Deep Shelter (3 page)

He got back to the station and sat at his desk. The office was empty, fan still turning. The real world felt disappointing after his adventure. He reached into his pocket and retrieved a pill bottle, studying it in the light. It was real. Belsey wondered when he could go back down. Live his Blitz fantasy. Take shelter. What did he know about London in the War? He saw the dome of St. Paul’s, indomitable, surrounded by destruction. He’d been told that in Regent’s Park there was rubble from bombed houses buried ten feet deep. In summer the grass died above it because the bricks couldn’t hold water.

He turned his computer on, typed
Blitz
into his browser and clicked
I’m feeling lucky
. A black and white photograph appeared. It showed a group of people standing next to a fresh bomb crater.
A Crowd on Walbrook, 2 May 1941
. The caption stated that one and a half thousand people had been killed in raids the previous night. Belsey looked at the faces of the crowd, expecting numb shock. But some were smiling. They had formed an orderly queue, waiting to peer down. He read the caption fully.
Members of the public queued to see the temple of Mithras, a Roman temple forgotten beneath the City of London, revealed by the overnight bombing
. Belsey tried to see the temple in the blackened crater. He printed a copy and folded it into his jacket.

Maybe he could go down tomorrow. He should have brought up a bottle of champagne for his date. That would have been cute. And then he had a better idea.

He put the pill bottles away in his desk then took one out again. He dropped half a benzylpiperazine. If it was stale it wouldn’t kill him, if it was still lively it would knock the dust off and get him bright-eyed and articulate. He stood up and checked the window. The late shift was arriving. There was some impressive sunburn; no one looked very happy. Sirens came from every direction as the evening began to curdle. London was turning edgy with undelivered promises.

Late shift, which meant it was almost 8 p.m.

Belsey shaved in the CID toilets. The swelling had gone down, which looked more appropriate for a date, if less heroic. There was no time to get home first, not that it was ever tempting. Home, currently, was the crumbling Hotel President on Caledonian Road. The arrangement had been a stop-gap while Belsey looked for a flat and had extended to six months now. It meant he could pay by the week and never had to worry about running out of soap. He didn’t spend more time there than he had to. He shaved, showered, splashed on some of Trapping’s Calvin Klein aftershave, found a box of condoms at the back of his desk drawer.

Halfway out of the station he saw Kirsty Craik, alone in the canteen. The canteen’s shutters were all down. Belsey stopped. He felt a pang of guilt about the shelter, a pang of lingering disbelief that she should have reappeared in his life. He brushed his suit again.

“Working overtime already.”

She looked up, a little weary, not ungrateful for distraction. In front of her were personnel files.

“Just pausing before home. It’s cooler down here.”

“Where are you living?”

“Kentish Town.”

“Good area.”

She nodded and studied him with an expression he remembered: contemplative, undecided.

“Do we need to talk?” Craik asked.

“We’re OK, I think. As far as I’m concerned you’re the new DS. I’ve seen you in action and you’re good. Professionally, I mean. I’m looking forward to it.”

She smiled, then softened her smile.

“You’re on restricted duties.” Belsey nodded. So she’d checked his file. What kind of journey would she imagine he’d been on, reading that? “How are you finding it?” Craik asked.

“Restrictive.” He wondered what else she’d been told, pictured her face as she was warned about him:
Oh, he’s trouble, is he
? “Things are fine, though. Much better. But when full duty wants me back I’m ready to serve. Restricted sometimes feels like being a Community Support Officer.”

“You could visit schools, give talks.” Craik smiled.

“I’d happily visit schools and give talks.”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to be sending you to any schools, Nick.”

She was watching him, calculating something. Old flame was a strange expression, Belsey thought. Maybe that was the point. It was all made more complicated by the way memory gets thick with fantasy. And they had liked each other. That had been the problem, although he couldn’t put his finger on the logic of it right now.

“This must be odd for you,” she said.

“Odd for both of us. But there are odder things in life. Last month I attended a scene where someone had broken into a vet’s surgery and OD’d on Euthasol. They were there, stretched out on the operating table. We work well together, you know that. I said you’d rise fast.”

He prepared to leave before the conversation got deeper. Then she surprised him.

“Where’s good for a late bite around here? Dark rum and dry roasted peanuts—that was your dinner of choice, I seem to recall.”

