The house was well kept, unlit, recycling boxes stacked and empty, front curtains drawn. No lights visible inside. The Volkswagen’s bonnet was ice cold. Belsey rang the doorbell and braced himself. No one answered. He went down a side path to bins and a second door. A window beside the door showed plates in a drying rack. The centre of the door itself was frosted glass. Belsey put his eye to the lock, saw it had a key on the inside. It didn’t feel bolted. He stepped along the path until he found a loose paving slab, levered it up and smashed the door’s glass panel. He waited for any response, then reached in, unlocked it and stepped inside.
It was a nice kitchen. Not hi-tech but not neglected. Cookbooks, casserole dishes, a handbag on the kitchen table. He walked through a beaded curtain to a living room with an upright piano and a lot of books. The home of a middle-class couple. Or not a couple any more.
He smelt the grief before he saw it. There was a bed made up on the sofa littered with tissues; toast and soup on the table beside it, a greeting card lying on its back. Sorry for your loss. Belsey picked it up. “I knew Duncan well,” it began. It amounted to a small, earnest letter. The whole thing was “tragic,” “cruel,” “senseless”; signed Gillian, dated yesterday.
There were more unopened on the mat by the front door addressed to an Andrea Powell.
Death is a fairly solid alibi. 87 percent was a pretty solid print match. Belsey tore an envelope open and read another card. “His talent will be missed as well as his warmth.” He looked around, trying to identify the nature of Duncan Powell’s talent. A key turned in the front door. He was standing there with the condolence card in his hand as Powell’s widow walked in and screamed. She dropped a carrier bag and lifted a hand to her mouth. She had a friend behind her, ready to fight. Belsey took his badge out.
“Police,” he said, as an alternative to “surprise” or “sorry” and sounding halfway between the two. “Don’t worry.” He didn’t convince himself.
“What’s going on? How did you get in?” She was a tall woman, black hair clipped back, large dark eyes reddened. Her friend was blonder, smaller, with a lot of bangles and outraged eyes.
“Come in. Sit down,” Belsey said. She came in and sat on the sofa, shaking. The friend watched from the doorway, arms folded. “Andrea?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Nick Belsey, a detective. I need to ask you a few questions about Duncan. Is that OK?” She nodded. “When did he pass away?”
“Two days ago. Monday.” She spoke with the traces of a Spanish or Italian accent but London had flattened the vowels and the skin tone.
“How?”
“I thought you were police,” the friend said.
“I’m on a separate investigation. Duncan’s name came up in possible connection with it.” Andrea was hesitant. He couldn’t blame her. “What happened?” he asked.
“He was hit by a car,” the blonde friend said.
Belsey kept his focus on the widow.
“Do they know who was driving?”
“No,” Andrea said.
“Where was he?”
“Around Golders Hill Park.”
That was getting close to Belsey’s neck of the woods.
“When exactly on Monday?”
“Around quarter to five.”
“Description of the car?”
“Silver,” she said. “That’s all.”
Quarter to five, Monday. Where was he around that time? He knew exactly where he was. Sitting parked up off Hampstead High Street, waiting for a silver BMW to tear his world apart. Now he had an idea what it was speeding from—a man’s death.
Andrea started to cry. She pulled a tissue from her sleeve. Her friend sat behind her and stared daggers at Belsey.
“What did Duncan do, professionally?” Belsey asked.
“He was a writer.”
“What did he write?”
“Excuse me, what’s going on?” The friend asked. “You’re upsetting her.”
Andrea pointed to a shelf beside the piano. Belsey stood up and went over. Hardbacks from the last ten years on an eclectic range of subjects: political scandal, organised crime, censorship, the cold war. But mostly the cold war. Counter-intelligence after Brezhnev, The New Spy Chiefs, Soviet Special Operations 1956–75. Propped against the books was a photograph of Powell in regulation overcoat and Cossack hat in Red Square, next to the McDonald’s. He was tall, with a thin, clean-shaven face, wire-rimmed glasses and an ironic smile. In another photograph he was sitting in the living room beside his wife, playing an acoustic guitar.
