Deep Shelter (5 page)

What was any of it?

Trapping packed up.

“Going to sleep under the desk again?” Trapping asked. He held his jacket, a bag of Japanese food and a couple of bootleg DVDs.

“Saves time in the morning.”

When he was gone Belsey dialled Jemma’s mobile again, hesitated before leaving a message, then reasoned that if someone got to checking her phone records they’d be all over him anyway.

“Call me,” he said. “Let me know if you’re OK.”

He emptied his pockets. The pharmacy covered his paperwork. Eleven bottles in all and some foil-wrapped packets marked
oral administration
. He split the foil. Inside was a small plastic stick, shaped like a cotton bud, with writing along the shaft:
1200 mcg fentanyl citrate
.

There was only one thing that wasn’t in his pockets: his police badge.

Belsey searched them again, more urgently. He checked his desk. Did he take it out with him? Of course he took it out. It was gone. He pictured it sinking into antique slime. It wasn’t his greatest problem, but it was the one that brought unavoidable consequences soonest. What other traces had he left down there? A lot of prints, champagne glasses, some flowers, a box of birthday candles, her bag.

He needed to get a grip on this.

He showered and found a spare shirt and a clean pair of trainers in his locker. He searched Trapping’s desk to see if his colleague had received anything connected to Jemma or the tunnels. The paperwork was all requests from Kirsty, minor queries to which Trapping was responding with unprecedented care and attention. He’d fallen in love. Good luck to him. Belsey put the bottles in his desk drawer and ran Jemma’s name through the Police National Computer. There were the details he himself had entered: Jemma Stevens, born 2/5/1991, cautioned for possession of a controlled substance 1 May 2013: home address 34 Kynaston Road, N16. Arresting officer DC Nick Belsey.

He took her house keys from his jacket. It was quarter to midnight.

SHE SHARED A RAMSHACKLE END TERRACE ON THE
border of Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill, between the organic cafes and the orthodox synagogues. Belsey parked outside. No lights on in the house. He walked to the front door and peered through the letter box. A shabby hallway: one pair of men’s trainers and a lot of women’s shoes. No sandals. He let himself in.

A corridor led through the ground floor with a living room to the left. It smelt of weed and stale beer. Belsey looked into the living room. A boy snored on the sofa. Cans covered the coffee table edge to edge. He continued down the corridor to a door at the end, opened it and watched a blonde girl sleeping. Early night for all. Must have been a big weekend. He had a very vague recollection of meeting her at Euphoria, the club where Jemma worked. Another tequila girl. Latvian. She lay diagonally across the bed, a thin arm pushing a duvet off her naked body. Belsey eased the door shut.

He went upstairs and tried the door beside a small bathroom. It led into another bedroom. Paintings and sculptures covered the floor and walls. There were photographs of Jemma with friends, a portfolio case, a lot of clothes and loose papers. Belsey stepped inside. He could smell her. Make-up lay strewn across a dresser, underwear in a pile on the floor. So he’d finally made it to her bedroom. He found a tissue and wiped his prints off the door handle and kept the tissue wrapped around his hand. It was a gesture: he’d already trailed DNA all over the place. A note on the bedside table said
Belsize Park, 8
. He took it. Above the bed was a calendar with shifts marked in. No mention of their date. She wasn’t due at work until the night after next.

He walked back to the living room and crouched close to the sleeper’s face. Belsey recognised him too. A guy who worked behind the bar at Euphoria. He’d served Belsey several times. Kiwi, well built, fixed a good mojito. Had clearly fixed himself a few. The reek of ashtray and stale beer triggered a sharp comedown. The surface of the world was broad and varied, but it did not contain the one thing he was looking for. He had lost someone underground. Belsey walked to the front door, let himself out and eased it shut.

HE RETURNED TO HAMPSTEAD
police station with the joyrider on his mind, increasingly sure that this was his suspect. He was the only other person with a connection to the shelter and the tunnels. The dark grey hood. And someone had broken into the dormitory, oiled the hinges, made themselves at home. Found themselves a neat getaway for when police were chasing them.

