The Hollow Man Page 12

  “The previous occupier,” Belsey said. “Where did you find that?”

  “It was on the chair.”

  “He’s the previous occupier. I still get catalogues.”

  “Is he the reason my robe says A.D.?”

  “He left in a hurry.”

  She raised an eyebrow, then tossed the catalogue aside. “What is it you’re not telling me?”

  Belsey sat down across the counter from her.

  “There’s a lot of things I’m not telling you, Charlotte, but then I’ve only known you for ten hours. For a lot of that time you were sleeping.”

  She finished her coffee and checked her watch. He looked at her face while he could, until she laughed and asked him what he was doing.

  “There’s nothing to eat,” he said. “Do you want to be driven back to your car?”

  “My car?”

  “The one you left . . .” And then he saw her start to smile. “There was no car.”

  She grinned, victoriously.

  Belsey drove her home. The streets were still desolate, a dawn chorus grating against the naked concrete of Archway. She directed him to a residential street off the Holloway Road. It was the kind of respectable, dark-bricked street he would have liked to live on himself had he managed to uphold his career, his decorum.

  “It’s not The Bishops Avenue,” she said with an embarrassed laugh.

  “No,” he said.

  “Stop by number 12.”

  He parked and she didn’t get out straight away.

  “Maybe I’ll see you again,” she said.

  “Fingers crossed.”

  “Think you’ll be able to find me?” There was a glint in her eye.

  “Easy.”

  And then she was out of the car and he watched her and she didn’t look back.

  He returned to The Bishops Avenue. The day began to brighten. It had just gone 7 a.m. and north London was coming to life: personal trainers training, builders in the front of vans pouring tea from flasks. Belsey saw, momentarily, how he would remember it from his own exile, when memory had done its filleting and hung up its bloodstained apron. He’d be left with the sight of Hampstead in the morning: parking attendants and children in boaters. And he’d find something to miss about it, some part of himself which was left there. Maybe he’d think of the morning with Charlotte, the whole elaborate deceit of it all and he’d think: Then I was myself, more than ever. What am I now?

  He spent a few minutes straightening Devereux’s home, cleaning the coffee cups. Then, on an impulse, he called the Mail on Sunday, got a receptionist and asked if a Charlotte Kelson worked there. She did.

  “Would you like me to put you through to her voice mail?”

  “No.”

  He hung up, stared out of the window and momentarily looked forward to a future that wasn’t going to happen.

  Belsey took the cheque made out to Reflections Ltd. and studied it again. There was a door through which Devereux was meant to exit this world and Belsey was blocking it. He was trying to get out of London using the same exit. He went to the kitchen to make more coffee, but he’d finished the jar. This seemed significant. He noticed a girl in the uniform of a local private school walking slowly past, beyond the gates. She gazed at the mansion, looking through the kitchen window.

  He slipped Devereux’s suit jacket on and stepped outside. He didn’t mean to follow the girl, but it happened that they were going in the same direction, along Hampstead Lane to the pond. A long way to walk to school, he thought. She turned down East Heath Road. He followed. At South End Green she disappeared and he stopped beside the doorway of Starbucks, appreciating the morning a final time: the busy triangle of the Green, bounded by the Heath to the north and the concrete of the Royal Free Hospital to the south. Supermarket delivery vans and pregnant mothers passed between the two, dappled by fresh sunlight.

  And already he had a sense of something terrible about to occur.

  The girl reappeared a few minutes later on the opposite side of the street. She glanced at Belsey, walked on towards Hampstead Heath train station, then turned and crossed the road towards him. Now he saw her face. He recognised her. Where had he seen her before? Eighteen years old in heels and makeup, with a quilted Chanel handbag and a white-tipped cigarette. Hardly a schoolgirl, but for the blue-and-gold jumper of South Hampstead High School. She looked at Belsey’s suit, Devereux’s suit, as she stepped up onto the pavement. She was staring at it. A chill spread from the small of his back to his chest and stomach.

