Deep Shelter (13 page)

“A spy?”

“In the seventies and eighties. I’ve no idea what to make of it. He’s interested in cold-war history. A fantasist. But on to something.”

“This is insane.”

Craik sifted through the papers. Then she put them down and exhaled. Her body relaxed against his own.

“I thought I was going to die,” she said. Belsey put a hand on her back and then moved it so his arm was around her shoulders.

“Me too,” he said. “Someone shot me.”

“Oh, God.” She lifted a corner of his shirt and touched a hand to the Taser wound.

“Does it hurt?”

“Yes.”

She felt where the barb had torn a neat line.

“Have you got a shower?” Craik asked.

“Through there. I’ll get some towels.”

She went into the bathroom. He headed to the store cupboard at the end of the corridor and took a stack of towels and a bathrobe. The shower was running when he returned. He threw the towels and robe into the bathroom along with jogging bottoms and an old T-shirt. Then he poured vodka into mugs.

“Join me in problem drinking?” he called through.

“Are you serious?”

“Medicinal. It will keep us going.”

Belsey drank and the situation immediately seemed more manageable. He was getting closer. He took his shirt off and splashed some vodka on the wound, then split a hexobarbitone with his thumbnail and took a speculative half. He called the CID office. There had been no more sightings of the suspect. The forensics team was working on the package of hair; London Underground and the Transport Police were keeping an eye out for any more trespass incidents.

He emptied an ashtray into the bin and tidied some clothes away, then took a seat on the bed and listened to the water trickle off Kirsty Craik’s body. It was past midnight now.

The water stopped. After another five minutes Craik appeared. She’d gone for the robe. She was pink with heat, hair under a towel. She sat beside him, then lay back across the bed. He lay beside her. He slipped the robe off her shoulder. There was the tattoo. He couldn’t remember if the writing was Thai or Vietnamese, but knew it was meant to offer protection in battle.

“Checking it’s me?” she asked. She rolled onto her side, away from him. He watched her neck. He had the feeling of returning to a place after years and the odd wonder that it should still be there, that things go on without you, but also that you might return.

“I should have trusted you,” Craik said. “About all this.”

“Not unless you’re mad.”

He put his arm over her. She wove her fingers into his own. A train slowed into King’s Cross with an interminable hiss as if the machinery of the city itself was decompressing. Then everything was quiet. He could hear the echo of platform announcements. I can have this moment, Belsey thought. He felt he’d overcome several insurmountable laws, of time as well as morality. He inhaled the peace, dragging it deep into his lungs. This was what corrupted: peace and quiet. It was what secrets fed off, growing inside you.

“Can I ask you something?” Craik said.

“Of course.”

“Why did you just vanish?”

Belsey hesitated.

“Tonight?”

“At Borough.”

“I didn’t vanish. You were posted away. I was almost prosecuted for all manner of offences. You didn’t want me messing up your career as well.”

“I was posted two miles away. It wasn’t overseas.”

“You were on the up.”

She unlocked her hand and turned towards him, studying his face as if for later identification purposes.

“What did you really think when you saw me at Hampstead?” she asked.

“I thought about us breaking into Brockwell Lido at three in the morning. I wondered if you were going to lead me astray again.”

“That was an amazing night.” Craik smiled, then glanced around the hotel room. “Do you like living here?”

“Not particularly.”

“What’s the picture, propped against the window?”

Belsey turned to see. There was Walbrook, the well mannered crowd peering into London’s fresh wound.

“It’s a bomb crater from the Second World War. It revealed a Roman temple buried beneath the City.”

“Why is it there?”

“I don’t know.” Belsey felt the pure present collapsing. The picture brought back memories of last night. He untangled himself and went over to it. He didn’t need the polygraph of Craik’s body against his own, monitoring his heartbeat. He opened the window and lit a cigarette. “Have you been to Rome?”

“Once, a few years ago.”

