by Rob McCarthy
‘Thanks,’ said Harry, suddenly uneasy.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Traubert. ‘I’m not asking for anything in return. You covered my back in A&E on Sunday night. I owe you for that. And you obviously think you’re onto something here.’
Harry didn’t say anything. Thought about how many times Solomon Idris could have died already. Bleeding to death on the dirty floor of a takeaway. Traubert fucking up in A&E. Crashing on the table during the operation, the allergic reaction. And he was still only barely alive, he thought. He remembered what Joy Idris had said that morning. The devil is trying to take my son. At least if they’d suspended him, he could have spent more time helping out with the investigation.
‘I think so,’ he said.
‘Well, let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.’
Harry’s phone buzzed in his pocket, the noise audible, and he resisted the urge to check it instantly.
‘Take it!’ Traubert said. ‘Go on, don’t let me bother you.’
The text was from Noble, styled with an efficiency Harry now knew to be trademark.
15 minutes. Boardroom, Jubilee Wing.
‘I’ll let you get on,’ Traubert said. ‘And I’m serious. If there’s anything you need, if it all starts to get a bit much, you know where I am.’
‘Thanks,’ Harry said again.
He got up from the chair and had the door three-quarters open when Traubert spoke.
‘Oh, there’s just one more thing.’
Harry turned around.
‘The police asked if they could have your computer records. They want to look at everyone who treated Idris since he came in, to rule out if anyone deleted the allergy by mistake.’
‘Sure,’ said Harry.
Traubert smiled and Harry shut the door. Felt the stress leave his body, just like the feeling of a cold beer on a Friday evening. He looked down at the text again, the screen still cracked from last night. He’d have to get that fixed, maybe the next weekend he had off. As he left the unit, he nodded to the young police officer on duty next to Idris’s bed. Keeping watch.
Harry made it to the Jubilee Wing in ten minutes, and had even managed to change out of his scrubs into normal clothing, maybe a little less smart than normal for the school assembly. The boardroom faced out onto a busy corridor near a coffee shop and the Friends’ Bookshop, and he stood with his back to the wall, a little way down the corridor, coffee in hand, waiting for Noble to emerge. As he waited, Harry scoured the news applications on his phone for any mention of the shooting, eventually finding something on the BBC News website, the local page for London. A seventeen-year-old male was ‘stable’ in an unnamed hospital after being shot by police on Sunday evening, and had been arrested on suspicion of firearms offences.
Standard fare for South London. Though the shootings usually made the news, the numerous stabbings and beatings didn’t even make the Standard, let alone the nationals.
The door opened after a short while and two uniformed officers came out, followed by three or four young-looking detectives in plain clothes, including DC Kepler, the Professional Standards detective who’d interviewed Harry on Monday morning. The same detective who’d decided that Keisha Best throwing herself in front of a train not long after she’d been twenty weeks pregnant wasn’t a crime. Noble came out next, scanned the corridor, spotted Harry and headed over.
‘Morning,’ she said. ‘How you feeling?’
‘Alright,’ said Harry. ‘Just the five of you?’
Noble turned and together they watched as the diminutive frame of Marcus Fairweather filled the doorway, nodding at both of them before moving away to reveal a woman, probably the wrong side of forty but holding on to her fresh face with an arsenal of make-up. Dark hair, cream suit, a folder under one arm, designer handbag, shoes with an inch heel. Not much in common with Noble’s leather jacket and Doc Martens.
‘Who’s that?’ Harry said.
‘Louisa Marsden,’ said Noble. ‘DCI with Homicide & Serious. She’s a bitch.’
‘Ha,’ said Harry. ‘Do you want a coffee?’
‘Nah. I need a fag, though.’
They turned and headed for the hospital’s main entrance.
‘I take it there’s no progress on who it was?’ Harry said.
Noble shook her head.
‘We’ve been busy,’ she said. They emerged into the morning fog and made their way towards a smokers’ cage, sandwiched between one of the medical school buildings and a bicycle park.
‘Oh really?’ said Harry.
