“Are we allowed to be in here?”
“Of course. That’s why they keep it clean and well lit.”
They stepped over the corrugated panel labelled No Entry and he directed her to the warden’s post.
“Go in and close your eyes,” Belsey instructed. She did as she was told. He followed. He lit three birthday candles, used their wax to stick them to the warden’s table, arranged the flowers in the empty bottle and set the champagne flutes up next to a fresh one.
“OK, you can open them.”
“Oh my God.” She laughed. “What the fuck, Nick? Whose birthday is it?”
“Ours. We’ve known each other precisely forty-two days.”
“Do I blow them out and make a wish?”
“You blow them out, I make a wish. You have to see if you can feel what it is.”
She punched him in the chest. He sat down and poured the drinks while she explored. The benzylpiperazine was working. He felt electric.
“Is this where you take all the girls?”
“I only found it today.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a bomb shelter from the Second World War.” He retrieved a first-aid kit from the dorm, emptied it onto the warden’s table and unscrewed the bottles: reds, blues, whites. Pills to make you bigger, pills to make you small. He read the labels again: the drugs apparently belonged to Site 3. Where was Site 3 and its party?
Jemma took her drink and sat on his lap. She plucked a carnation and threaded it into her hair. She kissed him.
“We’re celebrating a windfall,” Belsey said. “Plan is we enjoy ourselves, then take the bottles up. I sell them and we split the profit. You could walk off a few hundred quid up.”
“Just for coming down here?”
“For helping me carry them up. That’s my estimation.” He poured more champagne. They drank, kissed again and he slid a hand under the frayed hem of her cut-offs. She wriggled off him. Then she blew the candles out.
“Wow.”
There was that velvety darkness again. They were sinking through it. Belsey found his lighter and waited. He felt a hand on his crotch. Then it went. Then a few seconds later a torch beam appeared, deep in the dorm. It was Jemma.
“Happy birthday to us,” she sang.
Belsey stood up, felt his way to the dorm entrance and watched her explore among the bunk beds and boxes of drink. She clicked the Maglite off then on again.
“Can you hear something?” she said.
“What did you hear?”
“I don’t know. Where does it all lead?”
“It doesn’t.” He returned to the table, lit a candle, opened the rest of the first-aid boxes and began filling his jacket with their contents. He was uneasy.
“Jemma?”
“Yeah.”
“Be careful.”
“Why?”
“Break a leg down here and I’m not sure they’d get the ambulance down the stairs.”
She giggled. He downed his champagne. Then he heard a man singing. It was very faint. Belsey told himself he was imagining things.
“Jemma?”
“Nick? Is that you?”
The birthday candle flickered. Belsey looked around. Something at the back of the dorm creaked stiffly.
“Hang on, Jemma. Stay there.”
Belsey took the candle and walked into the dorm. Bunk cages danced in the wavering light. No sign of her. He waited for his date to jump out. That would be classic. She didn’t.
“Are you OK?” he called, and his voice sounded like the voice of someone on their own.
Belsey made a circuit of the dorm and arrived back at the spiral stairs. But he would have heard if she went back that way. He called up them, then returned to the warden’s post, pocketed the box of candles and walked through the dorm again. The candles were pathetic. He used the light from his iPhone instead. He headed past the cases of champagne. Had she been drunk enough to fall? Maybe she was pre-loaded when they met. At the end of the dorm he saw that a bunk had been pulled askew to reveal another door out. This door had been painted over at some point, forced open more recently. The wood around the lock was splintered. Belsey walked through into a narrow brick passageway. It turned sharp left after a couple of metres and you were at the start of a low, rounded tunnel. The tunnel stretched as far as Belsey could see.
“Jemma!’
He began along it, running. Thirty seconds later he saw something on the ground and the nightmare became a little more concrete. It was Jemma’s bag, the strap broken at one end, a sequinned purse still inside. No phone—but he’d felt that in the back pocket of her shorts. Belsey checked the break of the strap and listened to a silence that now had a very different tenor. He headed on, still gripping the bag.
