The Hollow Men: A Novel Read online

  Here, though, it was just him and a seventeen-year-old boy with a gun. The one who was really in charge of the situation, whatever the Met said.

  ‘Radio check,’ Quinn ordered. Harry had been given his own earpiece and collar mike. He heard the armed officers’ call signs one by one as they checked their communications. He was trying to reassure himself that they had his back. It wasn’t working. He felt an itch under his right arm, and took a deep breath of freezing air.

  ‘And you, Doc.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘OK,’ Quinn said. ‘Move up, stand by.’

  The two armed officers took their positions between two police vans, one of the gaps in the armoured horseshoe protecting the officers from the siege in the takeaway. The media were starting to arrive at the far cordon, and Harry could hear a helicopter somewhere in the night. Quinn leaned out and nodded to Noble and Wilson, who were still standing by the command vehicle. Harry followed his gaze and made eye contact with Noble for a brief second. She nodded and smiled. At that moment he realised where he’d seen her face before, and felt a twist in the pit of his stomach. Putting the memory away, he watched her raise a black satellite phone and start talking.

  ‘Hi, Solomon. It’s Frankie again. How are you?’

  I can’t imagine how he is, Harry thought. Coming to terms with the prospect of his life ending in a fried chicken takeaway.

  ‘Is our deal still on? Good, that’s great to hear. OK, this is what we’re gonna do. You’re gonna see some of our officers in front of the shop. But don’t worry now, they’re just there to make sure Dr Kent gets in safe and to collect the other people when they come out.’

  The other people. Harry guessed the book didn’t let her say the word ‘hostage’.

  ‘OK, I understand, Solomon. He’ll be with you shortly. Thanks for cooperating.’

  Noble turned and nodded to Quinn, who put his hand over his earpiece.

  ‘Charlie One and Two, move to position,’ he said.

  ‘Copy.’

  Harry watched the two officers walk round the corner, the one with the shield leading, his handgun poking out behind it, trained on the figure behind the panel glass.

  ‘In position.’

  ‘Charlie Three and Four standing by.’

  Quinn looked across at Harry and pointed to the two Trojan officers crouched either side of him, checking their weapons.

  ‘Good luck, mate.’

  Harry filled his lungs with crisp, empty air and stood up, taking his position between the two policemen.

  ‘In your own time, Charlie Three.’

  They emerged from behind the van and Harry felt every muscle in his body tense involuntarily. The first two guys were now crouched behind a concrete bench, aiming towards the figure at the far table. Harry looked up at the logo next to the flickering Chicken Hut sign, the smiling cockerel, and wondered how thick the glass beneath it was, whether it would cause the bullets to ricochet.

  They reached the benches and the second pair of officers took up positions either side of him.

  ‘This is as far as we go,’ one of them said.

  ‘Excellent.’

  Harry held the strap of his medical bag, the orange fluorescent stripe reflecting the takeaway’s lights. The internet café and cultural centre were closed, blinds down, their owners and staff no doubt evacuated earlier. His right armpit was itching again. He stood up, fixed his eyes on the blue strobes reflected in the takeaway’s front window and began to move. As he walked towards the light, he thought about what a good target the fluorescent strap across his chest was.

  ‘Romeo One Rifle, no shot.’

  The voice was a new one, one of the marksmen somewhere on the tower block behind him. Rifle bullets were twice as long and travelled twice as fast as those in the officers’ carbines, or Solomon Idris’s revolver. If the sharpshooters missed, they could easily slice through Harry and then a hostage.

  Quinn’s voice: ‘Rifle Two, check in.’

  ‘Romeo Two Rifle, I have a shot. Standing by.’

  Harry wrapped his hand around the metal handle of the door and pushed it in. A bell rang to announce his arrival. He took four steps forward so he was standing right in the middle of the shop.

