The Hollow Men: A Novel Read online

  The Hollow Men

  Rob McCarthy

  www.mulhollandbooks.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Mulholland Books

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  1

  Copyright © Rob McCarthy 2016

  The right of Rob McCarthy to be identified as the Author of the

  Work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN 978 1 473 61766 7

  Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 473 61765 0

  eBook ISBN 978 1 473 61764 3

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  All of the characters, institutions, events and locations in this story are entirely the work of the author’s imagination or, in the case of real locations, are used fictionally.

  Contents

  Sunday, 20 January

  Monday, 21 January

  Tuesday, 22 January

  Wednesday, 23 January

  Saturday, 26 January

  Sunday, 27 January

  Friday, 1 February

  Acknowledgements

  Crime Files

  Mulholland Books

  Sunday, 20 January

  The hearing is the last sense to go, and the first to come back. That was why doctors and nurses still spoke to coma patients even when brain scans showed no activity, and why the sound of his ringing phone interrupted Harry Kent’s dreams even when the low winter sun filtering into his living room hadn’t. The dream had been a vague one, mercifully peaceful, a series of vignettes interspersed with blackness. Purple skies and mountainsides full of lavender; a young woman, skin as pale as bone, hair dyed pink, trying to speak to him despite the plastic tube he was placing into her throat.

  Harry woke up and saw his phone vibrating on the glass coffee table, but couldn’t get to it in time. He reached over and picked it up, squinting to make out the number. It was a mobile he didn’t recognise. He glanced at the time. Quarter to seven in the evening. Outside, it was already dark, and had been for hours. He returned the call and got a question from the voice that answered.

  ‘Dr Kent? This is Dr Kent, yeah? The police surgeon?’

  In the background he could hear chaotic shouting, engines. The voice was female, direct, well spoken.

  ‘Speaking,’ Harry said.

  ‘This is DI Noble with Southwark CID. Frances Noble. Call me Frankie.’

  ‘Harry.’

  ‘So, Harry. We have a bit of a situation developing and we’d like your input.’

  Harry could hear a vehicle pulling up behind Noble. He stood up from the armchair he’d fallen asleep in and rubbed his forehead. The membranes in his brain were pulsating with every heartbeat, bringing a fresh headache with each strike. ‘What kind of situation?’

  ‘You’ll be briefed when you get here. But we need a doctor, right now.’

  ‘Which station?’

  ‘At a scene on Wyndham Road. We’ve closed off a section of the Camberwell Road just after the junction with Albany Road. There’s a strip of shops and takeaways. Know the place?’

  It was half an hour’s walk from Harry’s apartment, the other side of the Elephant & Castle roundabout. Five minutes by car.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘If someone’s hurt, you should call an ambulance.’

  ‘We already have one standing by,’ said Noble. ‘No one’s been injured yet.’

  Yet. A knot turning in his stomach, Harry stumbled into the kitchen. The apartment had been his for only four weeks, and a lot of his life was still in boxes in the hallway.

  ‘I can be there in fifteen,’ he said, breaking into a cough halfway through.

  ‘Great,’ said Noble. ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. I was on call last night, finished at nine this morning. You woke me up.’

  ‘We could be here some time. I can ring someone else if you want, but the on-call FME is all the way down in Woolwich. I saw your address was nearby and I thought I’d take my chances.’

  FME was his official title, Force Medical Examiner, but that sounded far too official and American for most people’s liking. Even if the old term, police surgeon, was a misnomer, given that Harry never performed surgery on his patients.

  ‘It’s OK, I’ll be there,’ he said. ‘But don’t hesitate to use those paramedics if things develop before I arrive.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Noble, and hung up.

  He didn’t have time to shower, so pulled on a clean shirt, jumper and trousers, thick socks for his steel-toed boots and took a shot of mouthwash. Washed his face with his hands in his bathroom sink. He didn’t look too tired, which was good, and now his hair was shorter it was easier to control.

  Harry reached into the cabinet above the sink and rummaged until he found the prescription bottle in the back corner. It had an orange-and-white label, announcing its contents as aspirin, 300mg, to be taken as needed. The label was peeling at the top corner where Harry had stuck it to the bottle – the previous one had been turquoise and in a different font, and had read dexamphetamine, 10mg. Not to exceed the stated dose.

  He put one of the amphetamines into his palm and swallowed it with water. Every hospital had its speed addicts among the registrars and senior house officers but Harry was careful – never more than one a day, and never more than two days in a row, even if he did fall asleep standing up in the lifts. Over the past week, he’d been the registrar on call for the ICU for three nights running. He picked up his medical bag from the hallway, checking that everything was in place, and retrieved the drugs pack he kept in a locked safe in his bedroom. In the hallway, he stopped to put on a woollen fleece.

  Harry headed out of his flat and onto the landing. The view northward was impressive: the Docklands, the Eye, the City, St Paul’s. From the roof terrace, two floors above his sixth-floor apartment, it was even better. It was why he’d bought it. The tower block on Borough Road had only existed for a few years, replacing what had previously been a council estate of over a thousand people. Those families had been shipped out to Croydon, their homes destroyed to make way for a posh new block of poky professional flats, each costing more than most of the previous inhabitants would make in their lifetimes.

