Deep Shelter

by Oliver Harris

  Everything converged on Centre Point, including the traffic which knotted at its foot. The area around the base was dismal, its confusion currently exacerbated by the endless construction site for a new rail link. Heavy grey columns elevated the first floor of the building and created a maze of dark passages, leading seamlessly into a grim subway. As a child Belsey had associated this burrow with the sleeping homeless who filled it. As a young man, with the pool hall that led off the same loveless underpass.

  Earnshaw Street, where the body had been left, was part of this mess, a cut-through created by the crash-landing of the tower block. It was a gap, with three Korean restaurants and a lesbian bar, all huddled together in deep shadow, as if there was strength in numbers. He saw the bloodstains immediately. They were on a stub of pavement beside the stairs up to Centre Point’s main entrance. They’d been scrubbed into strange patterns: pale, interlocked circles that Belsey decoded as an attempt to clean the paving stones with a sponge of some kind. Garters of police tape clung to railings. Tiny silver fragments of a foil ambulance blanket remained caught in the spikes of some dead shrubbery potted at the base. They looked like futuristic blossoms. He saw fingerprint dust on the glass behind it. The place had evidently received full forensic attention at some point.

  He plucked a scrap of foil from the shrubbery. The corpse can’t have looked that old if they’d tried to wrap it. He stuck a toe into the mulch of old carrier bags and cigarette packets behind the plant pot and saw something wedged there. A spray can. Belsey pulled it out and shook it. The brand was “Hycote,” colour: “Colorado Red.” It was still heavy with paint. Whoever had done the clearing must have been in a hurry.

  But not too hurried for a bit of redecoration. Belsey sniffed. He touched the wall in front of him. It was tacky with a fresh coat of grey paint. He stepped back, then crossed the road to gain a better vantage. Sprayed in upper case letters three feet high, on the concrete underbelly of Centre Point itself, was the word “CAVE.” The attempt to hide the word with a rushed paint job only made it seem more significant. Letters seemed to be emerging from the concrete itself.

  Belsey took the spray can to his car and threw it in. He checked with Dispatch once more. No record of a body came up. He tried three officers who might have been patrolling the area. None had heard of anything. There are clean-ups and then there are cover-ups, he thought. To wipe a record from the Emergency Response Database you needed to be sitting at or near the top.

  He went and stood where the BMW had been parked and tried to trace the route the body would have been dragged. The individual would have had extra cover: Denmark Street to the south was entirely blocked by the hoardings of the Crossrail building site. The car itself would be rich with evidence. Where was it? He realised he had no idea of its fate since he’d last seen it abandoned by the deep shelter. He called Camden Borough HQ.

  “There was a stolen BMW left in Belsize Park yesterday, around five p.m. Do you know what happened to it?”

  “Sure. It’s in Perivale.”

  Perivale was home to the Met’s car pound. Belsey gave them a call.

  “A silver BMW 7 series brought in yesterday—have you still got it?”

  “Yes. We’ve just been told it can be released.”

  “OK, it’s just become evidence in a murder inquiry. You need to hold it. I’m on my way over now.”

  IT WAS 12:30 P.M. when he got to the Vehicle and Evidence Recovery Service. Belsey turned off the A40, past the giant Tesco, to the car pound. A guard opened locked gates and directed Belsey to an office in a Portakabin. Another guard checked the records then led Belsey across the tarmac.

  The place was a cross between a prison and an eccentric museum. There were distinct zones: the sculptures of destruction, the plain old uninsured, the stolen. Then, on the high-security wing, under a plastic roof, there were those awaiting forensics attention.

  The BMW was at the front. Belsey put latex gloves on. He opened the doors and stepped back as the reek escaped. Clearly no one had checked it. The car had a plush interior: beige leather upholstery, chrome trim, headrest DVD screens. But it stank. You could see faint red-brown staining over the back seat. It smelt like purge fluid: blood but also stomach acid, and stomach contents. He gave the upholstery a bang. No maggots. So the corpse hadn’t been more than a few hours old. He’d seen cars that had transported older corpses. They were a crawling mess.

  The boot was empty. He searched the front of the car, trying not to breathe. A packet of tissues in the map pocket, aviator sunglasses, a 500ml bottle of Evian. In the footwell of the passenger seat was a magazine. Belsey lifted it out.

  The page it was turned to contained classified adverts: Write to service men and women . . . Military Memorabilia Fair . . . Army–Navy Rugby Match.

  He turned to the front cover. Military Heritage, from February 2013. The cover showed a picture of a tank. He flicked through the pages: two separate features on D-Day, articles on the first Gulf war, the Eastern Front, amphibious vehicles and medal collecting. Then a lot of adverts: memorabilia for sale, regimental reunions, charities for veterans. Nothing on shelters or tunnels.

  The magazine wasn’t scuffed. There were no footmarks, suggesting it had been thrown off the passenger seat during the chase. Belsey turned it back as he’d found it. Then he took it to his car and placed it in an evidence bag.

