Deep Shelter

by Oliver Harris

  “Wait,” Belsey said, pointlessly.

  He reached for his badge, pulled the gun. Someone screamed. People turned, then a lot of amateur historians hit the floor.

  An amber alarm light flashed. The National Archives—that would connect to more than just the garden-centre constabulary. He leaned over the enquiries counter.

  “I’ve got an enquiry. I’m looking for this file.” He produced the case notes, tried a wave of the gun. The bearded man was holding up best. He checked the code and entered it into the computer.

  “It was recently in use. Should be up here. You don’t need to hurt anyone.”

  “I don’t intend to hurt anyone.”

  The man led him through, past the security barrier. Guards watched the gun, hands raised; they looked as old as the files they were meant to be protecting. To one side were stacks of clear-fronted cabinets, like doors at a morgue. The bearded man checked their numbers, opened one and produced a small box.

  “Where do you want it?”

  “On the table.”

  He put it down. It was a plain brown cardboard box the size of a telephone directory. Belsey picked it up with his free hand. It was light. He flipped the lid off. Inside was one tattered manila folder. MINISTRY OF DEFENCE—TOP SECRET—ACID. Official stamps overlaid one another. Then, diagonally across them: “Declassified 2013.” The next page was the front of the file itself.

  MACHINERY OF GOVERNMENT IN THE

  EVENT OF NUCLEAR WAR

  SITE 3 RESEARCH PROGRAMME

  COMMAND CHAIN AND INITIATED

  PERSONNEL

  Belsey opened it. He stared at the yellow cardboard back of the folder. Nothing remained inside the sleeves apart from a piece of string and a corner of white paper. Someone had torn the whole thing out.

  He closed the box and sat down. He placed the gun on the table, listened to the sirens approaching.

  Sorry, Jemma. He would spend his life watching the torchlight disappear. Rewinding that evening and starting again. Almost 3:30 p.m., according to the clock on the reading room wall. She had another two and a half hours to live. And he could do nothing about it.

  He tried to light a cigarette and his arm felt like it was encased in metal. Belsey gave up. Through the windows around the side of the room he could see the day over halfway done, mid-afternoon ready to become late afternoon. It was Friday. Out in the world there would be that sweet, quiet relief that, no matter how awful it had been, things were over. The week was over.

  He considered self-medicating. He knew what he’d get in custody: some disinterested duty medic with a couple of milligrams of morphine. If he was lucky. He watched the strange scene he’d created, people under desks praying, curled up like it was rest time, their work left open above them. Abandoned pencils scattered. Then he stopped. Every pencil was missing its eraser.

  Belsey got unsteadily to his feet. He picked up a pencil, ran his thumb over the metal sleeve where the rubber should have been. He looked around. He wasn’t imagining it. There, in a neat pile on the guard’s desk, were the missing pink nodules. Alongside other confiscated items: bottles of water, a packet of mints, Tippex. Belsey walked over. The guard was nowhere to be seen. He lifted a sheet of regulations.

  Restricted items: food and drink, blades, glue, any kind of eraser.

  The bearded man was watching him.

  “Do you need something?” he asked.

  “I need to know who had that file most recently. Who was the last person to request it?”

  The man went back to his enquiries desk and tapped a key.

  “A Dr. Joseph Green,” he said. “Had it out two days ago.”

  50

  BELSEY KEPT TO BACK ROADS, HEADING NORTH, TOWARDS Highgate. Towards Windmill Drive. Fragments from the past four days coalesced in his damaged mind.

  Michael came to London for him. Because he thought Joseph would help. That’s what he said.

  Hugh Hamilton saw Michael Easton on 17 April. That was four days after Easton’s return from travelling. But it was Joseph he was after. Michael had read all of his work. He quoted from it. I’m sure Joseph loved that. Belsey thought back to his own first meeting with the doctor. He saw Joseph studying Military Heritage through the plastic of the evidence bag. That would have been minutes after Easton had announced that he was done with therapy, that state secrets will find their own way out. That he had been spending time at Kew.

