The Hollow Man

by Oliver Harris

“But I spoke to a man on your number.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he wasn’t you. Are things all right, Nick? Someone said you’d gone missing.”

  “Missing? I’m here at work.”

  “You sound different.”

  “I am different.”

  “Are you OK?”

  A note in his in-tray instructed Belsey to attend the headquarters of the Independent Police Complaints Commission at 3 p.m. They hadn’t wasted any time. Someone wanted him out. He looked at it and wondered if he’d gone missing. Maybe he was on the run. There were people on the run who were perfectly still. He folded the Internal Affairs note into his pocket, stood up and stretched.

  It was a relatively quiet day. Most of the other Hampstead detectives were at a training session in Enfield. The station was short-staffed and Belsey had to process a sixteen-year-old with a kilo of cannabis resin. Afterwards, he took the hash and bought some cigarette papers, begged a couple of cigarettes and returned to the station.

  He sat in the rape suite, smoking. It was comfortable there. That was the idea, he supposed: a sofa, some dried flowers, a side room behind a curtain. No one would look for him in the rape suite. He considered his plan as it stood and what he needed to do: investigate flights, locate his passport, raise a little travel money. Now he had decided on his course of action Belsey felt at peace. He hadn’t smoked hash since his early twenties. He thought of his expectations then, the thrill of police work, the crew he ran with. They would compete to see who could travel the farthest in a night, while supposedly on duty. One time he stuck the sirens on and made it to Brighton. He remembered standing against a rail beside the sea, feeling spray on his face and staring into the blackness. It felt like being on the edge of everything he knew. He had made it in forty-two minutes, down the M23. If it was this easy, he thought, how far could he go in a night? In a week? At that moment every cell in his body wanted to run. Looking out over the sea, he thought: Moving is the most important thing in the world. And he had forgotten that, as you do with the most important things.

  He spent five minutes gathering papers for a court visit next week that would not take place. He would be gone. The case concerned a husband who’d tried to kill his family after he’d lost his job. The bank had cut his overdraft facility, the neighbours smelt gas. Belsey was glad he would not be there to see it all unfold. The justice system would find itself temporarily without a cog, but it would survive. At twelve-thirty he returned to The Bishops Avenue.

  New shoeprints led towards the house, parallel with his own. Heath mud, size nines where he was size eleven: no treads, some pale dust on the outside of the left sole where they had tried to skirt the pink gravel.

  The visitor must have walked around the building, trying to see if anyone was in, then approached the bell. Belsey crouched to the bell. It was metal and would pick up good prints. He stepped back and looked at the windows. No lights on. None of the curtains had been moved. He emptied the mailbox attached to the front security gates. Then he climbed the steps and let himself in.

  “Hello?” he called. There was no answer. Belsey flicked through Devereux’s mail as he walked through the house, tearing open envelopes and discarding the junk. He thought there might be a PIN or, less immediately useful, a bank statement. But he was also now intrigued by the enigma of Alexei Devereux. What had brought this situation about? Where was he? As a good detective, Belsey did not like mysteries, and as a bad one he found too many. In his first week of CID, Inspector John Harlow—the only DI he ever truly respected—had seen it in him: It will be your downfall, Nick Belsey. Not knowing when to call it a day and stop asking bloody questions.

  He found three pizza-delivery menus, a letter from a call-forwarding company encouraging him to upgrade his service, and a lot of catalogues: for office supplies, outdoor sports equipment, children’s educational toys, health supplements and designer luggage. Devereux had also received several brochures about tooth whitening. Belsey read them then checked his own teeth in the bathroom mirror. They were streaked with coffee; the gums appeared to be falling away.

  A foul smell had begun to permeate the house. Belsey lit a scented candle from the bathroom. He sat at Devereux’s desk, took a fountain pen and some letterhead (“AD Development: Hope Springs Eternal”), and popped the cap of the pen. He wrote: Hello, I am here, and watched the ink soak into the thick paper. Then he took a fresh sheet and wrote his name and date of birth at the top. He wanted to write a confession. He wrote: I have been a police officer for twenty-one years, and then his mind went blank.