“When they got rid of Nero they buried his palace. Centuries later a shepherd boy fell through a crack in the hillside and discovered it. He fell into the palace. All the treasures and artworks were still there. Everyone came and let themselves down on ropes to see it—all this art from ancient times greater than they had thought possible. There it was, buried beneath their feet.”

“You were thinking about that?”

“Not exactly. I was thinking about people sleeping in shelters and tube stations during the Blitz, trying to imagine better ways of protecting themselves. Architects sleeping down there, dreaming of something that’s going to keep them safe for ever, and then they surface and the bombs have cleared space for them to have a go. So they start flinging up things like Centre Point. They want concrete. Somewhere they can hide.”

Craik made a noise that could have been assent or a yawn. After a moment she said:

“How far did we run?”

“Golders Green to King’s Cross, four miles or so.”

“Jesus. I can feel it in my legs.”

Belsey looked at her. Her courage wasn’t news to him. A moral kind of courage: he’d seen Kirsty Craik break up pub fights and stride into bloodstained domestics. She’d probably been missing the action.

“Sleep,” he said. “We’re not going anywhere for a while.”

He went to shower. A moment later she called through:

“Who’s Jemma Stevens?”

Belsey froze, water streaming into his face. The laptop. He turned the shower off, dried himself, and made a calculation as he dressed. The loyalty card was already being analysed: he had an hour or two before her name came up. Detectives didn’t do coincidences.

Craik had his laptop up on the bed. She wore a look of amused disapproval. The screen had blinked straight to Jemma’s Facebook page.

“Cute,” she said. “Bit young for you.”

“It may be our missing person,” he said. Craik’s expression darkened. “Her flatmate called the station a few hours ago and said she’d gone AWOL. I had a look at her page while you were showering. It could be nothing.”

Craik studied Jemma’s hair in the most recent pictures. It was long and dyed black.

“Or it could be something,” she said.

“It’s something to check. I feel like I might have come across her before. She sounds like a wild child.” The fact that he had remained calm was, Belsey suspected, testament to the soothing powers of hexobarbitone. “It’s just a possibility. I called the station; there’s been no developments.”

“Jemma Stevens.” Craik lay back. “I don’t think I’m going to sleep.”

“Just rest your eyes then.”

He sat by the window. Next time he looked she had her eyes closed. Belsey assessed his immediate future. First thing that would happen tomorrow: they get a positive ID from the loyalty card. Next, Jemma Stevens comes up on the police database with Belsey as arresting officer. They visit the flatmates who recognise him from visits to the club; then they get footage from Costa matching her card and see them together a few minutes before she goes missing. As investigations go that was pretty sweet. The whole thing would be wrapped in less than three hours.

So he needed to be clever. He stood up and no clever thoughts came. He lifted his jacket from the floor and something fell out. It was an exercise book. And then he remembered—the diary from the bunker. Belsey picked it up and flicked through. Neat biro covered the pages. The entries were initialled “S.R.”—the cover signed by “Regional Controller: Suzanne Riggs.” Each page was divided down the middle: on the left side was a commentary on the state of the nation; on the right, the scene down in the bunker. This listed officers present, alarm settings used, supply levels, sickness. But nothing was as vivid as the reports coming in from the outside world.

       
Thursday, 3 November

       
Military build-up along Soviet Union border with Turkey.

       
Covert civil preparations ongoing across London. Key personnel meeting at relevant centres.

       
Wartime Broadcasting Service in place, police support units on standby, local authorities briefed.

       
Friday, 4 November

       
Fire Brigade moved out of London, plus all hospital staff within 15-mile radius of Charing Cross. Non-critical patients sent home. Schools and libraries given Level 2 protection; communications installed.

       
Protests in Camden and Southwark.

       
Petrol rationing.

Belsey read on. Things didn’t improve. By the end of Sunday, 6 November all transport was under government control including British Airways and commercial shipping. The Cabinet’s War Measures Committee had begun moving art treasures out of London, Edinburgh and Cardiff. Twelve major roads had been reserved for government traffic.

At 12:30 p.m. on 7 November the Cabinet approved Queen’s Order 2. Parliament was suspended, emergency powers activated.