“Andrea, was Duncan working on the day he died?”
“Yes. Someone had said they wanted to meet him.”
“About what?”
“Work.”
“What was he working on?”
“I don’t know.”
“But this person wanted to help.”
“Yes. I think so. Duncan seemed . . . anxious.”
“Why anxious, do you think?”
“He said we should maybe think about getting away soon. He never used to talk about holidays. He said he’d leave his work and we would get away for a few months.” She gestured at a bereft pile of library books on the floor. Books on sailing, hiking, bird watching; birds of Southern Europe, the Adriatic, other places far from London and its secrets.
“Did Duncan ever mention underground tunnels?”
Both women stared at Belsey with renewed suspicion. The friend got up in disgust and went to the kitchen.
“Underground?” Andrea said. “No. I don’t understand. I don’t understand why you’re here.” Then the friend gasped melodramatically from behind the beaded curtain.
“What have you done to the door?”
“I’ll call a glazier,” Belsey said.
“Andrea, he’s smashed the side door.”
“Could you leave?” Andrea pleaded, weakly.
“Did you see any equipment he might have been using? Torches? Maybe dirty clothes?”
“Please.”
The friend returned to the living room.
“You need to leave now.”
“Look,” Belsey began, then saw another careless and conspicuous incident developing. Slow down, he thought. Keep calm. The friend’s expression said: What are you doing, you heartless bastard? Belsey wondered. He’d added a lot of confusion to the sorrow, like someone trying to improve a bad meal by covering it in paint. He gave Andrea Powell one of his cards and told her he may need to be in touch again, more as a final gesture of validation than in any hope she’d speak to him.
23
THE STORY WAS BREAKING ON THE TWO O’CLOCK NEWS when he got back in the car. “Concern is mounting for missing art student, Jemma Stevens. The twenty-two-year-old from Stoke Newington failed to return home after going out on Monday . . .” No last sighting was mentioned. No mention of the hair parcel either, although word of it must have spread—he had no doubt this was driving the media interest. Hampstead station leaked like a sieve. Journalists knew it was going to be box office. But they were acting well behaved for now and holding back on details. They gave Northwood’s name as senior investigator.
Belsey turned the radio off, called a trusted glazier, then drove back towards the station. He stopped for coffee at a place with vintage furniture and china teacups, ate a croissant and thought. Duncan Powell’s published works had made him conscious of quite how large a world he had entered, swept into a current of unfinished history that nineteen years of criminal investigation had not prepared him for. Powell never made it home. Nor had Argyle. Argyle, a former chief of the defence staff. Killed on Saturday night. Then Powell approximately twenty-four hours later, a cold-war historian. And now the suspect had another to hand. An art student.
Belsey pondered this, watching mothers with buggies and men hunched over iPads. He thought: London is a jigsaw puzzle. Because it fits together? Because it breaks apart? Because there’s a piece missing?
THERE WAS A FURIOUS message from Tom Monr
oe waiting for him on his office answering machine.
“I had this story. I was sitting around on your instructions and every other journalist in the city is having a big fucking laugh and wondering why I’m so slow.”
No sign of Rob Trapping or Kirsty Craik. Rosen was trying to outstare a crossword.
“Any word from the Sarge?” Belsey asked.
“She was called in by the brass about last night.”
“Where’s Rob?”
“Interview Room 3.”
Belsey felt a flicker of concern.
“Doing what?”
“Interviewing someone, I imagine.”
“Who?”
“The guy who lives with the missing girl.” Rosen tossed the crossword aside. Belsey shut his eyes. He went to the interview room and threw the door open. There was the Kiwi barman, leaning back, arms folded. He saw Belsey and got to his feet.