  ACCORDING TO THE REPORT, the BMW belonged to a Dr. Joseph Green, resident of 12 Windmill Drive, Highgate. Belsey drove over. He felt the usual release from destitution as he climbed Highgate Hill. London was a city of villages but only a few of them had the high ground needed to keep the rest of the population at bay. The doctor’s house was tall, Georgian, covered in ivy, with a melancholy space in front where its BMW should have been. It was almost 2 p.m. Jemma had been missing seventeen hours—seventeen hours in the company of a man who was careless with dead bodies. Belsey walked through a wild front garden containing several statues of the Buddha, knocked on Green’s front door, then pushed. It opened.

  “Coming,” a woman called.

  Not only was the front door open, they kept their keys on a rack just inside it. Why make it difficult for criminals? Maybe it was assumed that all the crime stayed at the bottom of the hill. The woman appeared, holding secateurs, in an airy blue dress and an explosion of silver-streaked hair.

  “Is this always open?” Belsey asked.

  “Oh, someone must have left it like that. Do you have an appointment?” she asked. Then she glanced uncertainly at the bagged magazine in his hand.

  “I have a few questions about the theft of your BMW. I’m from Hampstead CID.”

  “Ah, police. It’s Joseph you want to speak to. I’m Rebecca, his wife. The car’s nothing to do with me. Come through. He’s just with a patient.”

  She led him down a corridor sagging with bookshelves to a large room with four chairs, a lot of plants and one man already waiting. “Joseph won’t be a minute.” Rebecca gestured at a closed door, then excused herself. The other man shifted his weight and seemed anxious about losing his place in the queue. He wore a tweed suit, ginger goatee and glasses. Belsey checked his watch. He checked the books around the room. No evidence of military interests. Practically every other interest though: ritual, myth, dreams, childhood. It was dawning on him what kind of medicine Green practised.

  “Your first time?” The man in tweed asked.

  “Not really. You?”

  “Me?” This amused him greatly. “I’m one of the disciples.” He laughed. “I’m writing about the development of his theories.”

  “Are they good?”

  “Are they good!” The man laughed again. The study door opened and a patient emerged, fresh from confession and unsettled by the laughter. He straightened his tie. His navy suit looked second-hand. The disciple turned to him. “What would you say? Is Joseph any good?”

  “Joseph? Yes, of course. He’s . . . Joseph.” The patient blinked, a little clammy, eager to please.

&n
bsp; “Excuse me,” Belsey said, and moved past him into the consultation room. The doctor was behind a desk, writing fast. He had very bright white hair and a long, clean-shaven face. He wore a blue jumper over a white shirt, a little elegantly crumpled like the room around him. The desk was large and crowded, the backs of photo frames arranged like a defensive wall. Sash windows looked onto a luxuriously unkempt garden. Beside the window were African masks, Indian puppets, Japanese prints. Everything you’d expect to find. Beneath the window was the couch.

  “Detective Constable Nick Belsey,” Belsey said, showing his badge. Joseph Green looked up and his eyes sparkled. He capped his pen. There was the sheen of health worn by successful seventy-year-olds in the healing professions. It was around the edges you saw he was old: the veins of the hands, the corners of the eyes. He glimpsed the “disciple” outside and seemed glad of Belsey as a delay.

  “Is this yours?” Belsey handed him the magazine in the evidence bag.

  Green studied it.

  “No. Why?”

  “It was in your car. Can you think of any way it might have got there?”

  “Got there? No. It’s only me who uses the BMW.” The doctor seemed simultaneously amused and appalled by the magazine, handling the evidence bag as if it contained something exotic and possibly dangerous. He read through the plastic. “Signal squadron . . . Veterans . . .”

  So, Belsey thought, he had a solid lead: a rare magazine, a specialist community. His suspect was a man of certain interests.

  “What is it?” Green asked.

  “A magazine called Military Heritage. Did anyone see the man who took your car?”

  “I don’t think so. Does this belong to him?”

  “That would be one explanation. Have police run any forensic checks on your home? The front door? The key rack?”

  “No.” Green handed the magazine back. “To be honest, I got the impression . . . I got the feeling they would investigate but it wasn’t top priority. I know you people are busy.”

  There was a knock.

  “Ah, Hugh,” Green forced a smile. The disciple had moved his restless shifting to the doorway. Belsey thanked the doctor and left.

  He moved from the Bohemian clutter of the house into the smart road and worked a hypothesis. The suspect had the magazine when he stole the car. He had it out, open at a certain page. Belsey slipped it from the bag. He glanced across the adverts for service charities and veterans’ associations. Filling the lower half of the right-hand page was a black-and-white photograph of a crowd in uniform. Were you here? Did you or any family members serve in the 2nd Signal Brigade, 81 Signal Squadron . . .

  He wondered how to edge this situation into significance, enough for door-to-door enquiries, Military Heritage enquiries, forensic checks, all while keeping himself out of the picture. He sensed he was almost making progress. Then his phone rang.

  “Nick,” Rosen said. “We’ve got a journalist calling for you—about a missing woman.” Belsey felt a jolt. He scrambled for the meaning of this. “Said it was urgent.”

  “Who?”

  “Tom Monroe, on the Express. Know him?”

  “We used to drink together. What’s he saying?”

  “He needed to ask you about a missing woman.”

