Deep Shelter

by Oliver Harris

  “Jemma?”

  “No. This is Eva.” Now he heard the Eastern European accent. “Who is this?”

  “Does Jemma Stevens live there?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is the police. When did you last see Jemma?”

  “I haven’t see her since yesterday. Is she OK?”

  “We’re concerned about her whereabouts. If she shows up, call me. If she doesn’t, call me. OK?” He gave his direct number.

  “Why? What’s happened?”

  “Just let me know.”

  He poured a coffee. He had missed calls, two messages: the chemist offering fifteen hundred for the army drugs, Mr. Kostas calling from Diamante’s: “When can I collect those bottles?”

  He told Kostas to forget the arrangement, then tried another reply to Ferryman: Is she OK? What do you want?

  No action from Craik’s office; they were still tight in discussion. He called the Marine Policing Unit. For reasons that had never been entirely clear MPU incorporated the Confined Space Search Team. Maybe they wanted all the adventure boys together, gazing over the Thames from their Wapping base, planning their next challenge. He asked for DI Mick Conroy, a former Olympic rower and amateur cliff diver he’d met on a stag do.

  “It’s Nick Belsey, from Hampstead CID.”

  “Nicky, you rascal.”

  “Got a hypothetical situation, Mick, need to pick your brains. Say there’s a girl lost somewhere down in disused tunnels under London—how could I get you down there searching?”

  “We’d need authorisation from a Yard unit. Chief Inspector. Something like that.”

  “And how would you go about finding where she is? What kit do you use?”

  “Audio equipment, probably. If it stretches more than a mile. Maybe heat-detecting cameras.”

  “You could respond immediately?”

  “We’d have to check safety first. Especially if it’s disused. See if there was structural damage. See who has the latest map of the system.”

  “If it was a hostage situation underground?”

  “Christ. I suppose we’d need negotiators with us, maybe firearms. Would be a bit of a nightmare.”

  “OK.”

  “This is hypothetical?”

  “Until you hear otherwise.”

  A map of the system. Belsey looked at his A-Z, the shelters marked. He ran a check on the stolen Vauxhall Vivaro seen touring the entrance towers. The van had been taken ten days ago, from a back road in Clerkenwell, EC1. It was a face-to-face jacking. A whole new style compared to the theft of the BMW.

  The Vauxhall’s driver had been returning from a cash machine at 10:15 a.m. when a man stepped out from beside the van. The man threatened him with a kitchen knife, took his wallet and car keys and drove off with the van in the direction of Holborn. The hour alone made Belsey pause—a mid-morning carjacking was novel. Suspect described as white, twenty-five to thirty-five, fair, some stubble, six foot or thereabouts. An unhelpful note informed Belsey that an e-fit was yet to be completed. The officers on the case probably thought one of the usual suspects would be apprehended by now. But it was unusual every way you looked at it.

  The robbery occurred on Phoenix Place. Belsey checked Phoenix Place in his A-Z. It was behind the Royal Mail depot. The robbed owner was Victor Patridis, a chef at the depot itself. The van contained eggs, a tin of coffee and twenty-three loaves of white bread.

  What was the suspect doing behind a postal depot at 10.15 in the morning? And why steal a van? The Vauxhall was five years old, one of the old Royal Mail fleet repainted, with minor scratches and a dent on the left side. Hardly very desirable. And not discreet, either—a Vivaro was big. It seemed an odd choice for a surreptitious run-around. Good for transporting all sorts of things, though. Tools, people. It was yet to turn up.

  For whatever reason, six days after his tour around the shelters he stole the BMW. New wheels, new start. The BMW theft had been reported at 4 p.m. on Friday, 7 June. It crashed into Belsey’s life Monday the tenth.

  Three days was plenty of time for a BMW 7 Series to draw attention. Belsey returned to the force intelligence system. The car didn’t come up in connection with any crimes. But there were other lines of inquiry; this was London, it was a lot easier to kill a man than to park legally. Belsey called Camden Council Parking Enforcement. Sure enough the BMW had been ticketed the day before yesterday, 7:34 a.m. Sunday, 9 June, on double yellows and a bus route.

