The Hollow Men: A Novel

by Rob McCarthy

  Harry’s thoughts were broken by the arrival of two figures he had grown to recognise. Joy Idris, wearing her charity-shop coat and slightly dragging one foot. Junior Idris, gaunt and quiet, in the same school uniform that Solomon had been wearing in the photograph clipped to his police file.

  ‘Hello, Doctor,’ said Joy.

  ‘Hi, Mrs Idris. I’m Harry Kent, one of the doctors. We spoke to one another late on Sunday night, but you may not remember.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Joy. Harry’s stomach twisted.

  ‘Shall we go somewhere private?’

  Joy Idris nodded slowly and they shuffled towards the relatives’ room, freshly stocked with a new day’s supply of tissues. The way she moved was funereal, Harry thought, like she had already resigned herself to the fact of losing a child. It was the opposite of the pious optimism Harry had seen on Sunday, and he instantly regretted coming in on his own, but the rest of the doctors and the senior nurses were in handover, and the other nurses were all making sure that their patients didn’t die.

  ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘I am praying every hour of every day,’ Joy Idris said after a while. ‘The devil is trying to take my son. I am praying for God to give me my son back, but he does not answer me. And I can have no more days off. I must go to work today.’

  Harry nodded solemnly. He wondered what Joy did for a living, but didn’t feel like asking.

  ‘Even today, I will be docked two hours as I will come late. And Junior will be late to school, but they don’t care.’

  I bet they don’t, Harry thought. From last night’s conversation with DS Wilson, Harry was fairly sure that the Albany Road Academy had bigger problems than Year 9 students skipping their first lessons. He let the silence pass.

  ‘What do you know about Solomon’s condition?’

  ‘He had an operation yesterday. They took part of his spleen away. The surgeon explained it to me.’

  Harry nodded as she spoke. He was trying not to be obvious about the fact that he was studying Junior Idris, whose face was sinking into the off-white shirt collar, the tattered black school jumper. Junior was gazing at a point on the wall over Harry’s shoulder, and there was something about him that was unsettling. Maybe it was the resemblance to his older brother.

  ‘Yes, the operation went well,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid there were some problems afterwards.’

  Joy bowed slowly, and Harry wondered for a moment whether she was praying, before her head started to shake. Junior broke his gaze from the wall, reached down for a tissue and passed it to his mother, then returned to his default stare. Harry waited until Joy was looking up before he continued.

  ‘What kind of problems?’ Joy said, wiping tears from the side of her face. She didn’t look distraught, just exhausted.

  ‘Well,’ said Harry, ‘Solomon had an allergic reaction to one of the antibiotics he was given. I’m really sorry, it’s a mistake that shouldn’t have happened, and we’re trying to find out how it did. His condition became quite serious, and at one point his heart stopped briefly. We were able to restart it.’

  ‘My son’s heart stopped?’

  Joy Idris’s mouth hung open, her face expressionless.

  ‘For a short period of time, yes,’ he said.

  ‘His heart has never stopped before.’

  ‘I know this must be so distressing for you, Mrs Idris,’ Harry said. ‘But the important thing is that we started the heart again very quickly. Now, sometimes when patients go through something like that, it can have very serious consequences. But there’s absolutely nothing to suggest that Solomon is suffering any major after-effects.’

  ‘So he’s going to live?’ said Joy.

  The million-dollar question.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Harry. ‘I’m really sorry, but I can’t tell you the answer to that. He’s stable, but he’s still critical. He’s very sick, and we need to work really hard to get him better again, and it might not be possible. The one thing I can promise you, Mrs Idris, is that we will do absolutely everything we can. I can promise you that.’

  ‘God will decide,’ said Joy. ‘You can do everything you can, but at the end God will decide.’

  The cynical part of Harry’s brain said that Joy’s words were as good an appraisal of the situation as any he could have come up with. She repositioned herself on the table, a dry tissue folded, waiting in her right hand.