  He couldn’t ignore the stench any longer. It smelt like rotting meat. Time to clear the fridge out, Belsey told himself, and tried not to think what else it might mean. The smell was getting worse by the minute. Belsey walked to the kitchen but there was nothing rotting in the fridge, or any of the kitchen cupboards, or the bin. A single fly crawled across the tiled floor.

  Belsey crouched down to see it: a bluebottle, shimmering, turquoise. Belsey lay on his stomach, inching closer until he could see the jewel-like eyes and the twitching of the individual legs.

  Calliphora vomitoria. Nature’s pallbearers. It crawled to Belsey’s fingers and inspected them for signs of life. He had an awful feeling.

  There were two flies circling the light fitting in the living room. A third flew in from the hallway. The Calliphoridae could smell death ten miles away, but Belsey sensed he wouldn’t have to go that far. He followed another up the stairs.

  The smell was strongest in the bedroom. He covered his mouth and nose, checked behind the curtains, under the bed, the wardrobes, but couldn’t find any body.

  He walked down the corridor. The next door led into a laundry room the size of an average bedroom, with cupboards, rails, wicker baskets, two washing machines and a dryer. Belsey opened the cupboards and took the lids off the wicker baskets. He opened the washing machines and dryer. They were all empty. The room was large, but not large enough to hide a corpse, and he couldn’t understand what came between the two rooms to fill the rest of the first-floor corridor. Belsey walked back and knocked on the wall. It sounded hollow.

  He walked back to the bedroom. He looked at the right-hand wall and the floor-length mirror. He pressed on the surface of the mirror and it shifted. He pressed on the edge and it swung open.

  The mirror hid a small room. Belsey peered inside. A middle-aged man stared back from a swivel chair, suited, his throat sliced open and crawling with maggots. The space was rigged as a safe room: windowless, with electromagnetic locks, a phone and two CCTV monitors on a small desk. It had its own chemical toilet in the corner and a stack of mineral water and tinned food. Blood had reached the ceiling and the walls: shallow brown drops, held at the point where gravity had lost interest.

  Belsey walked back downstairs.

  He’d never been sick at a body and wasn’t going to start now. He went out to the garden and crouched down breathing the fresh air. It wasn’t enough to clear the smell from his nostrils` though. He took a scarf from Devereux’s wardrobe and made some strong coffee, drank half and watched it cool, then he poured the rest onto the scarf and tied it around his face. He found a pair of rubber gloves beneath the kitchen sink and went back.

  The copper smell of blood provided a low note alongside the appalling sweet reek of decomposition. Carotid arteries fountain up to twenty feet on a good day. Blood had dripped back down into the corpse’s face, streaking his scalp, dappling the front of his shirt. The man’s eyes were covered with an opaque yellow film. He was heavy-set, balding, with fading golden hair cropped close; clean-shaven with a dusting of postmortem stubble. Gases bloated the corpse but you could still make out a characterful face, like an emperor in decadent times; a strong nose and a full mouth. He’d had the muscle to dig deep and had done so with feeling. Belsey couldn’t help being impressed. A paring knife lay on the floor beneath his right ha
nd.

  On the desk in front of the body was a slim, bloodstained brochure: “The Reflections Funeral Plan”—motto, “Everything Settled.” It carried a photograph of two swans floating on water. Inside, various prices for cremations and funerals were listed, averaging on two and a half thousand with interest. You paid in instalments. It’s a good feeling when you know everything is in order, with no loose ends, and that your family will be spared undue distress. No loose ends? Belsey thought. Family? Devereux’s family seemed a long way away. Devereux had written a cheque for £3,200 from his UK current account, dated four days ago, made out to Reflections Ltd.