The station was quieter now. Belsey turned the lights back on in the CID office and ran some checks. The BMW had been stolen from outside its owner’s house in NW6, reported four p.m. on Friday 7 June. It looked like the thief got keys from just inside the front door. As car manufacturers got more ingenious at preventing hotwiring, car thieves got more ingenious at simply taking the keys. The summer’s trend was a powerful magnet strung on a fishing rod and dangled through the letter box. Urban angling.

No witnesses to the car theft. The thief then had the BMW for three days before his race down Rosslyn Hill. It didn’t come up in connection with any crimes in the interim.

While he had the force intelligence system up Belsey ran a search for any Red Lions that had reported loss of stock. Nothing on the system. But then the records only went back ten years.

Belsey went over to the borough map on the wall of the CID office. He traced the line a tunnel would have to follow, beneath Belsize, beneath Camden to the library in King’s Cross. Just under three miles. Where else might it lead?

He found a twenty-four-hour number for emergencies relating to Camden Council facilities. A man answered with the tone of someone paid to wait for a call and not delighted to receive one.

“Do you know anything about the cold-war bunker, under St. Pancras Library?”

“About what?”

“The bunker.”

“Is this a wind-up?”

“No. There’s an old communications room, set up for a nuclear war or something.”

“This is for emergencies with council facilities.”

“This is an emergency with a council facility.”

“Comedian.” He hung up. As a final stab Belsey typed in
London deep shelters
. He clicked the first link that came up.
The government began construction of deep level shelters under London in 1940
. . .

There were eight that had been used. Belsize Park, Camden and Goodge Street in north London. South of the river there were shelters at Clapham South, Clapham Common, Clapham North, Stockwell and Oval. A ninth, at Chancery Lane, was never put into operation. One at St. Paul’s was started but not completed.

They’d been built in secret. Work took place between 1940 and 1942. Until then, London’s population had been using tube platforms during air raids. Then bombs hit Bank and Balham tube stations killing 124 people already underground. The government decided it was time to dig deeper.

It wasn’t clear how the veil of secrecy was finally lifted. Belsey imagined London waking to find these defences sprung up, overnight, like mushrooms. Originally they were used by the government. In 1944 they were opened to the general public. There was no mention of connecting tunnels between them. No suggestion of communications rooms from 1983. But one obscure reference on a trainspotter’s website gave him pause:

It was originally claimed that following the conclusion of the war the deep tunnels would be joined together to constitute an express route beneath the congested Northern Line offering speedy access to the West End and City, but as Londoners are fully aware, this has never transpired.

But something had transpired.

Belsey printed out everything he could find on the shelters—articles, web pages, essays. He rescued a battered Umbro kitbag from beneath his desk, shook out some loose tobacco and replaced it with the medication bottles, the notes on the shelters and finally Jemma’s purse. He needed to find her. Spending all night in the CID office wasn’t going to help.

He got into the Skoda and drove around Belsize Park, down to the Camden shelter behind M&S. He drove past Euphoria on Eversholt Street, its short, desperate queue waiting for 1 a.m., when the entry fee dropped to three pounds. Then past her house again. He didn’t know how this was going to help. When he almost crashed into a cyclist on Stoke Newington Road he decided to head home.

QUARTER PAST ONE, HOTEL PRESIDENT. MARTYNA,
the night receptionist, nodded as he walked in.

“Long day, Nick. Busy?”

“Not really. You?”

“Busy? Here?”

He took the lift up to his room on the fifth floor. The place was empty as ever, a maze of peeling plaster and worn carpets. The current owner lived in Belarus, while he waited to convert it into something profitable. A German website confused it with a hotel of the same name and occasional families stayed for a disappointing night before leaving. Martyna worked triple-shifts and slept behind the desk. Peace reigned.

Belsey’s room sweated above the tracks of King’s Cross. He could hear the trains through the night, grinding on their rails like someone sharpening knives. If he leaned out of his window he could see the steep, brick back of Pentonville Prison. That gave him food for thought. Bringing Jemma here didn’t seem like such an awful option in retrospect.

