The Hollow Man (9 page)

15

B
elsey drove through Victoria, through the glum suburbs of government. Whitehall’s outlying muscle clustered inelegantly alongside the cheap hotels and chain restaurants. Belsey had never liked the area. Buildings either crouched to the ground or were the size of cruise ships. Humans shuffled in the cracks between public-sector slabs as if it was the buildings they were serving. Belsey turned onto Broadway towards New Scotland Yard.

The Kremlin, they called it. But Rome would have been a closer analogy. Like Rome, it was regarded with suspicion by its satellite districts, as a place where nothing actually happened, and to which everything was bound. To most police it was a still point in the centre of the machine, endless paper jammed in its endless wheels. The twenty featureless floors of mirrored windows enhanced the impression. From the outside it always looked empty. It never was.

Belsey parked around the corner, far enough away not to have the car bomb-disposed. He straightened his hair and tie in the rearview mirror, then approached the Yard, stepping over the slabs of anti-terrorist concrete, past armed guards in bulletproofs.

All white-collar departments got high security. Belsey knew it wasn’t going to be easy. They operated a system called sterile corridors, which meant even officers from other Yard departments needed permits to get through. He went through the visitors’ entrance, signed his name and department at the front desk and said he had an appointment with Ridpath. He was given a pass “to be worn around the neck at all times” and taken up to the fourth floor, where he showed the pass to get through the outer security of Economic and Specialist Crime. Then he had to talk his way into the warren, past Film Piracy, Stolen Vehicle, Computing, until the corridors were narrower, the pot plants thick with dust, and he was in the Financial Investigation Development Unit. The Yard has odd-shaped hollows worn by operational requirements, by a need for obscurity. It has nooks and byways into which careers fall, or lead themselves, away from daylight.

At the front desk for Financial Crime he used Ridpath’s name again.

“He said it was urgent.”

“Hang on.” The guard checked a list. A few late-evening loiterers. Plain-clothed men and women passed the desk, glancing at Belsey. “Is he expecting you?”

“Certainly is.”

Eventually the guard escorted Belsey through the department, past closed doors. They arrived at an office with a sign saying “Financial Investigation” and the guard knocked.

“Come in.”

The office had its own steel security door with hinge bolts. Inside, one man with greased black hair sat in the large, neat room, polished boots up on his desk. Belsey guessed that this was Midgley.

“Visitor for Inspector Ridpath,” the guard said.

“He’s busy . . .” Midgley began.

“I think he deserves a break,” Belsey said. There was a wooden door at the other end of the office. Midgley shook his head and smiled. Belsey walked past him. He knocked on Ridpath’s door and a small voice said: “Who’s there?”

“Alexei Devereux,” Belsey said. There was a long silence. Eventually the door opened.

Ridpath stood in the doorway. He was Belsey’s height, but a little wider, in a white shirt and paisley tie a few decades old. His eyes were small and dark but not without fire, and he sported a neat moustache, like the admission of a harmless personal foible. It drew attention to his plump, clean-shaven cheeks and his baldness. There was an overall carelessness to the man, like someone who’d been put together from badly written instructions. Behind him was a windowless office filled with papers: stacks on the floor and on top of cabinets and desks. It felt as if the space that remained had been carved out with effort.

“What is it?” he said.

“You called about a Mr. Devereux.”

“Who are you?”

“Detective Constable Nick Belsey.”

“Detective Constable?” he smiled.

“Excuse me,” Belsey said, stepping into the office and shutting the door with Midgley on the other side. Now it was the two of them, face to face.

“What do you want?” Ridpath said.

“I want to know about Alexei Devereux.”

Ridpath walked back to his desk and collapsed into an old cushioned chair. He waved with wary hospitality towards a spare seat and Belsey sat down and studied the inspector. It was terrible, he thought, in the twenty-first century, that you could tell a man lived alone by the state of his shirt collar. Ridpath moved some papers.

“A routine inquiry. I can’t recall the exact nature of it.” He found a file and flicked through it, then seemed to give up.

“What does AD Development do?” Belsey said.

“I don’t know. If it’s something to do with Devereux, then I’m not aware.” He spoke with the faintest of Yorkshire accents, like a man who’d spent a career trying to lose it, but it had clung on, honest and stubborn, and made Ridpath seem honest and stubborn too.

“Did you speak to him?”

“No.”

“What happened? Why did you call him in as missing?”

“I can barely remember. I must have been told to contact him. He wasn’t at his home, so I contacted you. Or your station, at least.”

“When did you try to contact him?”

“Won’t you have all this information at Hampstead?”

“Who said anything about Hampstead?” Belsey said.

“What do you mean?”

“You said Hampstead.”

“Isn’t that where you’re from?”

“I am. But I didn’t say it.”

“
He
was in Hampstead.” Ridpath’s voice was quieter, eyes steely. “Devereux.” There was something he wasn’t saying. Belsey suspected they were building a case and didn’t want it poached, a case concerning things far beyond one body in a Hampstead mansion. “He’s been showing a lot of cash around the place,” Ridpath said. “I just wanted to ask him a few questions.”

