The Hollow Man (16 page)

30

F
orensic Services Command occupied a brutal concrete block at 149 Lambeth Road. It was a conveniently short sprint across the river from the Yard. It was a slightly longer sprint from the Old Kent Road, through the subterranean labyrinth of Elephant and Castle, and felt less convenient still when carrying six grand in a dead man’s suit. Not the best part of town for cash transportation. Belsey kept alert, moving fast through the underpasses.

The Command, as it was known, didn’t announce itself to the public as such, unless you counted the tinted windows and black security bulbs that lined its outer walls. Otherwise it looked like a multi-storey parking lot decorated with slat blinds. A giant “149” on the deep shaft ventilator stood in place of any formal identification—that and the occasional police vehicle dipping silently down the ramps.

“I’ve got something for urgent analysis.”

The security guard stared at Belsey. A sign said “Welcome to Central Forensics” and underneath, “Our Values.”

“I need to speak to the night labs,” Belsey said. “It’s concerning the Jessica Holden murder inquiry.”

This got a call put through. The guard spoke to someone in the Command Unit, and Forensics Officer Isha Sharvani appeared a few moments later. Belsey was relieved to see a familiar face.

“Nick,” she said.

“Isha. I was sent round on an urgent. I know it’s not very kosher. Would you run a check on these?”

She looked at the freezer bags with scepticism bordering on disgust.

“What job?”

“The Starbucks shooting. Just see if the two of them match. Give me a call at Hampstead. You’ve got my number.”

“Nick Belsey.” She shut her eyes in exasperation. But he knew she’d help.

T
he first time Belsey met Isha Sharvani it was 8 July 2005. The previous morning he had been on a drugs raid, standing in a crack house on Adelaide Road with a woman handcuffed to a sink. They knew there was something big on because response vehicles had been racing through Camden into town for ten minutes, sirens on full: unusual enough for morning rush hour, and all flavours of emergency service. And they kept coming, so you knew it was cars from the neighbouring boroughs as well. Belsey’s team had killed their communications for the raid, and when they switched them on again there were call-outs to Russell Square and King’s Cross, and then an all-units to Tavistock Square. Then the world slipped into Code Red.

They knew the drill. For two years there had been practice runs. The crack addicts got a momentary reprieve. Crime seemed suddenly reassuring, part of an everyday routine bleached by a brighter light.

All units to central London.

And so the next morning he had found himself with Sharvani collecting samples of clothing from select members of Camden’s Pakistani community, ferrying them into Counter-Terrorism for analysis. The bosses had wanted someone Asian, preferably Muslim, to accompany him, and the fact that Sharvani was Hindu didn’t seem to bother them. It was a strange few weeks. Belsey made good contacts at the Regent’s Park mosque—intelligent men who knew Plato and Nietzsche as well as the Quran and were happy to discuss any of them—discovered a lot of hydroponic weed being grown by a group of Bangladeshi teenagers, and befriended Sharvani. He’d spent a lot of time at Forensic Command. He hadn’t been back until now.

He wanted to put his curiosity to bed. Or, better still, to sell it on. Let someone else fathom the bloodstains of The Bishops Avenue. He wished he could fast-track the forensics procedure, wished he had a team to put in the legwork necessary to establish who’d been passing through Devereux’s home.

The familiar clutter of abandoned market stalls at the back of Waterloo Station appeared, glimmering under the streetlights. He needed to get back to Hampstead and stash the money burning a hole in his jacket pocket. But he was starving and there would be nowhere open at the other end. Belsey ducked into a greasy spoon on Lower Marsh. Taxi drivers, post-work street sweepers and parking attendants lolled in the fug of the cafe blowing on gloved hands, rubbing scratchcards and occasionally glancing up at an old TV set.

The news was rounding off with shots of a footballer coming out of hospital. Then it flashed back to the night’s main story. Jessica’s parents seemed to appeal directly to the assembled workers in the cafe. All they wanted to know, they said, was why. Who took their beautiful daughter from them? Belsey had witnessed it a hundred times: grief’s appetite to know. Loved ones need to see the corpse, they need to see where it happened, look into the eyes of their child’s killer. As if the past would be buried in these experiences.

