Hollow Man

by Oliver Harris

  “She was contrary, stubborn. One of those girls you assume are well behaved because you don’t notice them, then you realise they’re shoplifting every lunch break. Not academically outstanding, not awful. But impossible to engage. The only piece of work I remember seeing was an essay on the First World War. I don’t know why I remember that. It was good. We were thinking about Oxbridge at one point. But she didn’t want to be here.”

  “Where did she want to be?”

  “Where does anyone want to be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The headmistress considered this. For a moment they sat there in silence.

  “Neither did Jessica,” she said finally.

  Belsey had a feeling he could get on well with the headmistress—in another situation, another life.

  “Do you know if Jessica was working? Paid work, I mean, not school.”

  “No. But she wasn’t doing much unpaid work in school. She was probably going to be expelled.”

  “For bad grades?”

  “For non-attendance. We don’t waste time on these things.”

  “How bad was her attendance?”

  “Of late, we’d be lucky to see her twice a week. Her parents didn’t know where she was. The last week was the worst. She’d decided school was over. That’s why I feel the press are barking up the wrong tree.”

  “I think you’re right.” Belsey nodded. “What do you think she was doing when she wasn’t attending?”

  “I have no idea. But a girl like that . . .” She shrugged.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’ve been running a school of teenage girls for half a decade now.”

  “A girl like what?”

  The head spent a while choosing her words. She chose: “A girl who thinks being adult means getting in trouble with older men. She should have buckled down. Only she thought she was too good for all this.”

  “School’s wasted on the young. Don’t they say something like that?”

  “Not quite.” The headmistress plugged the phone back in. It rang. “Will you tell your colleagues any of this, or are you afraid it might lose you media appeal?”

  “I’ll pass all this on,” Belsey said. “I believe Jessica was caught up in something. I’d appreciate it, if you hear anything, if anyone knows what she’s been up to, if they could let me know.” He took a pen and paper from the desk and wrote the number for his direct line.

  The head considered this, before nodding.

  “Of course. I’ll have a think. Now, if you’ll excuse me, eight hundred and fifty-one girls remain alive.”

  23

  Belsey walked down Hampstead High Street to a shop that sold handbags. He’d passed it a thousand times. Now it was time to go in.

  The shop was brightly lit and very bare. It was just Belsey, three staff, a security guard and the handbags. He looked along the rows of bags, each on its own plinth like a museum artefact. He saw the Chanel bag that the dead girl had been carrying.

  “I like this one.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How much is it?”

  “Sixteen hundred and ninety-five.”

  “Can you knock off the ninety-five?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’m joking. Do you sell many of these?”

  “Not too many.”

  The store security approached nicely with one hand folded over the other. Belsey thought of the struggling home on Lymington, the preteen bedroom. Where did she stash stuff, he wondered. The equipment for a second life, where did it live?

  What had he stumbled into?

  The assistant started straightening a row of wallets. Belsey looked out of the front window and saw a van marked “Pimlico Plumbers” with a man in aviator shades sitting in the front looking back at him. Suddenly the man put the van in reverse and cut away into traffic. “Thank you for your time,” Belsey said, walking to the door.

  “Thank you, sir,” someone said to his back.

  24

  Murder Squad had commandeered the Old White Bear for the purposes of refreshment and informal congregation, a pub the size of a postage stamp at the corner of two residential streets. There was a rule that said find the third-closest pub. No one liked to be seen drinking near to the incident room. The Old White Bear was halfway to Hampstead tube station and it was well hidden.

  This was where Belsey knew he’d find them, CID men and women standing around a single picnic table at the front, coats on, smoking fast. This was where a lot of the most useful discussions would be held. The pub was providing bacon rolls on production of a warrant card. The officers looked drained: many had come straight from other inquiries and were busy pouring sugar into cups of tea. Few remained for more than ten minutes.

