Authors: Oliver Harris
“Where did you get these?” Craik studied his face to see if he was winding her up.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Do you?”
“They just appeared?”
“Reception gave them to me.”
Belsey went downstairs. Crosby was polishing her glasses.
“The carnations,” he said.
“Pretty, aren’t they?”
“Where did they come from?”
“Someone left them outside. No name. So I thought—given she’s just settling in, a welcoming touch.”
Crosby stared at Belsey’s hand and he realised he was still gripping a petal. He returned to the main office, took a sheet of paper and set the petal down on it. He tapped the petal and watched the deposit that came off. A shadow settling. Subterranean dirt. They were his flowers. Jemma’s flowers. His phone rang again.
“Nick Belsey?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Chib, from Camden CCTV. Those tapes you wanted—can you come in?” He sounded nervous.
“Do you see him park?”
“A bit more than that.”
“I’ll come in now.”
“I think you better.”
CCTV CONTROL. THE SPACE STATION, AS IT WAS
known among police, hidden at the top of an anonymous office block behind Great Portland Street. It had nine rooms lit by banks of monitors, by the grey forms of oblivious individuals going about their business.
He knew something was up because they’d given him a screening room of his own, with a dedicated CCTV officer running the footage. The room was dark, dominated by a desk of switches and digital displays. The officer on the controls, Chib Kwesi, was good. Belsey saw him often enough, pulling footage of street fights, phone grabs, car crashes. Kwesi wore a crucifix over his shirt and had a passion for his job that belonged either to a stern moralist or a dedicated voyeur. He had the tape lined up. The stolen BMW was coming into shot. It was frozen on the screen, approaching from High Holborn into the shadows beneath Centre Point, the tower block that dominated the intersection of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road.
Time stamp: 04.19 a.m. Three hours, fifteen minutes before the parking ticket was issued.
“It’s not a great angle,” Kwesi said.
“Do we get his face?”
“Not well.”
“What do we get?”
He hit play. The BMW parked across the road from the camera, facing towards New Oxford Street. For a moment the car just sat there. The footage was low res, black-and-white, five frames per second. The vehicle sat right at the back of the shot. It wasn’t going to give a clear account of anything, let alone a face.
“Is this the only camera we get him on?”
“Yes.”
A couple of early morning revellers appeared, cutting unsteadily towards Charing Cross Road. Two more minutes passed. Then the driver’s door opened and a man got out. He wore a familiar grey hoodie, hood up.
“Wait,” Kwesi said.
Belsey expected the suspect to turn but he didn’t. He went to the rear door closest to the camera and opened it. There was someone else in the car. The driver reached in and they embraced. The passenger put an arm around his shoulder. Then, as the driver moved back, you saw that the arm was bare, his passenger naked. The passenger refused to release the driver, apparently trying to drag him back into the car. Finally the driver pushed backwards and the naked figure fell to the pavement. Kwesi hit pause.
“Corpse,” Belsey said.
“That’s what it looks like to me.”
Belsey caught his breath. He seized implications. Firstly, whatever doubts he may have had as to the gravity of the situation, the intent of his antagonist, could be packed away. Here was someone who trafficked in dead bodies. It made Jemma’s abduction part of something bigger. How did they connect? Kill someone Saturday night, abduct someone Monday evening. Was she a bargaining chip? A last hurrah? Just the latest?
More to the point, what was his suspect doing here, parked thirty seconds from Oxford Street? London wasn’t short of neglected corners to dispose of unwanted dead.
They rewound and watched the extraction again—he couldn’t see if the body was male or female. The driver stood above the body, obscuring it. He spent a moment staring down. Then he crouched and dragged it into the road, then out of shot beneath the camera. He couldn’t have dragged it far. He came back into shot fifteen seconds later, looking around the sides of the surrounding buildings as if he planned to scale them. At 04.23 he reached into the car and retrieved something from either the glove compartment or the dashboard. He took it across the road, in the direction of the corpse, shaking it.
“A can of something,” Kwesi said.
“A spray can.”
Eighty seconds passed. The suspect returned without the can, checked the doors of the BMW were locked and strolled off towards New Oxford Street.
“He just leaves the car and body there?” Belsey asked.
“That’s right.”