  “Do you know if any of your officers spoke to the driver?”

  “No. It says the vehicle was unattended My officers didn’t see anyone return while they were there.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “Earnshaw Street. Just behind Centre Point.”

  Earnshaw Street was a good result. Bang in the centre of town. The street itself was a back road off an incredibly busy junction. It was a hive of muggings and dealings. It was bound to be cameraed. He wanted the man’s face.

  Belsey called the council’s CCTV control room and told them he needed footage relating to an urgent investigation. He gave the time and location of the parking ticket and said he was on his way. Halfway out of the door Belsey heard his name. He turned.

  “Kirsty.”

  “Nick, could I speak to you?”

  He entered her office as the security boss left. The man turned back to Craik and nodded at Belsey.

  “That’s the one.”

  Belsey shut the door. Craik gestured at the images from the library spread across her desk.

  “Is this you?”

  He picked up a CCTV still. He’d been caught on two cameras, two angles, both good shots, neither flattering. At the time he had been staggering around in disbelief, but he looked like he’d broken in, filthy, desperate to browse the shelves.

  “It seems to be.”

  “You’ve been breaking into the library?”

  “No. And the break-ins are more likely to be break-outs, someone trying to leave the building having arrived via tunnels beneath it.” Craik looked bemused and slightly pained. “That’s why I was there.”

  “Could you expand on this a little?”

  “Underneath the library is an old war control centre or something—tunnels lead from it up to the deep shelter in Belsize Park. That’s how I got there.”

  “The shelter that you wanted a warrant on and I said we weren’t in a warrant situation.”

  “I have reason to believe someone is down there. I went in because I thought a life was in danger.”

  Belsey evaluated this new strategy as it came out of his mouth. He was embarking upon a course of half-truth, it seemed. A necessary risk. He had to account for his presence in the library and force some action. But it was still a door he had opened and would be unable to close.

  “Someone’s down there?”

  “I heard cries from the shelter. There’s definitely signs someone’s been in. Ask Constables Andy Durham and Ravni Singh. They were there this morning.”

  “What kind of cries?”

  “A woman. That’s what I thought I heard.”

  Belsey wanted to tell her about the email but that would give them half an ID on the girl and place him centre stage at the same time. It was there if he needed it. He still believed he could get a team down to the tunnels without ever needing to be the object of an investigation himself.

  “You threatened council staff with an axe.”

  “I didn’t threaten them. I had an axe with me. I was trying to get to the tunnels and they were obstructing an investigation.”

  “And what did you find? When you turned up wielding an axe?”

  “I was carrying it. I didn’t find anything. I couldn’t find the cupboard with the door behind it. The door’s . . . behind a cupboard.”

  Craik winced.

  “Nick, the security manager didn’t mention anything about a bunker.”

  “No one knows about it. I don’t think current council staff realise it’s there. It’s disused. But we need to move
on this. We need a specialist team down there taking a look. We might not have long.”

  She checked his eyes.

  “Calm down, Nick. OK?”

  His phone rang. He thought it might be CCTV control. He picked it up without looking at the number.

  “Two grand, final offer,” the chemist said, loudly. “I can clear those pills in a—”

  Belsey killed it. Craik stared at him. He began to leave. Then he saw the flowers.

  A vase on a shelf at the back was filled with carnations. They had creamy white petals, a line of crimson encroaching on the white. Belsey stared at them. He went over and touched a petal. Black dust came off on his fingers. He turned.

  “Where did you get these?” Craik studied his face to see if he was winding her up.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Do you?”

  “They just appeared?”

  “Reception gave them to me.”

  Belsey went downstairs. Crosby was polishing her glasses.

  “The carnations,” he said.

  “Pretty, aren’t they?”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “Someone left them outside. No name. So I thought—given she’s just settling in, a welcoming touch.”

  Crosby stared at Belsey’s hand and he realised he was still gripping a petal. He returned to the main office, took a sheet of paper and set the petal down on it. He tapped the petal and watched the deposit that came off. A shadow settling. Subterranean dirt. They were his flowers. Jemma’s flowers. His phone rang again.

