Deep Shelter (18 page)

“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.

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?”

“Well, they would have all been built within a few years of each other,” Monroe conceded. “They capture an architectural moment, shall we say.”

“Is Brutalism defensive?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is it used for bunkers? For protecting high-security installations?”

“It was meant to be about boldness, simplicity—a new, rational aesthetic.”

“Pretty solid too.”

“No doubt.”

“They’d work, as bomb-proof structures.”

“They certainly wouldn’t fall over very easily.”

“Even in a nuclear blast.”

“No.”

Belsey watched through the window as another broadcasting van pulled in and was immediately directed away. The journalists had begun to disperse. His waitress reappeared and he ordered a number at random.

“Douglas Argyle,” Belsey said. Monroe smiled.

“Know something about the rumours?”

“Maybe. What do you know?”

“Last seen going into a posh block of flats in Westminster. Not his own home. No reason for him to be there. According to his wife he’d left home Saturday night, anxious. Someone wanted to meet him. She’s convinced he was being blackmailed by a mistress. He gets a cab straight to Horseferry Road: he’s on cameras walking into this luxury block just before midnight—Westminster Green Apartments. Never seen alive again. The police were going through the whole place knocking on doors, so of course it made a lot of noise and some of us got curious. Then the gagging order came.”

“You’re not allowed to write about it?”

“No.”

“Why do I know that block—Westminster Green?” Belsey searched his mind. He imagined his way through that odd, exclusive area between Victoria and the river.

“Used to be Westminster Hospital,” Monroe said.

Belsey got his phone out.
Westminster Hospital
. . . He knew it had been mentioned. Which website had it been on? He fired off searches until he hit one of the amateur sites:
Tunnels had been extended from the Cabinet War Rooms to a new subterranean complex under Victoria, beneath three 1970s office blocks on Marsham Street, with an emergency exit in the basement of the old Westminster Hospital
.

“What was Argyle involved in exactly?” Belsey asked. “During the cold war?”

“Lots of things. He helped develop the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System; converted the RAF base at Aldermaston to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. At Porton Down he instigated studies into fallout and radiation. He basically re-engineered the military for nuclear war. How do you think this connects?”

“Westminster Hospital contained an emergency exit from government bunkers.” He showed Monroe the web entry. Monroe studied it. “There’s no record of Argyle’s death,” Belsey said. “I think he used some basement access that survives in the apartment block, an old route into the tunnels. Someone lured him down there. His body was dumped beneath Centre Point in the early hours of Sunday morning. It’s been wiped off the police system.”

Monroe maintained a poker face. A plate of gelatinous noodles was slammed down.

“Did you know a writer called Duncan Powell?” Belsey asked.

“Of course. Duncan was immense.” And then Monroe frowned. “He was hit by a car, Nick.”

“His prints were under the library.” The frown didn’t shift. Monroe was momentarily lost for words.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“You printed the place?”

“Not all of it. What was he working on recently? Any idea?”

“No.”

“I sent Ferryman an email. I asked why he killed Duncan Powell. He sent these.”

“You think Duncan . . .”

“Yes.”

Monroe turned back to the photos of the buildings. He moved the images again, studying each one in turn as if he was trying to memorise the sequence.

“They all have at least some government connection,” he said, finally. “Centre Point contains government offices on the ground floor. This is a shot of the three towers on Marsham Street in Victoria, close to Westminster Green Apartments—used to be Department of the Environment. Demolished now. This was the old Home Office building on Queen Anne’s Gate. Now houses Ministry of Justice.”

“Archway Tower?”

“Archway Tower used to be government property. And if you’re thinking tunnels, it sits right on top of the tube station.”

Belsey studied the bleak structure with fresh admiration.

“But you said these were telephone exchanges.” Belsey pointed to the three buildings Monroe had singled out.

“Telephone exchanges would have originally been government-controlled. They belonged to the General Post Office. The GPO was a government department, in charge of anything to do with communication: post, telephones, telegrams.” Monroe pressed his finger on the picture of the BT Tower. “Until the nineties, you wouldn’t find the BT Tower on any maps. Technically it was covered by the Official Secrets Act. Get an
A-Z
from the eighties and it’s not there. You know why it’s round? To withstand nuclear blasts.”