The Hollow Man Read online

  Girl gets mixed up with crooked businessman. Girl dies. He could spend a lot of time trying to join those dots or he could solve the more pressing mystery of how to remove himself from their mess before the Murder Squad arrived.

  Belsey left the Sweetheart office and headed back out.

  29

  Hampstead was having one of its nervous spells. The population had retreated and the dark peace of the Heath rolled out through the narrow streets like a fog. There was a sense of quarantine. Sometimes, as he walked through the village at night, its wealth seemed to Belsey like a kind of disease. He felt the isolation it imposed, the undercurrent of fear, the surgery. A breeze scraped dead leaves across the spotless pavements. The only humans he saw were teenagers in parked sports cars, releasing the cloying scent of skunk weed into the night.

  Belsey made his way to The Bishops Avenue. He wondered about Jessica’s fresh passport, then the letter in the handbag: I can’t do it. Sorry. She was meeting someone, he thought. Meeting Devereux, he tried to imagine. Had they been planning to flee together? Only Jessica got cold feet—and Devereux had already decided on a more absolute escape.

  Then there was the shooting.

  Maybe he was wrong about it all connecting. But he didn’t think so. And the collapse of business empires could make people angry. Go now, he thought. He was too entangled with a man who connected to a fresh murder victim. The police could well be looking for him already. Get out. But getting out meant getting money. Cassidy was expecting his delivery—all he needed were the goods to deliver.

  An empty beat car sat at the very top of The Bishops Avenue, close to the Heath. He could see a pair of detective constables moving house to house on their inquiries. They had passed Devereux’s. Belsey crossed the road, away from them, and approached number 37 from the far side. When he was sure they were well away from the house he crossed back, and walked swiftly up the path to the front door.

  He unlocked the door and went to the safe room, sat in the chair for a few minutes and shivered. He walked to the living room, turned on the TV and heard the headline: CONFUSION OVER COFFEE SHOP SHOOTING. Sky were devoting a lot of airtime to it. Initial reports of a robbery had been questioned. Someone had paid Jessica’s parents a visit and cleared out the photo albums: they had pictures of the girl at the front of a small stage in a satin dress, in a school line-up, one with friends in a Pizza Hut. But they’d failed to find the money shot, the heart-tug smile. Belsey crouched close to the screen. They seemed to favour the one of Jessica with friends. It wasn’t a good picture. She looked like she’d been caught off guard.

  He turned it off and finished loading Devereux’s possessions into the Porsche, squeezing shirts and suits into the remaining space and choosing which household appliances would be most profitable. There was more than he could take in one load so he made a separate pile of spoils in a corner of the garage for later use. Finally he stood in the study. The Persian rug looked like it was worth something. He could tie it to the roof. After five minutes of pushing and pulling he had moved the billiards table clear and was able to roll it up. He stared at the carpet beneath.

  A dark stain stretched towards his feet. Belsey crouched down and rubbed the carpet fibres between his fingers. Then he went and got a bottle of bleach from the utility room.

  He put the bleach on the stained carpet and watched it bubble. An old Murder Squad trick: The peroxide was reacting with an enzyme called catalase and breaking down into water and oxygen. Which meant it was blood. He stood there, staring at it with part weariness and part wonder. He felt the pull of investigation and the pull of escape, and swore with frustration. Eventually he took some cotton balls and went to the safe room. He stood on the chair and swabbed the dried blood on the ceiling with the cotton balls. Then he took scissors and two freezer bags from the kitchen and cut himself a sample of bloodstained carpet. He sealed each sample separately and labelled the bags “Blood: Safe Room” and “Blood: Study.” He would sell Devereux’s possessions first. But then he needed to pay a visit to Forensic Command. For the sake of his conscience and his curiosity.

  After Hampstead’s well-heeled menace he was glad for the more open threat of south London. Belsey drove through the estates, wondering how he’d explain the arrest of John Cassidy to his anxious father.

