Deep Shelter

by Oliver Harris

  NO ATTEMPT AT BEING discreet this time. He parked by the coffee shop and marched down the alleyway, armed and equipped. His heart sunk. Two uniformed police stood in front of the shelter, Constables Andy Durham and Ravni Singh, with a man he recognised as one of the Costa baristas.

  “What’s going on?” Belsey said.

  “Someone’s been messing around with the fence here. What are you doing up this early, Nick?” They saw the equipment in his hand.

  “Couldn’t sleep. Messing around doing what?”

  “The fence has been cut.”

  Belsey gave it a look.

  “Got any theories?” Singh asked.

  “Seems a strange place to break into,” Belsey said.

  HE DROVE DOWN TO St. Pancras Library. 7:10 a.m. The library was shut. He went around the back of the building. There was a delivery van with its doors open, parked beside a service entrance, someone trying to balance a vending machine on a porter’s trolley. Belsey walked in alongside the new machine, then headed for the library.

  He was past the issue desk, moving down the stairs when someone ran around the corner in a security uniform.

  “Stop,” he shouted.

  The guard was young, black, with sharp sideburns and a two-way radio.

  “It’s OK,” Belsey said.

  “Stay there. I’ve called the police.”

  “I’m police. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  A second guard appeared, seven foot, with a boxer’s flat face: “That’s him. That’s the man on the tapes.”

  “I need to go down here. Someone’s life may be in danger.”

  “You’re not going anywhere.”

  Belsey gripped the axe a little tighter. It seemed to get their attention. He carried on down the stairs to a staff-only corridor. The guards followed him at a safe distance. The corridor ended at a small staff room he hadn’t seen before. He tried a few doors to the side but they were locked. His memory of the place was fogged with adrenalin. He searched for his dirty footprints but couldn’t see any.

  He tried the other direction, opening a lot of small storerooms, none of which contained a cupboard marked Cleaners Only or a door down into a bunker. The guards kept with him.

  “It was here,” Belsey said. “There was a cleaners’ room, a corridor, an office. Where’s the cleaners’ cupboard?”

  “You’re looking for the cleaners’ cupboard?”

  Finally a man with cropped hair ran around the corner, speaking into a radio handset.

  “Boss,” someone called. “He’s got an axe.”

  The security boss was short and fierce. Either he didn’t hear the warning or he was ready to lay down his life for his library. He placed himself between Belsey and the next set of doors. Then before Belsey knew what was going on the man had a hand up in his face and Belsey was grabbing his wrist, throwing him to the floor. He was going for his cuffs, thinking: What am I doing? He stopped. This was stupid. This was what happened: you piled mistakes on top of each other. You became conspicuous.

  He lifted the security guard to his feet and walked out.

  9

  THIS WAS SMOOTH, HE THOUGHT, BLEAKLY; THIS was all going well.

  Into the office again and it was still only quarter to eight, sun now burning accusations through the window. No response from Ferryman in his inbox. Belsey looked at the original email, the picture of the windows. He sifted through a list of other crimes he should be investigating: a spate of stolen mobility scooters, someone selling ecstasy to twelve-year-olds. He checked the news. Refugees. Fighters on the back of a lorry. That was as useful as it got.

  He stepped out to the fire escape and tried to borrow some early-morning clarity. Panic was never useful. It drew attention. Attention right now meant arrest. That was one course of action, of course: come clean, take his chances. Only there were no chances. First rule of detective work: find the guy who led the girl into the abandoned tunnels from which she never returned. The phrase “slam dunk” rattled around his brain. He had never in his entire working life heard any London police officer use it and yet no other choice of words seemed appropriate. The case would be a slam dunk even if he had no previous; as it was he had a particularly lavish disciplinary record, violence and substance abuse being highlights. He’d been close to getting thrown out of the force on several occasions. He’d met the girl by arresting her, for Christ’s sake. He knew what added up; that was his job.

