The Hollow Men: A Novel

by Rob McCarthy

  ‘I hope she wakes up,’ Noble said. ‘One day.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Silence.

  ‘James gave a shit,’ Harry said after a while. ‘At least he did at the start. He told me he thought there was something more going on with Idris, something else he didn’t tell me on Monday.’

  ‘Maybe he wasn’t sure if he could trust you,’ Noble said. ‘There are lots of questions, Harry. Ask them tomorrow.’

  ‘OK.’

  They said nothing for a while. Harry sat upright in bed, looked over, and saw that she was asleep. She slept in a foetal position, to one side of the single bed, as if she expected someone to interlock behind her, someone larger. He turned away and looked at the door in front of him again. The darkness mellowed into a twilight, the blue of his adapted vision, and the orange filtering in from London outside. No matter how hard you tried, you could never block out that light.

  This would be a long night, he thought. The longest in a while.

  Wednesday, 23 January

  The dream on Tuesday night was a chaotic rage of blood and fire and anguish. Harry was at the helm of the Time and Tide, pushing her through black waters. He was on a river that didn’t exist, one as wide as the sea but with the smell of London. He found himself on the starboard deck, by the aft ladder. He backed away as James Lahiri came up out of the water towards him, climbing onto his own boat, his face ashen, a dark red hole in the back of his head. Then he saw faces in the water – Solomon Idris, Keisha Best, and Shaquille Dawson. Idris’s brother Junior in an Arsenal shirt. Faceless young men and women. Afghan boys and girls. All clawing to get onto the boat. Shouting out to him with wordless screams.

  A sound like a slamming door woke him up.

  They ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant. Harry filled his plate with bacon, greasy sausages and hash browns, poured coffee, and barely touched any of it. The promised snow had fallen overnight, a couple of inches that was quickly turning to slush on the roads and wreaking inconvenience rather than havoc across the city.

  Harry watched as Noble received a call, before offering the phone to him.

  ‘It’s for you,’ she said. ‘It’s your friend.’

  Harry took her phone and she went to refill her coffee, probably to give him privacy. So he went outside to stand in the snow, the cold an unwelcome return.

  ‘Morning. Harry,’ said Tammas. ‘Did you. Sleep?’

  ‘No,’ Harry said. ‘You?’

  ‘A little. I got woken. Up at. About. Six. Forty-five.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I got a. Visit. From some. Detectives. Up your end.’

  Harry felt the cold go through him faster than it should have. Three lanes of angry rush-hour traffic on the Old Street roundabout were competing with the congestion and the snow. He moved around to another wall to shield himself from the noise. ‘Who were they?’ he asked.

  ‘Homicide. They said. From Southwark. One of them. Oriental. Stank of. Cheap fags. Like the ones. You used. To get from. The mess. The one. In charge was. Female. Blonde. Not bad. Would have. Given me. A hard-on. If I had. A spinal cord.’

  Shit, Harry thought. The sergeant from Homicide & Serious, the one who’d supervised his interview at Lewisham, had been East Asian, probably Chinese, and the woman sounded suspiciously like DCI Marsden, especially if she’d been in charge. They’d driven all the way down to Kingston to speak to Tammas first thing, rather than wait for the morning. And the senior investigating officer had done it herself, not delegated it.

  ‘Bastards!’ Harry said. ‘Why the hell did reception let them in?’

  ‘I let them. In, Harry,’ said Tammas. ‘You know. How much. I appreciate. Visitors.’

  Harry took a long, hard breath.

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They wanted. To know. About. James.’

  Harry rested his head against the wall, and spoke in a voice an imitation of Tammas’s own, every word punctuated.

  ‘What did you tell them, boss?’

  ‘I told them. He was. One of the. Best. Doctors. I ever took. Under my wing. I told. Them. That if it wasn’t. For him. Lots of. People. Would be dead. You. And me included. And that. He went back. For seconds. Even though. It probably wrecked. His life.’

  The eulogy was appreciated, but it didn’t really matter. There was only one thing which did.

  ‘Boss, did you tell them about what happened with Alice?’

  ‘I didn’t. Have a choice.’

