The Hollow Man (5 page)

Belsey considered his options.

“When did you last see him?” he said.

“A couple of days ago.”

Belsey walked back in, closing the office door and pulling up a chair from the side.

“I’m an old business partner,” he said. “Perhaps he mentioned me. Jack Steel.” He shook her hand.

“Oh. Yes, maybe.”

“You must be . . .”

“Sophie.”

“Sophie, I’m also concerned, to be honest. I got a call last week and he said . . . well, he sounded upset. He wanted to say good-bye. I didn’t really understand what he meant at the time.”

“Good-bye?”

“Farewell. Was he meant to be in today?”

“He always is. At least once a day. I don’t know . . .” She trailed off.

“What about the other offices—Paris, New York? Have they heard from him?”

“No.”

Belsey got up, walked to the desk at the back and sat down again. He slid the bin out from beneath Devereux’s desk and removed the foil wrap of a cigar, an empty shopping bag and a receipt from a local coffee shop.

“When did you last see him?” he asked.

“Friday.”

Belsey opened the desk drawers. The girl made a noise.

“I don’t know if you should—”

“I know what I’m doing.”

The drawers were filled with cardboard wallet files in an assortment of colours. He emptied the files onto the desk and searched for bank details. She watched him, slightly horrified.

“How did he seem?” Belsey asked.

“On Friday? Distracted, I guess.”

Distraction: That was the danger. Do not become distracted. The paperwork didn’t give much away.

“What do you think was distracting him?”

“He said something about being down to his last million.” Belsey tried not to smile. “I think he was joking. I mean, I don’t know if he was joking. I didn’t think too much about it at the time.”

He stood up, turned to the green curtains, pulled them aside. They were covering bare bricks. He let them fall.

“Is the business going all right?” he said.

“As far as I can tell.”

“Hard times.”

“What’s going on? Is he OK?”

“Are you able to access the company accounts?” Belsey asked.

“No.”

“How much do you know about operational workings?”

“Nothing. I mean, I pay in cheques. Mr. D handles all the big transactions personally. Mr. Devereux, that is.”

“Mr. D?”

“Mr. Devereux.”

“Were you sleeping with him?”

“Was I what?”

“Sleeping with him. Having sex.”

“No.”

Belsey opened the lower desk drawer.

“Those are his private papers,” she said.

“We need to find out what’s going on.”

Belsey took out a file and emptied it. It contained a desktop diary. Belsey flicked through it: a suicide’s diary could look distinct. There was a lot of scrawl over the previous month—names and times, sometimes three or four days blocked out—“NY,” “Madrid.” Then it thinned out. Then it became blank. No plans for summer, no plans for spring. Only one incongruous entry, tomorrow night: “Dinner.”

“He was having dinner tomorrow.”

“Oh, he was always meeting people.”

“After that it looks like he was winding down.”

“What do you mean?”

She looked like she might start to cry. Belsey took the empty shopping bag from the bin and filled it with an assortment of papers while she blew her nose.

“What should I do?” the girl asked.

“Hold tight,” Belsey said. “If I know Alexei he’ll be lying low, waiting to surprise us all.”

8

B
elsey returned to Hampstead police station. He slid the “Good-bye” card into his drawer, then placed his new Zippo and the penknife on his desk and admired them. He pocketed the lighter. He glanced through the stolen AD Development paperwork and decided to study it in detail later, when he had time to concentrate. For the moment, at least, he still had a job.
Work while it is day. The night is coming when no man shall work.
There were messages for him: from the hotel where he’d been staying, a loans company, an ex, a second cousin he hadn’t seen since a wedding in 2004. People wanted to know why he wasn’t answering his phone.

He called the ex from the office line.

“I am. I just don’t have it.”

“But I spoke to a man on your number.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he wasn’t you. Are things all right, Nick? Someone said you’d gone missing.”

“Missing? I’m here at work.”

“You sound different.”

“I am different.”

“Are you OK?”

A note in his in-tray instructed Belsey to attend the headquarters of the Independent Police Complaints Commission at 3 p.m. They hadn’t wasted any time. Someone wanted him out. He looked at it and wondered if he’d gone missing. Maybe he was on the run. There were people on the run who were perfectly still. He folded the Internal Affairs note into his pocket, stood up and stretched.

