Deep Shelter (11 page)

Its special status, not only as central London’s first skyscraper but also as one of the very first buildings in the UK to be fully air-conditioned, led some to speculate as to its usefulness to the government in the event of a nuclear attack. Rumours also suggest that the building’s height served, at least in part, as a pretext for excavation, and that Centre Point goes down almost as far as it goes up, with at least ten floors of reinforced offices beneath the structure.

Either way, the priority appears to have been strength and security. Street-level landscaping was an afterthought, and possibly determined by the need to protect whatever lies below.

Belsey found a couple more articles along the same lines. He walked out and looked up at the building, up to the storm clouds it was threatening to puncture. He walked through the struts of the building to the site of the body dump. Someone had been back, since his visit this morning, this time with the tools to clean up properly. All traces were now gone: no ends of police tape, no debris; the graffiti had been painted over again, obscuring the letters absolutely.

He walked further round the base. A ramp at the side went down to the entrance of an underground car park. The entrance was sealed by electronic gates through which he could see the ramp continuing, lit by a single yellow light, corkscrewing down between white-painted breeze blocks. The camera watching over this had a familiar sign beneath it:
Stronghold
. It gave the same phone number as the camera beside the Belsize Park shelter.

Belsey tried the gates just in case. He pressed a buzzer on the wall beside the entrance. He waited five minutes for a car to come in or out. None did.

He returned to the bar. A few more customers had arrived. He picked up the whisky sour he’d been enjoying, then put it down. He touched the glass again. He lifted the drink to the light and there were no lip marks. No ice had melted. The drink was colder than he’d left it. He looked around.

He shared the bar with a thirty-something couple on an awkward date, three men loudly celebrating, two women who looked like models. Dance music pumped half-heartedly. The sky flashed.

Belsey walked out into a thunder clap loud as a bomb. It set off car alarms. There was sudden laughter, howls. Someone slammed into him—“Sorry mate”—a gang of kids high on weather, off to steam the late-openings. Belsey checked that he still had his wallet. Clouds opened with a ripping sound. He stared up through the rain at Centre Point. Then back through the streaming windows at his drink.

He checked his jacket for the disc from Camden CCTV and it was gone.

IT WAS 7:15 P.M. BY THE TIME HE MADE IT BACK TO THE
station. A crowd had gathered in the small office behind reception. It included Kirsty Craik.

“Sarge, I need to talk to you,” Belsey said. It was quite a get together in the little room. People stared at him. Everyone was there, civilian staff, even custody officers. They stood around a small table as if paying their last respects.

“Nick,” Craik said. “Look.”

A package of pale blue tissue paper had been torn open. He thought at first it contained a wig. The hair was dark, long. It was in good condition, glossy beneath the neon bulb; a full head’s worth. It spilled from the paper onto the white tabletop. No one touched it.

Belsey put on a pair of latex gloves from a box at the side. He picked up the paper and a small white card fell out. In neat black biro someone had written:
To DC Nick Belsey
.

“Where did it come from?” he asked.

“Left in reception, ten minutes ago,” Craik said. Belsey placed the card beside the strands and crouched to the level of the tabletop. The hair had been chopped unevenly. He rubbed a couple of strands between his fingers and a familiar dark dust came off.

“Someone actually entered reception?”

“Yes.”

“Who was here?”

“I was,” Wendy Chan said. She was back at the reception monitor now, checking the tapes.

“What happened?”

“He walked in, said it was for you, said you’d know what it was about and left. He was white, with a hood up. I’d say thirty to forty.”

“Grey hood?”

“Yes. Grey hood, and gloves, I think. We’ve checked the tapes and there are no clear shots. What is this, Nick? Who is he? Someone winding you up?” Her voice was weak and hopeful.

“Anyone see which way he went?”

“He was gone before we realised what had happened,” Chan said.

“Have patrols been alerted?”

“Yes.”

Belsey moved past the crowd, back into the rain. The street was empty. He drove to the Belsize Park shelter. No sign of any recent activity around the turret. A little further down the hill there was action, a small, soaked crowd around the tube station. Gates had been drawn across the entrance. Tempers were fraying. A couple of damp Transport Police constables loitered.