The tunnel presumably led to the other shelter entrance. It was just about tall enough to stand in. Belsey could hear his own blood pulse. He couldn’t hear anyone else. He half walked, half ran as much as the narrow strip between the curved sides allowed. It was marked with tracks where something had been dragged. He followed these tracks, using the light of his phone. After ten minutes in the tunnel he knew he had gone too far to connect with the other entrance. He kept walking. He assumed for some reason he was heading south, under Haverstock Hill, under Chalk Farm. He listened for the rumble of tube trains. Nothing. Every couple of hundred metres there was a bulb behind wire mesh, none lit. No visible security of any kind.
“Jemma.”
Belsey made a loop out of the bag’s strap, knotted it and slung it over his shoulder. He walked for another twenty minutes. If his hunch that he was heading south was right, he would be under Camden now, passing beneath the crowded pubs and teen tourists, under the canal and the market stalls. Eventually he reached a T-junction. A passage, identical to the one he was on, veered off to the left. It added a whole new level of complexity, turning a simple tunnel into a potential maze. Belsey imagined leaving the medication in a trail. He called her name again. He searched around for any signs of which way someone might have gone. Stencilled in red paint onto the concrete of his original route were the words: Passholders only.
Odd. But also promising—with a sense that he was, at least, heading somewhere. He continued. There was strength in a straight line. After another moment he checked his phone screen and saw one bar of battery. It was 9:20 p.m. He had been walking for thirty-five minutes. He had no food or water. He had a lot of drugs. He wanted to preserve enough juice to make a call in case of emergency, pictured himself trapped behind a vent somewhere, peeking out at the world. He lit a meagre candle instead. The tunnels seemed a different thing in candlelight, less man-made, his journey one that led out of the human world altogether.
Belsey wondered about the technicalities of marching someone along this route, dragging or forcing them. Wondered whether there were places to imprison them. He rode out a sudden blast of claustrophobia. Then he saw something on the ground ahead of him. Belsey stepped closer. It was a folding bike, a Raleigh Stowaway, paintwork scratched. Above it was a ladder. Belsey held his candle up and saw a square brick shaft.
He climbed unsteadily, candle dripping in one hand, until his head knocked the underside of a metal hatch. Belsey inspected it in the dim light. It had been propped a few inches open with the handle of a screwdriver. He pushed upwards, wedged his shoulder against the metal and clambered through, rolling out of the way as the screwdriver fell and the hatch slammed closed with an ominous clunk.
It blew the candle out. Belsey sparked his lighter. He was lying on the floor of a small office, or a studio of some kind. One table by the wall was loaded with equipment: a cabinet speaker, a cassette player, a typewriter. It had a brown swivel chair in front of it. He was alone.
The lighter got too hot. Belsey released the wheel. He lit another candle and stood up.
One door led out of the place, with a metal sign: To Situation Room. Belsey tried the handle. Locked. He flicked the light switch beside it and nothing happened. And
then he knew what he was about to discover. He went back to the hatch in the floor. There was no handle. He tried to work a key under the edge but the hatch was fastened shut.
Belsey secured the candle to the table. He kicked the Situation Room door hard, aiming beneath the handle. It didn’t budge. He swung the chair against it, then had a brief round of banging the chair against the hatch in the floor. It was pointless
He placed the chair beside the table and sat down.
As well as the Sony cassette player and the grey electric typewriter there were two silver microphones like antennae, a desk lamp and a glass ashtray resting on a hardback book. The ashtray was clean. The cabinet speaker had a corner to itself. On the wall above the equipment was what looked like a fuse box, with old-fashioned telephone receivers on either side, one black, one red. On the box itself were four switches labelled “Attack,” “Flood,” “Fire,” “Chemical.” These, it seemed, were the options.
A plain, round wall clock gave the time as quarter to four. A calendar beneath it hung at November, its square days crossed out to Friday 11. Belsey took it off its nail and turned to the front. The year was 1983. He hung it back.
He lifted the red telephone and put it to his ear. No dialling tone.