  Solomon Idris was sitting far from the door, his back propped up against the wall, one arm on the counter. Tracklines shaved into his hair, hands in the long front pocket of his hoodie, beads of sweat on his forehead, red, spider’s webs of blood on the whites of his eyes. The grainy camera image and the baggy hoodie had managed to disguise just how thin he was. DS Wilson had said that Idris was seventeen, but to Harry he seemed far older – his face was sunken, the cheeks sucked inward, close to the bones, and his eyes looked out with a stare Harry had seen before, an old man’s stare in young men who had seen things beyond their years. His figure shone in a halo of glowing meal deals, chicken buckets and side orders.

  Harry looked around and buried an almost uncontrollable desire to burst out laughing. Here he was, less than an hour after waking up in an empty flat, the scaffold of his mind held up by speed, standing in a fried chicken shop with an armed teenager. A chill ran through him, despite all the layers he had on, and he saw that the hostages were all shivering too.

  The mobile phone on the desk next to the gun rang and Harry tried to conceal that it had made him jump. Idris reached down with a delicate, measured movement and picked it up.

  Harry imagined Noble’s voice on the other end of the phone, firm but caring, like a schoolteacher. Idris’s face didn’t change and he said nothing. He hung up the phone and turned his gaze to Harry.

  ‘Take off the vest.’

  No sooner was the command out of Idris’s mouth than he collapsed into a fit of visceral coughing, his body jerking with every spasm.

  Harry’s eyes moved down to the gun on the table. A pocket-sized revolver, one of the thousands of street guns that circulated around the city. It looked small-calibre, not one of the magnum varieties which could cut through Kevlar like it was paper. At this range, Harry’s vest would stop the bullet.

  Idris nodded at one of the hostages, the young girl with her parents. ‘Take it off, bruv, or I waste the girl.’

  Her father let out a whimper, and Harry released the Velcro strap keeping the vest in place, sliding his arms out of the fleece and laying it and the vest on the ground. He decided that under no circumstances would he give the vest to Idris. Two layers of clothing down, the cold bit Harry’s skin even harder.

  Silence and cold air filled the restaurant and somewhere outside a distant siren stopped. Harry didn’t know what to say. The kid broke the deadlock.

  ‘Is you hungry?’

  At the mere mention of the word, Harry’s stomach did a full turn. Night shifts meant working from 8.30 in the morning to 8.30 at night, and handing over at the morning meeting usually went on until 9.30. His last meal had been a toasted sandwich from the hospital’s twenty-four-hour café somewhere around one a.m., eighteen hours ago.

  ‘Yeah, actually, I am,’ said Harry. ‘Starving.’

  Idris gestured towards the two Chicken Hut employees, their polo shirts the same colour as the blue plasters on their fingers, who jerked to their feet.

  ‘Boss, make man some chicken,’ he ordered, before turning to Harry: ‘What you want?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Harry.

  ‘Nah you isn’t!’ Idris said, coughing again. ‘You’s hungry. That’s what they there for, innit? That’s what they get paid to do, yeah? Just like you’s a doctor. You make people better. Or you s’posed to, innit? They make us chicken.’

  ‘Honestly, I’m fine,’ said Harry. ‘But thanks for the offer, mate.’

  Idris shrugged his shoulders and settled back into his chair. The smell of grease and spices hung in the restaurant, and Harry’s hunger worsened. The paradox of simultaneous hunger and zero appetite whatsoever was an all too familiar one to him.

  Noble’s voice sounded in his ear. ‘Tell him we had a deal, Har
ry.’

  Harry took a deep breath in.

  ‘You made a deal with Frankie about letting the other people go,’ he said.

  Idris looked at him through the bloodshot eyes that had evidently seen too much, rolled his head from side to side and burst into another fit of coughing. Harry could see the sternocleidomastoid muscles above his collarbones jerking as his lungs spasmed.

  ‘Fair,’ Idris said once the coughs subsided. He pointed to the family gathered in the near corner of the shop and then threw his hand towards the door. ‘Go,’ he said, and pulled a napkin to his mouth and coughed into it. Harry watched it fall, noting red spots surrounding the smiling cockerel on his white background. The family ran into the arms of the Trojan officers waiting at the door, who shepherded them to safety, a chorus of boots on concrete.