  The Wishing Well was already Friday-night messy, brittle with an air of cocaine snorted off burnt cisterns. Men in bright shirts slapped one another’s backs and a few tough-looking women laughed beside the bar. Belsey found the regulars in one corner, eyeing the fair-weather criminals.

  “Where’s Niall?” Belsey said.

  “He’s not here. Try the office. He said he’d be waiting for you. He’s not happy.”

  It had taken Belsey three years of favours and lock-ins to see the “office,” a derelict brick shed behind the Old Kent Road that had once been a Dairy Crest milk depot. It crumbled slowly behind high fences in a corner of wasteland. The brownfield site had been abandoned for years and was now meant to be turning into shops and key-worker housing, except the private backers had backed out leaving only barbed wire and a trashed Portakabin. It all lived behind huge dented gates that carried warnings about nonexistent dogs; pitch black, away from the road, away from streetlights.

  Belsey banged on the gates. Chains slid through metal and they opened. Cassidy was on his own, a single red point of cigarette in the darkness. Belsey drove in, across compacted mud, into the depot.

  Niall’s “office” housed an old backhoe, a flatbed truck draped in tarpaulin and a lot of scrap metal. A meagre light dripped through its roof of translucent, cobweb-encrusted plastic, revealing a stained concrete floor and charging points along one wall for the milk floats. It had been the gathering point after many crimes, a perfect slaughter. The years of metal theft had left a chaotic jumble of scrap. Objects scattered about included magnets, manhole covers, roofing, parts of bus shelters. There was even fencing and decorative ironwork from cemeteries. The sour smell of old milk remained very faint.

  Belsey left the headlights on. He jumped down from the SUV.

  “There was a breakdown of communication,” he said.

  “I’ll say there was a breakdown of communication. What the fuck’s he doing banged up?”

  “Johnny’s going to be fine. Trust me.”

  But Cassidy’s eye had been caught by the car and the load, and his trust followed that. The SUV would make his money back with enough spare to buy a few minutes with a decent lawyer.

  “Have you got papers for it?” he said.

  “What do you think?”

  “You said there were papers.”

  “That would be a silly thing for me to say.”

  “You always mess me about, Nick.”

  “That’s my job,” Belsey said. But he could see Cassidy was satisfied with the haul. It was all mint. “Take the plates off the Porsche before you do anything with it. Where’s the money?” he said.

  “Let’s see what we’re looking at first,” Cassidy said, and started moving Devereux’s possessions from the car. Belsey helped him, trying not to feel too guilty about leaving the remnants of Devereux’s elegant life in the corners of a milk depot. He admired the scrap, the ornamentation, the cemetery ironwork. Sometimes you could make out words: Sweet is the sleep of those who have laboured . . . Love is stronger than death . . . Home at last.

  They sold the metal to China. Or at least they did before the bottom dropped out of the market. One time Niall and the gang stole an entire bridge, near Swindon. They’d never been done for it. Belsey always wondered how you stole a bridge. He liked to imagine it passing through the night; seeing it from a distance, travelling east on the M4.

  “I heard about the Starbucks,” Cassidy said.

  “What do you reckon?”

  “Disgusting. A young girl like that.” He shook his head. He was sincere. Belsey had always admired
the passionate moral protests of criminals. Lest they be thought beyond humanity, perhaps. No, morality divided itself into ever thinner leaves.

  “It was a rifle. Where would they have got that?” Belsey said.

  “Not one of ours.”

  “Whose was it?”

  “It’ll be contract,” Cassidy said.

  “Why?”

  “That’s a job. A professional. And it wasn’t anything anyone’s heard about.” Belsey picked a dusty milk bottle up off the floor. It was full of cobwebs. He put it back.

  “Ever heard of a man called Alexei Devereux?” he asked.

  “No.” Cassidy took a shopping bag from his jacket. “Any more questions?”

  “How do you steal a bridge?” Belsey said.

  “You don’t need the whole bridge, just the metal.”

  “Do you melt it down in London?”

