The Hollow Man (11 page)

Belsey would have liked to have been in the cavalry. He could have gone into the Met horse section. Riots, football matches—these were the places you found horses now. He thought of his riot training, as a cadet, in the ghost town in Staffordshire kept solely for the purpose. He saw the empty streets before him, the shells of homes and shops and pubs echoing with the rattle of truncheons on shield plastic. Older officers, friends of his father, would still sometimes speak of the miners’ strike, and Brixton, Broadwater; these were shared rings through their careers, battle scars.

He took down the
Everyman Illustrated History of London
and imagined Devereux buying it after arriving here, excited by his new home. One page had been turned down at the corner, then turned up again, but the book retained the memory and opened.

Boudicca.

Perhaps the most total destruction London suffered was at the hands of the fierce warrior queen, Boudicca.

Devereux had underlined her name. The book continued:

Boudicca was a queen of the Brittonic Iceni tribe who led an uprising of the tribes against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire.

Belsey skimmed the account.

After a flogging and the rape of her daughters by the Roman Emperor, Boudicca rose up
A.D.
60 or 61. The Iceni destroyed Camulodunum (Colchester) routing a Roman legion sent to relieve the settlement. On hearing news of the revolt, the Roman governor Suetonius hurried to Londinium, the twenty-year-old commercial settlement that was the rebels’ next target. Concluding he did not have the numbers to defend it, Suetonius evacuated and abandoned it. London was burnt to the ground.

He read on until he got to Boudicca’s defeat at the Battle of Watling Street.

The warrior queen poisoned herself to avoid capture. Legend has it that she is buried on Hampstead Heath.

Belsey closed the book. He flicked the pages but no others had ever been folded down. No other names were underlined.

He pulled on a pair of suit trousers and one of Devereux’s raincoats and stepped out into the garden. He followed the sculpted pathway, past the bandstand. Moonlight glittered the wet grass, which was slowly losing its manicured sheen. Belsey imagined Devereux in this garden, walking at night. He remembered the corpse on the gurney with its stitched throat. He felt the man’s clothes around his living body. Then he began to check for ways into the property from the outside, making a survey of the walls and calculating what lay on the other side: other gardens, the grounds of Highgate School, the back of an old people’s home. It wouldn’t be impossible to get into the garden, force a French window, slit a man’s throat in his sleep.

Belsey walked past the tennis court, past the pond. The rain had cleared some dead leaves away from a patch of freshly turned soil in the far corner, beside the fence. Two thin conifer saplings had been planted six feet apart, each attached to a support stake with a buckle tie. He crouched down, stuck his hands into the soil and pulled out bulbs which had been planted an inch deep around the trees. They hadn’t started to sprout. The soil was a combination of topsoil and paler, clay-like subsoil and it stuck to Belsey’s hands.

He went and rinsed them in the pond while he considered this. He didn’t feel particularly inclined to investigate further. He wandered to a garden shed that contained two spades, a coiled hose and seven bags of peat but nothing else, around to a veranda he had not seen before, on the northern side of the house, with a swing seat and an abandoned ice bucket, then back to the tennis court.

There was a bang at the front of the house.

Belsey turned. Three more bangs—the side of a fist on wood. Someone was there.

Belsey left the lights off as he stepped silently back inside. He found a towel and wiped the rest of the clay off his fingers. Another three thumps: someone persistent; someone who believed the house was occupied. Belsey must have left the gate to the street open. He tried to think what the place would look like from outside. The study light was on but not the front rooms. Would the study be visible from the road? He moved back to the corridor, where Charlotte stood with a sheet wrapped around her.

“Who is it?” she said.

“I don’t know.” He realised he was speaking very quietly. She stared at his raincoat.

“You can answer it if you want.”

“I’d rather not. I don’t know who they are or why they’re here.”

“You don’t want to find out?”

“The house can attract attention.”

She looked at him curiously and wandered back to bed. Belsey checked the security screen in the front hallway. It showed a smart young man in frameless glasses and an expensive overcoat holding a newspaper over his head, and the emergency lights of an Audi convertible ticking at the kerb. The man glanced nervously up and down the street. Rain slashed the lenses of his glasses. He didn’t look like he’d chosen the house by chance.

Belsey found Devereux’s wallet, took out the clipping from the Arabic newspaper and unfolded it. He looked at the fair-haired man on the left of the photograph, shaking hands. He checked the screen again. He thought it might be the same man; it was hard to tell. Belsey waited in the living room. Eventually he heard the Audi start. The next time he checked the screen the man had gone.

