Deep Shelter (6 page)

“Those are specialist gloves.”

“A biker,” Coates said.

“Or a climber.”

Belsey went back upstairs and checked the envelope again. He turned his computer on and saw he had mail. A message had arrived at 4:14 a.m. to his work email address. From [email protected]. Subject line:
Did you get your badge?

Belsey opened the email. It consisted of a photograph of a building, or a slice of building: concrete and windows. The side of an office block. No detail visible through the windows. The concrete was grey and stained.

Someone could find his work email easily enough on the station website. But why send this? His tunneler having an episode, perhaps, working their own violent logic, tripping on Dexedrine and hearing voices give bad instructions. He read the subject line again, then the name, Ferryman, and tried to attach it to the image of the building. The shot was pretty. In a strange way. The honeycomb pattern of the deep-set windows receding into the sky, sunshine glaring the top right corner. Was it meant to be some kind of invitation? A clue?

He looked up Tempmail. It was a service that provided you with a temporary email address, no sign-up, no password, totally anonymous; destroyed content after fourteen days. He clicked
reply
, changed the subject line to:
Curious
. He typed:
Thanks, tell me more
, then clicked
send
.

Belsey ran “Ferryman” through the national system in case the name came up in connection with any other crimes. No one had logged it. He waited ten minutes. No reply. He printed a copy of the email. It was only when he was studying the printout that he saw a line of text beneath the photograph:

Jemma says don’t leave me down here
.

He felt sick.

He went downstairs, got the axe again, took a head torch, gloves and a stab vest, and went to his car.

NO ATTEMPT AT BEING
discreet this time. He parked by the coffee shop and marched down the alleyway, armed and equipped. His heart sunk. Two uniformed police stood in front of the shelter, Constables Andy Durham and Ravni Singh, with a man he recognised as one of the Costa baristas.

“What’s going on?” Belsey said.

“Someone’s been messing around with the fence here. What are you doing up this early, Nick?” They saw the equipment in his hand.

“Couldn’t sleep. Messing around doing what?”

“The fence has been cut.”

Belsey gave it a look.

“Got any theories?” Singh asked.

“Seems a strange place to break into,” Belsey said.

HE DROVE DOWN TO
St. Pancras Library. 7:10 a.m. The library was shut. He went around the back of the building. There was a delivery van with its doors open, parked beside a service entrance, someone trying to balance a vending machine on a porter’s trolley. Belsey walked in alongside the new machine, then headed for the library.

He was past the issue desk, moving down the stairs when someone ran around the corner in a security uniform.

“Stop,” he shouted.

The guard was young, black, with sharp sideburns and a two-way radio.

“It’s OK,” Belsey said.

“Stay there. I’ve called the police.”

“I’m police. There’s nothing to worry about.”

A second guard appeared, seven foot, with a boxer’s flat face: “That’s him. That’s the man on the tapes.”

“I need to go down here. Someone’s life may be in danger.”

“You’re not going anywhere.”

Belsey gripped the axe a little tighter. It seemed to get their attention. He carried on down the stairs to a staff-only corridor. The guards followed him at a safe distance. The corridor ended at a small staff room he hadn’t seen before. He tried a few doors to the side but they were locked. His memory of the place was fogged with adrenalin. He searched for his dirty footprints but couldn’t see any.

He tried the other direction, opening a lot of small storerooms, none of which contained a cupboard marked
Cleaners Only
or a door down into a bunker. The guards kept with him.

“It was here,” Belsey said. “There was a cleaners’ room, a corridor, an office. Where’s the cleaners’ cupboard?”

“You’re looking for the cleaners’ cupboard?”

Finally a man with cropped hair ran around the corner, speaking into a radio handset.

“Boss,” someone called. “He’s got an axe.”

The security boss was short and fierce. Either he didn’t hear the warning or he was ready to lay down his life for his library. He placed himself between Belsey and the next set of doors. Then before Belsey knew what was going on the man had a hand up in his face and Belsey was grabbing his wrist, throwing him to the floor. He was going for his cuffs, thinking: What am I doing? He stopped. This was stupid. This was what happened: you piled mistakes on top of each other. You became conspicuous.

