The Hollow Man

by Oliver Harris

  “But she went out sometimes, maybe to parties.”

  “Of course.”

  Belsey refilled his glass. He’d almost forgotten his promise to Miranda Miller.

  “Have you spoken to any reporters?” he asked.

  “We don’t want anything to do with reporters,” the father said.

  “Good. Because it’s important you get it right. If you need to speak to anyone, this is the woman the police recommend.” He passed Miller’s card. “A public statement can help the investigation; it jogs memories, witnesses come forward. This will get you through to Miranda Miller from Channel Five. She wants to help.”

  The mother examined the card as if it was meant to explain more than it did. Belsey stood up. He couldn’t bring himself to procure photographs. He’d tainted the purity of their grief and could leave now. There was still dust on his fingers.

  “She can help financially,” he said, nodding at the card. They heard him, but didn’t look up. Belsey continued to the door. But he wasn’t done.

  “What was Jessica like?” he said, turning. They looked straight at him now.

  “What do you mean?” the mother said.

  “Was she outgoing?”

  “She was a thoughtful girl. Always thinking.”

  “Friends?”

  “Yes, a few.”

  But the mother was looking up at the corner of the ceiling; you saw it in interview rooms a lot. It meant she was struggling to remember.

  “She hasn’t been here much recently, has she?” Belsey said.

  A silence. The husband looked to his wife.

  “She came and went,” the wife said.

  “Difficult girl? Lots of rows?” They couldn’t bring themselves to nod. “When was she last here?”

  “A few weeks ago.” The mother’s voice cracked. It was all about to get teary again.

  “Have you told the other officers?”

  “She knew there was always a bed for her,” the mother said. She covered her face with her hands. Grief is always guilt, Belsey thought.

  “She was a young woman. There was nothing we could do to keep track of where she went,” the father said.

  “But did you tell anyone she’d run off?”

  “She hadn’t run off.”

  Belsey turned again and this time began to leave.

  “Will you?” the mother said.

  “Will I what?”

  “Tell them.”

  “If I get the chance.”

  “Do you think it means something?” she continued, as if she hadn’t heard him. “Was the shooting something to do with Jessica?”

  “I don’t think so,” Belsey said. And it was a lie.

  22

  The solid Victorian brickwork of South Hampstead High School nestled behind the Finchley Road at the end of a residential street now thronging with TV crews. They stood just outside the school gates, grabbing sound bites from any girl who would stop. There were plenty of them, crying, fixing makeup, going out on their lunch breaks to smoke. It meant everyone was distracted and Belsey could walk in unchallenged.

  The echoing corridors were crowded with girls who stared as he passed. Did he look in a fit state to wander a school? He hoped he looked less strung-out than he felt. He remembered this sense of drive from the back-to-back shifts on other murder cases, body moving beyond fatigue, day and night taking on one shade of stress.

  Belsey made his way through the school, asking directions until he found the headmistress’s office. The door was open. The study looked unthreatening, bright with GCSE artwork and a lot of well-tended plants. In the background, a radio on the window ledge droned news of the shooting. The headmistress nodded to Belsey and continued to speak on the phone; she was younger than he expected, but with an authority that was hard to miss, in a well-cut suit and with blow-dried hair.

  “No . . . Yes . . . No, we’re not treating this as a threat to the school . . . Yes, we’ll be letting parents know as soon as we can. Thank you.”

  She hung up, gave an exasperated sigh. The phone started ringing and she unplugged it. Belsey showed his badge and she nodded wearily and beckoned him in.

  “We’re under siege here,” she said.

  “I’ll keep this brief.”

  A woman’s voice from the radio said: “. . . a straight-A pupil with everything before her . . .”

  The headmistress paused a second beside the radio.

  “Where do they get these ideas?” She shook her head then turned it off.

  “From you?” Belsey said.

  “Not me. Not from my staff. I feel terrible about what happened, and I’m sure she was perfectly pleasant if you got to know her, but she wasn’t a straight-A pupil. Not recently.”

  Belsey helped himself to a seat. He wondered what to make of this.

  “Do you have a moment? I have a few questions.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “She was on financial aid,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Her parents ran into financial difficulties about eighteen months ago, couldn’t meet the fees.”

  “Yes. How do you know?”

  “Because I’m a Hampstead detective. What else do you remember about her?”

  “She was contrary, stubborn. One of those girls you assume are well behaved because you don’t notice them, then you realise they’re shoplifting every lunch break. Not academically outstanding, not awful. But impossible to engage. The only piece of work I remember seeing was an essay on the First World War. I don’t know why I remember that. It was good. We were thinking about Oxbridge at one point. But she didn’t want to be here.”

  “Where did she want to be?”

  “Where does anyone want to be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The headmistress considered this. For a moment they sat there in silence.

  “Neither did Jessica,” she said finally.

  Belsey had a feeling he could get on well with the headmistress—in another situation, another life.

  “Do you know if Jessica was working? Paid work, I mean, not school.”

