Authors: Oliver Harris
“Any good news?”
“Depends what cheers you up. The hair was hacked off with a knife. But it looks like the victim struggled because at least a few strands have come out at the root. You can see the root is stretched and has broken with some tissue attached. It’s going to take a while to do full DNA.”
“What about the dirt on it?”
“The black deposit is actually particles of metal and carbon. You see it where there’s been machinery wearing down over a long period of time. Friction.”
“Brake pads.”
“Yes.”
“Brake pads for tube trains.”
Sharvani was hesitant, but conceded: “Sure. There are other traces you’d expect from tube tunnels: dense skin particles, rat urine. But I’m not sure what kind of tunnel this is. There are flakes of paint that contain lead.”
“And lead paint’s banned.”
“Exactly.”
“When did we ban it?”
“1958, I just checked. So go on, fill me in. What is this?”
“She was abducted on Monday night. I think she’s being kept underground somewhere. It might be in tunnels that haven’t been used for a long while. She’s being held there and we’re receiving threats that she’s going to be killed soon.”
“Have you got a suspect?”
“I’m glad you asked.” Belsey brought the diary out. “These might be his prints.” He handed it over. She inspected the marks.
“Not bad.”
“I need them processed.”
“I can tell the print team to do it this afternoon.”
“We have minutes rather than hours.”
Sharvani looked at the diary again. She walked him down the corridor to Fingerprints. The lab was a similar set up to Photographic, same white worktops, same smell of cleaning products and new technology. It had more stations, more computers, fewer empty mugs lying about.
“Jack,” Sharvani said. The print technician came over. He wore several earrings and traces of eyeliner. She explained the situation and he seemed open to helping. He placed the page under a lens of the IDENT1 machine and it appeared on his monitor. Belsey looked up and saw the words large across the screen:
Croydon fatalities: 130,000
.
“What is this?” the technician asked, looking impressed.
“Someone’s diary.”
“They had a worse week than me.”
He adjusted the page—
Kingston forty percent destruction. Fallout high—
then the fingerprint loops appeared, white on a black background. The technician isolated a print. He clicked a mouse, leaving a trail of crosses along the various ridges. A few more keystrokes and it was connecting to the national database. With a print that clear, if he was logged with a criminal record, results could be almost instantaneous. If he was on the rest of the system—people who’ve been printed as part of an inquiry but who have no record—it could take hours.
Belsey grabbed a seat at the side. Argyle, he thought. He looked at the portrait again. CAVE. Was it a motto? He got his phone out and typed in
Cave military motto
. No “Cave,” a lot of others; they were all in Latin.
“Does ‘cave’ mean something in Latin?” Belsey asked.
“‘Beware,’” Jack said, without looking up from the print scanner. “Why?”
“It means ‘beware’?”
“Like in ‘caveat.’”
“You’re wasted here, Jack,” Belsey said.
“Never during office hours.”
Beware. A dagger and smoke clouds. Belsey found what he could about Argyle’s career. Chief of the Defence Staff 1951–66. Permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence in 1970. He oversaw Britain’s civil defence arrangements in the cold-war period.
Civil defence was Riggs’s Saturday job. He opened another browser and typed in
local authority defence bunkers
. There was a list compiled by a group of enthusiasts: thirty-seven bunkers across the UK, stashed beneath innocent neighbourhoods, waiting. Hardened civil defence control for the Corporation of London could be found beneath the Guildhall, for the middle classes under Stoke Newington Town Hall. Salt-of-the-earth Bermondsey placed its council’s nuclear bunker under a garage adjoining the council offices, Dagenham beneath the grounds of a civic centre.
The same site also listed UK radar stations, NATO bases, the anonymous depots where emergency food and medical supplies were kept; finally, the Warning and Monitoring posts Riggs had mentioned. There were more than a thousand scattered about, operated by an army of volunteers until 1995. Belsey had to read the year twice. The posts consisted of an underground room big enough for three, equipment for them to monitor the surrounding landscape for bombs, fallout, chemical or biological attack, and riots. According to the site, the government had replaced all the old computers in these posts in the early nineties before someone somewhere pointed out the insanity.