He took the scrap of newspaper to Devereux’s study and placed it under the desk lamp. The two men grinned back at him. The image had been cropped close, but you could see sky beyond them and the tops of buildings, office blocks, a church spire. So they weren’t in the Middle East. It looked like London. At the very edge of the picture you could make out stonework, as if they had been posed in the doorway of a church, looking out to the city.

He leaned back in Devereux’s chair. Again, the dead man’s possessions seemed to gather to tell him something, but it was more urgent now: the artworks and junk mail and bare branches tapping the windows—trying to pass on a message he could not hear but needed to.

Belsey returned to the bedroom and saw the white sliver of a half-open eye.

“Who was it?” Charlotte asked.

“No one,” he said. She pulled the duvet over herself. He eased the door shut, went downstairs and lay on the floor, feeling his own lies and those of the dead creeping closer.

19

B
elsey woke up early. through a gap in the living-room curtains he could still see night. It was not yet six: one-night-stand early, with the familiar jolt of recollection. He went to the bedroom and watched Charlotte sleeping with one bare leg hooked outside the duvet, then he stepped back downstairs and put coffee on and tried not to remember his dreams. Images surfaced: Gower, Northwood, a forest. They were out of uniform, in casual clothes. They carried spades and walked with purpose. Belsey wondered if Northwood ever dreamt of him. How did he appear in Northwood’s dreams? How would he appear once he had fled? It was strange, he thought: that part of our existence which is in other people’s dreams.

Belsey knew his way around the kitchen now. He had settled in. He’d had sex in the house; not just had sex in it but used it for the procurement of sex. If that was not confirmation of tenancy, what was? Today he needed to raise six grand off the sale of Devereux’s possessions and set himself up with the financial infrastructure to empty the dead man’s accounts. He had a sense that something was catching up with number 37 The Bishops Avenue. Ideally he’d skip the UK by nightfall, but Belsey suspected he would have to lie low until tomorrow morning. He was on his second cup of coffee when he heard a door open upstairs. He went to the hallway to see Charlotte descending the curved red stairs in one of Devereux’s robes. She had a sleepy smile.

“I love these stairs,” she said. “What a way to start the day.”

“Sometimes I slide down the banister,” Belsey said. “It’s still very early.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s just gone six. You should go back to sleep.”

“I’m awake now. I figure I’ll go home and change before work.”

“Would you like coffee first?”

She walked towards him. He didn’t know what she was going to do. She kissed his cheek. Then she sat on a stool at the breakfast bar and they drank coffee, with the darkness loitering outside and the kitchen reflecting off the black windows.

“How are you feeling?” Belsey said.

“Good. Better than I have in a while. I enjoyed myself last night.”

“Me too.”

“It was unexpected.”

“That’s my favourite kind of night. Would you like some breakfast? I don’t know what I’ve got.” The fridge display was flashing a list of items: milk, eggs, fruit. He opened it. He couldn’t see a breakfast in there.

“Who’s Alexei Devereux?” she asked.

Belsey turned round. She was holding a clothing catalogue still in its plastic wrap, reading the address label.

“The previous occupier,” Belsey said. “Where did you find that?”

“It was on the chair.”

“He’s the previous occupier. I still get catalogues.”

“Is he the reason my robe says
A.D.
?”

“He left in a hurry.”

She raised an eyebrow, then tossed the catalogue aside. “What is it you’re not telling me?”

Belsey sat down across the counter from her.

“There’s a lot of things I’m not telling you, Charlotte, but then I’ve only known you for ten hours. For a lot of that time you were sleeping.”

She finished her coffee and checked her watch. He looked at her face while he could, until she laughed and asked him what he was doing.

“There’s nothing to eat,” he said. “Do you want to be driven back to your car?”

“My car?”

“The one you left . . .” And then he saw her start to smile. “There was no car.”

She grinned, victoriously.

Belsey drove her home. The streets were still desolate, a dawn chorus grating against the naked concrete of Archway. She directed him to a residential street off the Holloway Road. It was the kind of respectable, dark-bricked street he would have liked to live on himself had he managed to uphold his career, his decorum.

“It’s not The Bishops Avenue,” she said with an embarrassed laugh.

“No,” he said.

“Stop by number 12.”

He parked and she didn’t get out straight away.

“Maybe I’ll see you again,” she said.

“Fingers crossed.”

“Think you’ll be able to find me?” There was a glint in her eye.

“Easy.”