The late hour had turned the gleam of her eyes opaque. Good CID eyes, hard to read. But the offer was clear enough. Part of him would have loved to. There would be time, he thought. If this was how it was going to go.

“On the high street head to La Traviata. It’s better than it looks. Or try Carluccio’s. Skip Nights of India. Believe me.” He smiled again, didn’t offer to accompany her, and she cast a detective’s gaze across his suit and fresh shave. He felt the reek of Calvin Klein coming off him.

“You’ve got a date.”

“Just meeting a friend.”

“OK, Nick. Don’t be late for your friend.” She turned back to the paperwork but not quick enough to hide her blush.

“See you tomorrow. Bright and early to catch the library robbers.”

He left, amused by a faint regret. Then his phone buzzed, and all thoughts evaporated:
On way
, three kisses.

Jemma with a J, as she’d introduced herself in the custody suite. Someone who was all future. His chat-up line: “You take three grams of cocaine on a political protest? How much fun is it meant to be?” Third date, three kisses. Time to put a plan into action.

He visited the florist’s by Belsize Park station and bought a bunch of carnations with cream petals and crimson edges. The Co-op only had birthday candles, but they were better than nothing. He bought a box of twenty. He bought new batteries for the Maglite, paid ten pence for an extra-large shopping bag to hide it all in. He went into the Haverstock Arms and ordered two glasses of cava, drank them, placed the glasses in the bag with the torch and flowers.

Jemma with a J was twenty-two years old: a student of art, a tequila girl and a political protestor. Three noble ways to pass the time. She’d love it. She’d get to know him a little better. And it would save him the embarrassment of explaining his current living arrangements. So far he had visited the club where she worked a couple of times, paid for one dinner together, then last weekend she invited him to some free drinks at a gallery launch. Still no bed time. She’d asked for a glimpse of his life, perhaps in that misguided belief that police detectives roll with some kind of glamour. Other than the glamour they make for themselves. He was going to show her his art.

JEMMA WAS WAITING OUTSIDE BELSIZE PARK
tube station, dressed for heat: cut-off shorts, vest top and sandals, large shades pinning down long black hair. They kissed and he forgot a lot of potential complications.

“What’s in the bag?” she asked.

“A surprise.”

“Grab a coffee?”

They sat for a moment in the Costa with the shelter turret at its back, talked about their days, the bank robbers he’d caught, criminal empires brought down; then her work, sleazy men in the club, an art piece she was making with Lego and broken glass. She had wry mascaraed eyes and a smile that gave the lie to them, excitable, too young for him.

“Jemma, are you up for an adventure?”

“Yes.”

“I want to show you something.”

Belsey took her hand. They left the coffee shop and turned into the alleyway beside it. He led her towards the shelter. She looked at Belsey, puzzled.

“What is it?”

“A space ship.” He directed her to the cut fence and the chair, still in place beneath the window. “Are you OK climbing through?”

“Sure.” She shifted her handbag around and climbed in, making it look easy. “What the hell is this?” she asked from inside.

“This is where I live,” Belsey said. He dropped down beside her.

“You’re joking.”

“I’m joking.” He gave her the Maglite and pointed towards the stairs. “Lift’s out of order.”

“What’s down there?”

“Monsters.”

She led them down.

“Are we allowed to be in here?”

“Of course. That’s why they keep it clean and well lit.”

They stepped over the corrugated panel labelled
No Entry
and he directed her to the warden’s post.

“Go in and close your eyes,” Belsey instructed. She did as she was told. He followed. He lit three birthday candles, used their wax to stick them to the warden’s table, arranged the flowers in the empty bottle and set the champagne flutes up next to a fresh one.

“OK, you can open them.”

“Oh my God.” She laughed. “What the fuck, Nick? Whose birthday is it?”

“Ours. We’ve known each other precisely forty-two days.”

“Do I blow them out and make a wish?”

“You blow them out, I make a wish. You have to see if you can feel what it is.”

She punched him in the chest. He sat down and poured the drinks while she explored. The benzylpiperazine was working. He felt electric.

“Is this where you take all the girls?”