  As the officers melted back into the darkness, Harry felt more alone than he had in a long time. He tried to remember the sharpshooters behind him in the tower block, their crosshairs over the man, or rather the boy, in front of him. He looked at Solomon Idris and thought that he must be feeling pretty lonely, too. Probably lonelier than he had ever been before.

  Over half the patients at Bastion had been enemy combatants, insurgents responsible for the deaths and injuries of his comrades, men willing to kill for an ideology that included shooting young girls in the head for demanding an education. Your patient has an inalienable right to life, he told himself now, as he had then. The teenager in front of him hadn’t done anything nearly as bad as most of the people he’d treated over there. Victims of birth: just like growing up in a theocracy where Westerners had destroyed your livelihood and culture made you an insurgent, if you grew up poor in a concrete mausoleum in North Peckham, life inside a gang was the only security you could ever hope for.

  ‘Can I call you Solomon?’ said Harry.

  Idris grunted and nodded. More coughing.

  ‘I’m Harry. Can I place my bag down on this table?’ He got an imperceptible nod in reply. ‘What seems to be the problem?’

  ‘Can’t breathe. Got bare pain in my chest.’

  ‘How long have you been coughing?’ said Harry.

  ‘Weeks, man.’

  Harry reached into his medical bag and watched Idris wrap his fingers around the gun, releasing it when Harry withdrew his hand with a stethoscope entwined in it. How many gunshot wounds had he seen in his career? Six or seven in two years in London. Maybe a hundred in nine months at Bastion. Nothing quite as destructive as a bullet, its complete disregard for organ, bone or tissue, tearing through everything with equal malice.

  ‘You normally fit and well?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Any health conditions? Asthma? Diabetes?’

  ‘No.’

  Harry tapped the diaphragm of his stethoscope to check it was set round the right way.

  ‘Travelled anywhere recently?’

  Idris rolled his bloodshot eyes over to meet Harry’s.

  ‘Solomon, I don’t work for the police. I’m a doctor. Anything you tell me falls under doctor–patient confidentiality, and I’ll only pass it on to the police in the event that not informing them would risk placing you or someone else in danger.’

  Idris shook his head and laughed, but it quickly degenerated into coughing. Wet particles of saliva bounced off the table and onto Harry’s sleeve. He reached into the bag and put on gloves and a surgical mask. Once Idris was finished he indicated the two Chicken Hut workers, the builders, and the student in the cardigan.

  ‘Bruv, I’s sittin here with a piece and these five bitches. I think you could get away with sayin I’s dangerous.’

  Harry smiled. Idris didn’t react.

  ‘Maybe I could,’ Harry said. ‘But telling me if you’ve been abroad won’t change my mind. It might help me help you, though.’

  Idris nodded. Harry watched the neck muscles he used whenever he breathed.

  ‘Fair. I been in Nottingham a bit. I ain’t never left England.’

  Harry said nothing and felt the weight of fear in his chest. Or maybe it was guilt. At Solomon Idris’s age, Harry had never left the country either. It was one of the things that had been most noticeable, that had embarrassed him most, when he’d arrived at medical school, his peers all fresh from gap years in Phuket or Paraguay or Paris, or from the family safari in Kenya. If things had been different, could he have been here? Surrounded by the filth, a gun in his hand, contemplating the prospect of his last meal being a box of chicken?

  He ignored the feeling and put the diaphragm of his stethoscope just below Idris’s left collarbone.

  ‘Take a deep breath in.’

  He did so. Harry heard crackled, muffled whispers of life. He looked down, saw the gun again, and imagined the bullet in his own chest. He wondered what would kill him if Idris decided to use it. Sometimes gunshot victims died before they had time to bleed to death: their lungs collapsed and the pressure in their chests built up until it crushed their hearts, or the great vessels leaked into the airways and they drowned in their own blood.

  ‘Have you lost any weight recently?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘A couple months. But I ain’t been eatin, not much anyway.’