  “We could do with you on this one, Nick.” DC Tom Shipton shook his head. He was part of a small crowd centred on a patio heater. Belsey had worked his first ever murder with Shipton, a pensioner killed with a samurai sword in Elephant and Castle shopping centre. Next to him was a stooped, middle-aged officer with shaving cuts whom Belsey didn’t recognise, and June Glasgow. Glasgow was one of the most respected murder DIs in north London. She had long black hair, a black suit, plum-red nail varnish; no jewellery, not even a wedding ring, although Belsey happened to know she was civilly partnered with a young woman in the Home Office. But she kept herself interview-room bare. It became a habit: cards to the chest.

  “How are they playing it?” Belsey said.

  “Robbery,” Shipton said. He looked cold. He had his hands thrust into his overcoat pockets.

  “It wasn’t a robbery,” Belsey said.

  “He said, ‘This is a robbery.’ ”

  “Who?”

  “The gunman. This kid.”

  “I thought it was meant to be a gang of them.”

  “It’s not clear at the moment. But there was a gang in the area earlier, near Gospel Oak.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Belsey sensed an investigation running away under the momentum of its own mistakes. He’d seen it before. Glasgow watched him, with the curiosity of a good DI. She lit a cigarette.

  “What about CCTV?” Belsey said.

  “Nothing obvious,” Shipton said.

  “Some teenage gangster comes in and fires up a Starbucks and no cameras get a whiff?” Belsey shook his head.

  “People saw. He said, ‘Open the till.’ ”

  “Who says?”

  “There’s been other soft targets,” Shipton said. “KFC.” But his heart wasn’t in it.

  “It doesn’t get much softer than a fucking Starbucks,” Belsey said. “What did he want? Muffins? How much do they keep in the tills?”

  “No more than a hundred, but he doesn’t know that.”

  “How did he get away?”

  “On foot.”

  “After going armed? Munroe mentioned this red motorbike. What about that?”

  “I haven’t heard of any red bike.”

  Belsey winced. Investigative disconnect. This was how hours got wasted and criminals went laughing.

  “It wasn’t a kid, and it wasn’t a robbery,” he said.

  “Then what was it?”

  “And why do you care?” Glasgow said pointedly.

  “Why do I care?”

  “Why aren’t you assigned?”

  “I’m on other things.”

  No one seemed to find this hard to believe. No one seemed too sorry either. There was a general stubbing of cigarettes, a shaking of heads and checking of watches.

  “Where was she coming from, before the Starbucks?” Belsey said.

  “She was seen earlier near Kenwood.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Bishops Avenue,” Glasgow said. Belsey took a deep breath. It felt like being tapped on the shoulder. Glasgow studied his eyes.

  “With anyone?” he said.

  “No.”

  “What was she doing on The Bishops Avenue?”

  “Walking. We don’t know. We’re doing door to door
s later.”

  “How much later?”

  “Soon as we have the manpower.”

  “Are you releasing that information about her whereabouts?”

  “Ask Northwood.”

  Belsey shook a cigarette out of Glasgow’s pack and lit it with his Zippo.

  “It’s not on her way to school,” he said quietly, more to himself than to anyone else.

  25

  Every week or so a man went up to the Heath and exposed himself. CID had been putting a case together for a while. No one used to bother with flashers until it was noticed that they went on to pursue sex crimes of increasing severity. Perversion has diminishing returns. Now the flasher had done it again, getting bolder. Everyone knew this kind of thing headed only one way. So when Belsey got back to the station this was the job he had been assigned. The office was deserted—one message on his desk: Heath flasher—11:30 a.m.

  Three hours old. Belsey tore the message in half. It felt like a calculated insult. But then, he thought, maybe it was a blessing in disguise. Heavy grey clouds had begun rolling westwards. The Heath would be empty by the time the rain came. He could lose himself there. It would give him time to think.