It was a relatively quiet day. Most of the other Hampstead detectives were at a training session in Enfield. The station was short-staffed and Belsey had to process a sixteen-year-old with a kilo of cannabis resin. Afterwards, he took the hash and bought some cigarette papers, begged a couple of cigarettes and returned to the station.

He sat in the rape suite, smoking. It was comfortable there. That was the idea, he supposed: a sofa, some dried flowers, a side room behind a curtain. No one would look for him in the rape suite. He considered his plan as it stood and what he needed to do: investigate flights, locate his passport, raise a little travel money. Now he had decided on his course of action Belsey felt at peace. He hadn’t smoked hash since his early twenties. He thought of his expectations then, the thrill of police work, the crew he ran with. They would compete to see who could travel the farthest in a night, while supposedly on duty. One time he stuck the sirens on and made it to Brighton. He remembered standing against a rail beside the sea, feeling spray on his face and staring into the blackness. It felt like being on the edge of everything he knew. He had made it in forty-two minutes, down the M23. If it was this easy, he thought, how far could he go in a night? In a week? At that moment every cell in his body wanted to run. Looking out over the sea, he thought:
Moving is the most important thing in the world
. And he had forgotten that, as you do with the most important things.

He spent five minutes gathering papers for a court visit next week that would not take place. He would be gone. The case concerned a husband who’d tried to kill his family after he’d lost his job. The bank had cut his overdraft facility, the neighbours smelt gas. Belsey was glad he would not be there to see it all unfold. The justice system would find itself temporarily without a cog, but it would survive. At twelve-thirty he returned to The Bishops Avenue.

New shoeprints led towards the house, parallel with his own. Heath mud, size nines where he was size eleven: no treads, some pale dust on the outside of the left sole where they had tried to skirt the pink gravel.

The visitor must have walked around the building, trying to see if anyone was in, then approached the bell. Belsey crouched to the bell. It was metal and would pick up good prints. He stepped back and looked at the windows. No lights on. None of the curtains had been moved. He emptied the mailbox attached to the front security gates. Then he climbed the steps and let himself in.

“Hello?” he called. There was no answer. Belsey flicked through Devereux’s mail as he walked through the house, tearing open envelopes and discarding the junk. He thought there might be a PIN or, less immediately useful, a bank statement. But he was also now intrigued by the enigma of Alexei Devereux. What had brought this situation about? Where was he? As a good detective, Belsey did not like mysteries, and as a bad one he found too many. In his first week of CID, Inspector John Harlow—the only DI he ever truly respected—had seen it in him:
It will be your downfall, Nick Belsey. Not knowing when to call it a day and stop asking bloody questions
.

He found three pizza-delivery menus, a letter from a call-forwarding company encouraging him to upgrade his service, and a lot of catalogues: for office supplies, outdoor sports equipment, children’s educational toys, health supplements and designer luggage. Devereux had also received several brochures about tooth whitening. Belsey read them then checked his own teeth in the bathroom mirror. They were streaked with coffee; the gums appeared to be falling away.

A foul smell had begun to permeate the house. Belsey lit a scented candle from the bathroom. He sat at Devereux’s desk, took a fountain pen and some letterhead (“AD Development:
Hope Springs Eternal
”), and popped the cap of the pen. He wrote:
Hello, I am here
, and watched the ink soak into the thick paper. Then he took a fresh sheet and wrote his name and date of birth at the top. He wanted to write a confession. He wrote:
I have been a police officer for twenty-one years
, and then his mind went blank.

He couldn’t ignore the stench any longer. It smelt like rotting meat. Time to clear the fridge out, Belsey told himself, and tried not to think what else it might mean. The smell was getting worse by the minute. Belsey walked to the kitchen but there was nothing rotting in the fridge, or any of the kitchen cupboards, or the bin. A single fly crawled across the tiled floor.

Belsey crouched down to see it: a bluebottle, shimmering, turquoise. Belsey lay on his stomach, inching closer until he could see the jewel-like eyes and the twitching of the individual legs.

Calliphora vomitoria
. Nature’s pallbearers. It crawled to Belsey’s fingers and inspected them for signs of life. He had an awful feeling.

There were two flies circling the light fitting in the living room. A third flew in from the hallway. The Calliphoridae could smell death ten miles away, but Belsey sensed he wouldn’t have to go that far. He followed another up the stairs.

The smell was strongest in the bedroom. He covered his mouth and nose, checked behind the curtains, under the bed, the wardrobes, but couldn’t find any body.