  No one answered at the doctor’s house. The front door was open. Belsey walked through to the study. Joseph Green lay face down on the rug, one arm outstretched. He looked like he was trying to swim through his own blood. A very old hunting knife lay a foot from his outstretched hand.

  He asks whether I believe in hell, whether killing can ever be justified, whether there is a limit to forgiveness.

  Asks if I’d forgive my own killer if I met them, before or after death.

  Belsey turned slowly. The doctor had armed himself. He’d come to their final meeting prepared. But the hunting knife was clean. He’d been moving around the desk when he was stabbed by something more effective. The desk was knocked crooked. There had been a struggle in which papers and books had fallen, a handprint where he had tried to support himself against the wall.

  Belsey crouched and felt his neck. No pulse. But Belsey could hear breathing. He wasn’t the only living person in the room.

  He eased himself up. There was someone behind the door. Belsey took the Webley out, then kicked the door hard into the body of the individual. It sprang back towards him.

  “No!” Hamilton crouched. He held a leather briefcase in front of him as a shield. Belsey lowered the gun. “I just got here,” the disciple spluttered. “I don’t have anything to do with this. I just . . . I was told to come here.”

  A voice in Hamilton’s hand said: “Could you repeat which service you require: police, fire or ambulance?”

  “Hang up,” Belsey said. Hamilton killed the call. He glanced at the gun then Belsey’s blood-soaked sleeve. The call had connected. So they would be tracing it. Six-minute average response to a high-priority call in a dense urban area.

  “You were told to come here?” Belsey said.

  “My wife took a message—Joseph was ready to start participating again, to talk. I should come here immediately. But I think it was a . . . It wasn’t true. It was Michael. Michael who told me to come here.” His voice trailed off.

  Belsey studied the body again. No blotches of lividity. Less than twenty minutes dead. Hamilton moved for the door.

  “Stay there,” Belsey said. He turned the body just enough to see multiple stab wounds across the front of the torso then eased the corpse back. “Where was Joseph in November 1983?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  “I need to know.” Belsey glanced around the study as if something might tell him—the old books on anthropology, ritual, nature; Mankind and Community, The Psychology of Survival. “The argument you were having with him when I was last here—you were asking him about his training. Was it about that period? The eighties?”

  “No. Not at all. It was about Otto Brodsky. His Prague seminars. Just that. I don’t—”

  “Prague?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about it?”

  “This isn’t to do with me.”

  “Tell me about Prague.”

  “Joseph always said he was in Paris in the late sixties. But everything he wrote in that period echoes the early work of Otto Brodsky. And then I received evidence that Joseph studied with him, in Prague. He’s never spoken about it.”

  “You’ve got that evidence with you?”

  “Yes, I thought . . .” Hamilton looked for somewhere to rest his briefcase that wasn’t a corpse. He crouched down again, opened it on his knee and handed Belsey a smudged photocopy. Akademie Psychoanalýzy. It was an article written in Czech. Joseph Green’s name sheltered amid cramped columns of thick type, exposed by yellow highlighter.

  “It’s a list of speakers from th
e 1967 Prague Congress,” Hamilton explained, still shaking. He glanced at Green’s corpse, too busy bleeding to contest its biography. “Joseph’s on the list. Guest of the Prague Psychoanalytic Study Group. That’s Joseph delivering a paper, see, followed by Otto Brodsky and Claudio Laks, of the Czechoslovak Institute of Psychiatry.”

  “Where did you get this?”

  “It was posted to me anonymously.”

  “When?”

  “About seven weeks ago.” Belsey did the maths. As he expected, seven weeks ago was just after Easton’s return from the Czech Republic. “Evidently someone recognised its value,” Hamilton said.

  “What’s its value?”

  “The encounter is clearly where he got everything—his whole approach to analysis. And, of course, conveniently for Joseph, very few analysts had the opportunity to study with Brodsky.”