And then she was out of the car and he watched her and she didn’t look back.

H
e returned to The Bishops Avenue. The day began to brighten. It had just gone 7 a.m. and north London was coming to life: personal trainers training, builders in the front of vans pouring tea from flasks. Belsey saw, momentarily, how he would remember it from his own exile, when memory had done its filleting and hung up its bloodstained apron. He’d be left with the sight of Hampstead in the morning: parking attendants and children in boaters. And he’d find something to miss about it, some part of himself which was left there. Maybe he’d think of the morning with Charlotte, the whole elaborate deceit of it all and he’d think:
Then I was myself, more than ever. What am I now?

He spent a few minutes straightening Devereux’s home, cleaning the coffee cups. Then, on an impulse, he called the
Mail on Sunday
, got a receptionist and asked if a Charlotte Kelson worked there. She did.

“Would you like me to put you through to her voice mail?”

“No.”

He hung up, stared out of the window and momentarily looked forward to a future that wasn’t going to happen.

Belsey took the cheque made out to Reflections Ltd. and studied it again. There was a door through which Devereux was meant to exit this world and Belsey was blocking it. He was trying to get out of London using the same exit. He went to the kitchen to make more coffee, but he’d finished the jar. This seemed significant. He noticed a girl in the uniform of a local private school walking slowly past, beyond the gates. She gazed at the mansion, looking through the kitchen window.

He slipped Devereux’s suit jacket on and stepped outside. He didn’t mean to follow the girl, but it happened that they were going in the same direction, along Hampstead Lane to the pond. A long way to walk to school, he thought. She turned down East Heath Road. He followed. At South End Green she disappeared and he stopped beside the doorway of Starbucks, appreciating the morning a final time: the busy triangle of the Green, bounded by the Heath to the north and the concrete of the Royal Free Hospital to the south. Supermarket delivery vans and pregnant mothers passed between the two, dappled by fresh sunlight.

And already he had a sense of something terrible about to occur.

The girl reappeared a few minutes later on the opposite side of the street. She glanced at Belsey, walked on towards Hampstead Heath train station, then turned and crossed the road towards him. Now he saw her face. He recognised her. Where had he seen her before? Eighteen years old in heels and makeup, with a quilted Chanel handbag and a white-tipped cigarette. Hardly a schoolgirl, but for the blue-and-gold jumper of South Hampstead High School. She looked at Belsey’s suit, Devereux’s suit, as she stepped up onto the pavement. She was staring at it. A chill spread from the small of his back to his chest and stomach.

“Morning,” Belsey said. He gave a smile and a nod. He had a growing feeling of recognition, but his brain wouldn’t make the final connection. Something didn’t make sense. She met his eyes a final time. Then she flicked her cigarette butt into the road, where it streamed like a distress flare, and walked past him into the coffee shop.

He stepped closer to hear her voice.

“Latte with vanilla,” she said. “Takeaway.”

“Grande.”

“Yes.”

The first shot shattered the glass. Belsey dived instinctively to the floor. The impact of bullet on glass had been clearer than the shot itself, but he knew the sound of rifle fire. Another three shots came in quick succession, a second’s silence. Then the screaming began. Belsey crawled to the cover of the parked cars and tried to formulate a course of action. He heard a fifth shot, then a sixth. It was a high-powered rifle, firing from a distance. The crack of each shot echoed off a block of flats across the junction. Belsey checked the street: people running, people at the bus stop gripping one another, covering their heads; no one aiming a gun. There was a sound like a sudden shower of rain as the rest of the Starbucks window collapsed. Two more shots rattled into the store, unimpeded now. Belsey was calculating the angle they were coming from when it went silent. After a moment he moved, crouching, into the cafe, through the space where the window had been.

A display unit lay on the floor with bags of coffee beans across the tiles, blood spatter on an upturned table. The alarm rang shrill and pointless over soft jazz and the sound of a tap running. A woman in Starbucks uniform hid behind the counter.

“Police,” Belsey said, scanning the store just in case, checking furniture behind which someone could hide. “Get away from the windows. Go into the back.”

The barista looked up, blank with shock. Belsey studied the coffee shop again: one old woman cowering in the corner, a young East Asian man in Starbucks uniform clutching a bleeding arm. A male customer in blue overalls knelt behind an armchair, and the schoolgirl lay on her side in the storeroom doorway. She must have been moving towards shelter, Belsey thought. There was no gun around. No more shots either, just the alarm, the jazz and a strange silence underneath it all.