“I only found it today.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a bomb shelter from the Second World War.” He retrieved a first-aid kit from the dorm, emptied it onto the warden’s table and unscrewed the bottles: reds, blues, whites. Pills to make you bigger, pills to make you small. He read the labels again: the drugs apparently belonged to Site 3. Where was Site 3 and its party?

Jemma took her drink and sat on his lap. She plucked a carnation and threaded it into her hair. She kissed him.

“We’re celebrating a windfall,” Belsey said. “Plan is we enjoy ourselves, then take the bottles up. I sell them and we split the profit. You could walk off a few hundred quid up.”

“Just for coming down here?”

“For helping me carry them up. That’s my estimation.” He poured more champagne. They drank, kissed again and he slid a hand under the frayed hem of her cut-offs. She wriggled off him. Then she blew the candles out.

“Wow.”

There was that velvety darkness again. They were sinking through it. Belsey found his lighter and waited. He felt a hand on his crotch. Then it went. Then a few seconds later a torch beam appeared, deep in the dorm. It was Jemma.

“Happy birthday to us,” she sang.

Belsey stood up, felt his way to the dorm entrance and watched her explore among the bunk beds and boxes of drink. She clicked the Maglite off then on again.

“Can you hear something?” she said.

“What did you hear?”

“I don’t know. Where does it all lead?”

“It doesn’t.” He returned to the table, lit a candle, opened the rest of the first-aid boxes and began filling his jacket with their contents. He was uneasy.

“Jemma?”

“Yeah.”

“Be careful.”

“Why?”

“Break a leg down here and I’m not sure they’d get the ambulance down the stairs.”

She giggled. He downed his champagne. Then he heard a man singing. It was very faint. Belsey told himself he was imagining things.

“Jemma?”

“Nick? Is that you?”

The birthday candle flickered. Belsey looked around. Something at the back of the dorm creaked stiffly.

“Hang on, Jemma. Stay there.”

Belsey took the candle and walked into the dorm. Bunk cages danced in the wavering light. No sign of her. He waited for his date to jump out. That would be classic. She didn’t.

“Are you OK?” he called, and his voice sounded like the voice of someone on their own.

Belsey made a circuit of the dorm and arrived back at the spiral stairs. But he would have heard if she went back that way. He called up them, then returned to the warden’s post, pocketed the box of candles and walked through the dorm again. The candles were pathetic. He used the light from his iPhone instead. He headed past the cases of champagne. Had she been drunk enough to fall? Maybe she was pre-loaded when they met. At the end of the dorm he saw that a bunk had been pulled askew to reveal another door out. This door had been painted over at some point, forced open more recently. The wood around the lock was splintered. Belsey walked through into a narrow brick passageway. It turned sharp left after a couple of metres and you were at the start of a low, rounded tunnel. The tunnel stretched as far as Belsey could see.

“Jemma!’

He began along it, running. Thirty seconds later he saw something on the ground and the nightmare became a little more concrete. It was Jemma’s bag, the strap broken at one end, a sequinned purse still inside. No phone—but he’d felt that in the back pocket of her shorts. Belsey checked the break of the strap and listened to a silence that now had a very different tenor. He headed on, still gripping the bag.

The tunnel presumably led to the other shelter entrance. It was just about tall enough to stand in. Belsey could hear his own blood pulse. He couldn’t hear anyone else. He half walked, half ran as much as the narrow strip between the curved sides allowed. It was marked with tracks where something had been dragged. He followed these tracks, using the light of his phone. After ten minutes in the tunnel he knew he had gone too far to connect with the other entrance. He kept walking. He assumed for some reason he was heading south, under Haverstock Hill, under Chalk Farm. He listened for the rumble of tube trains. Nothing. Every couple of hundred metres there was a bulb behind wire mesh, none lit. No visible security of any kind.

“Jemma.”

Belsey made a loop out of the bag’s strap, knotted it and slung it over his shoulder. He walked for another twenty minutes. If his hunch that he was heading south was right, he would be under Camden now, passing beneath the crowded pubs and teen tourists, under the canal and the market stalls. Eventually he reached a T-junction. A passage, identical to the one he was on, veered off to the left. It added a whole new level of complexity, turning a simple tunnel into a potential maze. Belsey imagined leaving the medication in a trail. He called her name again. He searched around for any signs of which way someone might have gone. Stencilled in red paint onto the concrete of his original route were the words:
Passholders only
.