  “Because Czechoslovakia was communist.”

  “Exactly. He went there and learnt to imitate a new approach. And when he returned, he passed the theory off as his own. Why else would Joseph be so quiet about his visit?”

  “Because he was a spy.”

  Hamilton adopted an odd smile.

  “A spy?”

  “He was recruited by the KGB. What did he say exactly when you presented him with this evidence?”

  “He was furious,” Hamilton said, quietly.

  Belsey looked around. Back from Prague, evidence in hand, Michael starts his sessions. And he knows—he knows from the start he is sitting opposite the man who killed his family. He bides his time, toying with his prey. But still wanting more. He needs to find out exactly what happened. He wants to know what Ferryman did, and how to get back there.

  “Do you have any idea where Joseph was working in 1983?”

  “Some provincial backwater. Working for the government.” The strange smile returned, like someone discovering they are the object of a joke.

  “Working for the government?”

  “A survey of welfare. He didn’t talk about it much. He thought it was unglamorous. It was where he met Rebecca.”

  Again, lines from the case notes were returning to Belsey. He begins asking questions about my family, my relationship with my wife, how we met. Belsey imagined Michael here, session after session, getting closer. He has been turning up for sessions either early or late. Today I arrive and he is sitting behind my desk.

  Belsey stepped over the corpse and sat in the doctor’s chair. There were the pencils, the files. There was the defensive wall of framed photographs. A girl on a bike, a sepia couple in their wedding clothes. Finally, in faded colour, a very young Rebecca Green. Belsey wiped the blood off the frame with his cuff. Rebecca stood by a gate with fields behind her. Young and beautiful. Stuck in a provincial backwater. The fields behind her were striped with shadows. The sun was low. The shadows stretched from standing stones.

  The main stone was tall and thin. The other six were smaller stumps forming a crescent, like teeth in a jawbone. Belsey turned the desk lamp on. He followed the slope of the fields, past the stones, to the slate of the human habitation in the distance. Roofs clustered around a blunt church spire. Woods ran halfway up a hill above the village.

  “What is it?” Hamilton asked.

  “Piltbury.”

  Belsey turned Green’s PC on. Here came the sirens, from the west, from Hampstead. He ignored them. He pulled up a map of Piltbury. There was the church, the high street, the hill with the holiday cottage. There were those blank, white spaces all around it. Belsey clicked to satellite view. From the air they weren’t so blank; you could see large sections of land fenced off, long, thin buildings at right angles to one another. You could also see that something wasn’t right with several houses on the edge of the village. Instead of roofs they had ventilation slats.

  He found similar structures to the north, about a mile away. Then he spotted a third group, more than two miles south.

  Belsey sat back. He stared at the screen, then the photograph. Michael gets behind the desk, sees the photo. A new theory emerges: his deep memories aren’t subterranean London after all. He locates the standing stones. Decides it’s time for a country break. In Piltbury he must have begun to realise the size of Site 3. That’s when he knows he has to find William Lanzer. He’s going in; he needs to know his way around.

  Then it’s just a question of saying goodbye to the man who killed him and he’s off.

  4:49 p.m. The front door opened.

  “Joseph?”

  Rebecca Green. Hamilton looked to the door, then to Belsey. Sirens turned onto the road.

  “Joseph? Sweetheart?”

  Belsey stepped over the body to the couch. He opened the window and sat on the sill. Hamilton stared at him. The poor bastard was going to have some explaining to do.

  “Want to come through the window?” Belsey asked. The disciple shook his head. “Do Rebecca a favour and stop her getting in here. She doesn’t need to see this.”

  Hamilton nodded. He didn’t move. Belsey jumped out.

  51

  THE POLICE ENTERED 12 WINDMILL DRIVE A FEW SECONDS after Rebecca. Belsey held back until they were inside then ran to his car. The screaming from the house started as he began to drive.