‘Yeah. I thought it would be a good idea to run down alibis, cross-check any of our persons of interest, see if they own blue-and-silver motorbikes. Wilson’s been interviewing known associates of the gang who attacked Idris back in 2011, too.’
‘You think this could all be revenge?’
‘It’s possible,’ said Noble. ‘But it wouldn’t explain what happened yesterday, with the allergy.’
‘Back to square one, then?’ said Harry.
Noble shrugged her shoulders and smoked.
‘Exactly. That’s where Technical Services come in. We know that the change was made from a server on the East Wing, at seven-twenty, Monday morning, but the only way to find out who it was is to go through every log-in in turn and view their recent activity. So that’s what we’re doing, starting with everyone on duty Sunday night.’
Harry nodded, but he wasn’t hopeful – the one thing that was missing from all of this was motive. He went down a mental list of the people who’d treated Idris in hospital, and couldn’t think of a single reason any of them would want to cause him harm.
‘You should look into his bank accounts,’ said Harry. ‘I think Idris might have been getting money from somewhere.’
‘How do you know that?’ Noble said.
‘I can’t tell you,’ said Harry. ‘Confidentiality.’
Noble looked at him, unimpressed. ‘Well, he didn’t tell you, unless he’s woken up, which he bloody well hasn’t. Which means you got this from your friend Lahiri, who’s his doctor or his shrink or whatever the hell this Saviour Project meant.’
Harry tried not to betray anything with his face.
‘Come on,’ she said, pulling out her iPad. ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’
‘You know that I can’t,’ said Harry.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Noble. ‘Confidentiality means I can’t use anything Idris told his doctor against him. But I can use it to help us find whoever’s trying to kill him, I reckon.’
‘You got a law degree?’ said Harry.
‘Hell, no,’ said Noble. ‘A BA in philosophy, with a master’s in bullshit. But fuck it. Tell me what you know. If it helps, we already know about the money.’
‘What about it?’
Noble brought up some images from a folder on the tablet, scanned documents which looked like bank statements. Harry recognised the branch address. Walworth Road, near the Albany estate.
‘These are Solomon Idris’s finances,’ she explained. ‘As much as we appreciate your sage advice, one of the first things Mo did was pull his bank details. He had a junior saver’s account. With an awful lot of money going in for a seventeen-year-old kid from the Albany estate, allegedly in full-time education. Something in the region of two hundred pounds a week.’
‘Who was paying him that?’
‘A numbered account,’ said Noble. ‘We’re going to get a warrant to trace the payments, but the guy I spoke to in Organised & Economic said it could take months. But look at this.’
Noble’s finger tapped a single record made on 22 December 2012. Ten thousand pounds had been deposited into Idris’s account.
‘Jesus!’ said Harry. His thoughts immediately went back to the Time and Tide, Lahiri dropping the hint about Idris saving money, but without a job. Harry was sure Lahiri had been holding something back, and maybe this was it.
‘Cash deposit,’ Noble said. ‘No way to trace it, either.’
&
nbsp; ‘You think he was involved again?’ said Harry. ‘Drug money?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Noble. ‘I’d like to know. I’d like you to tell me what you know.’
Harry winced again, and the door of the smokers’ cage clattered as a pair of shattered-looking catering staff entered, their roll-ups tucked in the pockets of their smocks.
‘Can we get out of here before I get lung cancer, please?’
Noble scowled at him and they left, ducking into an alcove that separated the main hospital building from an old Victorian façade that now housed the neuroscience institute. Harry almost regretted the move. At least in the cage, it had been slightly warm. He moved to speak, but Noble got there first.
‘Harry.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Do you trust me?’
Harry shuffled a little, dug his hands into his pockets.
‘I guess.’
Noble smiled, and then leant against the wall and stared at him, a focused intensity.
‘I know that means a lot, because I know you don’t trust a lot of us. So I suggest we make a little pact. I believe that somebody tried to kill your patient, and I want to find them and bring them to justice. That’s all. I couldn’t give a fuck about the Met or your hospital or any of that shit. And I think you feel the same.’