“What’s going on?” Belsey asked.

“Person on the tracks, near Golders Green.”

“A suicide?”

“Don’t think so. In the tunnels.”

BELSEY SWUNG THE SKODA
around and sped to Golders Green. It had a similarly frustrated crowd, blocked by a whiteboard:
Station closed due to person on tracks
. Belsey moved past the notice and showed his badge to the staff member on duty.

“I need to speak to the Station Manager immediately.” He was led into the station, along a platform. The platforms were open-air: Golders Green was where the Northern Line surfaced after fifteen miles underground. To the north, overground track ran through low-built suburbia. To the south, a tangle of rails ran into three black holes, sinking under central London. It was an obvious entry point for someone wanting to explore what lay beneath the city.

The Station Manager greeted Belsey wearily. He was tall and grey with thick-lensed glasses. He had his bicycle clips on and was holding empty Tupperware. Home time. Only one colleague remained; he wore a hi-vis jacket and was reading a paperback propped on his stomach.

“What can we do for you?”

“I need to know about the trespasser.”

“Yes, I spoke to one of your lot a moment ago. Southbound tunnels. Don’t know what happened.”

“Did anyone see the intruder?”

“No. But they triggered an alarm.” The manager didn’t seem unduly fazed.

“When was this?”

“About half an hour ago. I don’t know where they went. Haven’t been any more alarms set off.”

“Are people looking for them now?”

“No.”

“Are you able to pinpoint exactly where they triggered the alarm?”

The manager put his Tupperware down and showed Belsey a metal alarm panel in a control room behind the office. It had a map of the tracks studded with small bulbs, then switches underneath for deactivating alarms at entry points and stretches of tracks while engineering or inspections took place.

“Here.” The manager touched a bulb in the centre, halfway between Hampstead and Golders Green. “Around North End.”

“What’s North End?”

“The old station.”

Belsey peered closer. He had spent half his life travelling the Northern Line. There was no station between Hampstead and Golders Green. Yet the map thought there was: North End.

“When was there a station?”

“Never.” Now the man allowed himself a smile. “It never opened. Abandoned before it was half-built. Stupid idea. They thought there was going to be a development on the Heath.”

“When was that?”

“About a century ago.”

“What’s there now?”

“Bits and pieces.” He checked his watch and drummed his fingers on the Tupperware.

“What’s that meant to mean?”

“I don’t know what’s there now.”

“Is there an entrance above ground?”

“Sort of, but it’s not obvious. It’s on the corner of Hampstead Way and Wildwood Road—just a little white box, like a Portakabin. There’s stairs down to what’s left of the station.”

Belsey knew Hampstead Way and Wildwood Road. Nice houses, occasional burglaries. He’d never noticed any portals leading underground.

“Could the trespasser have got in that way?”

“Not easily.”

Belsey went back to the map of the track and tunnel system.

“But they triggered the alarm near the abandoned station.”

“Roughly.”

“And there was no sighting of them here or at Hampstead?”

“No.”

“How far is North End from the stations on either side?”

“About a kilometre in each direction.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“North End?”

“Yes.”

He stared at Belsey. An odd smile curled his upper lip.

“You’ve got to be joking. I couldn’t authorise it anyway. North End’s nothing to do with us.”

“Who’s it to do with?”

“It’s got special security.”

“What do you mean?”

The man shrugged. “I don’t have authorisation. Besides, there’s only the two of us on duty and I’m about to clock off.” He checked his watch again and swore. “I’ve got to run now, in fact.”

Belsey was about to explain that he was in pursuit of a murder suspect and what this meant in terms of priorities, but it seemed unlikely to win the manager over. He seemed scared by the place and Belsey wanted to know why.

“OK,” Belsey said. “I just need to do some checks around here.”

“For what?”

“Fingerprints.”

“Fingerprints?”