So much effort. So much fear still down there, unspent. No one cleans up. He was starting to understand: something that never happens has a strange relationship to time. It can’t become the past. It gets lodged. And this was his suspect’s obsession—all the breaking into shelters, the rifled drawers beneath St. Pancras Library, trying to gather up abandoned paperwork . . .
“You’re a lucky man, Nick. You should take up gambling. Again.”
Sharvani and the print technician were staring at the computer.
“What have you got?” he said.
“Eighty-seven percent match.”
“He’s on the system?”
“Duncan Powell, West London, forty years old.”
Belsey went over.
“What’s it on for?”
“Dangerous driving—arrested, not charged, twenty-third of January this year. He was in a blue Volkswagen Passat. Taken to Kilburn police station.”
“What’s the address?”
“12 Viners Road, Willesden Junction.”
BELSEY SLOWED DOWN ONCE HE WAS IN WILLESDEN
. Viners Road was a short street of red-brick houses blocked at one end by the chain-link of a school playground. Belsey tried to match the placid scene with his image of the man tormenting him. Why not? Suburbs lent themselves to sadism and espionage. There was number 12, there was the blue Volkswagen owned by a man whose prints were all over Riggs’s diary. It was the last house on the row. Belsey parked, blocking the Volkswagen in, just in case Mr. Powell made a run for it. He grabbed his cuffs.
The house was well kept, unlit, recycling boxes stacked and empty, front curtains drawn. No lights visible inside. The Volkswagen’s bonnet was ice cold. Belsey rang the doorbell and braced himself. No one answered. He went down a side path to bins and a second door. A window beside the door showed plates in a drying rack. The centre of the door itself was frosted glass. Belsey put his eye to the lock, saw it had a key on the inside. It didn’t feel bolted. He stepped along the path until he found a loose paving slab, levered it up and smashed the door’s glass panel. He waited for any response, then reached in, unlocked it and stepped inside.
It was a nice kitchen. Not hi-tech but not neglected. Cookbooks, casserole dishes, a handbag on the kitchen table. He walked through a beaded curtain to a living room with an upright piano and a lot of books. The home of a middle-class couple. Or not a couple any more.
He smelt the grief before he saw it. There was a bed made up on the sofa littered with tissues; toast and soup on the table beside it, a greeting card lying on its back.
Sorry for your loss
. Belsey picked it up. “I knew Duncan well,” it began. It amounted to a small, earnest letter. The whole thing was “tragic,” “cruel,” “senseless”; signed Gillian, dated yesterday.
There were more unopened on the mat by the front door addressed to an Andrea Powell.
Death is a fairly solid alibi. 87 percent was a pretty solid print match. Belsey tore an envelope open and read another card. “His talent will be missed as well as his warmth.” He looked around, trying to identify the nature of Duncan Powell’s talent. A key turned in the front door. He was standing there with the condolence card in his hand as Powell’s widow walked in and screamed. She dropped a carrier bag and lifted a hand to her mouth. She had a friend behind her, ready to fight. Belsey took his badge out.
“Police,” he said, as an alternative to “surprise” or “sorry” and sounding halfway between the two. “Don’t worry.” He didn’t convince himself.
“What’s going on? How did you get in?” She was a tall woman, black hair clipped back, large dark eyes reddened. Her friend was blonder, smaller, with a lot of bangles and outraged eyes.
“Come in. Sit down,” Belsey said. She came in and sat on the sofa, shaking. The friend watched from the doorway, arms folded. “Andrea?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Nick Belsey, a detective. I need to ask you a few questions about Duncan. Is that OK?” She nodded. “When did he pass away?”
“Two days ago. Monday.” She spoke with the traces of a Spanish or Italian accent but London had flattened the vowels and the skin tone.
“How?”
“I thought you were police,” the friend said.
“I’m on a separate investigation. Duncan’s name came up in possible connection with it.” Andrea was hesitant. He couldn’t blame her. “What happened?” he asked.
“He was hit by a car,” the blonde friend said.
Belsey kept his focus on the widow.
“Do they know who was driving?”
“No,” Andrea said.
“Where was he?”
“Around Golders Hill Park.”
That was getting close to Belsey’s neck of the woods.
“When exactly on Monday?”