  “Not personally. I want him out of there, Nick. I want Johnny out.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Cassidy handed him the bag. It was filled with used fifties and twenties. Belsey counted six thousand in total and stuffed it in his jacket. He didn’t need to count it twice. It had the weight of freedom. He was almost ready to go.

  30

  Forensic Services Command occupied a brutal concrete block at 149 Lambeth Road. It was a conveniently short sprint across the river from the Yard. It was a slightly longer sprint from the Old Kent Road, through the subterranean labyrinth of Elephant and Castle, and felt less convenient still when carrying six grand in a dead man’s suit. Not the best part of town for cash transportation. Belsey kept alert, moving fast through the underpasses.

  The Command, as it was known, didn’t announce itself to the public as such, unless you counted the tinted windows and black security bulbs that lined its outer walls. Otherwise it looked like a multi-storey parking lot decorated with slat blinds. A giant “149” on the deep shaft ventilator stood in place of any formal identification—that and the occasional police vehicle dipping silently down the ramps.

  “I’ve got something for urgent analysis.”

  The security guard stared at Belsey. A sign said “Welcome to Central Forensics” and underneath, “Our Values.”

  “I need to speak to the night labs,” Belsey said. “It’s concerning the Jessica Holden murder inquiry.”

  This got a call put through. The guard spoke to someone in the Command Unit, and Forensics Officer Isha Sharvani appeared a few moments later. Belsey was relieved to see a familiar face.

  “Nick,” she said.

  “Isha. I was sent round on an urgent. I know it’s not very kosher. Would you run a check on these?”

  She looked at the freezer bags with scepticism bordering on disgust.

  “What job?”

  “The Starbucks shooting. Just see if the two of them match. Give me a call at Hampstead. You’ve got my number.”

  “Nick Belsey.” She shut her eyes in exasperation. But he knew she’d help.

  The first time Belsey met Isha Sharvani it was 8 July 2005. The previous morning he had been on a drugs raid, standing in a crack house on Adelaide Road with a woman handcuffed to a sink. They knew there was something big on because response vehicles had been racing through Camden into town for ten minutes, sirens on full: unusual enough for morning rush hour, and all flavours of emergency service. And they kept coming, so you knew it was cars from the neighbouring boroughs as well. Belsey’s team had killed their communications for the raid, and when they switched them on again there were call-outs to Russell Square and King’s Cross, and then an all-units to Tavistock Square. Then the world slipped into Code Red.

  They knew the drill. For two years there had been practice runs. The crack addicts got a momentary reprieve. Crime seemed suddenly reassuring, part of an everyday routine bleached by a brighter light.

  All units to central London.

  And so the next morning he had found himself with Sharvani collecting samples of clothing from select members of Camden’s Pakistani community, ferrying them into Counter-Terrorism for analysis. The bosses had wanted someone Asian, preferably Muslim, to accompany him, and the fact that Sharvani was Hindu didn’t seem to bother them. It was a strange few weeks. Belsey made good contacts at the Regent’s Park mosque—intelligent men who knew Plato and Nietzsche as well as the Quran and were happy to discuss any of them—discovered a lot of hydroponic weed being grown by a group of Bangladeshi teenagers, and befriended Sharvani. He’d spent a lot of time at Forensic Command. He hadn’t been back until now.

  He wanted to put his curiosity to bed. Or, better still, to sell it on. Let someone else fathom the bloodstains of The Bishops Avenue. He wished he could fast-track the forensics procedure, wished he had a team to put in the legwork necessary to establish who’d been passing through Devereux’s home.

  The familiar clutter of abandoned market stalls at the back of Waterloo Station appeared, glimmering under the streetlights. He needed to get back to Hampstead and stash the money burning a hole in his jacket pocket. But he was starving and there would be nowhere open at the other end. Belsey ducked into a greasy spoon on Lower Marsh. Taxi drivers, post-work street sweepers and parking attendants lolled in the fug of the cafe blowing on gloved hands, rubbing scratchcards and occasionally glancing up at an old TV set.

