‘I can keep you out of this,’ McGovern said.
‘I don’t need you to keep me out of this.’
The Detective Inspector shrugged. ‘Don’t say I didn’t try.’ He dabbed the corners of his mouth, folded the napkin on the counter and stood up. ‘Her dad owns half of Oxford Street. Imagine that.’
‘Oxford Street’s a dive.’
‘People saw you leave the club with her.’
‘No they didn’t.’
McGovern nodded thoughtfully. He walked out. Belsey watched him belch, then turn right towards his BMW.
Mind games. Feeling out the levers to work you. It had been a while.
Chloe Burlington. Slipped through that back door out of existence, invisible and everywhere, affording no readmission. Pushed through. He felt the guilt of proximity. Of having unwittingly accompanied someone there and not crossed over with them. The guilt of not having done something, of not pursuing a course of action he couldn’t quite imagine.
His business card beside her body. If McGovern wasn’t entirely bullshitting. Why? It said police on it. People thought that meant you could take care of things, look after them. She called at 12.19 a.m. No signal in the club itself. In the courtyard maybe. Or after leaving. He didn’t use his own voice on his voicemail. She would have got through to an automated message, and declined to leave one of her own.
Belsey downed his cold espresso and walked out. No one tried to arrest him.
7
HE BOUGHT RAZORS AND SHAVING cream from a chemist by Green Park station then took the bus back to north London. Things he wanted to establish: was Mark Doughty actually involved? Could he have known Chloe Burlington was going to be at Loulou’s? Did he loiter outside, waiting? Could he lure her away? Force her, or get her to follow him somehow?
A phone number Belsey recognised as West End Central was trying to get through to him. He rejected the call. For the moment. He left a message on Gabby’s voicemail: ‘I don’t mean to panic you but there’s a possibility the murder last night connects to Amber’s stalker. The police will need any details you have. Make sure you contact them.’
Lee Chester’s phone also went to voicemail.
‘Call me,’ Belsey said.
Hampstead police station looked as silent and neglected as he’d left it. He checked the windows, then climbed into the car park, undid the padlock on the side door and stepped in. Twenty-four hours away had given him some perspective: the drying clothes, empty bottles, improvised meals on old canteen plates. He saw a perverse defiance, as if he’d been trying to prove something. A misguided loyalty. A dog by its owner’s grave. He thought of the knocking that started all this. And he understood it now. Maureen Doughty had come to a place of dereliction to find someone who knew the terrain. Someone familiar with the cracks through which people fall. That was his thing.
He tidied up the empties, the cigarette butts. His own crisis, which had been overwhelming twenty-four hours ago, seemed relatively minor now.
The cold taps still ran. Belsey filled a pan in the office kitchen, fixed his last gas canister to the camping stove and turned the flame on high.
He searched through his missed calls again as the water boiled. Finally, inevitably, the unreturnable call at 12.19 a.m. He was surprised by the intensity of the feeling it evoked. He wondered if this was how death felt when you didn’t have the rituals of policing to absorb it. Even strangers’ deaths. Not quite strangers.
Signal cuts just east of Avenue Road, about an hour later. Suggesting the killer had travelled on foot. Or visited somewhere first. Avenue Road wasn’t on the most immediate route back, by foot or public transport.
He would have gone via the West End, was Belsey’s guess, into the comforting chaos of Oxford Street rather than through Mayfair to Baker Street, the way he and Amber had driven. There would have been people out and about either way. There were cameras.
Belsey split the water between a cafetière and the bowl he used for shaving. He shaved as the coffee brewed, studying his reflection in the glass of a framed photograph: Hampstead subdivision of the Metropolitan Police, 1932. His eyes switched focus between his face and the rows of stern, moustached officers.
He took the coffee to the old courtroom, sat in the dock and felt justice lingering in the semi-darkness.
He thought about Geoff McGovern.
Bullseye. Belsey had initially thought the nickname related to McGovern’s precision, because he got results. It was the Sarge, Neil Atherton, who led Belsey into the interview room after a McGovern interrogation and showed him the dart holes in the wall behind the suspect’s chair; Atherton pissing himself. Interviews are all about the psychology, Nick. Like a game of chess.