  “A current investigation?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have there been any other calls about it?”

  “No.”

  “What woman? Is something going on?”

  “Not that I know of, Nick. But it wasn’t me he wanted a conversation with.”

  Belsey called Monroe. He caught him at his desk for once. He could hear keyboards in the background.

  “Tom, what have you heard?”

  “Someone gone missing yesterday. Your neck of the woods.”

  “Who?”

  “Let’s say she was twenty-something, cute, long black hair.”

  “How do you know about this?”

  “I got an email.”

  “From who?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “Tom, this is highly sensitive, OK? This is not out there. I’m heading over to you now. Don’t do anything. Don’t write anything.”

  “In that case I’d probably be better off in the Jamaica, Nick. Your round.”

  13

  THE EXPRESS OFFICES WERE ON LOWER THAMES Street, by the river. The Jamaica Wine House hid around the corner on a back street and Monroe used to boast he could make it there from his desk, drink a pint and return in under three and a half minutes.

  He was taking it slower today. Belsey saw the depleted pint of Guinness first, then the legs stretched out, scuffed Chelsea boots crossed. Monroe was sunk deep in an ox-blood leather booth. He had the back room to himself, lunch crowd gone, empties still on the tables. He eyed Belsey and tilted himself upright without removing his hands from his pockets. His black suit had worn to a greasy shine. He looked like an undertaker who’d just been fired.

  “What have you got?” Belsey said.

  Monroe found his hands, then produced a pack of Camel Blues from one pocket and his phone from the other. He balanced the phone on the cigarettes and tapped it. The email appeared:

  From: Ferryman@tempmail.net

  Subject: Missing 11/06/2013. NW3 area. Can you help?

  “Can you help?” Monroe asked.

  Attached was a photograph. Jemma turned her head towards the camera. Her wrists were bound with duct tape, another twisted cord of tape running from the improvised restraints to a control panel in front of her. The panel was similar to the one Belsey had seen the previous night: telephone receivers, attack switches. Same equipment, but the room was larger, painted white. Her hair was tied back, a messy ponytail held in a rubber band. Her mascara was streaked but the eyes were dry now. Hostage weariness. Not someone really in the mood for photos. There was grazing on the upper arms. He couldn’t see other injuries. His Maglite sat on the table beside the equipment.

  “Is it for real?” Monroe asked.

  “Looks real enough to me. Any idea who she is?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Not yet.”

  Monroe looked thoughtful. But also aroused. His eyes were black and bright. There were people Belsey would prefer had this story. Monroe possessed one of the finest minds Belsey had drunk with, which hadn’t made the journalist happy, rich or very often sober. They’d first met under an East London fish market, in the Ship Tavern, a basement bar that kept strange hours for the market porters. It served pints at dawn. A group of them went through a big Ship phase: journalists, police and a few nocturnal entrepreneurs. They called themselves the Breakfast Club and thought it was witty.

  Monroe had been an art historian when they started drinking together, but he’d written a series of books on espionage to pay off drug debts and two of these were almost best sellers. Britain’s Most Notorious Spies was still in print. Then someone on the Express killed themselves, and he was offered the defence desk and eventually news. He was good at it because he was genuinely curious but seemed indifferent and aloof. His books did well because they were about secrets. Belsey used to say he should be a detective. There was something cold at the centre of Monroe that made him good company on self-destructive nights and made you wonder what you’d told him when you woke the next morning. When Borough CID fell, he splashed the lot.

  “This isn’t public yet,” Belsey said. “It needs to not be public. You could jeopardise an investigation and put her in real danger.”

  “What’s she in right now?”

  “It looks like she’s alive, which is something.”

  Monroe considered this.

  “I thought maybe it was off a fetish website. Technology perverts. Then something made me sit up. The machine she’s taped to, it’s part of HANDEL.”

  “What’s HANDEL?”

  “The old emergency communications system, for spreading word of a nuclear attack.” Belsey took a closer look at the machine. “The lights come on
if an impending strike is detected,” Monroe explained. “Then the operator flicks the switch here and says their piece. It uses the frequency of the speaking clock. The clock was a warm-up act. It kept the line in working order, ready.”

  Belsey looked from the machine to Jemma’s eyes again. Had she been drugged? Beaten? Monroe also met her eyes.

  “Who is she, Nick? Either you’ve got a name for her or you don’t. If you don’t then I reckon you need to publicise this picture pretty quickly and get one. If you know already, then why are you holding out on a friend? Have you sold this to someone else?”

  “No. Are others on this?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Why did it go to you?”

  “That was the other thing that made me sit up. I wrote about him.”

  “Who?”

  “Ferryman.” Monroe pointed at the email address. His face flickered with a smile, as if he’d surprised himself with this news.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Paraomshtik. Ferryman. He was a spy for the Soviets during the cold war. A mole. Passed intelligence on UK nuclear arrangements.”

  Two women came into the back room holding wine. They looked at Belsey and Monroe and walked out again.

  “Tell me about Ferryman,” Belsey said.

  “There’s nothing more to tell. He’s one of the unsolved. No one knows who he was.”

  “Is it possible this is him?”