“Hello,” he said. But he didn’t like the sound of his voice in the small, locked room. He checked the alert switches. Attack was up. Belsey flicked it down and waited, then flicked it up again. He tried “Flood,” imagined an outbreak of panic somewhere.
He moved the ashtray and picked up the book beneath it: Guide to the Standing Stones of Wiltshire. It was an old hardback, with black-and-white plates. Belsey imagined someone down here, sitting out a war, trying to remember what the world above was like; thinking about the puzzles mankind had posed before destroying them. So this would be his desert-island reading. He’d survive a fortnight without food but only three or four days without water. Sufficient time to acquaint himself with Wiltshire’s mysteries. He found his tobacco and papers, rolled a cigarette, then he wondered about oxygen supplies and put the rollie down.
So.
Belsey worked through the scenario that would unfold if he failed to return. They’d find his car still at the police station. Last solid witness was Kirsty Craik: I think he had a date; he stank of aftershave . . . That was unlikely to trigger a search of local bomb shelters. Maybe they’d trace CCTV, get Jemma and himself as they entered the alleyway. Then someone would replicate his puzzlement: But it doesn’t lead anywhere. What’s this building? Then that officer would descend, disappear . . .
He searched Jemma’s bag. A purse with cards: debit, Oyster, uni ID, some loose change and house keys. He transferred the purse and keys to his jacket. It would have been nice to imagine her surfacing, being able to raise the alarm. He wondered if she too was stuck somewhere in her own subterranean bubble of the 1980s, flicking the switches. Buried alive.
Then the rats woke up. Belsey listened to the scurry on the other side of the ceiling. They sounded burly; his last companions, waiting to strip the flesh from his bones. He stood on the desk and used up some of his remaining lighter fluid studying the ceiling. It was panelled, but one panel was different, fringed with thin black strands where liquid had oozed around the edges. Belsey took the desk lamp and knocked it against the panel. It sounded dull with rot. He flipped the lamp around, smashed the base through the wood, and a stream of filthy water ran into his face. Belsey stepped back and fell off the table.
He banged his shoulder but was more perturbed by the polluted flow. A rat bolted down the wall. Belsey gagged and waited. When the black trickle stopped he climbed back onto the desk. The panel had crumbled. Belsey scraped splinters out of the way and hauled himself up.
For a moment, he lay on the damp floor on the other side. He’d left the lighter and candles and Jemma’s bag in the room below. He had her purse, a stash of pill bottles stuffed in his pockets and his mobile. Its screen lit a flooded corridor. Bulbous cascades of orange dry-rot cloaked the walls. Plastic doorframes had folded into the passageway as if half-melted. Belsey got to his feet. He could smell sulphur fumes, sodden wood rotting away. He covered his nose and mouth. Sluggish reflections lapped at his shoes. He stepped over drooping frames, avoided low-hanging wires and an asbestos-lagged pipe.
The doorways at the side led into rooms of smashed porcelain: stems of toilets, shower tiles. Then it all went black. He pressed various buttons on his phone but the battery had gone. That’s it, he thought: eternal darkness. But not complete. A very faint, grey light hovered a couple of yards ahead. Belsey splashed his foot and the pale square moved. He went towards it and looked up. Light was creeping in somewhere above him. He felt around the walls until his knuckles hit the clammy metal of a ladder.
Desperation opened a new reserve of strength. He climbed for a minute to a small platform, a ledge of some kind with railings and, at the far end, concrete steps. These twisted up for more than ten floors but Belsey climbed them fast, propelled by the idea of ascent. He reached a heavy, wooden door. It shifted an inch when he pushed. Something was blocking it. Belsey leaned in, and both the door and the obstacle scraped far enough for him to squeeze through the gap. He found himself in a small room filled with cleaning products. Beyond it was a corridor glowing green with emergency exit lights. Belsey knelt and smelt dry carpet. It seemed, blissfully, like people had been there recently. He glanced back at the doorway from which he’d emerged. The obstacle had been a cupboard with a handwritten sign announcing: Cleaners Only. Where was he?