“How are you with a Ouija board?”

This stopped him. He closed the file. Then he carefully moved it to a different area of his desk. The graveyard. It must happen all the time, Belsey thought. Death stealing his cases.

“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised,” Ridpath said.

“Why’s that?”

“People who walk around with half a million pounds in cash need to have acquired it from somewhere, and those places aren’t always good for their health.”

“What makes you think he had that?”

“Ten days ago I got a Suspicious Activity Report from Christie’s on Old Brompton Road, an auction house.”

“I know what Christie’s is.”

“According to the SAR he paid for a painting with five hundred grand in paper money. Maybe that’s just how he likes to operate, but it means they’re obliged to inform me and I’m obliged to look into it.”

“Did you know who he was?”

“No. I was just doing my job.”

Belsey nodded. Perhaps the ideal detective would be barely conscious, he thought, operating their small lever in the network of machines that was justice.

“Does his death strike you as suspicious?”

“I imagine it’s all fairly straightforward.”

“Do you?”

“Listen, I investigate financial crimes. Dying is not a financial crime.” He leaned back with the satisfaction of a man who has chosen his portion of mystery. Belsey liked him. He liked people who didn’t want to be liked. Ridpath was charmless.

“What are AD Development up to?” Belsey asked.

“Is that his company, then? I’ve no idea.” Ridpath checked his watch.

“When did you first try contacting him?”

“Monday. I tried a couple of times on Monday and Tuesday. Then I gave your station a call.”

“What’s in the file?”

“Nothing. Just the initial report.”

“Show me.”

Ridpath stared at him. “No.”

“Why?”

“You’re not authorised.”

Ridpath took a bag of something from his desk drawer and stood up. It was an old loaf of white bread, starting to crumble. Apparently their meeting was over. Ridpath walked to the door and opened it. Midgley was standing a few feet away trying not to look interested. Belsey followed Ridpath through the office to the corridor and along the corridor to a window which opened a few inches, and looked down through darkness to the Thames.

Ridpath lay crumbs in a line on the windowsill and watched the pigeons swoop. Belsey wondered if he brought the bread from home. He wondered if he ever went home.

“I don’t know how you got in here,” Ridpath said coolly, “but I’d advise you to have one of the security see you safely out. It can be a bit of a maze.”

“I can see that,” Belsey said.

Ridpath went over to a vending machine and waited for what the machine described as a cappuccino. The drink arrived and he ate a spoonful of thin froth with a plastic stirrer. The financial investigator licked his lips.

“Do you not have anything else you should be doing?” he asked, when Belsey still hadn’t moved. But he seemed more curious than resentful.

“If you hear anything more about Devereux, will you let me know?” Belsey said.

“I doubt it.”

“Me too.”

16

B
elsey drove to King’s Cross and parked a few blocks away from the mortuary. He walked along the busy, lamp-lit streets with his head down, thinking: What was Ridpath’s game? What was in the file? Thinking also: Well, some people like using cash, even with six figures involved, even in Christie’s. Especially in Christie’s. It was only recently that auction houses had started trying to clean up their act.

But the big thought, the one he couldn’t shake, was that Devereux wasn’t his little secret anymore. Devereux was in the system, and the system never forgets. It doesn’t know what’s important, but that means it can’t be told what’s unimportant. It wasn’t good news. It meant someone might take an interest at any time—in the money, in the body, in the nice set-up on The Bishops Avenue.

He passed the British Library, turned onto Midland Road, and by the time he raised his head he was at the back of the Eurostar terminal. He gazed at the gravel strip beyond the chain-link fence—between the fence and the tracks. If he could get to that, to the train as it pulled out . . . People must do it, jump off again as it slowed towards Brussels, disappear into the Belgian night . . .

He arrived at St. Pancras Coroners Court and Mortuary. Broken concrete steps led up to the door. Beyond it, St. Pancras Gardens sheltered beneath a canopy of bare branches. The solemn red bricks of old workhouses towered over the scene. The ghosts of slum children rustled in the trees and reflected in the long, sad windows. Belsey took a lungful of night air before going in. The whole place seemed touched by death—not its grief or terror but a cold, quiet oddness. Death with a finger to its lips. So it was a fine place to put a coroner’s court.

He knocked on the dirty glass door of the court and wondered who was on night duty. After a moment Dr. Angela Hawks appeared, white-coated, shaking her head.

“We’re closed, Nick.”

“I’m here for the after-party.”

She sighed and let him in, locking the door again. He was going to give her a kiss on the cheek but she’d turned and was off into the murky world of wood panelling and formaldehyde.

He followed her to the morgue, a small room with a single steel table, linoleum tiles on the floor, cracked off-white tiles on the right-hand wall and thirty small, numbered doors on the left. A skeleton, ragged, missing its lower jaw, lay on the table.

“Look at this fellow,” Hawks said. “What do you make of it?”