  He needed to stay un-arrested then. The abductor wanted to play. That wasn’t necessarily the worst situation. Usually, if you’re going to kill someone you do it quickly. His joyrider, this Ferryman, was playing games and that worked best if Jemma remained alive. Right now it was possible Belsey was the only one willing or able to play along.

  He was left with three questions: Where was she? Who was Ferryman? What did they want? To answer the last question first: he knew at least that they wanted something. At the very least they wanted Belsey to play detective. That was a role he had rehearsed.

  Who was he? Belsey wrote down what he knew. The profile of the man he had chased down Rosslyn Hill: white male, physically able to handle himself, auto-theft skills, local knowledge, comfort zone extending two hundred feet beneath the surface of the earth. Wears gloves in a heatwave. Gloves indicated preparation and intent and forensic concern, all of which distinguished you from ninety-nine per cent of lawbreakers. And then he’d set up an untraceable email account—so add computer-literate. High intelligence.

  The individual knew where to find Hampstead police station. He paid a visit. He got himself involved with police. Maybe he had bad history with law enforcement. A score to settle. Belsey checked the obvious databases: Registered Sex Offenders, police harassers; he checked recent sex crimes, then all unsolved violent crimes in the borough, then abductions of young women going back ten years. He cross-checked abductions and auto theft. He didn’t turn up anything useful. He looked for any references to tunnels, but nothing connected at all. Finally he phoned John Cassidy, a grass who knew the local car-thieving community as well as anyone. Cassidy hadn’t heard anything about a BMW or a deep shelter or a looted Red Lion.

  A skilled criminal with no apparent connections. They existed. They were a rare breed. They tended to keep themselves apart for good reasons: efficiency, distrust, penchants that were judged ill-advised even by the criminal fraternity. Like subterranean kidnapping.

  Which led him back to the first question: Where was she? Belsey interrogated the wall map again, face close to it as if, by refocusing his eyes, a new pattern might appear beneath the familiar postcodes. Belsize Park to King’s Cross. He walked that route last night, under Haverstock Hill, under Camden High Street. He didn’t see her. She wasn’t there and hadn’t surfaced. The T-junction he’d seen last night, that tunnel veering off to the left began to haunt him.

  He put a notice out through the all-points system, a high priority query to CID in other boroughs: Have you had any incidents involving your deep-level bomb shelters? The strangest request he’d ever sent.

  He got six calls in fifteen minutes.

  ON THE NIGHT OF Saturday, 1 June, the weekend before last, while the city was drunk and distracted, a white male in a stolen white Vauxhall van had driven around deep shelters in central and south London, apparently trying to get in. He’d drawn enough attention to have his own file created.

  23.45, 1 June—intruder reported at Whitfield Street property to rear of Goodge Street shelter. Police attended. Retrieved a ladder suspected to have been used in attempted entry. Suspect not found.

  Fifty-five minutes later three drivers reported seeing an individual with a power tool attempting to enter the Stockwell deep shelter. Individual departed before police arrived. Fled in a white van.

  01.18—Clapham South deep shelter. Damage discovered to steel doors after reports by members of the public concerning an individual seen tampering with them. Suspect ID: white male, dark sports clothing, rucksack. Fled in a white van, but not b
efore a witness wrote down the make and registration. Vauxhall Vivaro, five years old, stolen that morning. Belsey printed out the list of the incidents and found his A-Z in his desk drawer. It was coming apart, page by page, like every Londoner’s, the result of living in a city you’d never entirely get your head around. But he needed something he could mark up. Amid the increasingly unstable surfaces of London there was something comforting in a paper map. He turned through, marked the city’s eight deep shelters with a cross, then put it in the Umbro bag and took the bag to his car.

  HE DROVE TO ONE shelter after the other, before rush hour clogged the roads and the present reformed itself. It seemed, in the dawn, they’d stepped forward. They were weights, holding the city in place.