“Around quarter to five.”
“Description of the car?”
“Silver,” she said. “That’s all.”
Quarter to five, Monday. Where was he around that time? He knew exactly where he was. Sitting parked up off Hampstead High Street, waiting for a silver BMW to tear his world apart. Now he had an idea what it was speeding from—a man’s death.
Andrea started to cry. She pulled a tissue from her sleeve. Her friend sat behind her and stared daggers at Belsey.
“What did Duncan do, professionally?” Belsey asked.
“He was a writer.”
“What did he write?”
“Excuse me, what’s going on?” The friend asked. “You’re upsetting her.”
Andrea pointed to a shelf beside the piano. Belsey stood up and went over. Hardbacks from the last ten years on an eclectic range of subjects: political scandal, organised crime, censorship, the cold war. But mostly the cold war.
Counter-intelligence after Brezhnev
,
The New Spy Chiefs
,
Soviet Special Operations 1956–75
. Propped against the books was a photograph of Powell in regulation overcoat and Cossack hat in Red Square, next to the McDonald’s. He was tall, with a thin, clean-shaven face, wire-rimmed glasses and an ironic smile. In another photograph he was sitting in the living room beside his wife, playing an acoustic guitar.
“Andrea, was Duncan working on the day he died?”
“Yes. Someone had said they wanted to meet him.”
“About what?”
“Work.”
“What was he working on?”
“I don’t know.”
“But this person wanted to help.”
“Yes. I think so. Duncan seemed . . . anxious.”
“Why anxious, do you think?”
“He said we should maybe think about getting away soon. He never used to talk about holidays. He said he’d leave his work and we would get away for a few months.” She gestured at a bereft pile of library books on the floor. Books on sailing, hiking, bird watching; birds of Southern Europe, the Adriatic, other places far from London and its secrets.
“Did Duncan ever mention underground tunnels?”
Both women stared at Belsey with renewed suspicion. The friend got up in disgust and went to the kitchen.
“Underground?” Andrea said. “No. I don’t understand. I don’t understand why you’re here.” Then the friend gasped melodramatically from behind the beaded curtain.
“What have you done to the door?”
“I’ll call a glazier,” Belsey said.
“Andrea, he’s smashed the side door.”
“Could you leave?” Andrea pleaded, weakly.
“Did you see any equipment he might have been using? Torches? Maybe dirty clothes?”
“Please.”
The friend returned to the living room.
“You need to leave now.”
“Look,” Belsey began, then saw another careless and conspicuous incident developing. Slow down, he thought. Keep calm. The friend’s expression said: What are you doing, you heartless bastard? Belsey wondered. He’d added a lot of confusion to the sorrow, like someone trying to improve a bad meal by covering it in paint. He gave Andrea Powell one of his cards and told her he may need to be in touch again, more as a final gesture of validation than in any hope she’d speak to him.
THE STORY WAS BREAKING ON THE TWO O
’
CLOCK NEWS
when he got back in the car. “Concern is mounting for missing art student, Jemma Stevens. The twenty-two-year-old from Stoke Newington failed to return home after going out on Monday . . .” No last sighting was mentioned. No mention of the hair parcel either, although word of it must have spread—he had no doubt this was driving the media interest. Hampstead station leaked like a sieve. Journalists knew it was going to be box office. But they were acting well behaved for now and holding back on details. They gave Northwood’s name as senior investigator.
Belsey turned the radio off, called a trusted glazier, then drove back towards the station. He stopped for coffee at a place with vintage furniture and china teacups, ate a croissant and thought. Duncan Powell’s published works had made him conscious of quite how large a world he had entered, swept into a current of unfinished history that nineteen years of criminal investigation had not prepared him for. Powell never made it home. Nor had Argyle. Argyle, a former chief of the defence staff. Killed on Saturday night. Then Powell approximately twenty-four hours later, a cold-war historian. And now the suspect had another to hand. An art student.
Belsey pondered this, watching mothers with buggies and men hunched over iPads. He thought: London is a jigsaw puzzle. Because it fits together? Because it breaks apart? Because there’s a piece missing?
THERE WAS A FURIOUS
message from Tom Monroe waiting for him on his office answering machine.