  Harry punched the wall.

  ‘Fuck!’ he spat. ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’

  The police were obeying the universal law of entropy, moving from order to chaos. The answer to why James Lahiri was dead started and finished with Solomon Idris, sitting feverish in a Chicken Hut. The patient he’d been trying to help, or that he’d let down, depending on which way you looked at it. If they were trying to look more widely, to treat his murder as a coincidence, then they would have a field day and get nowhere.

  ‘I wasn’t. Going to lie. To them. Harry.’

  ‘I know, boss.’

  ‘I told them. You didn’t. Do it.’

  ‘What?’

  There was a vent in the wall blowing out warm air, and Harry edged along to stand beside it.

  ‘I said. That however. Much you might. Have wanted. To do. It. You wouldn’t. Have the balls.’

  Harry didn’t know whether Tammas was being tongue-in-cheek or condescending. He let the warm air run through his hair and listened.

  ‘They were. Saying. Things,’ Tammas continued. ‘About. Lending money. Giving. Drugs to teenage boys. Changing things. On some. Computer system.’

  ‘That’s bullshit,’ Harry said. He wasn’t sure if he believed it or not. James had deleted that allergy, or at least someone with access to his computer log-in had.

  ‘I told them. It doesn’t. Matter what. James did. That he’s. Still dead. And someone should. Still pay.’

  ‘Harry!’

  He turned to his left and briefly raised his arms as the phone was snatched from his hand, only to lower them when he realised it was Noble, one hand inside her jacket.

  ‘Jesus Christ, what part of don’t go out of my sight is difficult for someone with a medical degree to understand?’

  Harry opened his mouth to speak, but Noble cut him off, grabbing his hand.

  ‘What happened to your hands?’

  Harry looked down. The cold had outmanoeuvred the pain, and he hadn’t even realised he was bleeding. There was a pair of cuts on the knuckles of his right middle and index fingers that looked deep, and were still oozing black-red blood.

  ‘Oh,’ Harry said. ‘I, erm, had a moment.’

  Noble regarded him with suspicious eyes. It almost looked like pity. He could still feel the tightness behind his sternum. He wanted to scream, for everything inside him to just explode out of any hole it could find. It felt compressed, as if the scars on his chest were sealing it all in. He longed for Lahiri’s scalpel to open it again, to release the pressure just as he’d done on Harry’s collapsed lungs halfway up a foreign mountain.

  ‘Do you want to finish your phone call?’ she said, passing it back to him.

  Harry put the phone up to his ear, but Tammas had hung up.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Noble said. ‘Wilson wants me over at Lewisham. He says he’s found something I should see.’

  ‘I’m coming with you.’

  ‘Harry, I’m not sure—’

  ‘Frankie, we made that deal yesterday, remember. That hasn’t changed. I was part of this from the start, and I plan to see it through to the end.’

  Noble shook her head.

  ‘This is fucked up.’

  A chunk of snow fell down from the roof, and landed between them. The cold went through Harry again, and he leant against the wall to catch his breath. She lit a cigarette and turned towards her car.

  ‘Come on, then.’

  All the other
times Harry had been to Lewisham station it had been to the custody suite or the interrogation rooms. He’d never made it into the inner sanctum, a seemingly infinite maze of offices, meeting rooms and training classrooms. Noble explained that they often transferred major investigations to Lewisham when they needed the extra facilities. He trudged to the station through the slush in the car park, still unused to the new shoes they’d got him. The jumper he’d been bought was reasonably thick, but the temperature was still hovering around zero outside and there was no one about without a coat. Hence the tattered black fleece from the boot of Noble’s car that Harry sported. The Metropolitan Police insignia was present on the chest, but if he folded the collar over it was just about covered. At least it helped him blend in.

  In the meeting room, all fifteen stone of DS Moses Wilson sat perched on a worktop. It was an old-fashioned classroom, with yellow-stained walls, a projector at one end, and wooden desks arranged in rows. It still stank of the cigarette smoke that had once hung from the ceiling, though it had long since been banished. Wilson was in a suit, which was bizarre, and almost made Harry feel underdressed for the occasion.

