The Hollow Man (6 page)

9

T
he ambulance crew arrived without lights or sirens: two men and a woman moving with the business-like pace of paramedics calling on a corpse.

“Wow,” they said as they came into the house.

They climbed the stairs, trying to guess how much it cost. “Fifteen million.”

“Twice that.” Then they stepped into the safe room and saw the infested body.

“Yep, he’s dead.”

“Did you try any CPR?” the woman asked, and they all laughed.

None of the brass came down, just a pathologist, his assistant and a photographer. The paramedics wandered through the house taking pictures on their mobiles. Soon the pathologist’s assistant had joined them, ogling. No one rushed the job.

When photographs had been taken and the pathologist had pronounced him dead, the crew wrapped the body in plastic and carried it on a stretcher to the ambulance.

“He’ll be in St. Pancras Mortuary if you want him.”

“Thank you,” Belsey said.

“Who’ll be doing an ID?”

“I’ll check for a next of kin. I don’t know. He lived alone.”

“OK.”

“I should have found the body the first time,” Belsey said. “I should have looked more carefully.” He shook his head. The ambulance pulled out. A security guard from the house across the road watched it go.

Belsey went back inside and shut the door. He opened all the windows. Why in the safe room, he thought. But suicides sometimes liked to tuck themselves away, to let the emergency services find them rather than a loved one. Or, in the absence of a loved one, their cleaner. And there was something fine about retreating into safety to slit your throat. He thought about the set-up: the funeral payment plan, the pragmatism of the cheque. It had been a tactful death, all things considered.

What were the implications for himself? Belsey wondered. Who would come to claim the house? A couple of hours ago, the remnants of Devereux’s life had seemed a lucky find. The sight of his body had made them appear more starkly abandoned. He sensed greater freedom, and greater responsibility.

He called Land Registry and ran a property search. Thirty-seven The Bishops Avenue was owned by a lettings company called Home from Home who described themselves as VIP relocation specialists: “for business leaders and their families; service includes school search.” They were based on Hampstead High Street. Belsey called the office and got a man with a very smooth, camp voice.

“You rent out the property at 37 The Bishops Avenue?”

“Yes.”

“To Mr. Devereux?”

“We can’t disclose details. Is this press?”

“It’s police. When did he start renting it?”

“This is police?”

“Hampstead CID.”

“Perhaps if you’d like to come into the office.”

Belsey called the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Association. Sure enough, the Porsche came up as a hire car. City Inter-Rent—offices in Heathrow, Marylebone and Croydon.

Everything became a little less substantial.

The DVLA said Devereux got his UK licence three months ago. They came up with a date of birth: 2 February 1957. It made him fifty-two years old when he took his life.

Companies House had no AD Development incorporated in the UK, which meant they weren’t trading as a limited company: no shareholders, no accounts to return. It was odd but not unheard of.

The phone began to ring and wouldn’t stop. Belsey paced Devereux’s bedroom and let it ring. He picked up the invoice from RingCentral (“Your Phone System, Everywhere”). It made him curious. RingCentral offered a service for companies that needed to divert calls. Belsey imagined it was the kind of thing you’d use when transferring location or understaffed. He thought of Sophie alone in the AD Development office.

The ringing stopped. Belsey lifted the cordless phone on the bedside table. He hadn’t used it yet. He pressed the button to redial the last call made from it. A woman answered.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” Belsey said.

“Is that you?” she said. In the background Belsey heard traffic, someone laughing. He hung up. A moment later he lifted it again and called St. Pancras Mortuary.

“You’ve got a body coming in from N2. Alexei Devereux. I’ve got an individual who can ID it. Send someone to this address.” He read off the office address for AD Development. “It’s Mr. Devereux’s office in the City. There’s a girl there who worked for him. She’s called Sophie. I don’t have her full name.”

“OK.”

“She doesn’t know about it yet. Be gentle.”

“Of course.”

Belsey used to be the one they sent to break the news. That was in his uniform days. He had got the nickname Angel of Death because he volunteered. Someone had to do it, and his colleagues were grateful. And there had been a very grim satisfaction to performing a task that could not go well and for which you were blameless. It had been a while since he’d made one of those visits.