  Belsey used the brochure to scrape some of the maggots away from the wound. Devereux had several cuts—short, parallel nicks high beneath his left ear: the trial cuts of the suicide, as they eased themselves into it. On his fourth attempt he dug deep, so deep he didn’t even make it across his throat; the incision petered out beneath the larynx. The job was done, though. There were no other injuries—no defence injuries on the arms or hands. Belsey didn’t particularly want to dwell on the larvae crowding the man’s nostrils but he persuaded himself to take a look. They were getting on well, still unhatched, over a centimetre long. In a sealed environment, at winter temperatures, that placed the death between three to five days ago.

  Belsey checked the room’s electronics. A sticker on the CCTV hard drive said “British Security Technologies.” The system was off. Belsey switched it on, looked for recording history but the drives were blank. He switched it off again and wondered about this. Certainly, as police, you learned that security technology got bought a lot more often than it got used. But then it wasn’t always filming several million pounds.

  He searched the suit. The pockets were empty.

  He left the safe room, cleaned his prints off Devereux’s wallet and placed it back beside the bed, found the last two days’ envelopes in the bin and put them in his pocket. Then he left the house and locked up.

  Belsey walked to Hampstead police station, to his office, and made a cup of tea. He gathered up the paperwork from AD Development. Then he went to a phone box outside the station and called the number for the station’s control room.

  “Hi. I’m the manager of a cleaning company in Hampstead. Could you pass a message to Detective Constable Nick Belsey? Tell him there’s still no sign of Mr. Devereux, the man missing from The Bishops Avenue. He asked us to let him know.”

  He walked back into the station and picked up the message, drove over to The Bishops Avenue, let himself into the house and radioed for an ambulance.

  “I’ve got a body here,” he said. “No, there’s no need to rush.”

  9

  The ambulance crew arrived without lights or sirens: two men and a woman moving with the business-like pace of paramedics calling on a corpse.

  “Wow,” they said as they came into the house.

  They climbed the stairs, trying to guess how much it cost. “Fifteen million.”

  “Twice that.” Then they stepped into the safe room and saw the infested body.

  “Yep, he’s dead.”

  “Did you try any CPR?” the woman asked, and they all laughed.

  None of the brass came down, just a pathologist, his assistant and a photographer. The paramedics wandered through the house taking pictures on their mobiles. Soon the pathologist’s assistant had joined them, ogling. No one rushed the job.

  When photographs had been taken and the pathologist had pronounced him dead, the crew wrapped the body in plastic and carried it on a stretcher to the ambulance.

  “He’ll be in St. Pancras Mortuary if you want him.”

  “Thank you,” Belsey said.

  “Who’ll be doing an ID?”

  “I’ll check for a next of kin. I don’t know. He lived alone.”

  “OK.”

  “I should have found the body the first time,” Belsey said. “I should have looked more carefully.” He shook his head. The ambulance pulled out. A security guard from the house across the road watched it go.

  Belsey went back inside and shut the door. He opened all the windows. Why in the safe room, he thought. But suicides sometimes liked to tuck themselves away, to let the emergency services find them rather than a loved one. Or, in the absence of a loved one, their cleaner. And there was something fine about retreating into safety to slit your throat. He thought about the set-up: the funeral payment plan, the pragmatism of the cheque. It had been a tactful death, all things considered.

  What were the implications for himself? Belsey wondered. Who would come to claim the house? A couple of hours ago, the remnants of Devereux’s life had seemed a lucky find. The sight of his body had made them appear more starkly abandoned. He sensed greater freedom, and greater responsibility.

  He called Land Registry and ran a property search. Thirty-seven The Bishops Avenue was owned by a lettings company called Home from Home who described themselves as VIP relocation specialists: “for business leaders and their families; service includes school search.” They were based on Hampstead High Street. Belsey called the office and got a man with a very smooth, camp voice.

  “You rent out the property at 37 The Bishops Avenue?”

  “Yes.”

  “To Mr. Devereux?”

  “We can’t disclose details. Is this press?”

  “It’s police. When did he start renting it?”

  “This is police?”