He lifted the security guard to his feet and walked out.

THIS WAS SMOOTH, HE THOUGHT, BLEAKLY; THIS
was all going well.

Into the office again and it was still only quarter to eight, sun now burning accusations through the window. No response from Ferryman in his inbox. Belsey looked at the original email, the picture of the windows. He sifted through a list of other crimes he should be investigating: a spate of stolen mobility scooters, someone selling ecstasy to twelve-year-olds. He checked the news. Refugees. Fighters on the back of a lorry. That was as useful as it got.

He stepped out to the fire escape and tried to borrow some early-morning clarity. Panic was never useful. It drew attention. Attention right now meant arrest. That was one course of action, of course: come clean, take his chances. Only there were no chances. First rule of detective work: find the guy who led the girl into the abandoned tunnels from which she never returned. The phrase “slam dunk” rattled around his brain. He had never in his entire working life heard any London police officer use it and yet no other choice of words seemed appropriate. The case would be a slam dunk even if he had no previous; as it was he had a particularly lavish disciplinary record, violence and substance abuse being highlights. He’d been close to getting thrown out of the force on several occasions. He’d met the girl by arresting her, for Christ’s sake. He knew what added up; that was his job.

He needed to stay un-arrested then. The abductor wanted to play. That wasn’t necessarily the worst situation. Usually, if you’re going to kill someone you do it quickly. His joyrider, this Ferryman, was playing games and that worked best if Jemma remained alive. Right now it was possible Belsey was the only one willing or able to play along.

He was left with three questions: Where was she? Who was Ferryman? What did they want? To answer the last question first: he knew at least that they wanted
something
. At the very least they wanted Belsey to play detective. That was a role he had rehearsed.

Who was he? Belsey wrote down what he knew. The profile of the man he had chased down Rosslyn Hill: white male, physically able to handle himself, auto-theft skills, local knowledge, comfort zone extending two hundred feet beneath the surface of the earth. Wears gloves in a heatwave. Gloves indicated preparation and intent and forensic concern, all of which distinguished you from ninety-nine per cent of lawbreakers. And then he’d set up an untraceable email account—so add computer-literate. High intelligence.

The individual knew where to find Hampstead police station. He paid a visit. He got himself
involved
with police. Maybe he had bad history with law enforcement. A score to settle. Belsey checked the obvious databases: Registered Sex Offenders, police harassers; he checked recent sex crimes, then all unsolved violent crimes in the borough, then abductions of young women going back ten years. He cross-checked abductions and auto theft. He didn’t turn up anything useful. He looked for any references to tunnels, but nothing connected at all. Finally he phoned John Cassidy, a grass who knew the local car-thieving community as well as anyone. Cassidy hadn’t heard anything about a BMW or a deep shelter or a looted Red Lion.

A skilled criminal with no apparent connections. They existed. They were a rare breed. They tended to keep themselves apart for good reasons: efficiency, distrust, penchants that were judged ill-advised even by the criminal fraternity. Like subterranean kidnapping.

Which led him back to the first question: Where was she? Belsey interrogated the wall map again, face close to it as if, by refocusing his eyes, a new pattern might appear beneath the familiar postcodes. Belsize Park to King’s Cross. He walked that route last night, under Haverstock Hill, under Camden High Street. He didn’t see her. She wasn’t there and hadn’t surfaced. The T-junction he’d seen last night, that tunnel veering off to the left began to haunt him.

He put a notice out through the all-points system, a high priority query to CID in other boroughs: Have you had any incidents involving your deep-level bomb shelters? The strangest request he’d ever sent.

He got six calls in fifteen minutes.

ON THE NIGHT OF
Saturday, 1 June, the weekend before last, while the city was drunk and distracted, a white male in a stolen white Vauxhall van had driven around deep shelters in central and south London, apparently trying to get in. He’d drawn enough attention to have his own file created.