On the other side of the corridor was an office with a potted plant and a PC. Belsey walked in. He switched the computer on. Then he saw a trolley of books behind the door. He lifted a pink, laminated paperback: Seduction of a Servant Girl. There was a yellow borrowing slip from St. Pancras Library pasted inside.
You’re joking, he thought. Belsey returned to the corridor. He followed the arrows on the Fire Exit signs to a door at the end, climbed one more flight of steps and found himself standing behind the issue desk. There were the shelves and computer terminals of the library, waiting in the gloom. Through the floor-length windows to his right St. Pancras Station rose into the sky, fairy-tale as ever, surrounded by the unenchanted hub of King’s Cross. Night traffic streamed east and west. He’d spent many pleasant hours in here, admiring this grey view, browsing the sports sections or even trying to improve himself with the classics. He felt physically stretched between the familiar world and the one from which he’d emerged. It was only detail by detail that King’s Cross convinced him he was in it.
His hands left smears where he touched. He crouched to see his face in a computer monitor and even his silhouette looked wrecked. He smoothed his hair down and felt it wet with sludge.
The main door out of the library was locked. He found a side door and pushed the steel emergency bar to open it. Alarms rang out. He stepped onto the pavement and the warm air felt incredibly fresh. Belsey looked up at the building from which he’d emerged. The library occupied the base of a ten-floor office block housing all the council departments, from street cleaning to pest control, a stark modern annexe to the old town hall next door. Its outmoded lead-streaked concrete struck him now as militaristic. He realised it had always appeared militaristic. It had been hiding in plain sight.
He crossed the road and watched from a bus stop as a young security guard in a yellow tabard appeared, assessing the open door, glancing up and down the street. It was 10.39 pm. Belsey had spent two hours underground. It felt three times as long. The walk back to Hampstead police station would take him a good forty-five minutes, but he didn’t want to get a taxi. That instinct was itself a wake-up call, a welcome to a new and complicated situation. He didn’t want a witness, someone able to say: yes, I saw him there, at that time, looking half-ruined. But witness to what?
Belsey walked. He still had energy. Benzylpiperazine lingered inappropriately in his blood. He tried to steady his mind and work one thought at a time.
W
as there any possibility she’d surfaced, that she was safe and well among people and sky? He told himself he was covering every angle when he was looking for some shred of hope. He felt Jemma’s purse in his pocket and thought of the broken bag strap. And once again Belsey saw the BMW crashing into his life, the man jumping from it, pulling his hood up.
5
THROUGH CAMDEN, BACK TO BELSIZE PARK. THE crowd was still out. Belsey kept to the quiet side of the street. But he was relatively incognito among the damage of closing-time London. He walked into the petrol station at the top of Haverstock Hill and found a cheap torch. His wallet contained no cash. He didn’t want to use his card, didn’t want to be traced. Belsey turned away from the CCTV and took a crumpled fiver from Jemma’s purse and paid with that. It didn’t make him feel wonderful.
There were no clues around either of the Belsize shelter towers, no signs that Jemma had come up, or been brought up, the way they had gone in. Belsey combed the weeds then climbed in through the window again. He walked to the top of the stairs and called.
Down the stairs again, wishing he had the Maglite rather than whatever crap BP were hawking. Even in the yellow beam he could see that the warden’s post was as he’d left it: champagne bottle, glasses, carnations. He was surprised by a sudden wave of anger. Stupid girl for wandering off. Stupid him. What a ridiculous amount of trouble for the sake of touching up an art student. He walked past the bunks, through the hidden door and brick passageway into the tunnel where he’d found her bag. He got down on his knees, looking for footprints or blood. Praying in the only way detectives know how. He wasn’t set up for forensics. He sat with his back against the curved tunnel wall, energy gone.
“Jemma!” he yelled. He closed his eyes. After five minutes he returned to the stairs.
He climbed out of the tower, retrieved the axe and bolt cutters. He shifted some mildewed cardboard to obscure the cut fence. Next stop was visiting her home, just in case. But that meant calling the station to request the address off criminal records. Or going in himself.
Deep Shelter Page 3