  “Morning,” Belsey said. He gave a smile and a nod. He had a growing feeling of recognition, but his brain wouldn’t make the final connection. Something didn’t make sense. She met his eyes a final time. Then she flicked her cigarette butt into the road, where it streamed like a distress flare, and walked past him into the coffee shop.

  He stepped closer to hear her voice.

  “Latte with vanilla,” she said. “Takeaway.”

  “Grande.”

  “Yes.”

  The first shot shattered the glass. Belsey dived instinctively to the floor. The impact of bullet on glass had been clearer than the shot itself, but he knew the sound of rifle fire. Another three shots came in quick succession, a second’s silence. Then the screaming began. Belsey crawled to the cover of the parked cars and tried to formulate a course of action. He heard a fifth shot, then a sixth. It was a high-powered rifle, firing from a distance. The crack of each shot echoed off a block of flats across the junction. Belsey checked the street: people running, people at the bus stop gripping one another, covering their heads; no one aiming a gun. There was a sound like a sudden shower of rain as the rest of the Starbucks window collapsed. Two more shots rattled into the store, unimpeded now. Belsey was calculating the angle they were coming from when it went silent. After a moment he moved, crouching, into the cafe, through the space where the window had been.

  A display unit lay on the floor with bags of coffee beans across the tiles, blood spatter on an upturned table. The alarm rang shrill and pointless over soft jazz and the sound of a tap running. A woman in Starbucks uniform hid behind the counter.

  “Police,” Belsey said, scanning the store just in case, checking furniture behind which someone could hide. “Get away from the windows. Go into the back.”

  The barista looked up, blank with shock. Belsey studied the coffee shop again: one old woman cowering in the corner, a young East Asian man in Starbucks uniform clutching a bleeding arm. A male customer in blue overalls knelt behind an armchair, and the schoolgirl lay on her side in the storeroom doorway. She must have been moving towards shelter, Belsey thought. There was no gun around. No more shots either, just the alarm, the jazz and a strange silence underneath it all.

  Belsey walked through the cafe towards the girl. Blood dripped down a free-standing sign that said, “Create your moment of goodness.” Bullets had passed through the sign into the sofas, opening them out. Yellow stuffing hung in the air.

  The girl twitched. There was a dark, wet gap where her left shoulder should have been. Blood spread across the front of her school shirt.

  “Don’t try to speak,” Belsey said, kneeling. He undid the shirt. He saw, among the general blood, darker entry wounds in the abdomen and chest and knew there was nothing he could do now. She was a few inches from Belsey’s face, gazing through the ribbons of blood into his eyes. He pressed both hands against the chest wound. Even as he tried against all odds to staunch the flow he was thinking: Those were hollow-tipped bullets—to do that kind of damage. And who runs around Hampstead with a rifle and hollow tips?

  “Don’t speak.”

  Because she was trying to speak. The girl reached for something, found a stack of paper cups on the floor and gripped this. Then she opened her mouth again and a bubble of viscous blood formed at her lips and burst. She closed her eyes. Was there som
e sacrament to perform? Belsey thought, as the blood dribbled down her chin; a police detective’s ritual: You have the right to remain silent . . .

  When she was dead he took the cups out of her hand and left the body for forensics.

  He called Central Operations from the coffee shop’s phone.

  “I’ve got a code three, Starbucks South End Green, shots fired. Detective Constable Nick Belsey present, requesting urgent assistance. One fatality, at least one other wounded.”

  “Is the scene secure?” the control room asked.

  “I reckon so.”

  Sirens filled the air now, approaching from Hampstead, Kentish Town, Camden and Highgate, homing in. But for the moment the scene was his. Commuters stared into the shattered shopfront. He turned to the closest pair, young men, and told them to keep everyone else across on the other side of the Green. Beside them was a man in municipal coveralls, a man in a suit and a woman in jogging gear.