It cut to a blonde girl, Jessica’s age. They’d got her into a studio, making an appeal from behind a bank of microphones. “Friend of Victim Appeals.” She cried well. She said:
Someone must have information
. She left flowers by the Starbucks and you saw she had expensive clothes. The camera got a shot of the message on the flowers:
Jess, RIP—justice will be done
.

Belsey bought a coffee and some chips and took his change to a payphone in the corner. He called Channel Five. Miranda Miller was out but her people were there and they knew who he was.

“Who’s the blonde girl?” Belsey said.

“A friend.”

“When did she show up?”

“Earlier this afternoon.”

“Took her a while.”

“She was in shock.”

“I bet.”

He called the incident room. They said: “She’s called Lucy. We’ve had her in twice. Doesn’t have anything helpful to say.”

“Are you sure?”

“I guess the question is whether
she’s
sure.”

T
he CID office was empty when he got back to Hampstead. He transferred five hundred pounds to Devereux’s wallet, then removed the bottom drawer of his desk and stuffed the rest of the money into the space beneath. He replaced the drawer and walked out, towards Pond Street.

They had the floodlights on in South End Green, casting strange shapes across the silent junction. Some of the pubs and restaurants farthest from the crime scene had opened, but they looked desultory, and many had stayed closed in a gesture of respect or resignation. The long shadow of the Gothic drinking fountain pointed towards the White Horse like a moondial. The artificial light caught all reflective surfaces: hubcaps, broken glass, frozen puddles. A van marked “Express Glazing Contractors” sat patiently, waiting to patch over the horror.

Belsey ducked under the tape and showed his badge.

“Who’s in charge?”

“I am,” a wiry, grey-haired detective sergeant said. “Who are you?”

“Nick Belsey. From Northwood’s office. He’s got a meeting with the Chief Constable in a couple of hours and wants to know the worst.”

“Dave Carter.” The sergeant shook Belsey’s hand, studying him cautiously. Belsey had always liked ballistics teams: quiet, precise men. Men of angles and velocity. “What’s the situation indoors?” Carter said.

“Chaos.” Belsey stepped into the tent. Carter followed him. The light was hazy through the canvas. It felt hallowed inside. A flag was stuck where a bullet had entered the floor. They didn’t outline bodies anymore, in case of crime scene contamination, but everything had been left where it fell and you sensed the space where a life had ended.

“How does it look?” Belsey asked.

“Eight fired. The first two shattered the window. One’s in the back wall above the serviettes, one behind the coffee machine. We think the fourth must have clipped the Chinese lad and the third hit the girl. So did another two. One’s embedded in the floor.”

“All from the same gun?”

“Yes. Something with a long barrel, not chromed.”

“Like a marksman’s rifle.”

“Sure. Maybe a modified service rifle. Gas-operated, bolt action for accuracy. The bullets are 7.62 x 54mm. That’s the kind of cartridge you find in military sniper rifles. Only these ones are hollow-tipped. The details suggest a gun that’s probably ex–Red Army: the Dragunov, or the VSK.”

Belsey crouched down to the bullet hole in the floor.

“How many rounds do they take?”

“The Dragunov takes a ten-round box magazine. The VSK has twenty. The VSK comes with a silencer, though.”

“So it wasn’t the VSK.”

“I doubt it.”

“See many Dragunov sniper rifles around these parts?”

“Not in my experience.”

They came ready for a mission, Belsey thought. He knelt and put a finger in the bullet hole, felt the angle, then followed it in his imagination, out beyond the tent. They came armed to carry out a hit, were positioned at a distance with telescopic sights onto the Starbucks, getaway ready. And they weren’t going to stop firing until the girl was dead.

“She would have been on the floor when it was fired,” Belsey said. “Crawling towards the storeroom.”

“Maybe.”

“Look at the trajectory.”

“It could be ricochet.”

“Would a ricochet retain that kind of power?”

“Bullets are strange things,” Carter said.

Belsey stood up. He walked out of the crime scene and gazed at the hospital. He thought of Tony, safe in his medicated dreams. Where was Alice Ward? He looked up at the stack of windows. People jumped from the roof sometimes. Three or four each year. You could see bald patches among the ground-level greenery where they’d had to clear bushes away to find the bodies. He looked at the roof. Then he walked towards the hospital entrance.

The neon-lit reception had the unwanted air of a bus depot. Belsey continued towards the back stairs. He timed himself. He climbed ten flights to Gastroenterology, walked the length of the ward and pushed through a fire door. Narrow concrete steps led up to the roof.

