Deep Shelter (4 page)

Odd. But also promising—with a sense that he was, at least, heading
somewhere
. He continued. There was strength in a straight line. After another moment he checked his phone screen and saw one bar of battery. It was 9:20 p.m. He had been walking for thirty-five minutes. He had no food or water. He had a lot of drugs. He wanted to preserve enough juice to make a call in case of emergency, pictured himself trapped behind a vent somewhere, peeking out at the world. He lit a meagre candle instead. The tunnels seemed a different thing in candlelight, less man-made, his journey one that led out of the human world altogether.

Belsey wondered about the technicalities of marching someone along this route, dragging or forcing them. Wondered whether there were places to imprison them. He rode out a sudden blast of claustrophobia. Then he saw something on the ground ahead of him. Belsey stepped closer. It was a folding bike, a Raleigh Stowaway, paintwork scratched. Above it was a ladder. Belsey held his candle up and saw a square brick shaft.

He climbed unsteadily, candle dripping in one hand, until his head knocked the underside of a metal hatch. Belsey inspected it in the dim light. It had been propped a few inches open with the handle of a screwdriver. He pushed upwards, wedged his shoulder against the metal and clambered through, rolling out of the way as the screwdriver fell and the hatch slammed closed with an ominous clunk.

It blew the candle out. Belsey sparked his lighter. He was lying on the floor of a small office, or a studio of some kind. One table by the wall was loaded with equipment: a cabinet speaker, a cassette player, a typewriter. It had a brown swivel chair in front of it. He was alone.

The lighter got too hot. Belsey released the wheel. He lit another candle and stood up.

One door led out of the place, with a metal sign:
To Situation Room
. Belsey tried the handle. Locked. He flicked the light switch beside it and nothing happened. And then he knew what he was about to discover. He went back to the hatch in the floor. There was no handle. He tried to work a key under the edge but the hatch was fastened shut.

Belsey secured the candle to the table. He kicked the Situation Room door hard, aiming beneath the handle. It didn’t budge. He swung the chair against it, then had a brief round of banging the chair against the hatch in the floor. It was pointless

He placed the chair beside the table and sat down.

As well as the Sony cassette player and the grey electric typewriter there were two silver microphones like antennae, a desk lamp and a glass ashtray resting on a hardback book. The ashtray was clean. The cabinet speaker had a corner to itself. On the wall above the equipment was what looked like a fuse box, with old-fashioned telephone receivers on either side, one black, one red. On the box itself were four switches labelled “Attack,” “Flood,” “Fire,” “Chemical.” These, it seemed, were the options.

A plain, round wall clock gave the time as quarter to four. A calendar beneath it hung at November, its square days crossed out to Friday 11. Belsey took it off its nail and turned to the front. The year was 1983. He hung it back.

He lifted the red telephone and put it to his ear. No dialling tone.

“Hello,” he said. But he didn’t like the sound of his voice in the small, locked room. He checked the alert switches. Attack was up. Belsey flicked it down and waited, then flicked it up again. He tried “Flood,” imagined an outbreak of panic somewhere.

He moved the ashtray and picked up the book beneath it:
Guide to the Standing Stones of Wiltshire
. It was an old hardback, with black-and-white plates. Belsey imagined someone down here, sitting out a war, trying to remember what the world above was like; thinking about the puzzles mankind had posed before destroying them. So this would be his desert-island reading. He’d survive a fortnight without food but only three or four days without water. Sufficient time to acquaint himself with Wiltshire’s mysteries. He found his tobacco and papers, rolled a cigarette, then he wondered about oxygen supplies and put the rollie down.

So.

Belsey worked through the scenario that would unfold if he failed to return. They’d find his car still at the police station. Last solid witness was Kirsty Craik:
I think he had a date; he stank of aftershave . . .
That was unlikely to trigger a search of local bomb shelters. Maybe they’d trace CCTV, get Jemma and himself as they entered the alleyway. Then someone would replicate his puzzlement:
But it doesn’t lead anywhere. What’s this building?
Then that officer would descend, disappear . . .

He searched Jemma’s bag. A purse with cards: debit, Oyster, uni ID, some loose change and house keys. He transferred the purse and keys to his jacket. It would have been nice to imagine her surfacing, being able to raise the alarm. He wondered if she too was stuck somewhere in her own subterranean bubble of the 1980s, flicking the switches. Buried alive.