  All shelters were constructed identically, but each turret had acquired its own character over time. On Tottenham Court Road, the Goodge Street station bunker had an entrance that maintained the sober brown brickwork of a neighbouring church. Its sister tower, on a side street, was painted in cream and pink stripes. Belsey tried to imagine it connecting back up to Camden, to Belsize Park.

  Stockwell’s south tower was behind garages on Studley Road. No visible damage. The northern entrance drew all the attention, sitting multicoloured on a traffic island in the centre of Stockwell roundabout. Belsey used to drive past it, heading into Brixton from his old posting at Borough. Lambeth council had taken responsibility for its own street art, commissioning a bright mural of local war heroes to cover the tower’s curved walls. Belsey walked around the base until he saw damage. The rainbow-coloured slats of a vent had been mangled, opening a small aperture to the darkness inside. He put his mouth to the hole.

  “Hello?” And then, feeling as ridiculous as he did desperate: “Jemma?”

  It was seven miles back under central London to Belsize Park. Long tunnel if it connected. Again, Belsey tried to see it from the abductor’s perspective; he wondered about the mechanics of forcing someone through that network. But then it wasn’t too hard to force all sorts of things when you’ve got someone alone underground.

  Clapham South had one entrance tower on Balham Hill, the other rising from the dew of Clapham Common. He hadn’t been in the area since the riots. You could still see faint scars where the bins had melted. But everything was sparkling again. The suspicious individual had been spotted on the common. Belsey found several small holes at chest height in the shelter’s metal entrance panel. He listened, although he didn’t know what he expected to hear. An officer drove by and stopped. He was small, eager, deeply tanned. Belsey showed his badge.

  “I’m interested in the man who was messing around with this a couple of Saturdays ago.”

  “Someone really wanted to get in,” the officer said. “Member of the public saw sparks. Blowtorch.”

  “Did he gain access?”

  “I don’t know. It was locked when we arrived.”

  “Do you know if he was caught on any cameras?”

  “There’s nothing. But his vehicle connects to an incident on the Central Hill Estate, Gipsy Hill. Same night. They might have more.”

  “What kind of incident?”

  “Vandalism again.”

  “Is there a shelter there?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  CENTRAL HILL ESTATE CLUNG to the top of Gipsy Hill, all jagged concrete, tiered ranks of houses poised before the view as if ready to defend themselves from the rest of south-east London. A high canopy of leaves let thick light through to the dark glass and walkways. The only colour came from the red and blue flashing sign of an off-licence.

  Belsey walked around the estate until one block of flats made him stop. Pear Tree House. He saw immediately that something was wrong with the building. From the front it was a four-storey block of flats, but from the back the hill fell away to expose a further four floors below. These lower floors were windowless, a solid block of concrete washed with pale blue paint. The only thing interrupting the concrete was a set of black iron doors at the base.

  He radioed a request for any local officers to attend—said he was interested in the vandalism from the night of Saturday, 1 June—and a patrol car swung by five minutes later. It contained a silver-haired sergeant and his young probationer, who was sporting fresh lipstick.

  “There was an incident, Saturday the first,” Belsey said.

  “Yes. We called it in,” said the Sergeant.

  “What did you see?”

  He got out of the car and pointed towards the base of Pear Tree House. “Bloke was trying to break open those doors. Then, when we approached, he bombed it back to the van and tore off. Almost knocked some kid off his scooter.”

  “What’s in there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There are no windows on the lower floors.”

  The Sergeant looked at the block as if seeing it for the first time. “No.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “No idea.”

  Belsey approached the double iron doors and saw the beginnings of an attempt to cut through them with a blowtorch. He went to the front of the building and rang each flat number until someone buzzed him into the entrance hall. There was a pushchair, two bikes, no stairs down. He checked the lift. The buttons inside offered nothing beneath the ground floor. A man called down the stairway.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi,” Belsey said. “Do you know what’s beneath the flats?”