  The lift arrived at the ground and Harry walked to his car, the red-and-orange medical bag hoisted over his shoulder. He was thinking about DI Noble and her ‘developing situation’. No one could be seriously hurt: not all police surgeons were trained in emergency medicine; many were GPs or psychiatrists. An anaesthetist by training, Harry was a relatively rare specimen. The vast majority of his police work involved taking forensic samples, or deciding whether substance abusers or the mentally ill were fit to be interviewed or detained. As he approached the car, he mentally flipped a coin. It was a little early for the junkies to surface, so he prepared himself for one of the tortured personalities the city might decide
to throw at him.

  By the time he was out of the car park, he had forgotten the dream.

  The police had cordoned off Camberwell Road and the diversion was running riot with the evening traffic, sent north up Albany Road to join the Old Kent Road towards Peckham. The road was blocked by police cars parked facing one another and a line of blue-and-white tape. A second cordon inside went around the square of concrete that was Wyndham Court, leading onto a nondescript estate, the row of shops and takeaways Noble had mentioned blocked by larger police vans. Four uniformed officers stood at the outer cordon, two of them armed.

  Harry’s stomach tightened again as he wound down his window. Police with guns at the cordons meant firearms involved at the scene, even in this part of town. Nightmare visions of a schizophrenic man waving a shotgun flooded into his consciousness. Whatever this situation was, from the sheer amount of police vehicles present it would evidently not be as simple as Harry had been hoping.

  ‘Road’s closed, mate,’ the officer at the cordon mouthed. His white breath spiralled in the air and hit Harry’s windscreen.

  Harry reached out of his window and presented his ID card.

  ‘Dr Kent? You the police surgeon?’

  ‘No,’ Harry said. ‘I’m the police dentist. DI Noble’s six-monthly check-up is due.’

  The officer shook his head and pointed over to his left.

  ‘Park up here. I’ll walk you in,’ he said, before turning to a colleague. ‘Sandy, log Dr Kent in. 19.16.’

  Harry parked on a double yellow and locked the car, retrieving his bag from the passenger seat. Even with half the Met watching, it was still Walworth. He ducked under the tape, his medical bag bouncing on his back as he walked towards Wyndham Road. A line of patrol cars and vans had formed a semicircle around the shopfronts, a fried chicken takeaway separating an internet café from an Islamic cultural centre. A group of three people were standing behind a large police command unit at the apex of the horseshoe, its side labelled Territorial Support Group in stencilled letters.

  The only woman was not in uniform, her black leather jacket reflecting the floodlights surrounding the group.

  ‘Guv, this is Dr Kent,’ the officer escorting him said.

  Noble extended her hand. ‘Thanks for getting here so quickly. This is, er, rather rapidly getting quite hairy. I’m Silver Command.’

  She stepped to one side to introduce the two men standing to her right. The officer in plain clothes was black, six foot four at least, and dressed in the tracksuit bottoms, blue camouflage hoodie and glossy gilet that was the uniform of the estates surrounding them. The other man was in tactical gear: a blue insulated jumpsuit beneath full body armour, complete with bulletproof helmet, visor and sidearm. ‘This is DS Wilson, he’s with me from CID. And Inspector Quinn, with Trojan. He’s Bronze Command.’

  The police used the same Bronze-Silver-Gold system for major incidents as the NHS, so Harry was vaguely familiar with it. As the team leader with Trojan, the Met’s specialist firearms unit, Quinn was on the front line, in charge of whatever was going on behind the blockade of police vehicles, while Noble managed the scene and dictated strategy. Gold Command would be the chief superintendent at the borough headquarters, pacing anxiously around the office and watching video feeds. Harry nodded at both of the men and shook their gloved hands.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘So what’s going on?’

  The TSG van’s side shutters had been pulled up to reveal a camera image displayed on a flat screen; Wilson moved to allow Harry to see it. It showed the takeaway’s façade, peeling blue paintwork above plate glass windows, behind which were four tables and a counter. A youth in a coat too big for him was sitting at the rear table, on which sat an empty box of chicken, three Coke cans and a small black gun. The other people were arranged in a huddle at one side of the room, all standing: two builders in orange high-vis, two men wearing Chicken Hut polo shirts, a family with a young daughter, a hipster with tight jeans and a knitted cardigan.

  ‘This is Solomon Idris,’ said Noble. ‘That’s a provisional ID, DS Wilson and his team are working on confirming it as we speak. He’s been holding those people hostage for about an hour now.’

  Noble’s explanation was concise and clear, but it left Harry cold. ‘I don’t know what you expect of me,’ he said. ‘I’m not a psychologist. If you want me to profile him, or negotiate, I can’t do that.’

  She laughed. ‘Believe it or not, Dr Kent, we have our own specialist officers trained for just that.’

  ‘Where are they?’ Harry said.

  Noble shook her head. ‘The ones attached to South-East London are all at a European police conference in Antwerp. I think there’s someone on their way from the Yard, but this is hardly high priority.’