He went to the study and sat down with the paperwork from the AD Development office. There were a lot of inquiries and proposals, a lot of acronyms: SSI International, NK Trading, Saud Holdings and LV Media, all discussing stakes in an AD operation. There were a lot of people looking to invest in Alexei Devereux, it seemed. He, in turn, was always up for a deal. A stack of letters concerned his inquiries about land in Sharm el Sheikh and Abu Dhabi. He appeared to have interests in banks, sport, media, hotels and gambling. Belsey imagined he must have contributed in some way to Devereux’s fortune. It allowed him to feel a small sense of justice in whatever stratagem he was pursuing.

A significant amount of the paperwork gave the name Alexei Demochev. It tended to be older business: faxes and correspondence from Russia; Moscow lawyers and accountants, sometimes writing in Cyrillic, sometimes English or French. Belsey checked the number on the aged fax machine in the study and it was the machine to which they’d been sent.

At the bottom of the pile was a page of newspaper in Arabic, torn out roughly along one side. Belsey was ready to disregard it as scrap when he saw that one of the articles had been circled in blue Bic. Four inches of closely printed calligraphic script were accompanied by a grainy black-and-white picture showing an Arabic man in a light-coloured suit shaking hands with a blond man in frameless glasses. The blond one was younger. Both were smiling. The date was given in Roman numerals at the top of the page: Monday 9 February. Three days ago.

The circle of Bic lent the clipping an urgent significance—that and its proximity in time to Devereux’s suicide. Did Devereux read Arabic? The impenetrability of the writing was frustrating. Belsey reclaimed Devereux’s wallet from the bedroom, folded the article twice and placed it inside. Then he returned the wallet to his pocket and felt better.

One course of action involved arranging ID in Devereux’s name but with his own photo. A driver’s licence or passport. That would be easy enough. He could use the Bishops Avenue address to open an entirely new bank account, complete with credit card and overdraft, then reacquaint himself with the kind people at No Worries Loans dotcom, except this time with a credit score that would open up an unsecured twenty-five grand.

But it would take time. And Belsey sensed there was something more ambitious he could pull off, involving the money already there. He had been given the sparkling playground of Devereux’s life, and he hadn’t seen half of it yet. He didn’t buy the poor Russian businessman act.

He needed to find out a little more about his target. He needed to stay awake.

Galaxy Drug Store occupied the centre of a run-down parade of shops in East Finchley, sheltered between a William Hill and a Chinese takeaway. Its sign was missing the final “e” but the window display made up for it, flashing “All-Night Pharmacy” in neon. The window was crowded with film posters and international phone cards, and told the passing custom that they had DVDs for hire. Belsey walked in.

The maximum amount of ephedrine hydrochloride legally available without prescription in one sale was 180mg. The only product commonly sold within these restrictions was ChestEze tablets, which bundled 30mg of caffeine, 18.31mg ephedrine and 100mg anhydrous theophylline, the last being a member of the happy family of xanthines, a pharmacological cousin to caffeine. They came in packs of nine.

Belsey walked up to the counter where a teenage assistant stood picking at his skin.

“I’ve been told I need a product called ChestEze,” Belsey said. The boy looked at him doubtfully, then went to shelves behind the counter and fetched a pack. He placed it down between them. Belsey made a show of reading the small print:
For relief of bronchial cough, wheezing, breathlessness and other symptoms of asthmatic bronchitis.

“Could I get two packs?” Belsey said.

“I can’t sell you two, I’m afraid.”

“One’s for my father. I got the bronchitis off him.”

The boy raised an eyebrow but went to fetch another. He seemed easy game. Belsey asked him to wait and found some air freshener, vitamins and a pack of Sudafed as well.

“I don’t have a PIN for it,” Belsey said, taking out the Amex.

The boy briefly closed his eyes with a weariness beyond his years, then he pressed a button and passed Belsey a chewed pen.