Harry guessed she was waiting for a reply, so he just nodded.
‘Good. So why don’t we share everything we’ve got. And it stays between you and me, and we get this sorted. Deal?’
Harry nodded slowly at first, then quickly.
‘Deal,’ he said.
‘I’ve shown you mine,’ Noble said. They were briefly interrupted by a loud blast from an ambulance’s airhorn as it came out onto Denmark Hill from the hospital entrance.
‘I don’t know much,’ said Harry. ‘James, my friend, is Idris’s GP. He told me that Idris was saving money, but he reckoned that he’d lied about having a job. Said he bumped into him handing his CV in at a restaurant. Idris had plans to move out, move to Nottingham.’
‘With Keisha Best?’
‘It looks like it.’
‘That ten grand came in just before Christmas,’ said Noble. ‘Keisha died in November.’
‘Maybe Idris knows something,’ said Harry. ‘That’s money to keep him quiet.’
‘We’d thought about that,’ said Noble. ‘It’d give someone a motive.’
Harry’s phone buzzed. A text from Charlie Ambrose, the youth worker with the Saviour Project, offering him a lift down from the Ruskin to the Albany Road Academy. Harry showed it to Noble.
‘Let’s hope we can find out, then,’ he said.
‘Too right. Keep in touch,’ said Noble.
They headed back towards the main hospital building. Noble had almost turned away when Harry called after her.
‘Frankie.’
She turned.
‘Say this allergy thing is just negligence, a coincidence, whatever. And Fairweather wants to bury this all. You know you could get in a lot of trouble for swimming against the tide, right?’
‘I’ve had nine years in the Met, Harry,’ she said, coming back up to him. ‘You don’t need to tell me.’
‘So why are you willing to risk it?’ said Harry. ‘I mean, I’m glad someone is.’
‘Same reason you’re not doing what that message told you to last night,’ Noble said, and left.
Harry picked up a sandwich on his way into A&E and searched around for the Saviour Project office. It was tucked into a corner, upstairs, and he walked through the main shop floor as he looked for it, nodding to Rashid and Shelton as he passed them. They were leaning over a patient covered in defibrillator pads and monitor wires, with the ashen-grey face of someone who’d been brought back from the brink of death. He could tell by the look on their faces that the situation was grave. Harry made it to the office before he let himself exhale.
It was an underwhelming room, a door which could easily have led to a storage cupboard, an A4 piece of paper declaring its occupant as ‘Saviour Project JRUH’. The door was open, revealing a narrow room with a desk overflowing with files, an old computer and two chairs when there was only really room for one. In the middle of this stood a young man with an armful of posters and leaflets, whom he presumed to be Charlie Ambrose. Harry remembered Traubert’s spacious office a floor above them, enough room for his mini-fridge, and groaned inwardly.
‘Come in!’
Harry stepped into the room.
‘Hi, I’m Harry.’
‘Good to meet you,’ said Ambrose. ‘I’ve just ordered a cab, there’s no way we can carry this lot on the bus.’
Ambrose passed Harry a bundle of the materials, and they shuffled awkwardly out onto Denmark Hill where the taxi was waiting.
‘Their third period goes on until two,’ Ambrose said as they arranged the boxes on the cab’s floor. ‘We’re on after that.’
‘OK,’ said Harry. ‘I guess I’ll just be standing around. I want to keep my head down until I’m in a room with Shaquille Dawson.’
‘Sure,’ said Ambrose. ‘Duncan does most of the talking, anyway. You’ll enjoy it. He’s quite theatrical. Inspiring, even.’
Harry nodded. In a weird way, he was looking forward to it. As if being in the environment that Solomon Idris and Keisha Best had shared would help him in some way appreciate the misery their lives had encompassed.
The taxi edged slowly through the lunchtime traffic around Camberwell Green, the cabbie cursing about the stupid pissing bus drivers, four or five buses in various stages of making stops and blocking their progress. Ambrose leaned forward and turned the intercom off.
‘Where are you from, Harry?’