That was when the panic buying became serious. Alongside increased protests and acts of sabotage. Evening of 7 November: terrorist bomb at Immingham destroyed the oil refinery and fuel stocks. A bomb at Devonport naval base killed four. The Prime Minister made three broadcasts discouraging evacuation, promising that the government was going to stay side by side with ordinary Londoners.

The place to be was the bunker. Alarm setting to black, stocks sufficient, communications 100 per cent, no sickness reported. Standing by.

The banks closed on Tuesday 8, the same day the BBC suspended weather forecasts and Warsaw Pact divisions entered Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, King’s Cross and Paddington stations shut down due to a mass attempt to flee the capital.

World War III began at 11 a.m.

       
11:05. Attack Warning sounded.

       
11:32. Three 20-megaton ground-bursts. Croydon, Brentford and Heathrow destroyed.

       
12:00. Putney Bridge and Wandsworth Bridge down, plus elevated section of the M4.

       
16:00. First radiation sickness reported across Essex and Cambridgeshire.

       
Wind NW.

Four more waves of attacks came over the next twenty-four hours. When the smoke cleared the first stats arrived: two and a half thousand dead in Barking; Southwark close second with over two thousand casualties. Camden and Westminster fared better: fifteen hundred dead between them but a lot of survivors trapped under houses.

Belsey tried to remember November 1983. He had been nine years old, living in Lewisham, preparing for life as a professional footballer while avoiding an alcoholic detective father.
Lewisham—1300 dead, 8000 injured
.

He got up to fix another drink.

What did he do in the cold war? He remembered the Soviet Union on maps, Reagan, Thatcher, a theatre group that visited his secondary school and performed a play about the bomb. CND put on an exhibition at Catford Library showing Japanese children with third-degree burns. He didn’t remember half the population disappearing. London appeared to still be there tonight, rain-soaked. It had survived, even if the peace felt fragile.

He sat down again, beside the window, leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

Ferryman.

Why take Jemma? What did he want Belsey to do? There are obsessives, Monroe warned. Cold-war obsessives. Spy obsessives. An individual alights on the mysterious figure of Ferryman. What does it mean to them? Ferryman’s someone at the heart of the secret state, betraying it; he passed intelligence on and then disappeared. That was something to idolise, Belsey supposed. And everyone liked spies. They resembled us, only ever half in their own lives. But with a purpose. They survived on a familiar diet of deception and selective betrayal. Sometimes they got away. Ferryman was a myth and still perhaps in the world, in the London of 2013, abandoned on his island of secrecy.

Belsey saw the deep shelters being passed from war to war, preserved in the ice of the nuclear age. He saw the tunnels, and then Jemma bound to the HANDEL machine. When he next opened his eyes the room had turned grey with morning. Craik’s phone was ringing. He found it among her clothes and gently shook her awake.

“It’s the station,” Belsey said. “Want it?”

Craik swung herself upright. Belsey went into the bathroom and splashed his face. He could hear the conversation.

“No, not
all
CCTV. Establish where and when the card was last used, which branch. Then, if there’s footage, whether she was with anyone. It’s not complicated. Have them send it directly to me.”

Belsey was thinking he could do with some coffee. His muscles were stiff from the electrocution. He walked back into the room and his own phone rang. It wasn’t the station; it was a local landline. Very local: same initial digits as the hotel.

“Hello?” Belsey said. No one spoke. He checked the signal; the call was connected. He walked over to the window. “Belsey speaking.”

No one speaking back. No one hanging up either.

Craik said: “I’ll head over now. No, I’m not at home. I’m . . . close by.”

Belsey grabbed a shirt and stepped out to the corridor.

“Talk to me,” he said.

“Did I disturb the two of you?”

The voice was calm, soft. Background of street—a car passing, a shutter being rolled up. Then the clunk of coin; a phone box. Belsey walked to the window at the end of the corridor and checked the slice of Caledonian Road beneath it. No one there.

The two of you
. Had he followed them from St. Pancras last night?