Belsey hunched against the cold as he moved across the gravel surface. It took two and a half minutes to get from the front of the hospital to the roof. There was only one place on the roof where you could get sights on the Starbucks. It was around the back of an air-con unit, on a foot-wide strip of roofing tape at the very far edge. It was an acute angle onto the coffee shop’s entrance but not impossible. The white tent appeared innocent at this distance, circus-like. The Heath stretched beyond it, placing the crime scene on the shore of a dark, ruffled sea.

Belsey checked the roof for cartridge cases, footprints, cigarette butts. What he saw was nothing. It looked like it had been raked clean.

He returned to 37 The Bishops Avenue. He didn’t enjoy sharing it with a bloodstain. The phone was ringing as he walked in. Sometimes it would stop for a second, then it began again. He sat on the sofa and listened to the incessant force of individuals attempting to make contact with the dead Russian. He put the TV on. He thought: They didn’t empty the gun; they had a mission and they’d completed it and then wrapped up. He tried to imagine the ruthlessness, the sense of invulnerability. And they knew Jessica Holden was going to be in that Starbucks that morning.

Belsey walked to the study and looked at the stain. The phone rang again. He picked up the receiver.

“Mr. Devereux?”

Belsey remained silent, heart pounding.

“Mr. Devereux?” A man with a Southern U.S. drawl. Belsey cursed and hung up. He pressed the switch hook on the phone’s cradle, let the phone ring twice, then released it.

“This is Jeff Cadden from MarketWatch
Financial Digest
in Chicago—” Belsey pressed the hook. It rang immediately. He answered.

“Hey,” a man said. “Hey. What the hell—”

“Who’s that?” Belsey said.

“Who’s that?” the caller said.

Belsey hung up. It took ten seconds to ring again.

“Hello? Is that Alexei Devereux?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Devereux, I know it’s late. My name’s Mark Levine, I’m a lawyer for SSI International. There appears to have been some confusion—”

Belsey hung up, heard it ring, answered.

“Mr. Devereux?”

“Yes.”

“This is Les Ambassadeurs restaurant. Regarding your booking.”

Belsey touched his finger to the hook. He’d had enough of playing PA to a dead man. But he stopped.

“Hello?” he said.

“Hello? Mr. Devereux?” The man from Les Ambassadeurs was still there. He spoke with an indistinct Continental twinge. Belsey thought of the final entry in Devereux’s diary—Friday 13 February: “Dinner.”

“What did you say it was regarding?”

“Your booking. Tonight.”

“What about it?” Belsey said.

“Will you still be requiring it?”

“When have I booked for?”

“Eleven p.m.”

“What did I book?”

“A table for two in the restaurant area.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I still want it.”

“Of course, sir. We’ll see you at eleven.”

Belsey opened Devereux’s wallet and flicked through the hotels to the black card that said
Les Ambassadeurs
with a Mayfair address: 5 Hamilton Place. It said:
Private Members’ Club and Casino
. A table for two sounded cosy. Just the idea of an 11 p.m. casino dinner was intriguing; Belsey could imagine what deals were made in that timeless world. He had just over forty-five minutes to get there. He wondered if Devereux’s dining companion knew their date was off. They would be a useful person to speak to. It was a long shot, Belsey thought, but then he didn’t have any other plans.

He found a Valentino suit at the back of Devereux’s wardrobe: charcoal, single-breasted. He chose a white shirt, put the suit on, splashed some Lacoste aftershave and popped a ChestEze.

Belsey hailed a cab on the corner of The Bishops Avenue. At Regent Street he directed it away from the lights and crowds into the backstreets of Mayfair. Everything shone slick and black under the streetlamps. They continued down one-way streets of antiques shops and lawyers’ offices into the cold shadow cast by Park Lane’s hotels.

Les Ambassadeurs hid in the gloomy crevice between the Four Seasons and the Intercontinental. It shared the back street with a taxi stand and the hotel service entrances. Chefs and chambermaids crouched, smoking, in the niches. But the casino itself was a fragment of Georgian elegance. It occupied a town house, with freshly cleaned stonework and glistening iron railings. Belsey got out of the cab and paid. Three steps led up to wooden doors guarded by a man in tails and a waistcoat. A small, grey sign said “Les Ambassadeurs Club.” Belsey straightened his tie.