  “Stop the traffic,” Belsey said. “Go up Pond Street. You”—he turned to the jogger—“go up to Keats Grove, and you on Fleet Road, stop all traffic. Now.”

  Paramedics in green began to mass outside the hospital, waiting for the all-clear: the upper tier of the parking lot had a fringe of nurses and patients in dressing gowns, staring down. The first two response vehicles arrived a moment later, police drivers strewing their cars across the road and pavement, nudging the folded tables of adjacent cafes and the vegetable crates of the health food shop. Belsey saw his boss, Inspector Tim Gower, jump out of a Ford S-Max a few minutes after them, in civilian clothes, striding towards the carnage. Gower saw Belsey.

  “Are you hurt?”

  Belsey realised he was covered in blood.

  “I’m fine.”

  “What happened?”

  “Someone started firing into the Starbucks. It sounded like a rifle.”

  “Did you see them?”

  “No.”

  “Any idea which way they went?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  Gower put an order out: no more vehicles until they had armed officers present. Belsey gave a brief rundown of what he knew: eight shots five minutes ago, no sign of any gunman.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” Gower said. He turned to the other officers and ordered tape boundaries and then yelled at the civilians to clear the area.

  Armed Response turned up three minutes later, followed closely by Homicide and Serious Crime Command. After ten minutes of well-drilled swagger from the boys with guns, the paramedics and scene-of-crime officers were allowed to move in. Five minutes after that, a white tent covered the front of the Starbucks like a belated airbag. Forensic officers tagged the area with numbered flags. They searched the sky and talked about rain. The girl was carried out on a stretcher, beneath a blanket, and there was an awkward hush that lasted all of thirty seconds before work resumed.

  Belsey gave his account to one of the Homicide team, DS Joseph Banks.

  “I didn’t see anyone drive up. I didn’t see anyone run away.”

  “How many shots did you hear?”

  “Eight. Like a hunting rifle. It was at some distance.”

  “Other people are saying ten or more.”

  “No. There was echo. I wouldn’t say more than eight.”

  “From where?”

  “I don’t know. But it was the girl they wanted.”

  “The schoolgirl?”

  “Three shots, one to her shoulder, two to the torso.”

  “If that’s right.”

  “I saw it.”

  “What were you going to be doing today?”

  “Going into work,” Belsey said. He watched Chief Superintendent Northwood climb out of the back of an armoured, metallic-grey BMW, uniformed, capped, glowering. His driver remained in the front. All other officers paused to acknowledge his presence, as if the whole event was stage-managed for Northwood’s arrival. Those who knew him gave casual salutes; the rest retreated into the background. Northwood surveyed the panorama until his gaze fell on Belsey. This was, it seemed, the one detail out of joint. He marched over.

  “What a surprise,” the commander said, with quiet fury.

  “Sir.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I was getting a coffee.”

  He stared at Belsey. Then he walked away, towards the crime scene.

  “You know him?” Banks said.

  “We’re close.”

  “Get yourself sorted. Go in. We’ll pass any instructions through your station.”

  20

  It was a five-minute walk from the crime scene to Hampstead police station. Belsey chose to go up Pond Street, past the hospital, to avoid the bottleneck of emergency vehicles on South End Road. At the station he showered, borrowed a clean shirt and went to the meeting room. The usual morning prayers—the 8:30 a.m., pre-shift meeting—had been converted to a murder briefing. Gower gave a breakdown of what they knew, then read a list of officers to go to the incident room and a list of those to remain on Rosslyn Hill assisting from there. Belsey wasn’t assigned to either.

  “Look,” he said to Belsey, when the other men and women had gone, “I’m still waiting to hear from the IPCC, but I think it’s best if we keep you on restricted duties. Away from Northwood. Someone’s got to hold the fort . . .”