  He briefly considered asking about HIV, about whether Joy had known anything about it, but they had already checked with the Burgess Park Practice and the local GUM clinics, and there was no record of Idris ever attending for testing or diagnosis. At seventeen, Solomon Idris was effectively an adult. And Harry was loath to break the news of an adult patient’s status to a family member without their permission, especially one in Joy Idris’s emotional state.

  ‘Our team are looking after him twenty-four hours a day,’ Harry said. ‘As I said before, Mrs Idris, we will do everything we can.’

  Joy rose slowly, and for a second Harry was sure she was about to topple forward and collapse. She was shaking with every movement, her lips trembling, the tissue gripped in a tight fist. Harry rushed forward to catch her, but Junior got there first and batted his arm away.

  ‘Don’t you touch my mum, you fuckin’ faggot.’

  Harry backed off, only to watch Joy Idris push her son away.

  ‘Junior!’

  She turned to Harry, tears still wetting her eyes.

  ‘I must go to work. Thank you, Doctor.’

  She headed for the door. Harry rose to show her out, but her free hand had already opened it, and he stood awkwardly beside the table as Joy left. Junior followed his mother out, his head cocked back, facing Harry. The teenager’s eyes, bloodshot and wrought with adolescent fury, never left Harry’s, and he thought long and hard about the look he had seen in Solomon’s eyes on Sunday night. He thought about the message that the man who’d attacked him had left on his phone. Wondered if that was all he should do. Forget Solomon Idris, hope he got better and walk away.

  Harry followed what remained of the Idris family out of the door and closed it behind him.

  Once the family had left, Harry went to Idris’s bed and checked the plan from the ward round. He was to be reviewed that day by both the surgical and the HIV teams, continued on the anti-fungals, have one litre less of fluid than yesterday, and be trialled on a lower oxygen concentration. The CT scan was booked for lunchtime, and Dr Shelton had agreed to escort him.

  ‘I hate CT,’ Shelton had said. Most doctors did. Sick patients had a habit of deteriorating on the way either to or from the scanner, and some even arrested when they were in the machine itself. Of course, the scanners were invaluable, but the ‘doughnut of death’ still made doctors twitchy, and Harry was among them. That said, Shelton was a safe pair of hands if anything went wrong. Harry had asked if there was anything he could do to help out, but the team had everything under control.

  He was in the stairwell on his way to the doctors’ mess when his phone rang.

  ‘Hi, Frankie.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  Noble sounded worried, but her voice was almost a whisper. Harry pictured her in a corridor, or maybe smoking in the car park, trying to disguise the conversation from prying ears.

  ‘The hospital,’ said Harry. ‘Is everything alright?’

  ‘No, it’s fucking not,’ said Noble. ‘I’ve got to be quick, but basically your IT people have been talking to our IT people. They’ve traced the source of the entry which deleted the allergy on your system.’

  Harry stopped on the stair, leaning sideways against the wall. Felt his scrubs stick to his body with sweat.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘It wasn’t an external hack,’ Noble said. ‘The deletion was made in the early hours of Monday morning, from a trust computer. They don’t know which one yet, but they know it was on the East Wing servers.’

  ‘Fuck!’ said Harry. Two physiotherapists
passing him on the stairs turned their heads, then kept going. The East Wing was home to A&E, the ICUs and the emergency theatres, and hundreds of acute ward beds. Hundreds of computers. And someone inside one of those departments had deleted the allergy as Solomon Idris had been fighting for his life.

  ‘Do they know whose log-in was used?’ Harry said, his heart pounding. He doubted it – if so, they would have a culprit, and Noble would either have said so, or the police would be making an arrest.

  ‘No, but they will soon,’ she said. ‘Either way, Fairweather’s gone mental. He’s launched a joint investigation with Homicide & Serious, and they’ve brought in a DCI from the local Murder Investigation Team. They’re already at the hospital, setting up. Technical Services are gonna search through the accounts.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘They’re looking at you, Harry,’ Noble whispered. ‘I told them what happened to you last night and it completely backfired. I’m sorry. They think that you’re involved with Idris somehow.’