  “Hampstead CID.”

  “Perhaps if you’d like to come into the office.”

  Belsey called the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Association. Sure enough, the Porsche came up as a hire car. City Inter-Rent—offices in Heathrow, Marylebone and Croydon.

  Everything became a little less substantial.

  The DVLA said Devereux got his UK licence three months ago. They came up with a date of birth: 2 February 1957. It made him fifty-two years old when he took his life.

  Companies House had no AD Development incorporated in the UK, which meant they weren’t trading as a limited company: no shareholders, no accounts to return. It was odd but not unheard of.

  The phone began to ring and wouldn’t stop. Belsey paced Devereux’s bedroom and let it ring. He picked up the invoice from RingCentral (“Your Phone System, Everywhere”). It made him curious. RingCentral offered a service for companies that needed to divert calls. Belsey imagined it was the kind of thing you’d use when transferring location or understaffed. He thought of Sophie alone in the AD Development office.

  The ringing stopped. Belsey lifted the cordless phone on the bedside table. He hadn’t used it yet. He pressed the button to redial the last call made from it. A woman answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi,” Belsey said.

  “Is that you?” she said. In the background Belsey heard traffic, someone laughing. He hung up. A moment later he lifted it again and called St. Pancras Mortuary.

  “You’ve got a body coming in from N2. Alexei Devereux. I’ve got an individual who can ID it. Send someone to this address.” He read off the office address for AD Development. “It’s Mr. Devereux’s office in the City. There’s a girl there who worked for him. She’s called Sophie. I don’t have her full name.”

  “OK.”

  “She doesn’t know about it yet. Be gentle.”

  “Of course.”

  Belsey used to be the one they sent to break the news. That was in his uniform days. He had got the nickname Angel of Death because he volunteered. Someone had to do it, and his colleagues were grateful. And there had been a very grim satisfaction to performing a task that could not go well and for which you were blameless. It had been a while since he’d made one of those visits.

  He went to the study and sat down with the paperwork from the AD Development office. There were a lot of inquiries and proposals, a lot of acronyms: SSI International, NK Trading, Saud
Holdings and LV Media, all discussing stakes in an AD operation. There were a lot of people looking to invest in Alexei Devereux, it seemed. He, in turn, was always up for a deal. A stack of letters concerned his inquiries about land in Sharm el Sheikh and Abu Dhabi. He appeared to have interests in banks, sport, media, hotels and gambling. Belsey imagined he must have contributed in some way to Devereux’s fortune. It allowed him to feel a small sense of justice in whatever stratagem he was pursuing.

  A significant amount of the paperwork gave the name Alexei Demochev. It tended to be older business: faxes and correspondence from Russia; Moscow lawyers and accountants, sometimes writing in Cyrillic, sometimes English or French. Belsey checked the number on the aged fax machine in the study and it was the machine to which they’d been sent.

  At the bottom of the pile was a page of newspaper in Arabic, torn out roughly along one side. Belsey was ready to disregard it as scrap when he saw that one of the articles had been circled in blue Bic. Four inches of closely printed calligraphic script were accompanied by a grainy black-and-white picture showing an Arabic man in a light-coloured suit shaking hands with a blond man in frameless glasses. The blond one was younger. Both were smiling. The date was given in Roman numerals at the top of the page: Monday 9 February. Three days ago.

  The circle of Bic lent the clipping an urgent significance—that and its proximity in time to Devereux’s suicide. Did Devereux read Arabic? The impenetrability of the writing was frustrating. Belsey reclaimed Devereux’s wallet from the bedroom, folded the article twice and placed it inside. Then he returned the wallet to his pocket and felt better.

  One course of action involved arranging ID in Devereux’s name but with his own photo. A driver’s licence or passport. That would be easy enough. He could use the Bishops Avenue address to open an entirely new bank account, complete with credit card and overdraft, then reacquaint himself with the kind people at No Worries Loans dotcom, except this time with a credit score that would open up an unsecured twenty-five grand.