  The news was rounding off with shots of a footballer coming out of hospital. Then it flashed back to the night’s main story. Jessica’s parents seemed to appeal directly to the assembled workers in the cafe. All they wanted to know, they said, was why. Who took their beautiful daughter from them? Belsey had witnessed it a hundred times: grief’s appetite to know. Loved ones need to see the corpse, they need to see where it happened, look into the eyes of their child’s killer. As if the past would be buried in these experiences.

  It cut to a blonde girl, Jessica’s age. They’d got her into a studio, making an appeal from behind a bank of microphones. “Friend of Victim Appeals.” She cried well. She said: Someone must have information. She left flowers by the Starbucks and you saw she had expensive clothes. The camera got a shot of the message on the flowers: Jess, RIP—justice will be done.

  Belsey bought a coffee and some chips and took his change to a payphone in the corner. He called Channel Five. Miranda Miller was out but her people were there and they knew who he was.

  “Who’s the blonde girl?” Belsey said.

  “A friend.”

  “When did she show up?”

  “Earlier this afternoon.”

  “Took her a while.”

  “She was in shock.”

  “I bet.”

  He called the incident room. They said: “She’s called Lucy. We’ve had her in twice. Doesn’t have anything helpful to say.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I guess the question is whether she’s sure.”

  The CID office was empty when he got back to Hampstead. He transferred five hundred pounds to Devereux’s wallet, then removed the bottom drawer of his desk and stuffed the rest of the money into the space beneath. He replaced the drawer and walked out, towards Pond Street.

  They had the floodlights on in South End Green, casting strange shapes across the silent junction. Some of the pubs and restaurants farthest from the crime scene had opened, but they looked desultory, and many had stayed closed in a gesture of respect or resignation. The long shadow of the Gothic drinking fountain pointed towards the White Horse like a moondial. The artificial light caught all reflective surfaces: hubcaps, broken glass, frozen puddles. A van marked “Express Glazing Contractors” sat patiently, waiting to patch over the horror.

  Belsey ducked under the tape and showed his badge.

  “Who’s in charge?”

  “I am,” a wiry, grey-haired detective sergeant said. “Who are you?”

  “Nick Belsey. From Northwood’s office.
He’s got a meeting with the Chief Constable in a couple of hours and wants to know the worst.”

  “Dave Carter.” The sergeant shook Belsey’s hand, studying him cautiously. Belsey had always liked ballistics teams: quiet, precise men. Men of angles and velocity. “What’s the situation indoors?” Carter said.

  “Chaos.” Belsey stepped into the tent. Carter followed him. The light was hazy through the canvas. It felt hallowed inside. A flag was stuck where a bullet had entered the floor. They didn’t outline bodies anymore, in case of crime scene contamination, but everything had been left where it fell and you sensed the space where a life had ended.

  “How does it look?” Belsey asked.

  “Eight fired. The first two shattered the window. One’s in the back wall above the serviettes, one behind the coffee machine. We think the fourth must have clipped the Chinese lad and the third hit the girl. So did another two. One’s embedded in the floor.”

  “All from the same gun?”

  “Yes. Something with a long barrel, not chromed.”

  “Like a marksman’s rifle.”

  “Sure. Maybe a modified service rifle. Gas-operated, bolt action for accuracy. The bullets are 7.62 x 54mm. That’s the kind of cartridge you find in military sniper rifles. Only these ones are hollow-tipped. The details suggest a gun that’s probably ex–Red Army: the Dragunov, or the VSK.”

  Belsey crouched down to the bullet hole in the floor.

  “How many rounds do they take?”

  “The Dragunov takes a ten-round box magazine. The VSK has twenty. The VSK comes with a silencer, though.”

  “So it wasn’t the VSK.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “See many Dragunov sniper rifles around these parts?”

  “Not in my experience.”

  They came ready for a mission, Belsey thought. He knelt and put a finger in the bullet hole, felt the angle, then followed it in his imagination, out beyond the tent. They came armed to carry out a hit, were positioned at a distance with telescopic sights onto the Starbucks, getaway ready. And they weren’t going to stop firing until the girl was dead.