  He sat out the shower beneath an oak, deep in the woodland behind Spaniards Road. He realised how badly he had needed this moment of reflection. Images returned: the dead girl’s eyes, her mouth shaping to a word. To a name? He saw Jessica in the office of AD Development, saw the empty shell of St. Clement’s Court, and then Charlotte Kelson with a hair clip in her hand. A woman in Mr. D’s life. A woman now as dead as him.

  When the rain stopped he walked to the gardeners’ hut. One of the Heath’s keepers, Peter Scott, bent over a bag of dead leaves, unloading them onto a bonfire. He had a thin face with pockmarks in the cheeks. His hands were stained with blue-ink scars that Belsey had seen on other men who’d done long sentences in category-A prisons. They had never spoken about it. The smoke gathered thick as wool among the damp branches.

  “What are the Heath Constabulary for?” Belsey said.

  “They said I should contact you. It’s the same one, this flasher.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They all talk about his fingernails. Long, dirty nails.”

  “You should be a detective.”

  “She wouldn’t leave her name.”

  Belsey sighed. He crouched by the fire and warmed his hands. “How are you doing?”

  “Never been better.”

  Belsey fed some dead branches into the flames and watched Scott work. They were often like this. The gardener was that rare thing: a good man to be silent with. When the last of the bags had been emptied Scott disappeared into the hut. He emerged a few minutes later with two mugs of tea and gave one to Belsey. They sat on logs outside the hut.

  “What about that shooting?” Scott said.

  “You heard about it?”

  “It’s on the radio. Are you not on that?”

  “Not me. What are they saying?”

  “Schoolgirl, innocent bystander, glowing future ahead of her.”

  “I was told to hold the fort.”

  “Is this the fort?”

  “One of them.”

  They drank their teas. Then Scott stood up and checked the sky.

  “I want to show you something,” he said.

  They walked deeper into the Heath. The edges of the world appeared sharp, as if the air had been polished by the rain. They walked past Athlone House, the red-bricked mansion that had housed the RAF intelligence school in World War II. Belsey imagined the men here, the classrooms with blackboards and aerial photographs of towns marked for destruction. Then they climbed past the derelict mansion, to a copse of chestnut trees on the edge of the Heath.

  “Look.”

  A few of the trees were branded with fluorescent-yellow crosses; the sort of marks used by workers digging up roads.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. They appeared a couple of weeks ago. Probably for a race. People come for a run, mark the route. They don’t ask.”

  “Show me some more.”

  He led Belsey over a kilometre or so, showing him the trees marked with a yellow X.

  “No plans to chop them? No disease?”

  “There’s nothing like that going on.”

  “It’s not a run,” Belsey said.

  “Well, I don’t know what it is. Continues down towards Highgate Ponds, and back across the East Heath.”

  Belsey picked at some bark. It flaked, silver grey. This was what made the plane tree perfect for London, Scott had told him once, it shed its skin and the pollution with it; a lesson there. They came across another cluster of yellow crosses a moment later.

  “Have you reported it?” Belsey asked.

  “That’s what I’m doing,” the gardener said.

  26

  Belsey walked down Heath Street to the village.

  It was past 4 p.m. now, the time of a winter afternoon when Hampstead had a light of its own, silver and mauve; the colour of bags under the eyes of someone you loved and made tired. It came up from the ponds and hung about Downshire Hill and Flask Walk making the beautiful homes more cruelly beautiful.

  An Evening Standard van pulled up outside the tube station with the headline on its side: HAMPSTEAD RAMPAGE HORROR. A fresh pile of newspapers was dumped next to a distributor and a man purchased one without breaking his stride. Belsey admired the moment: the city as machine, bound in its rhythm of morbid fascination. He swiped a copy and read it as he walked.

  “A Hampstead schoolgirl died this morning after a gun attack on a Starbucks in north-west London . . .” They kept to the official line on her all-round abilities and general popularity. The school was in shock. They were arranging counselling. There was no picture of Jessica yet.