Kwesi hit fast forward. At 04.44 a man and woman staggered into view; he pressed her up against a wall and she slipped a hand under his shirt as they kissed. Then she looked past him. You saw the woman recoil. The man turned, then also took a step back. You couldn’t see their expressions. You saw the woman fish a phone out of her handbag and speak without taking her eyes off the corpse.
04.57. The windows of the car and the office block began to flash: an ambulance with high top lights arriving somewhere to the left. At 05.02 more bulbs began to gather in the glass: police. The concrete lit up. The BMW sat insouciant throughout it all. No one paid it any attention. By 05.20, crime scene technicians must have got there. An indistinct figure crossed into shot, non-uniform. Someone strung tape in the distance, blocking the road from Holborn. The activity went on for about an hour, building, then dispersing. Then nothing at all: 06.37.
“What happened?” Belsey said.
06.59. A man in T-shirt and shorts urinated against the wall to the right of the shot before staggering back to Tottenham Court Road.
“Go to when it was ticketed,” Belsey said.
07.29. A parking attendant waddled into view. He checked his watch, circled the vehicle, bit a pen. The clock hit 07.30 and he tapped away at his machine. Nothing appeared to alert him to the fact that he was a few metres from a recent body dump. The ticket was logged at 07.34. Belsey knew wardens: he could almost believe that the man’s attention to parking violations would eclipse any homicide concerns, but not quite.
“That, my friend, is one hell of a quick clean-up operation.”
Earnshaw Street, he thought. Back of Centre Point. Belsey brought up the email from Ferryman. The image of the building. The side of a tower block.
“Look at this.” He passed the phone over. “What do you reckon?”
“It’s Centre Point.” Kwesi read the subject line. “‘Did you get your badge?’ Who is this?”
“I think the email’s from whoever’s leaving the body. Go back to when he drops it. Can you enhance his face?”
“Not well.”
Chib showed him. The image of the suspect’s face was grained almost to the point of pixelated anonymity. Belsey could see the corpse’s arm. It was thin. Still hard to tell if the flesh had belonged to a man or a woman. Belsey’s instinct was leaning towards male. No long hair visible anyway. Then it dropped.
The spray can. Followed by the eighty seconds off camera. The stroll away.
“Where does he go?”
“Nowhere. That’s the strangest thing. There’s eight cameras within a couple of hundred metres and he’s not on any of them. I’ve checked.”
“He disappears.”
“Exactly.”
Belsey felt a familiar combination of emotions: awe, frustration, total perplexity.
“But he collects the BMW at some point,” Belsey said. “I was chasing it thirty-six hours later.”
Kwesi skipped to 09.20 a.m. The man returned alone, walking fast, checking the street. He spent a moment beside the BMW, apparently admiring the clean-up. A school party crossed in front of him, young children holding hands. Then he tore the parking ticket off the windscreen and climbed back in. He pulled out hurriedly and disappeared towards New Oxford Street. Kwesi paused the tape.
Belsey called in a check on the body. He didn’t remember hearing of any corpses turning up on Sunday morning. He was right: no bodies had been discovered at that time. Not according to Local Intelligence. He tried Central Communications Command and they knew nothing either. Nor did the Met-wide emergency response system or the Yard’s own call-handling centre. Belsey phoned the two squads that bordered the dump site: Camden Borough headquarters, then Westminster police at West End Central. He got flat denials.
Belsey turned back to the tapes. This wasn’t right.
“Run it from when the police arrive, triple speed.”
They watched the empty space, lit by the refracted lightshow of an emergency. The comical high-speed blooming of the incident—the shadows of
someone
,
some
people on the concrete. Then the departure.
“See how fast they leave?” Belsey said. “Police, SOC; they just pile out of there.”
They watched the whole thing from start to finish, three times. Kwesi crossed himself. Belsey crossed himself. They spent a few seconds staring at their reflections in the blank screen.
BELSEY HEADED TO CENTRE POINT WITH A CD OF THE
footage in his pocket, wondering what story it contained.
He arrived as the day hit noon, parked on the corner of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road, pushed through the mesh of pedestrians towards the tower block. What a place to leave a corpse: the spiritual centre of the West End, which was a contradiction in terms. Centre Point was thirty-four floors of bleak, latticed concrete. It marked a meeting of the ways—the retail purgatory of Oxford Street, Soho to the west: bars and clubs and strip-shows. To the south was theatreland, to the east the museums and universities of Bloomsbury. You could see the tower block for miles, stuck in the middle of all this, its name lit up across the top as if it meant something. A beacon. A lighthouse warning you away from the rocks.