Then the rats woke up. Belsey listened to the scurry on the other side of the ceiling. They sounded burly; his last companions, waiting to strip the flesh from his bones. He stood on the desk and used up some of his remaining lighter fluid studying the ceiling. It was panelled, but one panel was different, fringed with thin black strands where liquid had oozed around the edges. Belsey took the desk lamp and knocked it against the panel. It sounded dull with rot. He flipped the lamp around, smashed the base through the wood, and a stream of filthy water ran into his face. Belsey stepped back and fell off the table.

He banged his shoulder but was more perturbed by the polluted flow. A rat bolted down the wall. Belsey gagged and waited. When the black trickle stopped he climbed back onto the desk. The panel had crumbled. Belsey scraped splinters out of the way and hauled himself up.

For a moment, he lay on the damp floor on the other side. He’d left the lighter and candles and Jemma’s bag in the room below. He had her purse, a stash of pill bottles stuffed in his pockets and his mobile. Its screen lit a flooded corridor. Bulbous cascades of orange dry-rot cloaked the walls. Plastic doorframes had folded into the passageway as if half-melted. Belsey got to his feet. He could smell sulphur fumes, sodden wood rotting away. He covered his nose and mouth. Sluggish reflections lapped at his shoes. He stepped over drooping frames, avoided low-hanging wires and an asbestos-lagged pipe.

The doorways at the side led into rooms of smashed porcelain: stems of toilets, shower tiles. Then it all went black. He pressed various buttons on his phone but the battery had gone. That’s it, he thought: eternal darkness. But not complete. A very faint, grey light hovered a couple of yards ahead. Belsey splashed his foot and the pale square moved. He went towards it and looked up. Light was creeping in somewhere above him. He felt around the walls until his knuckles hit the clammy metal of a ladder.

Desperation opened a new reserve of strength. He climbed for a minute to a small platform, a ledge of some kind with railings and, at the far end, concrete steps. These twisted up for more than ten floors but Belsey climbed them fast, propelled by the idea of ascent. He reached a heavy, wooden door. It shifted an inch when he pushed. Something was blocking it. Belsey leaned in, and both the door and the obstacle scraped far enough for him to squeeze through the gap. He found himself in a small room filled with cleaning products. Beyond it was a corridor glowing green with emergency exit lights. Belsey knelt and smelt dry carpet. It seemed, blissfully, like people had been there recently. He glanced back at the doorway from which he’d emerged. The obstacle had been a cupboard with a handwritten sign announcing:
Cleaners Only
. Where was he?

On the other side of the corridor was an office with a potted plant and a PC. Belsey walked in. He switched the computer on. Then he saw a trolley of books behind the door. He lifted a pink, laminated paperback:
Seduction of a Servant Girl
. There was a yellow borrowing slip from St. Pancras Library pasted inside.

You’re joking, he thought. Belsey returned to the corridor. He followed the arrows on the Fire Exit signs to a door at the end, climbed one more flight of steps and found himself standing behind the issue desk. There were the shelves and computer terminals of the library, waiting in the gloom. Through the floor-length windows to his right St. Pancras Station rose into the sky, fairy-tale as ever, surrounded by the unenchanted hub of King’s Cross. Night traffic streamed east and west. He’d spent many pleasant hours in here, admiring this grey view, browsing the sports sections or even trying to improve himself with the classics. He felt physically stretched between the familiar world and the one from which he’d emerged. It was only detail by detail that King’s Cross convinced him he was in it.

His hands left smears where he touched. He crouched to see his face in a computer monitor and even his silhouette looked wrecked. He smoothed his hair down and felt it wet with sludge.

The main door out of the library was locked. He found a side door and pushed the steel emergency bar to open it. Alarms rang out. He stepped onto the pavement and the warm air felt incredibly fresh. Belsey looked up at the building from which he’d emerged. The library occupied the base of a ten-floor office block housing all the council departments, from street cleaning to pest control, a stark modern annexe to the old town hall next door. Its outmoded lead-streaked concrete struck him now as militaristic. He realised it had always appeared militaristic. It had been hiding in plain sight.