  Warm corpse. Easton had been there less than half an hour before Belsey arrived. There was only one quick route to Piltbury. Belsey kept a look-out for white vans, driving one-handed, ignoring the pain in his immobile right arm. He put his phone on speaker and called Wiltshire police as he swerved onto the M4, giving a description of Easton.

  “Consider him armed and dangerous. He’ll be heading for Piltbury if he’s not already there. He has a hostage with him, a young woman. She’s called Jemma Stevens.”

  “Piltbury?” They sounded incredulous. “We’re not getting any command-level instructions to that effect.”

  “Well, all hell’s about to break loose. Someone should have told you.”

  “Who is this?”

  There was another call coming in. Belsey switched.

  “Nick? It’s me, Kirsty.”

  “Don’t tell me where you are.”

  “I think I’m safe. Where are you?”

  “On the M4. Can you get online?”

  “Nick, you need to stop while you’re still alive. It’s a miracle we made it this far. I can get us help.”

  “I need you to get a map of Piltbury up. It’s got Site 3 under it.”

  “Piltbury?”

  “There’s an underground railway from London to Piltbury. Easton had made Freedom of Information requests about the government purchase of rail track—track used for this connection. That’s how they would have got the government out of London. That’s the last resort—the move.”

  He managed to open the road map on the passenger seat with one hand.

  “I’ve got Piltbury,” Craik said.

  “Can you see those fenced-off areas?” Belsey said. “With the long, narrow buildings?”

  “The military bases.”

  “Bases?”

  “If that’s what you’re talking about. There’s a few of them. The closest is called Rudloe Manor. Hang on . . . It’s an RAF Communications and Command headquarters.”

  “Where?”

  “In Hawthorn. Then there’s Basil Hill Barracks half a mile to the east of that. Something called Piltbury MOD Computer Centre just north of the village. The place has more military business than civilian going on.”

  Belsey balanced the map on his knees. He tried to navigate the village in his mind. He reached the pub. The Quarry House. It struck him now as a curious choice of name.

  “In the village there’s a pub called the Quarry House. Where’s the quarry?”

  “Wait. OK, I’ve got a history of the area. Yeah, it used to be all mining around there. Bath stone, first real rock as you head west from London. The mines are disused now.”

  “Where were they?”

  “Everywhere, by the looks of it. The core was in Spring Quarry to the south-west
of Chippenham.”

  “Where else? How far does it extend?”

  “Well, there was a mine at Hudswell, one at Monkton Farleigh.”

  Belsey pulled up on the hard shoulder, searched the map and found Hudswell and Monkton Farleigh. He got the area on satellite view on his phone. You could trace the mines by the vents. They extended west to Bath, east to Chippenham, down to Melksham in the south. If the bunker occupied the old mines, it was the size of a town. He thought of the blood map and began to adjust his sense of scale.

  “How would you get down there, Kirsty?”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “If you really felt you had to.”

  “A vent.”

  There appeared to be only one vent that wasn’t sheltered amid barracks. It was in a field just beyond a house on the outskirts of Piltbury itself. Hill View House.

  “I think I know where he’s heading.”

  He started the car, cut back onto the motorway.

  “And you’re going to do this on your own?”

  “No, I’m taking a lot of supportive friends with me. What do you think?”

  “I think you’ll be in a great place for people to kill you.”

  Belsey was trying to decide if there was anything else he needed to say—something honest, maybe a farewell. He lost reception before he thought of the words. It cut as he passed the sign for Piltbury.

  52

  THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE SKY. BELSEY saw as he approached the village. The portion capping Piltbury was streaked with elaborate cloud formations. He thought, at first glance, that there was a fire somewhere, but the smoke wasn’t black, it was bright orange.

  He took the turn-off and Piltbury was gone, lost in spreading orange clouds. Easton must have covered the area fast, setting off those Combat Effect flares. The smoke seemed to have at least five sources. It was expanding, rolling out across fields and narrow country roads, joining other clouds. It hung in trees, confused cattle.