  Belsey returned to the CID office and sat at his desk. He hadn’t been expecting this. He leaned back in his chair with his eyes shut listening to the sirens on Rosslyn Hill and felt like he used to, aged eleven or twelve, hearing his father and his father’s friends drunk downstairs. Shut out of the party. He had spent his life as a police officer trying to find out what people got up to downstairs, knocking on the doors of men and women’s individual nights and peering in. He didn’t like to be shut out of a murder investigation. Not when his shoes still had the victim’s blood on them. Devereux’s shoes.

  His hope had been to flee the country this evening. He knew, without having to think, that his plans were on hold for now. It would look awful. And he couldn’t bring himself to turn his back on a girl who had died in front of him. Not for the moment. Guilt was not just a matter of what you had done, but what you had chosen to run from—even if it was not your crime to start with. He could not run while her dying face was still fresh in his mind.

  And he had recognised her.

  The canteen was empty. Belsey turned the TV on. Sky News showed shots of the white tent; men and women beside the police tape being interviewed and their breath steaming. The ticker reported SHOCK AND CONFUSION OVER SHOOTINGS IN AFFLUENT LONDON SUBURB. There were no photos of the girl yet.

  He thought of patterns: women get killed by the men who love them. Places of work get fired up by former employees. Walk into a coffee shop with five people inside and one of them will owe someone money, another will have slept with someone’s wife. None of these clicked. Belsey moved through the events as his mind had preserved them, using the visualisation techniques he used with witnesses. He started with the morning he had been enjoying, the sunlight, the shape of branches against the sky. He moved in on the details: frost in the centre of each paving slab; a horn blaring somewhere on Fleet Road. Then he let the girl appear. And he looked harder than he did then. He saw the individual strands of her dark brown hair, the black quilt of the handbag, a chipped nail on the cigarette hand. The right hand. The girl looked back at him, her gaze passing back through him, and the more he thought, the more she stared, still staring, from wherever she was now.

  He had seen her before today. He had seen her recently. When had he been into a school, or spoken to teenagers?

  Tony Cutter arrived at the station, shaking and delusional, confessing to the crime. Belsey offered to speak to him.

  “I had my suspicions, Tony.”

  “I’m sorry, Nick. There’s blood on my hands.”


  “Things happen. Let’s move on. Where are you sleeping these days?”

  “Alice Ward.” The psychiatric ward of the Royal Free. It saw a lot of Tony.

  “Looks like you’ve been on the street quite recently,” Belsey said.

  “I was. Now they’ve given me a bed in Alice.”

  “Cheaper than a hostel.”

  “Cheaper than a hostel!” He laughed. “I’m not going in a hostel.”

  Belsey walked him back to the Royal Free. They attracted glances on Rosslyn Hill. With Pond Street taped off, the traffic had solidified, as if it was all part of a spreading rigor mortis.

  “Can I ask you something?” Belsey said, as they approached the hospital.

  “I’m in trouble, aren’t I, Nick?”

  “Did you ever work?”

  “Work?”

  “Did you ever have a job?”

  “I was a handyman. And then I washed the buses, when I was married.”

  “You were married?”

  “Seventeen years, Nick.”

  The police tape stopped short of the Accident and Emergency Department, allowing a narrow channel for ambulances. There was a thin crowd beside the hospital itself: nurses, visitors, patients on drips. All watched the forensics team. There was nothing to see and it was hypnotic.

  “I’ll be all right from here,” Tony said.

  “OK. I’m hoping to go on holiday soon,” Belsey said. “So you might not see me around. If you don’t, then take care of yourself. Don’t cause trouble.”

  “Off on holiday!” Tony grinned.

  “Bye, Tony.” Belsey walked back to the police station and called Dispatch. “Where’s the incident room?”

  “St. John’s. Downshire Hill.” They’d taken over the nearest church, which was common procedure for the initial days of a Major Incident Inquiry. The investigation was at speed, and there was no way Hampstead police station could accommodate it. The station gave him a number to call. He called.

  “Any ID on the girl yet?”

  “Jessica Holden, eighteen years. Hospital have just pronounced it DOA.”