Belsey took his bag of supplements and walked to the public library on the high road. He asked for a guest code for the PCs, logged in and searched for Alexei Devereux. The top few hits looked credible: one was an article in Russian from the
Khiminskaya Prada
and one an article from the
Wall Street Journal
. You had to pay to view the
Wall Street Journal
article in full, but it began: “Of all the new crop of oligarchs to set their sights beyond Russia, Alexei Devereux is perhaps the most intriguing.” The
Eurasian Trade News
website dropped his name in a list of five men “changing the face of the Russian entertainment sector.” It didn’t say how. It said he was “notoriously reclusive.” Later it said, “The enigmatic Alexei Devereux is personally responsible for pumping two billion dollars into the ailing sports network TGT.” The
Novaya Sayat
newspaper linked a spike in Posky International shares to talks of a Devereux buyout. Posky operated in the leisure and retail sector. The piece was an inch-high column to the side of a general stock graph from 2007. Only the
Moscow Business Gazette
, dated to last October, gave something of the life: “Ultra-reclusive, ultra-successful investor,” Devereux was one of “the Christmas List,” ten men who pioneered the second round of sell-offs over Christmas 1998. It said Devereux had gone into political exile after his ties to opposition politicians made life increasingly untenable in Russia.

Belsey read the last article twice. The implication was that he had gone into exile shortly before the piece was written, which was ten weeks ago. It said he had bases in Paris, London and New York and would probably be welcome in any of them. But no one knew where he’d gone. No one knew where his businesses were going.

B
elsey returned to the house. The smell of putrefaction had begun to fade. The insect life had moved on to its next show. He sprayed the air freshener, then found the bottle of champagne in the fridge and opened it. A recommended adult dose of ChestEze was one tablet in four hours. He took three with a glass of Veuve Clicquot. He shut the safe room and tried to forget it was there. He was slightly horrified by his actions, and yet this horror was a place to be for the moment.

Belsey looked at the American Express credit card. It became valid only five days ago. He called the customer services number on the back.

“I have a new credit card here,” Belsey said. “But I never received a PIN for it.”

“Would you like us to dispatch a new card?”

“I just need a PIN number.”

“We’d have to dispatch a new card as well.”

“That’s fine. And you send the PIN separately?”

“That’s correct.”

“How long would that take?”

“Two or three days.”

“Can you do it special delivery? I don’t want to lose another one.”

“I’m afraid not, sir. But it should be with you in the next few days.”

“That’s fine.”

“I just need to ask a few security questions. Could you give me your date of birth?”

“Second of February, 1957.”

“And your postcode?” He lifted an unopened catalogue of gardening equipment and read it off the address label.

“Your mother’s maiden name?”

“Demochev,” he tried.

“That’s not the name I have here, sir.”

So he’d hit a wall. Belsey wondered how he would get Devereux’s mother’s maiden name. He pictured a dense archive of Soviet-era paperwork. It had always seemed touching to him, the use of maiden names as security; this private knowledge of our mothers’ pasts. It didn’t touch him now.

“I’m an orphan,” he said.

There was a pause. “OK, sir. Is there a particular name you gave us? A password?”

“I’ve forgotten.”

“We would need to receive that before we can dispatch a new card.”

“OK.”

Belsey hung up. He gave it fifteen minutes, then called the Card Fraud Unit’s offices in Temple.

“Any reports just made on this individual’s card?”

“Not as far as I can see. Want to make one?”

“No.”

Out of curiosity Belsey called City Police and the Serious Fraud Office. He ran Devereux and his company past them but they knew nothing, were uninterested and, by their own account, busy enough already.

It takes the average person twelve months to discover that their identity has been stolen. That was for the living. If this was what he was doing, stealing Devereux’s identity, then it gave him some time. He felt ready to pick up where Devereux had left off. If he was going to be born again it would be nice to be someone rich.

Belsey set about his first systematic search of the premises. There were a lot of things he would have been interested to find: a will, a chequebook, the driver’s licence or any other photo ID, PINs, passwords, address books that might contain them, a laptop. He started with the study. The study had an elaborate dresser consisting of two alcoves joined at the top by an arch, with shelves in the alcoves, drawers beneath them, and then small cupboard doors. Everything was empty but for blank paper, yellowing newspapers in French and Italian; old catalogues.