  “Nick Belsey?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Chib, from Camden CCTV. Those tapes you wanted—can you come in?” He sounded nervous.

  “Do you see him park?”

  “A bit more than that.”

  “I’ll come in now.”

  “I think you better.”

  11

  CCTV CONTROL. THE SPACE STATION, AS IT WAS known among police, hidden at the top of an anonymous office block behind Great Portland Street. It had nine rooms lit by banks of monitors, by the grey forms of oblivious individuals going about their business.

  He knew something was up because they’d given him a screening room of his own, with a dedicated CCTV officer running the footage. The room was dark, dominated by a desk of switches and digital displays. The officer on the controls, Chib Kwesi, was good. Belsey saw him often enough, pulling footage of street fights, phone grabs, car crashes. Kwesi wore a crucifix over his shirt and had a passion for his job that belonged either to a stern moralist or a dedicated voyeur. He had the tape lined up. The stolen BMW was coming into shot. It was frozen on the screen, approaching from High Holborn into the shadows beneath Centre Point, the tower block that dominated the intersection of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road.

  Time stamp: 04.19 a.m. Three hours, fifteen minutes before the parking ticket was issued.

  “It’s not a great angle,” Kwesi said.

  “Do we get his face?”

  “Not well.”

  “What do we get?”

  He hit play. The BMW parked across the road from the camera, facing towards New Oxford Street. For a moment the car just sat there. The footage was low res, black-and-white, five frames per second. The vehicle sat right at the back of the shot. It wasn’t going to give a clear account of anything, let alone a face.

  “Is this the only camera we get him on?”

  “Yes.”

  A couple of early morning revellers appeared, cutting unsteadily towards Charing Cross Road. Two more minutes passed. Then the driver’s door opened and a man got out. He wore a familiar grey hoodie, hood up.

  “Wait,” Kwesi said.

  Belsey expected the suspect to turn but he didn’t. He went to the rear door closest to the camera and opened it. There was someone else in the car. The driver reached in and they embraced. The passenger put an arm around his shoulder. Then, as the driver moved back, you saw that the arm was bare, his passenger naked. The passenger refused to release the driver, apparently trying to drag him back into the car. Finally the driver pushed backwards and the naked figure fell to the pavement. Kwesi hit pause.

  “Corpse,” Belsey said.

  “That’s what it looks like to me.”

  Belsey caught his breath. He seized implications. Firstly, whatever doubts he may have had as to the gravity of the situation, the intent of his antagonist, could be packed away. Here was someone who trafficked in dead bodies. It made Jemma’s abduction part of something bigger. How did they connect? Kill someone Saturday night, abduct someone Monday evening. Was she a bargaining chip? A last hurrah? Just the latest?

  More to the point, what was his suspect doing here, parked thirty seconds from Oxford Street? London wasn’t short of neglected corners to dispose of unwanted dead.

  They rewound and watched the extraction again—he couldn’t see if the body was male or female. The driver stood above the body, obscuring it. He spent a moment staring down. Then he crouched and dragged it into the road, then out of shot beneath the camera. He couldn’t have dragged it far. He came back into shot fifteen seconds later, looking around the sides of the surrounding buildings as if he planned to scale them. At 04.23 he reached into the car and retrieved something from either the glove compartment or the dashboard. He took it across the road, in the direction of the corpse, shaking it.

  “A can of something,” Kwesi said.

  “A spray can.”

  Eighty seconds passed. The suspect returned without the can, checked the doors of the BMW were locked and strolled off towards New Oxford Street.

  “He just leaves the car and body there?” Belsey asked.

  “That’s right.”

  Kwesi hit fast forward. At 04.44 a man and woman staggered into view; he pressed her up against a wall and she slipped a hand under his shirt as they kissed. Then she looked past him. You saw the woman recoil. The man turned, then also took a step back. You couldn’t see their expressions. You saw the woman fish a phone out of her handbag and speak without taking her eyes off the corpse.