  He continued down Hampstead High Street to the incident room.

  The room had settled into its rhythm; off the boil now, but simmering. Already the investigation was moving out from its epicentre to the world. Belsey looked for June Glasgow but couldn’t see her.

  “Know where I’d find DI Glasgow?”

  “Outside, at the back. Just finished interviewing witnesses.”

  He poured two coffees from a pot beside the inquiry manager’s desk and took them out. Glasgow leaned against the church wall, alone with her thoughts.

  “Nick,” she said. He gave her a coffee. “Just what I need.”

  “Any joy with the interviews?”

  “Waste of time so far.” She sipped her coffee. “Nutters.” She passed him her pack of cigarettes and held out a light. After another moment she said: “I’ve been drafted into a pile of shit.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Northwood sees it as his.”

  “It is.”

  “But he’s not a senior investigating officer. He shouldn’t be steering. Did you see the conference? Now we’ve got fifteen papers leading with street gang.”

  “What are your angles?”

  “We don’t have them. That’s the point. That should tell us something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re right, it wasn’t a robbery. But I’ve no idea what it was. I’ve never worked anything like it.”

  “But you’ve got ideas.”

  “Something with no logic, so we shouldn’t be looking for it. Maybe crackheads.”

  “Crackheads are high visibility. You’d have witnesses from Charing Cross to Highgate.”

  “Psychotic.”

  “Same.”

  “So what are your ideas, Nick?” she said, tired of the game.

  “An assassination,” Belsey said.

  “On who?”

  “Who was in there?”

  “A seventy-five-year-old woman visiting her sister in hospital. A cleaner from Uganda on his way to work. A Chinese student, twenty-one years old, who’s been working at Starbucks two months. The store manager—a Polish woman tipped for big things in Starbucks management—and a
schoolgirl who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. We’ve checked them all. No history, no suspicious connections.”

  “Only one of them was fired at.”

  “The schoolgirl?” She shook a match and dropped it. Belsey knew what she was thinking: Speculation like this wouldn’t mean much to the chain of command around her. A senior-looking plain-clothed officer slipped out of the back of the church, down the stone steps to the road. He winked at Glasgow as he passed.

  “The Magdala,” he said, lifting his drinking hand. Glasgow gave a noncommittal thumbs-up. Belsey watched him go.

  “Who was that?”

  “Ken Barber. From Gun Crime,” Glasgow said. But she was still puzzling over Belsey’s theory. “You’re saying it was a hit on Jessica Holden.”

  “Is there no way she could connect to anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like trouble, individuals with history.”

  “Not so far as I’m aware.” Glasgow turned to Belsey. “I heard you had some trouble of your own,” she said, as if maybe this was all about Belsey’s state of mind.

  “I’m all right.”

  “I asked for you on the team.”

  “And here I am.”

  She looked at him dubiously. “There’s only one thing we found on the girl.”

  “What is it?”

  “A letter in her handbag sealed in an envelope. Her writing.”

  “Saying?”

  “Sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “It says something like ‘I can’t do it. Sorry.’ A let-down letter.”

  “Can’t do what?”

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t addressed to anyone.”

  “Are you chasing it?”

  “We’re speaking to everyone who knew her. We haven’t found any signs of a romance so far. If we find a love drama we’ll follow that, but this doesn’t look like the work of a jilted teenager to me.”

  “I guess not.”

  “I’ve got to get back. Thanks for the coffee, Nick.” She didn’t thank him for his thoughts. Belsey watched her make her way back into the church, then walked to the Magdala pub and introduced himself to DI Barber. He was sitting at the back of the pub with a couple of the Murder boys. They looked glazed and tetchy. First drink since the call-out. But the inspector seemed all right. Barber had heavy-lidded eyes and several gold rings. He fetched Belsey a chair. Belsey broke Miranda Miller’s fifty-pound note and got four pints in.