  “No. But she wasn’t doing much unpaid work in school. She was probably going to be expelled.”

  “For bad grades?”

  “For non-attendance. We don’t waste time on these things.”

  “How bad was her attendance?”

  “Of late, we’d be lucky to see her twice a week. Her parents didn’t know where she was. The last week was the worst. She’d decided school was over. That’s why I feel the press are barking up the wrong tree.”

  “I think you’re right.” Belsey nodded. “What do you think she was doing when she wasn’t attending?”

  “I have no idea. But a girl like that . . .” She shrugged.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’ve been running a school of teenage girls for half a decade now.”

  “A girl like what?”

  The head spent a while choosing her words. She chose: “A girl who thinks being adult means getting in trouble with older men. She should have buckled down. Only she thought she was too good for all this.”

  “School’s wasted on the young. Don’t they say something like that?”

  “Not quite.” The headmistress plugged the phone back in. It rang. “Will you tell your colleagues any of this, or are you afraid it might lose you media appeal?”

  “I’ll pass all this on,” Belsey said. “I believe Jessica was caught up in something. I’d appreciate it, if you hear anything, if anyone knows what she’s been up to, if they could let me know.” He took a pen and paper from the desk and wrote the number for his direct line.

  The head considered this, before nodding.

  “Of course. I’ll have a think. Now, if you’ll excuse me, eight hundr
ed and fifty-one girls remain alive.”

  23

  Belsey walked down Hampstead High Street to a shop that sold handbags. He’d passed it a thousand times. Now it was time to go in.

  The shop was brightly lit and very bare. It was just Belsey, three staff, a security guard and the handbags. He looked along the rows of bags, each on its own plinth like a museum artefact. He saw the Chanel bag that the dead girl had been carrying.

  “I like this one.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How much is it?”

  “Sixteen hundred and ninety-five.”

  “Can you knock off the ninety-five?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’m joking. Do you sell many of these?”

  “Not too many.”

  The store security approached nicely with one hand folded over the other. Belsey thought of the struggling home on Lymington, the preteen bedroom. Where did she stash stuff, he wondered. The equipment for a second life, where did it live?

  What had he stumbled into?

  The assistant started straightening a row of wallets. Belsey looked out of the front window and saw a van marked “Pimlico Plumbers” with a man in aviator shades sitting in the front looking back at him. Suddenly the man put the van in reverse and cut away into traffic. “Thank you for your time,” Belsey said, walking to the door.

  “Thank you, sir,” someone said to his back.

  24

  Murder Squad had commandeered the Old White Bear for the purposes of refreshment and informal congregation, a pub the size of a postage stamp at the corner of two residential streets. There was a rule that said find the third-closest pub. No one liked to be seen drinking near to the incident room. The Old White Bear was halfway to Hampstead tube station and it was well hidden.

  This was where Belsey knew he’d find them, CID men and women standing around a single picnic table at the front, coats on, smoking fast. This was where a lot of the most useful discussions would be held. The pub was providing bacon rolls on production of a warrant card. The officers looked drained: many had come straight from other inquiries and were busy pouring sugar into cups of tea. Few remained for more than ten minutes.

  “We could do with you on this one, Nick.” DC Tom Shipton shook his head. He was part of a small crowd centred on a patio heater. Belsey had worked his first ever murder with Shipton, a pensioner killed with a samurai sword in Elephant and Castle shopping centre. Next to him was a stooped, middle-aged officer with shaving cuts whom Belsey didn’t recognise, and June Glasgow. Glasgow was one of the most respected murder DIs in north London. She had long black hair, a black suit, plum-red nail varnish; no jewellery, not even a wedding ring, although Belsey happened to know she was civilly partnered with a young woman in the Home Office. But she kept herself interview-room bare. It became a habit: cards to the chest.

  “How are they playing it?” Belsey said.

  “Robbery,” Shipton said. He looked cold. He had his hands thrust into his overcoat pockets.

  “It wasn’t a robbery,” Belsey said.

  “He said, ‘This is a robbery.’ ”

  “Who?”

  “The gunman. This kid.”

  “I thought it was meant to be a gang of them.”

  “It’s not clear at the moment. But there was a gang in the area earlier, near Gospel Oak.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Belsey sensed an investigation running away under the momentum of its own mistakes. He’d seen it before. Glasgow watched him, with the curiosity of a good DI. She lit a cigarette.

  “What about CCTV?” Belsey said.

  “Nothing obvious,” Shipton said.

  “Some teenage gangster comes in and fires up a Starbucks and no cameras get a whiff?” Belsey shook his head.

  “People saw. He said, ‘Open the till.’ ”

  “Who says?”

  “There’s been other soft targets,” Shipton said. “KFC.” But his heart wasn’t in it.

  “It doesn’t get much softer than a fucking Starbucks,” Belsey said. “What did he want? Muffins? How much do they keep in the tills?”

  “No more than a hundred, but he doesn’t know that.”

  “How did he get away?”

  “On foot.”