  04.57. The windows of the car and the office block began to flash: an ambulance with high top lights arriving somewhere to the left. At 05.02 more bulbs began to gather in the glass: police. The concrete lit up. The BMW sat insouciant throughout it all. No one paid it any attention. By 05.20, crime scene technicians must have got there. An indistinct figure crossed into shot, non-uniform. Someone strung tape in the distance, blocking the road from Holborn. The activity went on for about an hour, building, then dispersing. Then nothing at all: 06.37.

  “What happened?” Belsey said.

  06.59. A man in T-shirt and shorts urinated against the wall to the right of the shot before staggering back to Tottenham Court Road.

  “Go to when it was ticketed,” Belsey said.

  07.29. A parking attendant waddled into view. He checked his watch, circled the vehicle, bit a pen. The clock hit 07.30 and he tapped away at his machine. Nothing appeared to alert him to the fact that he was a few metres from a recent body dump. The ticket was logged at 07.34. Belsey knew wardens: he could almost believe that the man’s attention to parking violations would eclipse any homicide concerns, but not quite.

  “That, my friend, is one hell of a quick clean-up operation.”

  Earnshaw Street, he thought. Back of Centre Point. Belsey brought up the email from Ferryman. The image of the building. The side of a tower block.

  “Look at this.” He passed the phone over. “What do you reckon?”

  “It’s Centre Point.” Kwesi read the subject line. “‘Did you get your badge?’ Who is this?”

  “I think the email’s from whoever’s leaving the body. Go back to when he drops it. Can you enhance his face?”

  “Not well.”

  Chib showed him. The image of the suspect’s face was grained almost to the point of pixelated anonymity. Belsey could see the corpse’s arm. It was thin. Still hard to tell if the flesh had belonged to a man or a woman. Belsey’s in
stinct was leaning towards male. No long hair visible anyway. Then it dropped.

  The spray can. Followed by the eighty seconds off camera. The stroll away.

  “Where does he go?”

  “Nowhere. That’s the strangest thing. There’s eight cameras within a couple of hundred metres and he’s not on any of them. I’ve checked.”

  “He disappears.”

  “Exactly.”

  Belsey felt a familiar combination of emotions: awe, frustration, total perplexity.

  “But he collects the BMW at some point,” Belsey said. “I was chasing it thirty-six hours later.”

  Kwesi skipped to 09.20 a.m. The man returned alone, walking fast, checking the street. He spent a moment beside the BMW, apparently admiring the clean-up. A school party crossed in front of him, young children holding hands. Then he tore the parking ticket off the windscreen and climbed back in. He pulled out hurriedly and disappeared towards New Oxford Street. Kwesi paused the tape.

  Belsey called in a check on the body. He didn’t remember hearing of any corpses turning up on Sunday morning. He was right: no bodies had been discovered at that time. Not according to Local Intelligence. He tried Central Communications Command and they knew nothing either. Nor did the Met-wide emergency response system or the Yard’s own call-handling centre. Belsey phoned the two squads that bordered the dump site: Camden Borough headquarters, then Westminster police at West End Central. He got flat denials.

  Belsey turned back to the tapes. This wasn’t right.

  “Run it from when the police arrive, triple speed.”

  They watched the empty space, lit by the refracted lightshow of an emergency. The comical high-speed blooming of the incident—the shadows of someone, some people on the concrete. Then the departure.

  “See how fast they leave?” Belsey said. “Police, SOC; they just pile out of there.”

  They watched the whole thing from start to finish, three times. Kwesi crossed himself. Belsey crossed himself. They spent a few seconds staring at their reflections in the blank screen.

  12

  BELSEY HEADED TO CENTRE POINT WITH A CD OF THE footage in his pocket, wondering what story it contained.

  He arrived as the day hit noon, parked on the corner of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road, pushed through the mesh of pedestrians towards the tower block. What a place to leave a corpse: the spiritual centre of the West End, which was a contradiction in terms. Centre Point was thirty-four floors of bleak, latticed concrete. It marked a meeting of the ways—the retail purgatory of Oxford Street, Soho to the west: bars and clubs and strip-shows. To the south was theatreland, to the east the museums and universities of Bloomsbury. You could see the tower block for miles, stuck in the middle of all this, its name lit up across the top as if it meant something. A beacon. A lighthouse warning you away from the rocks.