Deep Shelter
Authors: Oliver Harris
Everything secret degenerates
.
Lord Acton
1
H
E WAS TRYING TO GET A MOMENT
’
S PEACE WHEN THE
car appeared. Monday 10 June, end of a hot day. The city had started drinking at lunchtime and by 3 or 4 p.m. crime seemed the only appropriate response to the beauty of the afternoon. Belsey’s shift had consisted of two stabbed fourteen-year-olds and a disgruntled customer attacking his local pub with an electric drill. At quarter to five he felt his contribution to law and order had been made. He parked off the high street, sunk two shots of pure grain vodka into iced Nicaraguan espresso and put his seat back. In an hour he’d be off duty, and in a couple more he’d be on a date with an art student he’d recently arrested for drugs possession. All he had left to do, so he thought, was avoid getting any more blood on his suit.
The BMW tore into view before he’d taken a sip. There was a screech of tyres; someone screamed. Belsey watched it skid around the corner of Heath Street, almost tipping onto two wheels. Pedestrians dived off the crossing. A taxi swerved to avoid it, drove through the window of Gap Kids.
Belsey stuck his sirens on. He jammed his drink in the holder and swung back onto the high street, lifting his radio.
“Got a pursuit: silver BMW heading south on Rosslyn Hill. Possible injured up by Hampstead tube.”
Still no other sirens. Belsey sighed, raised his seat and took his own car over sixty. The force owned good Skodas tweaked for high-speed driving. This wasn’t one of them. He could hear the control room trying to scramble back-up, but no one was nearer than a mile away. You and me, he thought. He kept tight with the car as they approached Belsize Park. It looked like the driver was alone.
The BMW stuck to the high street. Which was odd. There were emptier roads if he wanted an escape but the driver had a plan, or liked having an audience. Or he didn’t give a fuck, was high, having the time of his life; sun’s up, steal a car. Belsey waved for him to pull over. It was optimistic. They crashed through a set of red lights at the junction with Pond Street and Belsey knew someone was going to get killed. He prepared to abandon the pursuit. Then the driver braked.
The BMW skidded straight over the crossing. Belsey veered to the side, clipped a minibus and swung to a stop twenty metres further down the hill. He grabbed his cuffs as the BMW’s door opened and a white man in black gloves jumped out. The driver pulled up a hood, grabbed a black rucksack from the car.
“Pursuit on foot,” Belsey radioed. “Belsize Park.”
The man barged through pedestrians. But he was off home ground, it seemed: he sprinted into an alleyway at the side of Costa Coffee. Belsey knew it was a dead end. He took the clip off his spray and turned the corner.
Something swung towards his face. Belsey lifted his arm. Metal slammed into his elbow and then his left cheek. He turned, dropping the spray, blinded with pain. He heard the man run deeper into the cul-de-sac. Belsey made sure he was still blocking the only way out. He extended his arm. It worked. He had vision. He picked up his spray and turned back to the alleyway, face throbbing.
“Police! Come out with your hands in front of you!”
The alleyway ended at a patch of concrete behind the coffee shop. It was sometimes used for parking, with space enough to squeeze in three or four cars. But no one was parked there now. There was no suspect either, just weeds fringing cracked tarmac.
“Come out slowly. I can see where you are.”
Nothing moved. The empty space was blocked at the end by a small brick building. No way in, blank metal panels blocking what must once have been a doorway; no handles on them, no lock. Belsey pushed and they were sealed shut. The building had no visible windows, nothing anyone could get through. It was flanked by high fencing, topped with rusted barbed wire. The fence wasn’t climbable. It divided the parking area from junk-strewn brambles. Even if you could climb the fence, there was nowhere to go, and Belsey would have heard the chain-link rattle. The man had disappeared.
THE CAVALRY ARRIVED A
minute later. Belsey went back to the main road and saw a lot of flashing blue lights and his colleagues disembarking, less brightly, wiping sweat and staring at the minor pile-up in the road.
“He’s gone,” Belsey said.
“You lost the guy?”
“You off the pace, Nick?”
“Get a look at him?”
“He had his hood up,” Belsey said. “Pretty sure he was white. In a dark grey hoodie. He had a rucksack. And gloves, I think. Was anyone hurt, up by the station?”
“Nothing serious. You reckon he was in gloves?” They squinted at the sun. “Where did he go?”
“Down beside the coffee shop. It doesn’t lead anywhere.”
His colleagues wandered into the alleyway, turning their radios down. Belsey assessed the moment of drama preserved in the road: his car and the BMW each with their driver’s door thrown open, black lines scarring the tarmac behind them. He thought of the sudden stop. And then the sense of purpose that led up to it. The driver knew where he was going.
Belsey reached into his own car and shoved the vodka under the passenger seat. Then he called the control room and ran a check on the BMW. It had been reported stolen three days ago, taken from outside a house in Highgate. Belsey stepped into the Costa. A barista asked for his order.
“The parking lot at the back, does that belong to you?”
“It’s not ours.”
“Do you know who owns it?”
“No.”