He crossed the road and watched from a bus stop as a young security guard in a yellow tabard appeared, assessing the open door, glancing up and down the street. It was 10.39 pm. Belsey had spent two hours underground. It felt three times as long. The walk back to Hampstead police station would take him a good forty-five minutes, but he didn’t want to get a taxi. That instinct was itself a wake-up call, a welcome to a new and complicated situation. He didn’t want a witness, someone able to say: yes, I saw him there, at that time, looking half-ruined. But witness to what?

Belsey walked. He still had energy. Benzylpiperazine lingered inappropriately in his blood. He tried to steady his mind and work one thought at a time.

Was there
any
possibility she’d surfaced, that she was safe and well among people and sky? He told himself he was covering every angle when he was looking for some shred of hope. He felt Jemma’s purse in his pocket and thought of the broken bag strap. And once again Belsey saw the BMW crashing into his life, the man jumping from it, pulling his hood up.

THROUGH CAMDEN, BACK TO BELSIZE PARK. THE
crowd was still out. Belsey kept to the quiet side of the street. But he was relatively incognito among the damage of closing-time London. He walked into the petrol station at the top of Haverstock Hill and found a cheap torch. His wallet contained no cash. He didn’t want to use his card, didn’t want to be traced. Belsey turned away from the CCTV and took a crumpled fiver from Jemma’s purse and paid with that. It didn’t make him feel wonderful.

There were no clues around either of the Belsize shelter towers, no signs that Jemma had come up, or been brought up, the way they had gone in. Belsey combed the weeds then climbed in through the window again. He walked to the top of the stairs and called.

Down the stairs again, wishing he had the Maglite rather than whatever crap BP were hawking. Even in the yellow beam he could see that the warden’s post was as he’d left it: champagne bottle, glasses, carnations. He was surprised by a sudden wave of anger. Stupid girl for wandering off. Stupid him. What a ridiculous amount of trouble for the sake of touching up an art student. He walked past the bunks, through the hidden door and brick passageway into the tunnel where he’d found her bag. He got down on his knees, looking for footprints or blood. Praying in the only way detectives know how. He wasn’t set up for forensics. He sat with his back against the curved tunnel wall, energy gone.

“Jemma!” he yelled. He closed his eyes. After five minutes he returned to the stairs.

He climbed out of the tower, retrieved the axe and bolt cutters. He shifted some mildewed cardboard to obscure the cut fence. Next stop was visiting her home, just in case. But that meant calling the station to request the address off criminal records. Or going in himself.

THE STATION WAS SUMMER-NIGHT
busy, custody full, officers distracted. A gang of men in swimwear with towels and bloodied faces crowded the corridor, next to a line of sullen Koreans with bags of bootleg DVDs. The smell of vomit permeated the ground floor. Belsey returned the equipment to the storeroom and went up to CID.

He walked into the office and out again. The sight of Rob Trapping had taken him by surprise. It was a discomfiting splash of normality alongside his transgressions. He removed his soiled jacket. There was nothing he could do about his trousers. Belsey checked Jemma’s purse was well stuffed inside it, then made his entrance again. The young detective constable looked up and gave a cautious smile.

“You OK, mate? Look a state. Where’ve you been?”

Belsey sat down at his desk.

“Underground,” he said.

Trapping grinned. “You were at the Skinner’s. You’ve been drinking.”

Belsey stared at his grin.

“I’ve been drinking, that’s right.”

“You should have called,” Trapping said.

“It was just a swift one.” Belsey winked. Trapping shook his head. Belsey turned his desk light on. He plugged his phone in to charge and checked for messages. No messages. He tried Jemma’s mobile and it went straight to voicemail. He hung up. He stuck her purse in his drawer while he decided what to do with it, then brought up the evening’s reports. No shortage of crime. Nothing involving a young woman of Jemma’s description.

What did he know about St. Pancras Library? Sitting at his desk, he sensed an uneasy coincidence close at hand. He picked up the pile of papers Kirsty Craik had given him: incident reports from St. Pancras Library. There had been three supposed “break-ins”; the most recent had been two days ago, then eight days ago and ten days ago. Someone had been setting off the emergency exit alarm as they left the building. It was unclear how they got in in the first place. Belsey thought it might be getting clearer. The man he had chased that afternoon had shown him the route down, and Belsey felt with certainty that this same man had been breaking out through the library. And that this same man had Jemma with him now. If his suspect was coming and going via the bunker there must have been an easier route up, one more straightforward than breaking through the ceiling. Maybe via that locked door—the one marked
To Situation Room
, whatever that was.