  ‘Fuck. Thanks for the heads-up.’

  Harry’s head was spinning. The thought that he would be a suspect in an investigation he’d effectively started was a fairly ironic one.

  ‘Are we still going ahead with the plan for this afternoon?’ he said. ‘The school?’

  ‘Well, we’ve already made the arrangements,’ said Noble. ‘And Wilson’s ready. So let’s go for it. It’ll take that long for Fairweather to get things sorted, fingers crossed. Anyway, I’ve got to go.’

  ‘You’re coming to the hospital now?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Noble said. ‘I’ll see you later. I’ll drop you a text.’

  Noble hung up. Harry sat down on the stairs, put his hands against his temples, and forced himself to think. It wasn’t anything to be worried about. He was innocent, he’d never even met Solomon Idris before forty-eight hours ago. That wasn’t what terrified him. What scared him was the now-confirmed fact that there was a person who wanted Idris dead, who had tried to get him killed at Camberwell Road, and had probably procured an illegal termination for Keisha Best. And that person either worked inside the hospital or had access to someone who did.

  There was someone who was a threat who might well be in the building right now, and Harry had no idea who it was. Whether it was the same person who’d brandished a knife at him last night.

  ‘You alright there, my friend?’

  Harry turned to the voice behind him. It was Rashid.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Harry. ‘Just tired, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, forgive me,’ said Rashid. ‘I just had Dr Traubert on the phone. He wanted to see you.’

  Harry rolled his eyes as he spun on his feet and headed upstairs. He had a terrible feeling that his day was about to get a lot worse. Told himself that as long as Solomon Idris made it back from the CT scanner alive, everything was going to be fine.

  Despite his mood, Harry found the padded chair in Traubert’s office relatively comfortable. The room was substantial, and Harry ran his eyes across the shelves of the large case of textbooks behind Traubert’s desk, ranging from the classics of medicine, Gray’s Anatomy and Kumar & Clark, to journal editions on anaesthetics and critical care. There were numerous texts in French and German, too, and the centrepiece, at the bottom: a carbon-fibre mini-fridge made by Porsche, which Traubert was reaching over to open.

  ‘Can I offer you some Fiji water?’ Traubert said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have any coffee.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Harry had forgotten that Traubert was a health nut. On the opposite side to the bookcase was another shelving unit, which featured various awards and framed photographs, many of Traubert engaged in diverse forms of exercise – cycling, swimming, marathons. The alpine backgrounds suggested that a lot of them were from his native Switzerland, and Harry noticed that there were no pictures of anyone else other than members of a cycling team.

  Traubert retrieved two bottles of water from the fridge, passing one to Harry. He unscrewed the top and considered the tropical scene on the label.

  ‘What is this stuff?’ he said, taking a sip. It just tasted like ordinary water, but cold.

  ‘It’s the purest water on the planet,’ said Traubert. ‘Fiji has unique geology, and the aquifers there are like nothing else in the world. As you may know, I’m teetotal, and I don’t drink anything caffeinated. But pure, chilled water, there’s nothing like it. It helps focus my mind.’

  Harry couldn’t help thinking of the amphetamine he’d washed down that morning with a glass from the Thames Water supply at his flat. He reckoned that did a much better job of focusing the mind. Traubert perched on the desk and delivered his soliloquy. Harry gathered that the board of directors were terrified that the press would discover the police were treating the deletion of Idris’s allergy as a potential criminal matter, and typically they were far more scared of the damage to the hospital’s reputation than the possible existence of a staff member who had tried to get a patient killed. As with any other super-massive organisation, when something like this happened in the NHS, the sharks smelled blood, and some of that could be Harry’s.