After a few months the word ‘mentor’ acquired an ominous tone. Things Belsey had learned from Geoffrey McGovern: how to strike fear into fearless men; how to recycle the seized proceeds of crime to run informants off the books; how to use journalists as a combination of investigative tool, source of bribes and moral alibi. McGovern approached work as a spectrum of opportunities, from the restoration of law and order to enhancing his portfolio of income streams. And the two weren’t always incompatible. Not when you were getting good intelligence off your chosen dealers, letting them grow their business, creaming off profit to fund your own unorthodox brand of investigation.
Happy days. Happy crew. And the Crown: their pub, at a time when every pub in south-east London had its own flavour of corruption. That was the coppers’ pub, a stronghold, and Belsey had destroyed it. If it’s getting archaeological you need to tell them where to dig. He imagined spades hitting something hard: clearing the top soil to reveal a single night, like a fragment of bone. Christmas Eve, 2002. A raid had gone down, a huge batch of ecstasy seized. Big motors parked outside the pub, men from the Yard, Drugs Squad. Everyone was going to claim their Christmas bonus, Belsey amongst them. There was a cheer as he walked in. He realised what a position he’d come to occupy; saw younger officers watching him; handshakes and backslaps. The air was thick. Someone pulled a cracker. Everyone laughed. They were wearing paper hats. There was a stink of aftershave and sweat. Someone put two hundred quid in Belsey’s jacket. He looked around at the smiling faces, saucer-eyed, jaws working.
Jesus Christ.
A pub full of thirty corrupt police officers on ecstasy is a sight you don’t forget. Pat Durham, Tommy Reeves, John Rossdale; men unaccustomed to euphoria. A few of the regulars missing. Must be guarding the haul. Divvying it up. Waiting for the heat to pass.
‘Fucking A, lads. Where did it go? Where’s the rest?’
Rossdale winked, nodded to the storeroom, put a finger to his lips. ‘Merry Christmas, Nick.’
‘Here?’ Belsey grinned in disbelief. ‘Are you mad?’
They weren’t mad: they were police. They owned the night and day. They were high as kites.
‘Where’d you get the tip-off?’
Rossdale leaned in, unsteadily. ‘You.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The pills are from the Adjaye brothers.’
His informants.
‘You’ve done us a favour.’
‘Samuel can’t have liked that very much.’ Belsey tried to keep his smile, his voice.
‘He ran to the Yard,’ Durham laughed. ‘Tried to turn supergrass. Guess who he went to? Jim fucking Kiver. Chief Superintendent Skiver himself.’
‘What did Skiver do?’
‘Drove him straight back to us, of course.’ A roar of laughter, mouth wide, face contorted as if screaming.
There were specks of blood on the party hats. Belsey clinked glasses with his colleagues, checked their grazed knuckles. Someone forced a pill into his mouth. He left the pub.
Samuel Adjaye lay cuffed on the floor of a cell in Borough police station, seventeen years old, naked but for a Santa Claus hat. The hat had been pulled down over his eyes, his teeth broken. Piss spread around him across the tiles. Belsey got him out of the cuffs, found him some clothes.
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‘I didn’t know about this,’ Belsey said.
‘Bullshit,’ he said through his broken mouth, chin wet with mucus and tears.
‘It’s true.’
‘You said I was protected.’
‘How much did they take?’ Belsey asked.
‘Five hundred grand cash, a thousand pills.’
Belsey got Adjaye into an ambulance. He went to evidence stores and checked the book. According to DS McGovern, they’d seized a total of fifty pills and two grand in cash. That was breathtaking duplicity, even by Borough standards.
Up to the deserted CID office. Belsey took the claw hammer from McGovern’s desk drawer, then he put it back, picked up the phone and dialled.
‘It’s me.’
‘Nicky. Merry Christmas.’
‘Got a proposal if you’re able to move fast. Big haul. Once in a lifetime.’
‘How fast?’
‘Fast like now. And you’d need kit.’
