she’d worn two Sundays ago. She sat next to him and ordered a large glass of house red, grinning at Harry. She’d just finished work, the final nine-to-five in a long week, with a weekend off to look forward to. Harry was about to start, working Friday through Monday, from 8.30 at night to the same time the following morning. Lots of the other registrars had covered for him while he’d been away, so he owed a few people favours.
Noble picked up her drink and they headed over to a booth at the back.
‘What’s this, then?’ she said, sipping at her wine. ‘Our first date?’
Harry laughed. ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘Though if you’re hoping to stay at mine tonight, you’ll have to make do with an on-call room.’
‘That’s very presumptuous,’ said Noble. Harry finished his coffee and took a look over the food menu, but it all sounded a bit too artisan. He needed something calorific enough to prepare him for a twelve-hour night stint.
‘How was work?’ he said.
‘Good,’ said Noble. ‘I was up with CAIT for most of the afternoon. They’re handing over Traubert’s file to the CPS on Monday morning. They’re covering the exploitation side, all the sexual stuff.’
They’d only spoken over the phone in the intervening week, not seen each other in person. Harry had spent most of it asleep, either at home or after long, cathartic sessions down at Marigold House. From what he’d gathered, Traubert had answered no comment to every single question asked of him.
‘What about the conspiracy charge, then?’
Both of them had given statements to the Homicide & Serious team in Lewisham about what had happened at the hospital. Traubert had been seen drawing up a syringe in A&E, and the police believed he had done so with the intention of administering whatever drug it contained to Idris somewhere between the ICU and the CT scanner, but had then emptied it to try and destroy the evidence when he’d been confronted. According to Noble, if the syringe contained something deadly, they would have enough to charge Traubert with conspiracy to murder.
‘Forensics got back to us on the syringe, said it contained potassium chloride.’
Harry nodded. On the wards, potassium was kept in separate cupboards from other preparations, and in pre-filled syringes with red stickers on them. Injected into a patient who didn’t need it, the drug would stop the heart within seconds. It wouldn’t show up on a post-mortem either because cells leaked potassium after death, so the rise wouldn’t be noticed. The clever bastard, Harry thought.
‘Then you’ve got him, surely?’ he said.
‘They’ll have a hard time proving that syringe was intended to kill Idris,’ Noble said. ‘And that was the only question he bloody answered. Gave a prepared statement saying he’d found the syringe in A&E and was waiting to dispose of it properly.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Harry. ‘There’s no reason for anyone to draw up a twenty-mil syringe of potassium; that’s a massive dose. They’ll never believe him.’
Noble shrugged. ‘It’s circumstantial. People are still innocent until proved guilty in this country, Harry.’
‘Even rapists? Even paedophiles?’
‘He’s not a paedophile,’ said Noble. ‘His victims were adolescents, not children, and he abused both females and males, which means it’s not paedophilia in the classical sense. Most paedophiles are attracted to a certain gender, a certain age range, and they justify their actions as normal sexual behaviour, a form of love. But here the abuse was driven by violence. CAIT have a psychologist attached, and she told me she thought Traubert was more of a sadistic personality, that it was the act of controlling them which turned him on, and teenagers were just who he happened to have access to.’
Harry shook his head. All along, people had suspected James Lahiri of heinous acts, and made the comments about never really knowing somebody. Under their noses had been a monster, and they’d all missed it. How long had Harry worked with George Traubert; how many times had he sat in his office wishing he was somewhere else? Those questions, and more, occupied his thoughts, the way a schizophrenic’s hallucinations refused to give him peace. Where had Lahiri crossed paths with those men, their activities and their plans, and why did he have to die?
Noble reached out and touched his knee, but he pulled back, almost on instinct. She looked up at him and tried an understanding smile.
‘Harry, don’t beat yourself up about it,’ she said.
‘That’s easy for you to say,’ he retorted.
‘Do you know what the CAIT psychologist told me?’ Noble said, lowering her voice. ‘She said that the type of personalities who commit crimes like that, sexual sadism, are usually the types who go on to commit serious sexual violence. Eventually, the violence and the rapes aren’t enough to satisfy their urges, so they go on to worse. Serial murder. Much as I hate to admit it, without you we probably wouldn’t have caught Traubert. Christ knows what he might have gone on to do.’
‘You’re saying he might walk, though,’ Harry said.
‘On the conspiracy charge, maybe,’ said Noble. ‘But on the other stuff, we’ve got him nailed to the wall. We’ve got the drugs in his office, and even if they’re shaky in court we’ve got everything CAIT found at his house. Sophisticated video recording and editing equipment, a spare room with lime-green sheets, the exact same ones we saw in the video. They couldn’t get any DNA off them, but Technical analysed the lighting pattern in the room and they can stand up in court and say that video was filmed in his house. His bank account had withdrawals of two hundred and fifty pounds a week which coincide with the payments to Idris. And his hard drive’s got stuff on it that would make your blood run cold. They’ve sent it across to CEOP for analysis. They’ve got about two thousand images and videos, most of it Category Four and Category Five.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Penetrative sex, imagery of a sadistic or violent nature. Most relating to adolescents, some children. They’re charging him with rape, indecent assault, possession of a controlled substance, making and possession of indecent images. You name it. He’s history, Harry.’
‘He’ll be out in ten years,’ said Harry, stirring the black clumps left in his coffee cup.
‘Bollocks,’ said Noble. ‘There’s no judge in the country that will go easy on him. And however long he gets, he’s a middle-class sex offender whose face will be all over the papers. He won’t last a month inside Belmarsh.’
Harry thought about that. In his elective at medical school, he’d spent four weeks with the medical unit at Wandsworth prison, and he’d seen the things that the inmates did to sexual offenders, particularly paedophiles. He’d seen one patient who’d had bleach poured onto his genitals while three other inmates held him down. He thought about things like that happening to George Traubert, and then about Charlie Ambrose dying slowly in a hospital bed, his burned skin slowly crushing him to death. He wondered what kind of thing was called justice.
‘The images of Solomon went back as far as 2009,’ Noble went on. ‘It looks like that’s
when he started abusing him, right at the beginning of the project.’
‘Four years, and it took his girlfriend to kill herself before he decided to try and escape?’ said Harry. Solomon Idris would have been thirteen years old. It explained how he’d managed to get advanced HIV disease by the age of seventeen, and it explained what had haunted Harry the most, the look in his eyes, that thousand-yard stare.
‘Who knows what his mindset was that night,’ Noble said. ‘You know as well as I do the psychological damage that kind of abuse does to people, especially teenagers. For all we know, you could have been right. It could have been a suicide attempt.’
Harry stirred his coffee some more.
‘Well, he came bloody close. And I hardly helped him, did I?’
He thought about Fairweather’s words, inviting him to pack in the police work. After what he’d seen of the organisation over the past weeks, writing a resignation letter was climbing up his to-do list.
‘I’m glad you were there,’ Noble said. ‘You stood up for what you thought was right, even though the easy thing to do was walk away. Most people take the easy route, but you didn’t.’
She got up to go to the toilet, and her words sat in Harry’s stomach like a lump of undigested food. He was listening to Tammas’s thoughts about life, remembering the words he’d said. How everybody had a hollow inside of them, which they strove their whole existence to find something to fill. Maybe Noble had filled it with her husband, and now he was gone, she filled it with her work. And when it came to people like George Traubert, maybe it was filled with something unspeakable, or maybe it was empty, closed off by some psychological valve to the rest of the human world. Whatever it was, Harry didn’t understand what could drive a man to do that, and he hoped he never would.