  The computer in front of him was locked, a Met Police logo above the log-in boxes. Plugged into the console was the USB drive Shaquille Dawson had handed over the previous day. Harry thought about that, how it felt like a different time. A lot could happen in eighteen hours.

  ‘Technical Services cracked it this morning,’ Wilson said. The detective looked rough, like he’d been up all night. There was a coffee stain on his tie. ‘You’ll never guess what the password was.’

  Harry said nothing. Thought about what a seventeen-year-old would use as a password. A footballer’s name, maybe, or a rapper.

  ‘141112KAB,’ Wilson said.

  Noble shook her head. ‘I don’t get it.’

  Harry got it, but Wilson explained first.

  ‘14 November 2012,’ he said. ‘The day Keisha Best died, followed by her initials.’

  Harry became aware of his heartbeat again, and silence descended. They could hear muffled conversations from the adjacent conference rooms.

  ‘What’s the delay?’ Noble said.

  ‘I thought we’d wait for DCI Marsden’s team,’ said Wilson. ‘They’re having a briefing upstairs.’

  ‘Sod that,’ said Noble. ‘Show us now. You’ve seen what’s on it, right?’

  Harry watched Wilson shuffle, and knew that he had, and whatever he’d seen had scarred him. He had the same look he’d recognised in Solomon Idris at the Chicken Hut, and it all fell into place. Just like that, he knew.

  A seventeen-year-old boy with eyes that had seen too much.

  An eighteen-year-old girl, recently pregnant, with the fortitude to stare down a commuter train.

  Both of them HIV-positive.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said. ‘It’s sexual, isn’t it?’

  Wilson nodded.

  ‘Abuse?’ Harry said.

  Wilson nodded again.

  ‘Some of the worst shit I’ve ever seen. I told Marsden, I had to, guv. I’ve sat through it once, and I’m not gonna watch it a second time. Respectfully, the less times this video gets seen by human eyes the better.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Noble said. ‘Fuck.’

  Harry felt numb. They stood in silence for a minute or so until the door opened without a knock. Harry recognised DCI Marsden from when he’d seen her at the Ruskin, now dressed in a dark red power suit, her entourage surrounding her like acolytes around a cardinal. The same people had been at Marigold House that morning, questioning a grieving man about who might want to kill his departed friend. He recognised other faces: the Chinese sergeant, sweat patches under his arms, the two detectives who’d interviewed him after the shooting. Last into the room were two people Harry did not want to see at all: DCI Fairweather, complete with damp trenchcoat and an even smaller suit this time. Kepler, his lapdog, trailed behind, a new sheaf of A4 paper tucked under his arm.

  ‘Detective Inspector,’ Marsden said, nodding towards Noble.

  ‘Morning, ma’am.’

  The detectives from Homicide & Serious, at least eight of them, filed into the room and formed two rows behind the chairs that Harry and Noble were sitting on. One of them spoke up.

  ‘This is from the stick Shaquille Dawson handed over, right?’

  ‘To Dr Kent, yes,’ Marsden said. ‘Let’s play it.’

  Harry felt eyes burn into the back of his neck and wondered why she had felt the need to point that out. At the computer, Wilson nodded solemnly and brought up a media player. He clicked play and bowed his head forward. To Harry, it looked like he was praying.

  The video buffered for a while, and then the scene appeared. Keisha Best was face down on a double bed with lime-green sheets, naked, her hands tied to the headboard with thin plastic cord, something stuffed inside her mouth. The image was jerky, as if the camera was hand-held, but the quality was good: not quite high definition, but not far off. Good enough to make out a trickle of dark blood running from Keisha’s left buttock down the inside of her leg. She was moaning, a terrible sound Harry recognised as the low vowels of intoxication. He’d heard them enough times in A&E. What was it that the post-mortem had found? Benzodiazepines, ketamine and GHB?

  Solomon Idris entered the picture, also naked, facing away from the camera. His eyes were red from crying, and from the way he moved it was obvious that he was drugged, too. He moved closer to the camera, knocking into the bed as he did so, and then the image revealed the shackle around his right ankle, a length of chain running off into the distance. Like a dog tied up outside an off-licence. Slowly, Idris turned to face the camera.