“Sit down,” Belsey said. “Rob, corridor, word.”
Trapping bounded out.
“He’s got previous, Nick: assault and possession. They were seeing each other. She broke it off. I’ve left a message for Sergeant Craik.”
“What’s he saying?”
“A lot of bullshit about you, of course.”
“Like?”
“That you know something, you’re responsible, you were shagging her. Were you?” Trapping smiled.
“What’s his name?”
“Jayden Culler.”
“Give me a moment.”
Belsey walked in and shut the door. He stopped the tape recorder. The barman glowered.
“Jayden, relax.”
“What the fuck is this? What am I doing here?”
“Leaving. You’re on your way out, my friend. I’m working hard to find out what’s happened to Jemma. I’ve got nothing to do with her disappearance. Do you understand? I know it’s not to do with you either. It doesn’t help anyone if you go on talking crap about me.”
“How do you know it’s not to do with me then?”
“I can not know it pretty fast if that’s how you want it to go.”
“Don’t threaten me. Where is she?”
Belsey marched him out of the room, past Trapping, out of the station.
“Nick, what the fuck . . .”
“He’s alibied.”
Belsey ignored Trapping’s pained stare. He watched Jayden walk away. A few seconds later he watched Trapping march off towards the pub. Then he returned to the CID office and searched the Local Intelligence system for Duncan Powell’s death.
Knocked down on North End Way, 4:46 p.m. Monday. Logged as a fail-to-stop collision. The car hit Powell from behind before continuing south towards Hampstead. The body had been thrown ten metres. One witness saw it. The witness was called Colin Thorpe. He had stopped his Land Rover on the far side of North End Road to take a call. He described Powell running “as if being chased.” He had been running when he was hit. Powell wasn’t dressed for a jog: jeans, jumper, walking boots. He’d been running from Hampstead Way, onto North End Road—running from the entrance to the abandoned North End Station? This sounded slightly more complicated than a fail-to-stop.
It was a silver car that hit him—“probably a BMW,” according to Thorpe. Duncan Powell was pronounced dead at the scene at 5.11 pm. The pathologist logged cause of death as “blunt-force trauma.”
Belsey called the witness, Thorpe, and left a message on a BT voicemail to get in touch with him urgently.
He looked for who was leading the investigation. Technically the accident happened in the borough of Barnet, just over the border from Camden, beyond Belsey’s jurisdiction. So while the crash occurred less than a mile from Hampstead it had gone to an entirely different team. Not a team covering themselves in glory. They’d obviously smelt something slightly odd, interviewed Powell’s friends and family to try to establish what he’d been up to. But it had all become a bit much for them. The effort must have seemed unrewarding and, on Tuesday morning, they chalked it up as a straight hit-and-run. Who wants an unsolved murder on your books when you can have a road-traffic accident?
Belsey checked his own report of the car chase. It was there on the system: Silver BMW 7 Series, driving dangerously down Rosslyn Hill, 4:48 p.m. That was two minutes after Powell was hit, one mile away, by the same make of car.
How hard was it to connect those incidents?
Belsey tried calling the officer named as main point of contact for Powell’s investigation, DI Gary Finch. He spent five minutes being bounced around extensions before someone told him that Finch was out of the office at a birthday party. “Call back tomorrow.”
Belsey slammed the phone down. He emailed [email protected]: Why did you kill Duncan Powell?
He spent ten minutes typing up a detailed account of all this and left it on Craik’s desk. She could try her luck with the elusive Gary Finch. It would give her something to chew on, at least.
By the time he got back to his computer there was a block of ten emails from Ferryman. Subject line: Memorials. He opened the most recent. It contained a link. He clicked the link and a video appeared. But the video was just a still black-and-white photograph, a modern concrete building: ugly, bare, with small dark windows.
He turned the sound on and screams filled the office. His colleagues turned. Belsey hit mute. He stole the headphones off Rob Trapping’s desk and plugged them in.