  “No. What’s there?”

  “That’s what I’m asking.”

  “Who are you looking for?”

  Belsey walked out. He took a picture of the building on his phone and emailed it to Ferryman with a question mark.

  The city was getting stranger by the minute.

  10

  HE SAT IN HIS CAR AT THE TOP OF GIPSY HILL. THE Umbro bag contained nothing on Pear Tree House. He found the meds under the papers and inspected the labels. Site 3.

  South London stretched beneath him. He knew a lot of people down there; a lot of esoteric knowledge was archived in those brown terraces and grey estates. Someone had to have a lead.

  THE CHEMIST ANSWERED HIS door ten floors above Lewisham Way, at the summit of one of the area’s more respectable tower blocks. He wore a white bathrobe, long rust-coloured hair wet around his shoulders. A pendant hung against his chest where the robe sagged, the goddess Shiva glinting in the light of New Cross Gate.

  “I know it’s early,” Belsey said. “I need your mind.”

  The chemist checked the walkway with faintly luminescent eyes. He let Belsey in. Cushions lay on the floor around a square of glass propped up on bricks. The glass supported an ashtray full of eggshells and a pint glass containing a fork and three raw eggs. Belsey took the bottles from his bag and lined them up beside the ashtray. The chemist whisked his eggs. He considered the bottles. He drank and Belsey averted his eyes. When he looked back the chemist was wiping yolk from his moustache. He turned the bottles to read the labels then unscrewed one and poured small pink pills into his palm.

  “Where did you get these?”

  “Underground.”

  “What’s Site 3?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You busted someone?”

  “Not exactly. Seen anything like this before?”

  The chemist rolled a pill between thumb and forefinger. He touched it to his tongue.

  “How many of these can you get?”

  “I’m not selling. I need to know what they are, where they’re from.”

  “Modafinil’s a pep pill. Soldiers use it on patrols to stay awake. Same with the benzyls and Dexis.” He moved three bottles to the side. “These are downers: Evipan is a sedative. Amytal’s similar—those are the yellow ones. Pentothal’s a brand of sodium thiopental; more like an anaesthetic.”

  “What are these fentanyl things?”

  “Fentanyl citrate. One hundred times more potent than morphine.”

  “Why a lollipop?”

  “Emergency situations. You don’
t have to fuss about with fluids or needles. Just suck it and see. What you’ve got is a field kit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Military supplies. That’s where I’ve seen it, not on civvy street. Most of these haven’t been available on script since the seventies.”

  “Too much fun?”

  “Too much fatality. Six or seven of these barbs and it’s goodbye cruel world. Like signing a prescription for a noose.”

  “When did they stop doing them?”

  “I’d say they were phased out 1985, 1986. I used to see amobarbital and Evipan around in the early eighties, before it all went heroin.”

  Belsey’s phone rang. It was the CID office, which felt ominous. He let it ring. The chemist contemplated an unopened bottle.

  “The pills are in good condition. Where have they been?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got to go. I owe you one.”

  The chemist nodded. He watched Belsey gather up his merchandise and walk to the door.

  “I’d give you twelve hundred for the lot,” he said.

  Belsey stopped.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Have you tried them?”

  NINE O’CLOCK AND THE CID office was getting lively. Craik’s door was shut, but he could see through its small window that she had company.

  “Who’s with the Sarge?” Belsey asked his colleagues.

  “Head of security, St. Pancras Library.”

  “Great.”

  Belsey surfed the gloom. He walked past her office again and recognised the man as his sparring partner from the library that morning. There were CCTV stills being spread on Craik’s desk.

  Belsey sat down at his own desk and checked his emails. No more word from Ferryman. He checked the intelligence system; no bodies had been found. He tried Jemma’s phone with no more luck. Thirteen hours gone. People would be starting to wonder where she was. He got a landline for Jemma’s home off his arrest report.

  “Hello,” a girl answered, and for a brief second his heart soared.