The memory still made his heart race, as if to compensate for the calmness he felt in the moment. A debt of adrenalin he’d never pay off.
Back to the Crown, men dancing on the pool table, passing around a World’s Best Dad mug filled with whisky. Come on, Nicky. Then the moment when all the windows fell in. Officers hitting the ground as they heard gunfire. It was beautiful. Half the partygoers didn’t even know what was going on before the attackers were leaving again, spilling pills, popping shots from a handgun at the stock behind the bar. Belsey had chosen the right men for the job. As he lay there on the floor he took a moment to appreciate it. To appreciate the end, which, even then, he knew was a rare privilege: to know it when it comes. To feel darkness folding back into the night.
Officers ran to their cars. Everyone pretended they knew who to fuck up, because you had to, but they were just running. No one was going to be caught anywhere near the place. And when everyone had run, it was just Belsey and McGovern. Last out as ever. And it was peaceful, standing there. Knowing they wouldn’t see this place again. Knowing it was over and they were about to kill each other. Buzzing.
They didn’t manage to kill each other. Belsey was discharged from St Thomas’ Hospital after forty-eight hours, arrested, locked up for another two days. McGovern left A&E the following Wednesday, Boxing Day. Eventually Belsey was released from custody, told to go home, stay silent and wait. The days that followed were the strangest in his life. The city entered that limbo between Christmas and New Year and it felt as if the Yard had extended its cover-up operation to the world at large. The streets themselves had taken a vow of silence. On 12 January, Belsey was reassigned to Hampstead police station. He heard McGovern was on his way to Islington CID. As if, beyond the worst of violence and corruption, there was nothing but the upper-middle classes.
Did McGovern think he’d won now, as his career ascended and Belsey’s remained earthbound, then subterranean? McGovern’s smart move had been to get onto the next rung of the ladder fast. His personal network was broad and there were photographs of him playing golf and attending gala dinners with everyone from the Chief Constable to the Lord Mayor. Last year Belsey heard he’d arrived at Homicide and Serious Crime Command, which had offered refuge to no shortage of sick men. But he and McGovern were always going to be with each other in some way. McGovern, who knew him at his worst. And who, more dangerously, knew what Belsey had seen of his own heart. Not a figure he wanted in an already complex scenario.
He heated water for porridge. Fished half a lime from a mug of dark rum and squeezed the juice in. Keep scurvy at bay, or something. Then he splashed in some rum as well. When he’d eaten, he turned his phone on, went online.
‘Stars Shaken by Death of Socialite.’ Front page of the Daily Mail website.
Chloe Burlington, murdered last night in what is being described as a random attack, was the daughter of Sir Malcolm Burlington, owner of the Derringer Group of companies, and heir to the Beaufort Estate in Somerset. A talented artist and designer who came to London in 2010 to study at Central Saint Martins, Chloe was described by friends today as ‘a warm and kind person’, ‘the life and soul of any party’, and ‘a girl who had everything before her’. Burlington led a glamorous, jet-set lifestyle, dividing her time between Paris, Geneva and Monte Carlo before establishing herself at Beluggi’s London HQ, where colleagues say she was expected to rise fast.
Apparently the height of her fame involved Fortune’s Heirs, a reality show about beautiful European aristocrats. It didn’t seem like the design career had taken off, no matter what her friends said. There were projects in the pipeline. She used to be a party animal. She hosted legendary parties at her father’s palace. To a detective’s eye, there were gaps in the CV.
The Mail ran a screenshot of her Instagram account from the previous evening: the princess with a Beluggi bag. ‘Can’t wait to celebrate this tonight.’ That post would have given a heads-up on where she was going to whoever cared to know.
He kept searching. There were a couple of photographs online from the time of the TV series. That was two or three years ago. Belsey couldn’t see anything to inspire current murderous obsession. He looked through the rest of the ghost Instagram account, life’s pleasure outliving its owner like hair and fingernails. And what a life of pleasure, a bright, expensive shell of a life: health food, cocktails, international travel. All that was missing was the advertising copy. Now perfect for ever.
Only, her last posting wasn’t about Beluggi: it was a picture of a bridge.