“I’ll see myself out.” This was all the manager needed to hear. He picked up his bike helmet, bade farewell to his colleague and left. Belsey waited. The colleague settled back down on his chins. The book rose and fell as he breathed. Belsey gave it thirty seconds. He took a step towards the room with the alarm panel. He waited for his companion to look up. There was no movement. Belsey walked in. He reached for the panel, found the alarm switch for North End and eased it down. He did the same for the sections leading south from Golders Green, then slipped a torch off its hook.

He walked down the platforms to the southern end, past the sign
No Passengers Beyond This Point
, beneath the last of the security cameras. No one stopped him. The platform sloped down to the tracks. He walked on the gravel, along the sidings towards the three black mouths of the tunnels.

He didn’t know if all routes passed the ghost station. The middle tunnel seemed as good as any. He stepped over the tracks towards it. The darkness looked solid. Some vague superstition made him wonder if he could just walk in. He could. The air was immediately cooler. Belsey kept the torch off for eighty metres or so, until the entrance was a small coin of world behind him. Then the tunnel curved and the world was gone.

Silence again. Belsey continued south. There’d been a trespasser half an hour ago. How far could he get in that time? Was he heading back to his captive? Belsey stepped from sleeper to sleeper. Every minute or so he’d stop and listen. If someone decided to run a train he’d feel the vibrations. He would have time to press himself against the sides. He’d be visible, though.

Ten minutes in he found North End. There was a gap in the bricks beside him. A small arched passageway led from one darkness to another. He walked through and found himself beside a platform. The platform was at shoulder height. It had been taken over for storage: sacks of loose ballast, wooden sleepers, cable reels. All had become a uniform grey, like deep-sea creatures starved of light. He lifted himself up to the platform, blackening his hands in the process, and stepped past the abandoned ballast into a central corridor. It had unpainted plaster walls but modern emergency exit signs pointing to the bottom of a concrete spiral staircase. There were bright red fire extinguishers as well, shiny as Christmas baubles. To the right of the stairs were the steel doors of a lift that hadn’t been installed earlier than the 1970s. It had an up button and a down button, but the down button needed a key card to operate it. He could hear the station manager’s uncertain voice:
It’s got special security
. Belsey pushed the buttons. No lift came. Something scraped behind him.

The sound came from the far end of the central corridor. It was the sound of metal being dragged along the ground. His torchlight picked out a small door at the end of the corridor:
No Access to LU Staff
. Belsey walked through and almost fell to his death.

The cover of a square hatch had been removed. It opened onto a brick shaft with a ladder on one side, leading down into bottomless darkness. His stomach turned. He was standing in a dank cubicle, apparently built for the purpose of housing this hatch. There were two notices on the wall, one with health and safety regulations, one detailing the Official Secrets Act.

Belsey could hear someone at the bottom, running. He tucked the torch into his belt and started down.

When he reached the bottom he found a familiar set-up: the low, rounded tunnel in the torchlight, a subterranean fug. He smelled wax and rust and something marshy, the slow decay of metal and concrete. But this time there was company, running fast. Belsey headed in pursuit of the sound. The narrow strip between the curved walls made chasing difficult. Twice he tripped and fell. After five minutes or so Belsey stopped and could still hear the person ahead. He set off again. He ran for twenty minutes. It was impossible to tell how far ahead his target was. They sounded tantalisingly close, but then there wasn’t much going on to drown them out. Belsey wondered if he was chasing echo. Then he thought of the package of hair and gathered his strength for a final sprint. The sound of steps had gone. He reached a T-junction and felt sure this was where he had been the previous night, but that now he was rejoining the tunnel he’d originally investigated. The sense of familiarity gave him hope. He headed left, towards the library bunker.

Somebody screamed. It was a woman, up ahead. A couple of seconds later there was a crash. Belsey sprinted again. He almost ran straight past the ladder he’d used twenty-four hours earlier. There was no bike today. The hatch at the top was open. He looked at the square of darkness and imagined someone ready to decapitate him as he surfaced. He could hear breathing just by the hatch. Belsey hauled himself up slowly, then reached into the space of the room and his hand brushed a leg.