His colleagues emerged back onto the high street, shrugging. Their first thought would be that he’d fucked up somehow. They would suspect him of getting it wrong: intoxication, imagination, heatstroke. He walked past them, back into that closed stub of world and searched for CCTV. There were few corners of London so unloved that no one filmed them. Sure enough, mounted high on one of the fence’s struts was a fixed camera, angled to cover the bare space. It was weather-beaten but looked in working condition.
Protected by Stronghold
, a sign beneath it announced. Stronghold gave a London telephone number.
Belsey called it. No one answered. He searched for Stronghold on his phone. There were no security companies with that name.
He ran a search on the phone number itself. It didn’t link to anything about Stronghold, but was offered as the maintenance contact number on a smart-looking page for an organisation called Property Services Agency. According to its website, PSA managed facilities for the UK government and armed forces.
Belsey turned towards the empty lot. He stared at the bleached cans and broken furniture in the weeds, the back of Costa, finally the building which sealed the alley shut. This structure was odd, he saw now. The ground floor was perfectly round. The floor above it formed a square tower with ventilation slats.
Belsey peered through the chain-link fence at the side. A tall brick outcrop to the building jutted into the brambles. This did have something that looked like it might once have been a window, but it was boarded up now. He stepped back and appraised the structure as a whole. It possessed an air of seriousness. Something began to play at the edges of his memory.
Belsey walked two minutes down the high street. He found an identical structure on the corner of a residential road, the same round base and a ventilation tower on top of it, only this one was painted entirely white. Years ago he had asked one of the older Hampstead CID officers what it was and promptly buried the answer. He had passed the building a thousand times since and not thought about it again. The structure sat behind tall gates. Through them, Belsey could see an entrance to the tower, sealed by black mesh with a bright yellow sign:
DANGER: DEEP SHAFT
.
MOST CID OFFICERS WERE IN THE CANTEEN WHEN
he got back. Belsey checked the swelling on his face and took a paracetamol. He bought what passed for a coffee and joined the noisiest table: Detective Constable Derek Rosen, oldest on the team, was working solemnly through a plate of chips. DC Rob Trapping, twenty years less worn, had come in for an evening shift armed with Ray-Bans and a handheld electric fan. With them were Wendy Chan and Janice Crosby, civilian stalwarts who managed the front desk. They were all talking about a new detective sergeant who had apparently arrived that morning.
Belsey waited, wondering why he was the last to hear about these things. In a lull he said: “Up on Haverstock Hill there’s a round, white building. On the corner of Downside Crescent.” The group turned to him.
“The old bomb shelter,” Rosen said.
“Bomb shelter?” It was coming back to him. “There’s another one behind Costa,” Belsey said.
Officers at an adjacent table turned, ready to be amused. They were familiar with Belsey’s tangents. DC Derek Rosen, being the station’s elder statesman, held up a fat hand.
“It’s not another one,” he said. “It’s another entrance to the same shelter.” He leaned back and wiped the ketchup from his mouth. Rosen liked the War. He started wearing a poppy in September. “In case one of them is hit when you’re down there,” he elaborated.
“That would make it about half a kilometre long,” Belsey said.
“It is.”
“There’s one in Camden as well,” Crosby added.
“Where?”
“Behind Marks & Sparks.”
“How many are there?”
“There’s a few about,” Rosen said. “Five or six in London, maybe more.”
“What are they used for now?”
“
Used
for?”
“Someone’s looking after them,” Belsey said. “The Belsize shelter’s still got a camera on it. What’s down there?”
There was silence, a few shrugs. No one knew.
“Why?” Rosen asked.
“The guy I was chasing, I think he might have gone in.”
This provoked laughter alongside a more considered scepticism, but no more information. Talk turned to cold beer and evening plans.
Belsey wanted to go down.
He’d need a warrant. If he could prove his man entered, hit a police officer, was an ongoing threat . . . One problem was that, technically, Belsey was meant to be on restricted duties. He’d misbehaved last year, toying with some minor identity theft, and this was his punishment: sit back, do the grunt work, don’t chase. Then he remembered the conversation he’d walked in on. If there was a new sergeant he might be able to take advantage, hustle authorisation before they caught up with his dubious credentials.
“What do we know about the new Sarge?” he asked.
“Fit,” Trapping said. He aimed his fan in Belsey’s face. “Chilli hot, my friend.” The rest of the table shook their heads. Trapping winked. He was the kind of officer Belsey admired: untroubled. Twenty-four, six foot four, and a police detective, confident that these facts were good news for himself and society.
“She’s meant to be very good,” Crosby said.
“I didn’t think we were getting anyone.”
“We decided, if we stopped paying you, we could afford the Sergeant.” Rosen dropped a chip into his mouth.
“What’s her name?”
“Kirsty Craik.”
“You’re joking.”
Belsey went up to the CID office. There was something different, and after a few seconds he realised what it was: the place
felt
like an office: an air of quiet industry, of paperwork being dutifully completed. Detective Constable Adnan Aziz winked, then nodded to the corner office. Belsey knocked on the open door. A woman with a blonde ponytail looked up and smiled coolly.