He walked down the corridor. The next door led into a laundry room the size of an average bedroom, with cupboards, rails, wicker baskets, two washing machines and a dryer. Belsey opened the cupboards and took the lids off the wicker baskets. He opened the washing machines and dryer. They were all empty. The room was large, but not large enough to hide a corpse, and he couldn’t understand what came between the two rooms to fill the rest of the first-floor corridor. Belsey walked back and knocked on the wall. It sounded hollow.

He walked back to the bedroom. He looked at the right-hand wall and the floor-length mirror. He pressed on the surface of the mirror and it shifted. He pressed on the edge and it swung open.

The mirror hid a small room. Belsey peered inside. A middle-aged man stared back from a swivel chair, suited, his throat sliced open and crawling with maggots. The space was rigged as a safe room: windowless, with electromagnetic locks, a phone and two CCTV monitors on a small desk. It had its own chemical toilet in the corner and a stack of mineral water and tinned food. Blood had reached the ceiling and the walls: shallow brown drops, held at the point where gravity had lost interest.

Belsey walked back downstairs.

He’d never been sick at a body and wasn’t going to start now. He went out to the garden and crouched down breathing the fresh air. It wasn’t enough to clear the smell from his nostrils` though. He took a scarf from Devereux’s wardrobe and made some strong coffee, drank half and watched it cool, then he poured the rest onto the scarf and tied it around his face. He found a pair of rubber gloves beneath the kitchen sink and went back.

The copper smell of blood provided a low note alongside the appalling sweet reek of decomposition. Carotid arteries fountain up to twenty feet on a good day. Blood had dripped back down into the corpse’s face, streaking his scalp, dappling the front of his shirt. The man’s eyes were covered with an opaque yellow film. He was heavy-set, balding, with fading golden hair cropped close; clean-shaven with a dusting of postmortem stubble. Gases bloated the corpse but you could still make out a characterful face, like an emperor in decadent times; a strong nose and a full mouth. He’d had the muscle to dig deep and had done so with feeling. Belsey couldn’t help being impressed. A paring knife lay on the floor beneath his right hand.

On the desk in front of the body was a slim, bloodstained brochure: “The Reflections Funeral Plan”—motto, “Everything Settled.” It carried a photograph of two swans floating on water. Inside, various prices for cremations and funerals were listed, averaging on two and a half thousand with interest. You paid in instalments.
It’s a good feeling when you know everything is in order, with no loose ends, and that your family will be spared undue distress
. No loose ends? Belsey thought. Family? Devereux’s family seemed a long way away. Devereux had written a cheque for £3,200 from his UK current account, dated four days ago, made out to Reflections Ltd.

Belsey used the brochure to scrape some of the maggots away from the wound. Devereux had several cuts—short, parallel nicks high beneath his left ear: the trial cuts of the suicide, as they eased themselves into it. On his fourth attempt he dug deep, so deep he didn’t even make it across his throat; the incision petered out beneath the larynx. The job was done, though. There were no other injuries—no defence injuries on the arms or hands. Belsey didn’t particularly want to dwell on the larvae crowding the man’s nostrils but he persuaded himself to take a look. They were getting on well, still unhatched, over a centimetre long. In a sealed environment, at winter temperatures, that placed the death between three to five days ago.

Belsey checked the room’s electronics. A sticker on the CCTV hard drive said “British Security Technologies.” The system was off. Belsey switched it on, looked for recording history but the drives were blank. He switched it off again and wondered about this. Certainly, as police, you learned that security technology got bought a lot more often than it got used. But then it wasn’t always filming several million pounds.

He searched the suit. The pockets were empty.

He left the safe room, cleaned his prints off Devereux’s wallet and placed it back beside the bed, found the last two days’ envelopes in the bin and put them in his pocket. Then he left the house and locked up.

Belsey walked to Hampstead police station, to his office, and made a cup of tea. He gathered up the paperwork from AD Development. Then he went to a phone box outside the station and called the number for the station’s control room.

“Hi. I’m the manager of a cleaning company in Hampstead. Could you pass a message to Detective Constable Nick Belsey? Tell him there’s still no sign of Mr. Devereux, the man missing from The Bishops Avenue. He asked us to let him know.”

He walked back into the station and picked up the message, drove over to The Bishops Avenue, let himself into the house and radioed for an ambulance.

“I’ve got a body here,” he said. “No, there’s no need to rush.”