23.45, 1 June—intruder reported at Whitfield Street property to rear of Goodge Street shelter. Police attended. Retrieved a ladder suspected to have been used in attempted entry. Suspect not found.

Fifty-five minutes later three drivers reported seeing an individual with a power tool attempting to enter the Stockwell deep shelter. Individual departed before police arrived. Fled in a white van.

01.18—Clapham South deep shelter. Damage discovered to steel doors after reports by members of the public concerning an individual seen tampering with them. Suspect ID: white male, dark sports clothing, rucksack. Fled in a white van, but not before a witness wrote down the make and registration. Vauxhall Vivaro, five years old, stolen that morning. Belsey printed out the list of the incidents and found his
A-Z
in his desk drawer. It was coming apart, page by page, like every Londoner’s, the result of living in a city you’d never entirely get your head around. But he needed something he could mark up. Amid the increasingly unstable surfaces of London there was something comforting in a paper map. He turned through, marked the city’s eight deep shelters with a cross, then put it in the Umbro bag and took the bag to his car.

HE DROVE TO ONE
shelter after the other, before rush hour clogged the roads and the present reformed itself. It seemed, in the dawn, they’d stepped forward. They were weights, holding the city in place.

All shelters were constructed identically, but each turret had acquired its own character over time. On Tottenham Court Road, the Goodge Street station bunker had an entrance that maintained the sober brown brickwork of a neighbouring church. Its sister tower, on a side street, was painted in cream and pink stripes. Belsey tried to imagine it connecting back up to Camden, to Belsize Park.

Stockwell’s south tower was behind garages on Studley Road. No visible damage. The northern entrance drew all the attention, sitting multicoloured on a traffic island in the centre of Stockwell roundabout. Belsey used to drive past it, heading into Brixton from his old posting at Borough. Lambeth council had taken responsibility for its own street art, commissioning a bright mural of local war heroes to cover the tower’s curved walls. Belsey walked around the base until he saw damage. The rainbow-coloured slats of a vent had been mangled, opening a small aperture to the darkness inside. He put his mouth to the hole.

“Hello?” And then, feeling as ridiculous as he did desperate: “Jemma?”

It was seven miles back under central London to Belsize Park. Long tunnel if it connected. Again, Belsey tried to see it from the abductor’s perspective; he wondered about the mechanics of forcing someone through that network. But then it wasn’t too hard to force all sorts of things when you’ve got someone alone underground.

Clapham South had one entrance tower on Balham Hill, the other rising from the dew of Clapham Common. He hadn’t been in the area since the riots. You could still see faint scars where the bins had melted. But everything was sparkling again. The suspicious individual had been spotted on the common. Belsey found several small holes at chest height in the shelter’s metal entrance panel. He listened, although he didn’t know what he expected to hear. An officer drove by and stopped. He was small, eager, deeply tanned. Belsey showed his badge.

“I’m interested in the man who was messing around with this a couple of Saturdays ago.”

“Someone really wanted to get in,” the officer said. “Member of the public saw sparks. Blowtorch.”

“Did he gain access?”

“I don’t know. It was locked when we arrived.”

“Do you know if he was caught on any cameras?”

“There’s nothing. But his vehicle connects to an incident on the Central Hill Estate, Gipsy Hill. Same night. They might have more.”

“What kind of incident?”

“Vandalism again.”

“Is there a shelter there?”

“I don’t think so.”

CENTRAL HILL ESTATE CLUNG
to the top of Gipsy Hill, all jagged concrete, tiered ranks of houses poised before the view as if ready to defend themselves from the rest of south-east London. A high canopy of leaves let thick light through to the dark glass and walkways. The only colour came from the red and blue flashing sign of an off-licence.

Belsey walked around the estate until one block of flats made him stop. Pear Tree House. He saw immediately that something was wrong with the building. From the front it was a four-storey block of flats, but from the back the hill fell away to expose a further four floors below. These lower floors were windowless, a solid block of concrete washed with pale blue paint. The only thing interrupting the concrete was a set of black iron doors at the base.