He sat on the edge of his bed. Propped beside it was a gift that Jemma had given him the first time they met, a square of broken placard sprayed with the advice
Fuck the Feds
. He’d been asked to remove it from the CID office. Now Belsey turned it to face the wall. He tried her mobile again without success. The purse in his bag felt like a ticking bomb. He took it out and put it in a drawer, then took it out of the drawer down to the hotel basement, through the sad shadows of Disco President and wedged it in the cavity beneath a bench seat.

He returned to his room and opened his laptop, logged into Facebook and found Jemma’s page. He looked for photos of himself. None that he could see. Ten minutes later he was still sifting through images of her life. He studied the other men, knowing they would deflect attention from him should any investigation arise and not certain how he should feel about this.

At 2 a.m. he put the laptop down, opened his window and checked his phone wasn’t on silent. The night was cooling. He emptied his pockets, unfolded a piece of paper. There was the crowd on Walbrook, staring at the Roman temple. Belsey propped the picture on the windowsill and thought of the journey he had walked, the old communications equipment, the noxious sludge. And somewhere down there was his police badge. He would have to report it, devise some explanation for his new line manager and former lover.
Where’s good for a late bite around here?
He should have gone with Kirsty. What hadn’t even been a decision now appeared as a crossroads, with endless implications. The fuck-up was great.

Belsey drifted into a thin, uncertain sleep as he contemplated it. He dreamed of a room filled with 1980s furniture, brown sofas around a steel mortuary slab. Suddenly it became busy. Jemma Stevens was wheeled in, naked and very pale. A forensic pathologist lifted the skin away from her chest, prised the girl’s ribcage apart and, with glee, showed Belsey her internal organs blackened by dirt, hardened like concrete.

AT 6 A.M. HE DROVE BACK TO BELSIZE PARK. THE
sky was bright already, with the soft, lemon light that spelt another hot day. The shelter entrance behind Costa was as he left it. He climbed in again, called again.

He drove by Jemma’s home and counted the same shoes through the letter box. He unlocked the front door and walked up the stairs, past the same snoring, to the darkness of her bedroom and back down again.

Into the station. The sound of hoovering filled the corridors, the chatter of the Uruguayan cleaners. Belsey ran every system check he could think of, looking for someone who might fit his tunneler: men currently wanted for sex crimes and abduction; men recently released from sentences for such crimes; men on the run, possibly in London. No leads. And no overnight reports that connected. On the plus side, no bodies had been found. Then Belsey saw the brown envelope propped against his monitor.

It was blank, A3 size. He picked it up, shook it and his police badge fell out.

Belsey stared at the badge. It rested against his keyboard. He switched his desk lamp on and could see a layer of orange-brown sediment over the imitation leather wallet. He checked the envelope again. No markings, uncreased, nothing else inside.

Julia Coates was on the front desk, busy giving herself a manicure.

“Did someone bring this in?” Belsey asked, showing her both badge and envelope.

“Yes. A member of the public, I think. Said they found it, you lucky sod. What have you been up to?”

“Did you see them?”

“Not me. It was Patrick. Couple of hours ago.”

“Can you check the book?”

She checked the duty log and read: “Badge and warrant card belonging to DC Belsey returned, 4:20 a.m. Individual declines to leave name.”

“Nothing else?”

“No. Why? Were you offering a reward?”

“Could you get the tapes up?”

She frowned, then wheeled her chair over to the CCTV monitor. It took a moment. She got the shot up.

The station entrance led into what was essentially a cubicle with the front counter protected by a Perspex screen, a bench to the right beneath a noticeboard, one camera trained on the ledge in front of the screen.

What you saw was that Patrick was a liar. He wasn’t on the desk—he’d left it for ten seconds to retrieve a cup of tea. Whoever handed the badge in must have been waiting and knew where the camera was. They held back, never quite stepping into view. They left the envelope on the ledge, in front of the Perspex. They wore gloves.

“Pause it.”

The gloves. Belsey thought of the joyrider running. Black gloves. On the screen you could see that they had a back panel, a strap, and what looked like paler fingertips, possibly retractable.