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  Seventeen years old, Harry thought. Perhaps when he’d seen him in the Chicken Hut, in a coat too big for him, fingers wrapped around a gun, Solomon Idris had looked like a man. Here, he was undoubtedly a boy.

  Whoever was behind the camera did something, silently, and Idris flinched. Then he turned to face the bed and mounted the girl strapped to it, his body visibly trembling as he wept. Both the bodies shook and cried. Harry had to look at the floor, but somehow that just made it worse. Wilson had been right. This was the worst sound he had ever heard, the worst thing he had ever seen. This darkness had no place in the world. Behind him, one of the homicide detectives rushed to a bin and vomited.

  A new sound came from the speakers, and it made Harry look up. It was a voice, from behind the camera, but it sounded electronic and garbled, low and menacing.

  ‘You know that’s not good enough.’

  Harry looked across. Noble was still watching, unblinking, her knuckles white around the armrests of her chair.

  Idris, begging again: ‘Please. Make it stop.’

  ‘Do it!’ the mechanical voice commanded.

  ‘No!’

  The camera moved, up and closer to the bed, and then Harry realised that whoever was holding it had stood up. A pair of hands came briefly into view. They were wearing pale blue non-latex gloves, exactly the type used in hospitals. Idris flinched as the man behind the camera approached.

  ‘Hit her!’ the voice said.

  Idris sobbed again, raised his hand, and brought it down on the side of Keisha Best’s face, and both of them cried out.

  ‘Do it again!’ the voice shouted, and Harry felt the anger rise in him, and turned around, and wanted to find another wall to punch. By now, the chorus of silence among the gathered police officers had started to break, people swearing, heads in their hands. At the back, Fairweather and Kepler were arguing in whispers.

  DCI Marsden broke through, standing up.

  ‘I think we’ve seen enough,’ she said. Wilson reached over and paused the video. The still frame caught Idris with a distraught expression on his face, while Keisha thrashed beneath him. Wilson, flustered, tried to minimise the window but missed a couple of times before the image finally disappeared.

  ‘You’ve seen it before, Detective Sergeant?’ M
arsden continued.

  Wilson nodded.

  ‘What happens?’

  Harry watched Wilson swallow hard, still staring at the floor, before meeting Marsden’s eyes. ‘That continues for about four or five minutes. He hits her repeatedly. The man behind the camera taunts Idris about his inability to reach orgasm. He then approaches the bed and rapes Miss Best himself, while forcing Idris to watch. Then the video cuts out and back in again, and we see Idris performing fellatio on the offender. The whole thing lasts about thirteen minutes, ma’am.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Marsden. Harry looked around the room. The DCI was probably the only person who wasn’t visibly distressed by what they had just seen. Instead she looked cold.

  ‘He rapes both individuals?’

  ‘It appears so, yes,’ said Wilson, his voice cracking.

  Harry felt stupid for not working it out earlier. It hadn’t been about embarrassing the Saviour Project by leaking stories about giving kids cannabis to the press. That was no reason to kill another human being. Making sure a video like that one wasn’t watched by anyone but the sick, depraved fucks who would pay for that sort of thing was. The silence lasted about thirty seconds, until Marsden spoke again.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘This is one investigation now. Under my control. We work together, and we work our arses into the ground until we’ve found the people responsible for this, and put them in prison. Enhanced Protection Wings – they’ll get what’s coming to them. Understood?’

  The chorus replied: ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Harry looked behind him. Fairweather had his arms crossed and was typing an email out on his phone, evidently pissed at having been sidelined. Marsden continued.

  ‘Let’s summarise what we know so far. We know that a computer account at the Ruskin belonging to Dr Lahiri deleted the penicillin allergy on Solomon Idris’s medical record. It’s reasonable to assume that this was intended to kill Solomon. We also know that a firearm was discharged in the vicinity of Wyndham Road while Idris had hostages there, again with the likely intention of causing his death. And we know that Dr Lahiri was murdered yesterday evening. That’s about all we know for sure. So, let’s talk.’