Odd. A photograph of a bridge over clear blue water, taken at an angle, as if from some way down a river bank. The bridge was small, humpbacked, stone, with ornate white railings. Through its arch you could see water continuing, expanding into a lake. Trees either side. Hills in the distance.
Posted 11.58 last night.
Fifteen people had liked it. Belsey scrolled through a handful of her followers. No Mark.
His phone rang: the talent agent, Andy Price, again. Belsey sent it to voicemail and ran a search on the man. Price had a colourful online presence. Aside from being sued by two former clients, including 2013’s Miss Blackpool, he seemed entirely charming. The website for AP Total Media Management celebrated ‘one of the fastest-growing media consultancies, housing an expanding celebrity client list’. Belsey didn’t return the call. He finished his coffee. Then the floor shook.
He went to the window. A black Mitsubishi Shogun had pulled up: tinted windows, chrome alloy wheels, bass pumping. It sat for a moment, just entertaining the neighbourhood, then Lee Chester got out.
Belsey went downstairs fast. Lee was still staring at the notice when he arrived at the front.
‘Closed?’ he said. ‘You mean I won?’
Lee wore a white vest that showed off his chest and its artworks. His head was freshly shaved, left arm wrapped in cling film. Belsey checked the car and saw a man in shades and braids in the passenger seat. The car meant Lee wasn’t carrying – for actual drop-offs he used a much less conspicuous Golf GTI – but this wasn’t what Belsey needed stationed outside his home.
‘Kill the music,’ he said.
Lee conveyed the message. His passenger turned the music down.
‘You didn’t tell me you knew Amber Knight,’ he said.
‘I didn’t.’
‘You’re a dark horse.’
‘Can we get out of sight?’
They climbed into the car. Belsey squeezed in the back, next to gym bags, a weightlifting belt, a lot of empty mineral water bottles. A shelf of subwoofers dug into his neck.
‘I told you I knew him,’ Lee said to his companion, waving a picture of Belsey and Amber on his phone’s screen. His companion considered Belsey from behind his mirrored lenses, nodding. ‘You’re a dark fucking horse, Nick. What else aren’t you telling me?’ The dealer grinned, eyes bright with placid wonder. His neck veins pulsed beneath a tattoo of fruit-machine cherries. The new piece, under the cling film, appeared to be St George killing the dragon. Belsey moved a st
ack of flyers from his seat. Over the last few years, Lee Chester had developed a tactic of surrounding himself with shallow industry – club promotion, property refurbishment. He was charming and professional, but you don’t make money out of hard drugs for ten years without occasionally burning people in the face with a clothes iron. Lee’s eagerness to hurt competitors legally as well as physically had helped Belsey put away several less diplomatic dealers. It had earned Lee a .22 bullet still lodged in the thigh he liked to show off after a couple of Stellas. He considered himself immortal, which Belsey imagined helped with everything.
‘This here’s my friend Daniel,’ Lee said. ‘Does a bit of the old music production. Was hoping you’d meet.’
Daniel nodded in the rear-view. Lee twisted in his seat, arm around the headrest. ‘Get Amber to my club and I’ll write off whatever Mark owes me. We’ve got a special night coming up, a relaunch. She’d love it.’
‘Why would I care about Mark Doughty’s debt?’
‘Sounded like you cared.’ Lee looked momentarily hurt. Then he smiled again. ‘What’s she like? Does she party? Does she need my number?’
‘Right now, Amber’s like someone in danger. Serious danger, from your friend Mark Doughty. I think Mark might have murdered someone last night. I’d like to find him before he kills anyone else.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘No.’
‘Fucking hell. Who’d he kill?’
‘The girl in Mayfair. It’s on the news.’
‘Jesus Christ.’ He straightened to face the windscreen again and bit a cuticle.
‘I need to know who he is,’ Belsey said.
‘I barely know the guy.’
‘He was stalking Amber. He’s been in her house. Has he been in trouble with the police before?’
‘Probably.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s a weirdo, isn’t he. He chats a lot of shit.’
‘About what?’
The House of Fame Page 7