‘Bermondsey, originally. My dad worked the docks.’ It was half true. He’d worked the docks after he’d got back from the Falklands, and then six years later he’d walked out on Harry’s mother and disappeared. ‘What about you?’ he asked.
‘South Norwood,’ said Ambrose. ‘Well, Grenada on my mum’s side, Trinidad on my dad’s.’
‘How’d you get involved with the project?’
‘Roundabout way,’ said Ambrose. ‘I was a paramedic for ten years. Worked out of Oval, but I packed it in after I had my daughter. It’s not a good job; you spend most of your day shipping drunks to A&E, or getting shouted at by managers. And you see so many of these poor children. I just . . . I don’t know, I wanted to make a real difference. Improve some of their lives. I retrained as a youth worker, spent a few months with my church. But kids don’t listen to religion anymore. There’s no respect for it. Then Duncan got in touch about the Saviour Project, and I thought, hey, I’ve found my calling. This is it. And I’ve never looked back.’
Harry smiled and hoped it didn’t look fake. The one thing that had struck him about everyone he’d met from the Saviour Project was the relentless optimism; in a way, it reminded him of the way Joy Idris had been on the night her son had been shot. Confident that, against all the statistics, things would come out right. It jarred a little, almost felt naive. Maybe Whitacre and Ambrose just ignored the ones who fell by the wayside, and concentrated on the success stories.
‘How’s Solomon doing?’ Ambrose said.
‘He’s stable,’ said Harry. ‘Not out of the woods yet, though.’
‘Good,’ said Ambrose. ‘I got the call pretty late on Sunday; I was busy. I tried to go and see him yesterday morning, but I couldn’t get in. Too many of you doctors. I said a little prayer, though. Felt like it was the least I could do.’
‘You know him?’ Harry said.
‘Vaguely,’ said Ambrose. ‘That’s the shame about this job. You get to see some of these kids grow up. Every time they’re back in A&E, they’re a bit taller. First time he came in, he wasn’t really interested. He came to a couple of appointments and then just stopped, happens to about half the kids we take on. Then he was back, two years later, this time stabbed. I went to see him on the ward a few times. I told him it wouldn’t end well.’
‘He was still in hospital when his friends were killed. All three of them, down at that house in Camberwell. After that, he let us in. Accepted our help.’
Ambrose sat back in the taxi, and Harry watched him roll his eyes towards the sky. Probably praying, if the youth worker’s previous statements were anything to go by. A cyclist shot past the side of the taxi, prompting a horn blast and a tirade of muted swearing.
‘I felt the same when I used to work for the ambulance service,’ said Ambrose. ‘You don’t remember the ones you saved, just the ones you couldn’t.’
Harry was fairly sure that depended on your outlook. He remembered a few he’d lost, but a few of the ones he’d helped, too. He wondered which category Solomon Idris would end up falling into.
‘We’re not sure if what happened on Sunday with Idris was gang-related or not.’
‘We?’ said Ambrose.
‘The police,’ said Harry. The pact. Him and Noble. That was the we.
‘And I guess that’s why you’re here, and we’re doing this,’ said Ambrose. ‘Duncan didn’t really explain it. He says, we do. That’s the kind of team we are.’
‘Sounds like a good team,’ said Harry. ‘Sounds like you’re doing some good work.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ambrose. ‘Any kid we get out of that life is worth it, you ask me. Don’t care how much money we spend. Some of the things they’ve gone through, so young. Let me ask you, Harry – how many gang members under the age of nineteen d’you think have symptoms of PTSD?’
‘Forty per cent?’ he said, smiling.
Ambrose laughed.
‘Lucky guess,’ Harry said.
‘You been talking to Duncan?’
‘No, James Lahiri. He’s an old friend of mine.’
After last night, the word was becoming easier to say.
‘Ah, James. He’s a good man,’ said Ambrose. ‘Needs a few more months outside Middle England. No offence to him. That’s one of the reasons Duncan has me at all the assemblies. Helps to have someone local up there. Gives us more credibility.’