Everything converged on Centre Point, including the traffic which knotted at its foot. The area around the base was dismal, its confusion currently exacerbated by the endless construction site for a new rail link. Heavy grey columns elevated the first floor of the building and created a maze of dark passages, leading seamlessly into a grim subway. As a child Belsey had associated this burrow with the sleeping homeless who filled it. As a young man, with the pool hall that led off the same loveless underpass.
Earnshaw Street, where the body had been left, was part of this mess, a cut-through created by the crash-landing of the tower block. It was a gap, with three Korean restaurants and a lesbian bar, all huddled together in deep shadow, as if there was strength in numbers. He saw the bloodstains immediately. They were on a stub of pavement beside the stairs up to Centre Point’s main entrance. They’d been scrubbed into strange patterns: pale, interlocked circles that Belsey decoded as an attempt to clean the paving stones with a sponge of some kind. Garters of police tape clung to railings. Tiny silver fragments of a foil ambulance blanket remained caught in the spikes of some dead shrubbery potted at the base. They looked like futuristic blossoms. He saw fingerprint dust on the glass behind it. The place had evidently received full forensic attention at some point.
He plucked a scrap of foil from the shrubbery. The corpse can’t have looked that old if they’d tried to wrap it. He stuck a toe into the mulch of old carrier bags and cigarette packets behind the plant pot and saw something wedged there. A spray can. Belsey pulled it out and shook it. The brand was “Hycote,” colour: “Colorado Red.” It was still heavy with paint. Whoever had done the clearing must have been in a hurry.
But not too hurried for a bit of redecoration. Belsey sniffed. He touched the wall in front of him. It was tacky with a fresh coat of grey paint. He stepped back, then crossed the road to gain a better vantage. Sprayed in upper case letters three feet high, on the concrete underbelly of Centre Point itself, was the word “CAVE.” The attempt to hide the word with a rushed paint job only made it seem more significant. Letters seemed to be emerging from the concrete itself.
Belsey took the spray can to his car and threw it in. He checked with Dispatch once more. No record of a body came up. He tried three officers who might have been patrolling the area. None had heard of anything. There are clean-ups and then there are cover-ups, he thought. To wipe a record from the Emergency Response Database you needed to be sitting at or near the top.
He went and stood where the BMW had been parked and tried to trace the route the body would have been dragged. The individual would have had extra cover: Denmark Street to the south was entirely blocked by the hoardings of the Crossrail building site. The car itself would be rich with evidence. Where was it? He realised he had no idea of its fate since he’d last seen it abandoned by the deep shelter. He called Camden Borough HQ.
“There was a stolen BMW left in Belsize Park yesterday, around five p.m. Do you know what happened to it?”
“Sure. It’s in Perivale.”
Perivale was home to the Met’s car pound. Belsey gave them a call.
“A silver BMW 7 series brought in yesterday—have you still got it?”
“Yes. We’ve just been told it can be released.”
“OK, it’s just become evidence in a murder inquiry. You need to hold it. I’m on my way over now.”
IT WAS 12:30 P.M.
when he got to the Vehicle and Evidence Recovery Service. Belsey turned off the A40, past the giant Tesco, to the car pound. A guard opened locked gates and directed Belsey to an office in a Portakabin. Another guard checked the records then led Belsey across the tarmac.
The place was a cross between a prison and an eccentric museum. There were distinct zones: the sculptures of destruction, the plain old uninsured, the stolen. Then, on the high-security wing, under a plastic roof, there were those awaiting forensics attention.
The BMW was at the front. Belsey put latex gloves on. He opened the doors and stepped back as the reek escaped. Clearly no one had checked it. The car had a plush interior: beige leather upholstery, chrome trim, headrest DVD screens. But it stank. You could see faint red-brown staining over the back seat. It smelt like purge fluid: blood but also stomach acid, and stomach contents. He gave the upholstery a bang. No maggots. So the corpse hadn’t been more than a few hours old. He’d seen cars that had transported older corpses. They were a crawling mess.