Belsey walked through the cafe towards the girl. Blood dripped down a free-standing sign that said, “Create your moment of goodness.” Bullets had passed through the sign into the sofas, opening them out. Yellow stuffing hung in the air.

The girl twitched. There was a dark, wet gap where her left shoulder should have been. Blood spread across the front of her school shirt.

“Don’t try to speak,” Belsey said, kneeling. He undid the shirt. He saw, among the general blood, darker entry wounds in the abdomen and chest and knew there was nothing he could do now. She was a few inches from Belsey’s face, gazing through the ribbons of blood into his eyes. He pressed both hands against the chest wound. Even as he tried against all odds to staunch the flow he was thinking:
Those were hollow-tipped bullets—to do that kind of damage. And who runs around Hampstead with a rifle and hollow tips?

“Don’t speak.”

Because she was trying to speak. The girl reached for something, found a stack of paper cups on the floor and gripped this. Then she opened her mouth again and a bubble of viscous blood formed at her lips and burst. She closed her eyes. Was there some sacrament to perform? Belsey thought, as the blood dribbled down her chin; a police detective’s ritual:
You have the right to remain silent . . .

When she was dead he took the cups out of her hand and left the body for forensics.

H
e called Central Operations from the coffee shop’s phone.

“I’ve got a code three, Starbucks South End Green, shots fired. Detective Constable Nick Belsey present, requesting urgent assistance. One fatality, at least one other wounded.”

“Is the scene secure?” the control room asked.

“I reckon so.”

Sirens filled the air now, approaching from Hampstead, Kentish Town, Camden and Highgate, homing in. But for the moment the scene was his. Commuters stared into the shattered shopfront. He turned to the closest pair, young men, and told them to keep everyone else across on the other side of the Green. Beside them was a man in municipal coveralls, a man in a suit and a woman in jogging gear.

“Stop the traffic,” Belsey said. “Go up Pond Street. You”—he turned to the jogger—“go up to Keats Grove, and you on Fleet Road, stop all traffic. Now.”

Paramedics in green began to mass outside the hospital, waiting for the all-clear: the upper tier of the parking lot had a fringe of nurses and patients in dressing gowns, staring down. The first two response vehicles arrived a moment later, police drivers strewing their cars across the road and pavement, nudging the folded tables of adjacent cafes and the vegetable crates of the health food shop. Belsey saw his boss, Inspector Tim Gower, jump out of a Ford S-Max a few minutes after them, in civilian clothes, striding towards the carnage. Gower saw Belsey.

“Are you hurt?”

Belsey realised he was covered in blood.

“I’m fine.”

“What happened?”

“Someone started firing into the Starbucks. It sounded like a rifle.”

“Did you see them?”

“No.”

“Any idea which way they went?”

“I’ve no idea.”

Gower put an order out: no more vehicles until they had armed officers present. Belsey gave a brief rundown of what he knew: eight shots five minutes ago, no sign of any gunman.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Gower said. He turned to the other officers and ordered tape boundaries and then yelled at the civilians to clear the area.

Armed Response turned up three minutes later, followed closely by Homicide and Serious Crime Command. After ten minutes of well-drilled swagger from the boys with guns, the paramedics and scene-of-crime officers were allowed to move in. Five minutes after that, a white tent covered the front of the Starbucks like a belated airbag. Forensic officers tagged the area with numbered flags. They searched the sky and talked about rain. The girl was carried out on a stretcher, beneath a blanket, and there was an awkward hush that lasted all of thirty seconds before work resumed.

Belsey gave his account to one of the Homicide team, DS Joseph Banks.

“I didn’t see anyone drive up. I didn’t see anyone run away.”

“How many shots did you hear?”

“Eight. Like a hunting rifle. It was at some distance.”

“Other people are saying ten or more.”

“No. There was echo. I wouldn’t say more than eight.”

“From where?”

“I don’t know. But it was the girl they wanted.”

“The schoolgirl?”

“Three shots, one to her shoulder, two to the torso.”

“If that’s right.”

“I saw it.”

“What were you going to be doing today?”

“Going into work,” Belsey said. He watched Chief Superintendent Northwood climb out of the back of an armoured, metallic-grey BMW, uniformed, capped, glowering. His driver remained in the front. All other officers paused to acknowledge his presence, as if the whole event was stage-managed for Northwood’s arrival. Those who knew him gave casual salutes; the rest retreated into the background. Northwood surveyed the panorama until his gaze fell on Belsey. This was, it seemed, the one detail out of joint. He marched over.