  Harry had some sympathy with them. A kid with a gun in a fried chicken takeaway, he thought. It wasn’t a Middle Eastern embassy siege.

  ‘So what happened?’ he asked. ‘Is he trying to rob the place?’

  ‘Not as far as we can tell,’ she replied. ‘We’ve managed to get the CCTV feed. He ordered and paid, sat down and started eating. Then he just pulled out the gun, fired into the air and told everyone not to move. He let three schoolkids who were there go and told them to call the police. And here we are.’

  There was a chime from inside DS Wilson’s gilet, and he reached in to retrieve a BlackBerry, opening up an email. From his expression, Harry guessed it was something useful.

  ‘Mo, what have we got?’

  ‘His record,’ Wilson said, waving the screen around.

  ‘Anything interesting?’ said Noble.

  ‘Solomon Idris, seventeen years old, address on the Albany estate,’ Wilson summarised. ‘Got previous for possession of a bladed weapon, ABH, robbery. Used to be affiliated, Wooly OC, but he got himself shanked in 2010 and since then nothing. Looks like he’s gone straight.’

  Everyone listened intently to Wilson, who spoke quickly, but with an almost mournful tone in his voice, like a disappointed parent. Noble was working a piece of chewing gum from one side of her mouth to the other furiously. Harry would bet that it was the nicotine-rich variety, and the chewing was an addict’s release.

  ‘Some kind of vendetta?’ Quinn suggested.

  ‘After almost two years on the straight?’ said Noble. ‘Unlikely.’

  She turned back to Harry.

  ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘he’s made a few demands. He wants to speak to a lawyer, and he wants to make a statement and have it broadcast on BBC News.’

  ‘Are you meeting them?’ Harry asked.

  ‘We’ve got some legal aid bod coming over from the Yard. We’re still working on Huw Edwards.’

  Quinn put his hand to his earpiece and went running off towards the back of the van. Harry noticed two bored-looking paramedics with cardboard cups of tea, sitting in the front of the ambulance and waiting for someone to get shot. He stepped forward, his breath dancing in the cold air.

  ‘With all due respect,’ he said, looking between Noble and Wilson, ‘I still don’t see what I’m doing here.’

  ‘He’s sick,’ Noble said. ‘Solomon.’

  ‘What, you mean mentally ill? You want a psych assessment?’

  ‘No. Well, not as far as we know. The kid’s physically sick. He’s been coughing his lungs up, maybe once every few minutes, for about half an hour now. That’s why you’re here. Also looks like he’s having trouble breathing. We’ve negotiated a deal. Three of the hostages will be released in exchange for medical attention.’

  Harry leaned in closer, as though if he could hear her better she’d make more sense. He put his palm up, then regretted it. Outside his fleece pocket his hand burned cold. ‘Sorry? You want me to go into the takeaway with Idris and treat him, am I right?’

  Noble nodded and started to explain. ‘Look, we really think—’

  ‘And all this time he’s still armed, yeah?’

  Inspector Quinn returned from behind the van and put a hand on Harry’
s forearm, squeezing just too tightly to be considered reassuring. ‘Look, I know that sounds scary, but trust me. I’ve got sixteen officers deployed, four round the back covering the fire exit, six at the front, all eyes on the target.’ He pointed up at the council flats that looked down onto the takeaway. ‘Two sharpshooters up there. At all times at least one of them has a crosshair right on the subject. The other four guys are a walk-in team. They’ll take you right up to the door. Believe me, this guy makes even a fraction of a move for that weapon and my boys will take him out before you even start to shit your pants.’

  Quinn laughed and Harry didn’t. ‘I’m glad you’re not negotiating,’ he said.

  ‘So am I, mate.’

  ‘You’ll do it then?’ The voice was DI Noble’s, blunt, to the point.

  Harry hadn’t finished nodding before someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around. DS Wilson was holding up a Kevlar vest. ‘Let’s get this on under your fleece, then,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t want you to get chilly, now, would we?’

  Harry sat on the step of the van trying not to shiver. Inspector Quinn was next to him, addressing the four armed officers gathered in front. They were battle-ready, two with MP5 carbines slung across their chests, the others with heavy metal shields and handguns, hard-man bravado visible on their faces. Harry took one look and knew each was as nervous as he was.

  ‘OK,’ Quinn said. He was holding a whiteboard tablet on which he’d sketched a map of the storefronts. ‘Charlie One and Charlie Two will advance up the street and wait behind the concrete bench here. Once they’re in position, Charlie Three and Charlie Four will escort Dr Kent up to the same position. From there, I want radio confirmation of eyes on target before Dr Kent approaches the front door. If at any point you lose your shot, radio in.’

  Grunts of understanding from the four officers. Harry’s heart was starting to race. A familiar feeling was coming back to him, one that he hadn’t missed. But it had been different when he’d been in the field – he’d been a cog in a machine, whether in the safety of the hospital at Bastion, behind dozens of security circles, or darting out of the back ramp of a helicopter with a platoon of Royal Marines to take the heat for him. There, he’d had a mission, something he could focus on to ignore the flying bullets. The kid in front of him with three limbs blown off and half of his circulating volume soaked into the dust.