Belsey walked the length of the gurney and back: scraps of cloth the same grey colour as a clump of hair clung to bones stained green. Some clay remained on the bones. “Male,” Belsey said. “There’s lesions on the bones. Syphilis perhaps. A nick at the top of the spine, blade nick. Maybe died from a blade at their throat.”

“When?”

“Where did you find him?” Belsey said.

“Near Tower Bridge.”

“Skull and teeth stained green from copper waste, so he was buried before the Royal Mint was built. Deposits on the skull. Buried in what?”

“Lead.”

“That’s why he’s still got some hair.”

“He’s Roman. About 200
A.D.
’s our guess.”

“What brings him to the land of the living?”

“The shopping centre under construction. Already excavated a whole medieval graveyard and now they’ve found it’s built on top of a Roman one.”

Belsey peered into the Roman’s empty eye sockets.

“The first thousand years are the most crucial in a murder investigation,” Belsey said. “We might have missed our chance. Has he got a name?”

“Hadrian. We’re going to rebury him, but we’re waiting for someone who knows the correct Roman rituals.”

They were respectful with the dead, according to council stipulations; unnoticed and unthanked for it. Belsey liked them for that. The world was most careful with you when you cared least.

“Has the coroner been for that suicide I sent you?”

“Not today. He was at a fire on the M11 roadway.”

“Anything worth mentioning?”

She covered the Roman skeleton with a blue sheet, checked a chart in the lab and unlocked door number 29, dragging the long shelf out on greased wheels. Belsey took a pair of disposable gloves from a Kleenex-style box on the side and helped unwrap Alexei Devereux.

She’d shaved some of the hair away to check the skull. There was the usual Y-shaped incision down his front. The throat had been sewn up and the eyes sealed shut. It felt strange seeing the body again, having occupied the life. Belsey felt a pang of guilt. But more powerful was a sense of kinship.
Devereux, old friend
, Belsey thought.
Me and you
.

“Anything in his stomach?”

“Some red meat, greasy. He hadn’t eaten for several hours. A few mils of alcohol in the blood but nothing dramatic.”

“Did the secretary ID him?”

“Yes.”

“How did she seem?”

“Young. Upset. A little nauseous. Cried over my floor and said she couldn’t believe it.”

“Did she call him Mr. D?”

“Why?”

“That’s what she called him. Mr. D.”

“Cute. Do you mind if I have a cigarette?”

Hawks hung up her white coat and they went to the roof. It was windy. There were three mildewed armchairs and a free-standing ashtray among the chimneys and aerials. She lit two cigarettes and passed one to Belsey.

Hawks smoked with her arms folded, one elbow cradled in a hand, leaning against a Gothic clay chimney pot. Her sandy hair fell just short of her shoulders. Belsey remembered a party for a retiring pathologist, when they were outside looking at the moon and she took his arm. It was instinctive and innocent. Maybe that was why he never did anything until they were leaving, when he made the clumsy pass. Strange, calling them passes, he thought. A passing-by, a gone.

Hawks took a long pull on her cigarette and studied Belsey’s face. “I heard you were having some kind of review.”

“Who told you that?”

“I forget. Is it true?”

“I’m conducting a review. I’m in a period of transition.”

“Where are you transiting to?”

“I don’t know yet. I had an out-of-money experience.”

Hawks laughed. For a second she looked younger and less wary. Then she crushed her cigarette under her heel.

“You look shattered.”

“I’m having trouble sleeping.”

“Come on,” she said.

They went back in and stood either side of the waxy corpse.

“Are you done?” she asked.

“Give me a moment.”

Hawks went and sat on a stool by the side counter. “What are you thinking?”

“What’s the mistake people make when trying to slit their own throat?”

“Is this a joke?”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t know. What is it?”

“They tilt their heads back.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“Tilt your head back.”

She did. He came over and touched her throat, running a finger along the muscle.

“That’s the platysma; it’s a fine muscle. It’s not easy to hack through.”

“Maybe he didn’t.”

“I found him with the head back,” Belsey said.

“And?”

“Could you see it being murder?”

“I’m not a police detective. There’s nothing to make me think foul play—there are trial cuts, a tapering wound, no other injuries. That’s all I can tell you.”

“What do you know about Project Boudicca?”

The pathologist stared at him. “Is she involved?”

“I think she may be.”

“Queen of the Iceni. Burnt London down. You still find Roman coins that melted together in the heat.” She looked at the clock. “It’s quarter to nine, Nick. Why am I doing your history homework for you?”

“I’m trying to broaden my education.”

“Try the coroner tomorrow. Maybe he can broaden your education.”

Belsey binned his gloves. They washed their hands together at the sink. Belsey said: “Did you know the first coroners were meant to go to shipwrecks to see how much treasure there was for the king? That’s what they were for.”

“I didn’t know that. What do you want me to do with Mr. Devereux?”

“Just get rid of him.” She dried her hands. Then she looked up at Belsey, wearily. “No. Hold on to him for the moment,” Belsey said.