  The problem was, he wasn’t really listening. He was thinking about the text message the man who had attacked him last night had tapped into his phone, and the photos on the files of Solomon Idris and Keisha Best.

  ‘Does that make sense?’ Traubert asked.

  Harry was staring at the bookshelf again. There was a hardback French volume there, which didn’t seem particularly medically related. It sounded romantic when he said the words in his head, even though he didn’t have a clue what they meant.

  ‘Harry!’

  ‘Sorry, Dr Traubert. I didn’t get much sleep last night.’

  It wasn’t really true. Harry glanced at the black-and-gold clock on the wall. Almost eleven. He sank back into the chair, trying to keep track of what Traubert was saying. He mentioned something about the chief executive getting involved, wanting to be kept appraised of the situation. People were worried about the presence of a police investigative team inside the hospital, particularly when they were looking at staff.

  ‘I have to say, you’re bad luck, Harry,’ Traubert continued. ‘Basically, what I’m trying to say is that I’m on your side.’

  ‘Who isn’t?’ Harry said.

  ‘Well, if you must know, a number of members of the board were pretty angry with you,’ Traubert said. ‘They didn’t feel it was appropriate for you to tell the police that the allergy had vanished. Not until Patient Safety had completed their own investigation.’

  ‘I was just speeding the process up,’ Harry said. ‘If they’ve got nothing to hide, why are they bothered?’

  ‘Because they don’t care about anything other than this trust’s reputation,’ Traubert said. ‘Anyway, certain people want me to keep an eye on you.’

  Harry rolled his tongue around the inside of his mouth, closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was briefly disappointed that he was still in his boss’s office, and that Traubert was still there, still smiling.

  ‘Well, you’re keeping an eye, aren’t you?’ Harry said.

  Traubert stood up, looking over Harry’s shoulder as if he was expecting someone else to come in through the door.

  ‘I have four departments to run in this hospital,’ Traubert said. ‘So I don’t want this to take up any more of my time than is absolutely necessary, alright? I sat through a bullshit meeting this morning where someone even went so far as to suggest we suspend you.’

  Harry said nothing. Traubert went on.

  ‘I told them that if they did I’d resign in protest, and that if they wanted to scapegoat someone, they should wait until the police find the person who is behind all of this. That they shouldn’t hang one of my best registrars out to dry.’

  Traubert drained his bottle and tossed it into the recycling bin.

  ‘You want another bottle of water?’

  Harry shook his head.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said Traube
rt. ‘How involved are you with this?’

  Harry shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I’m helping the police with their enquiries.’

  ‘Come on, Harry. I can tell that you care deeply about this teenager.’

  ‘Mmm,’ was all Harry could manage. He was wondering where the hell his consultant was going with this, whether it was groundwork for an insult.

  ‘You’re helping the police in your role with them, this forensic thing?’

  Harry nodded. ‘In a way,’ he said. ‘I’m visiting Solomon’s school this afternoon. It’s part of the outreach scheme. The Saviour Project.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Traubert. ‘That’s Duncan Whitacre’s project, isn’t it?’

  He pronounced the name White-acre, so Harry was briefly confused before he agreed.

  ‘What a fantastic piece of work,’ Traubert continued. ‘Duncan should get a medal for setting it up; it’s probably saved more lives than we ever do here. Stuff like that’s the way forward, you know. Have you been involved before?’

  ‘No,’ said Harry. ‘Just, um, helping out this once.’

  ‘It’s brilliant,’ Traubert said. ‘You know, I was a locum A&E consultant here back when Whitacre was setting it up. I helped find them an office. There was a similar thing at the Toronto General when I worked there.’

  Harry’s mind drifted back to Lahiri on his boat, and to meeting Whitacre on the ICU. How both of them had viewed what had happened to Solomon Idris as a failure on their part.

  ‘Anyway, what I was trying to tell you is that you should watch your back. And I’ll do my best to keep the bastards upstairs from directing their rage at you.’