  Idris erupted into the worst coughing fit so far, and Harry jumped backwards, pulling his stethoscope back over his neck. Idris bent double and retched, and Harry reached into his pack for a clinical waste bag, holding it at Idris’s chin so the teenager could cough into it. When the fit was finished, he leant over and inspected the sputum, but there was nothing in the bag despite the fact that the teenager’s lungs were audibly full of crap. Maybe there were cysts, or he was too weak to cough it up. Christ, Harry thought.

  ‘How long have you been feeling like this?’

  ‘About a week. Thought it was a cold, innit.’

  From the muffled breath sounds and the distress he was in, it was more than a mere chest cold. Harry suspected a serious pneumonia, maybe even tuberculosis, and when he spotted a greyness in the nail beds of Idris’s fingers, he went into his bag for a pulse oximeter. He had almost forgotten that he was in the midst of a police siege, because all this was routine. A sick patient, who needed a differential diagnosis and stabilisation. Ignoring the smell of fried chicken and the radio static in his ear, the sterile yellow light was the same as A&E at night.

  Harry held up the oximeter and pushed it open.

  ‘Can I slide this onto one of your fingers, please?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It measures how much oxygen is in your blood.’

  ‘No needles?’

  Idris’s other hand closed around the gun’s handle, and Harry tensed again. Although it was a natural reflex, it was actually the worst thing to do. The bullet would do less damage if his muscles were relaxed when it hit him. The kid looked as terrified as Harry felt, although that was little comfort.

  ‘No needles.’

  Idris released the gun. Another irony, Harry thought. A teenager who’d taken a knife blade to the thigh nervous about a needle-prick. The reading flashed up. Eighty-seven. Ninety-five and above was normal: Idris’s levels were life-threatening.

  ‘Solomon, listen to me—’

  Idris grabbed the bag and coughed into it.

  ‘I need to go and get an oxygen cylinder for you to breathe from. Your oxygen levels are so low you’re in danger of damaging your brain.’

  ‘Go get it.’

  Idris picked up his gun and gestured. Harry pictured the sharpshooters behind him breathing in and quickly out again, so their bodies would be totally still when they applied the modicum of final pressure to triggers they were already squeezing. His earpiece burst into life. It was Noble, her voice striking the reality of the situation back into him like a cold wind.

  ‘Harry, stay where you are,’ she said. ‘We can use this as leverage to get the hostages out.’

  Idris broke into another coughing fit, sending blood-streaked saliva into the clinic
al waste bag. Harry watched the muscles in his neck and shoulders contracting, every breath drawing a pained grimace, a new struggle for air.

  He turned around and headed to the door.

  As Harry walked out of the shop, sleet hit him in the face. He stepped up to a run until he passed the concrete bench, where two Trojan officers emerged from the shadows and took him by the arms, practically dragging him to cover.

  ‘Give it a rest!’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘He’s not gonna shoot me in the back, is he?’

  ‘You don’t know that, do you?’

  Noble, Quinn and Wilson were waiting behind the police van, and it was Noble who accosted him first. Harry headed past them towards the ambulance, instructing one of the paramedics to open it up.

  ‘Dr Kent!’

  Harry turned to face Noble. Her calm exterior was gone, and the redness in her face indicated a mixture of cold and frustrated rage. He guessed that the friendly first names of their introduction were out of the window.

  ‘Is your earpiece working?’ she said. ‘You did hear me tell you to stay put, didn’t you?’

  Harry pulled off the dirty gloves and mask and threw them into the clinical waste bag the paramedic was holding in front of him.

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘But that boy in there is seriously ill, Inspector. He needs to be admitted to hospital or he could be in real danger.’

  ‘I get that,’ said Noble. ‘But if he starts shooting then those innocent people in there are in danger, as are my officers and as are you. You can’t just work against us, alright?’

  ‘OK,’ Harry said, raising his palms. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have disobeyed you. But don’t you forget, I’m a doctor, not a police officer. My first responsibility is to my patient and I won’t let his health be used as a bargaining chip.’