  “After going armed? Munroe mentioned this red motorbike. What about that?”

  “I haven’t heard of any red bike.”

  Belsey winced. Investigative disconnect. This was how hours got wasted and criminals went laughing.

  “It wasn’t a kid, and it wasn’t a robbery,” he said.

  “Then what was it?”

  “And why do you care?” Glasgow said pointedly.

  “Why do I care?”

  “Why aren’t you assigned?”

  “I’m on other things.”

  No one seemed to find this hard to believe. No one seemed too sorry either. There was a general stubbing of cigarettes, a shaking of heads and checking of watches.

  “Where was she coming from, before the Starbucks?” Belsey said.

  “She was seen earlier near Kenwood.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Bishops Avenue,” Glasgow said. Belsey took a deep breath. It felt like being tapped on the shoulder. Glasgow studied his eyes.

  “With anyone?” he said.

  “No.”

  “What was she doing on The Bishops Avenue?”

  “Walking. We don’t know. We’re doing door to doors later.”

  “How much later?”

  “Soon as we have the manpower.”

  “Are you releasing that information about her whereabouts?”

  “Ask Northwood.”

  Belsey shook a cigarette out of Glasgow’s pack and lit it with his Zippo.

  “It’s not on her way to school,” he said quietly, more to himself than to anyone else.

  25

  Every week or so a man went up to the Heath and exposed himself. CID had been putting a case together for a while. No one used to bother with flashers until it was noticed that they went on to pursue sex crimes of increasing severity. Perversion has diminishing returns. Now the flasher had done it again, getting bolder. Everyone knew this kind of thing headed only one way. So when Belsey got back to the station this was the job he had been assigned. The office was deserted—one message on his desk: Heath flasher—11:30 a.m.

  Three hours old. Belsey tore the message in half. It felt like a calculated insult. But then, he thought, maybe it was a blessing in disguise. Heavy grey clouds had begun rolling westwards. The Heath would be empty by the time the rain came. He could lose himself there. It would give him time to think.

  He sat out the shower beneath an oak, deep in the woodland behind Spaniards Road. He realised how badly he had needed this moment of reflection. Images returned: the dead girl’s eyes, her mouth shaping to a word. To a name? He saw Jessica in the office of AD Development, saw the empty shell of St. Clement’s Court, and then Charlotte Kelson with a hair clip in her hand. A woman in Mr. D’s life. A woman now as dead as him.

  When the rain stopped he walked to the gardeners’ hut. One of the Heath’s keepers, Peter Scott, bent over a bag of dead leaves, unloading them onto a bonfire. He had a thin face with pockmarks in the cheeks. His hands were stained with blue-ink scars that Belsey had seen on other men who’d done long sentences in category-A prisons. They had never spoken about it. The smoke gathered thick as wool among the damp branches.

  “What are the Heath Constabulary for?” Belsey said.

  “They said I should contact you. It’s the same one, this flasher.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They all talk about his fingernails. Long, dirty nails.”

  “You should be a detective.”

  “She wouldn’t leave her name.”

  Belsey sighed. He crouc
hed by the fire and warmed his hands. “How are you doing?”

  “Never been better.”

  Belsey fed some dead branches into the flames and watched Scott work. They were often like this. The gardener was that rare thing: a good man to be silent with. When the last of the bags had been emptied Scott disappeared into the hut. He emerged a few minutes later with two mugs of tea and gave one to Belsey. They sat on logs outside the hut.

  “What about that shooting?” Scott said.

  “You heard about it?”

  “It’s on the radio. Are you not on that?”

  “Not me. What are they saying?”

  “Schoolgirl, innocent bystander, glowing future ahead of her.”

  “I was told to hold the fort.”

  “Is this the fort?”

  “One of them.”

  They drank their teas. Then Scott stood up and checked the sky.

  “I want to show you something,” he said.

  They walked deeper into the Heath. The edges of the world appeared sharp, as if the air had been polished by the rain. They walked past Athlone House, the red-bricked mansion that had housed the RAF intelligence school in World War II. Belsey imagined the men here, the classrooms with blackboards and aerial photographs of towns marked for destruction. Then they climbed past the derelict mansion, to a copse of chestnut trees on the edge of the Heath.

  “Look.”

  A few of the trees were branded with fluorescent-yellow crosses; the sort of marks used by workers digging up roads.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. They appeared a couple of weeks ago. Probably for a race. People come for a run, mark the route. They don’t ask.”

  “Show me some more.”

  He led Belsey over a kilometre or so, showing him the trees marked with a yellow X.

  “No plans to chop them? No disease?”

  “There’s nothing like that going on.”

  “It’s not a run,” Belsey said.

  “Well, I don’t know what it is. Continues down towards Highgate Ponds, and back across the East Heath.”

  Belsey picked at some bark. It flaked, silver grey. This was what made the plane tree perfect for London, Scott had told him once, it shed its skin and the pollution with it; a lesson there. They came across another cluster of yellow crosses a moment later.