Ten emails, ten concrete buildings, ten soundtracks involving a young woman who wanted to go home. Belsey shut his eyes and forced himself to listen, just in case he could extract any useful information—in the voice, the acoustics, background noise. There wasn’t any background noise. The acoustics were, at a guess, subterranean. The young woman pleaded and sobbed.
It was Jemma.
Belsey turned his attention to the buildings. He recognised four of them immediately: Centre Point, the modern annexe containing St. Pancras Library, the BT Tower, a black-sided office block that had to be the Archway Tower. The six others he couldn’t ID. He printed them out, spread them on his desk and they formed a sea of bleak concrete.
Brutal. What was it Monroe had said? Masterpiece of the Brutalist style. Belsey called the journalist’s mobile. He was sent to voicemail after two rings.
“Listen, Tom, stop being a cock. Get back to me.”
He hung up.
“Is there a press conference on the missing girl?” Belsey asked the office. “Reporters waiting anywhere?”
“I heard they were at King’s Cross,” Aziz said.
“They were told something about the library,” Rosen added. “Council was going to give a press conference. Then decided not to. Idea was squashed.”
“Squashed?”
Rosen shrugged.
Belsey made a few calls. Eventually he pieced together what had happened. Camden Council announced there would be some kind of statement, then at quarter past two they sent a memo: it was called off. No explanation given. A lot of journalists left kicking their heels around St. Pancras. And Belsey saw what was happening. This was what Ferryman wanted—attention on the tunnels; men and women congregating on the border of secrecy, pressing at the silence and waiting for it to burst.
24
THE BORDER OF SECRECY RIGHT NOW WAS THE STRETCH of dirty pavement between Chop Chop Noodles and Camden Town Hall. There was a lot of confusion around the library. One satellite broadcasting van waited across the road; hacks were engaged in a casual standoff with council security and half a dozen uniformed police wearing “nothing to see” expressions. It was 3:30 p.m.
“What are they saying?” Belsey asked a news reporter sharing pizza with her cameraman.
“They’re saying we should contact the Yard press office. It’s a bloody shambles.”
“What’s the Yard saying?”
“That it’s not for them to comment.”
“Seen Tom Monroe?”
“Try Chop Chop.”
The noodle house was a King’s Cross institution, staffed by
black-shirted waiters whose task was to get you out of there as quickly as possible. Monroe wasn’t playing. He had the back corner, his phone and notebook out, and he was nursing prawn crackers and a bottle of Tsingtao. Belsey sat down. Monroe rifled the crackers.
“I hope you got good money for it, Nick. I’m getting fucking death threats off my editor now.”
A girl slapped a laminated menu in front of Belsey. Belsey moved it to the side along with the crackers and beer. He spread Ferryman’s photos across the table.
“Here’s a game. What have they got in common?”
Monroe glanced at the pictures.
“You fucked me over.”
“Want to go to the press conference instead?”
“Is there one?”
“No. Do you think your friends out there have any idea what’s going on? No one’s being told anything.”
Monroe looked at the printouts more closely.
“And this is the scoop? Post-war architecture got ugly?”
“I don’t know what it is. That’s where you’re going to help me. You said something about the style. Brutal.”
“Brutalist.”
“Go on.”
“It’s a style of architecture: concrete, modern, pure.”
“Pure?”
“Pure of line.”
“Centre Point is Brutalist.”
“I’d say.”
“The library up the road?”
“Brutal as they come.”
“Are these all Brutalist?”
Monroe lifted a picture then moved it to the side.
“Yes.” He shuffled the images into configurations. “These are telephone exchanges: Moorgate, Baynard House, Colombo House in Waterloo.”
“Telephone exchanges.”
“I think so.”
Belsey looked at the cold, concrete monoliths. He understood now why they seemed so unhuman; homes for machines. “Does anything connect them all, apart from the style?”
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