Now Belsey watched each new arrival.
A black Hyundai drove into shot, parked close to the hotel entrance. A man climbed out. He had light brown hair neatly combed, a raincoat over a grey suit. No luggage. He flicked a cigarette to the ground as he crossed to the entrance.
Straight to the lifts.
A yellow Aston Martin V8 drove in fast, parked askew. Chloe Burlington climbed out. She wore a trench coat, skinny white jeans, black ballet pumps. Expressionless. Hands in the pockets of her trench.
A couple emerged from a grey Peugeot 5008 people carrier. Belsey took a second to recognise them: the Shaws – Conor’s parents. The back-up vehicle that had tracked Mark Doughty’s Renault through the Essex night, on a mission to dump Harper’s corpse and bring back the troops.
Over the next twelve minutes another sixteen individuals entered the Comfort Hotel. A significant number emerged from hi-spec cars: Mercedes, BMWs, SUVs. None carried luggage. Seven men, nine women. All arrived alone. Some entered via a side door into the restaurant before cutting through to the lifts and stairs. Jason Stanford used this route, pulling down the hood of a grey tracksuit top as he stepped into the lobby.
The one other thing they had in common: the arrivals didn’t look comfortable being there. They walked fast. They ducked into the hotel as if escaping rain.
‘Know what this is?’ Belsey said. The hotel staff shook their heads. ‘An event? A function of some kind?’
‘We don’t do anything like that.’
Belsey switched to footage of the reception area. Men and women gathered by the lifts, waiting to go up but not talking. No contact between them.
He tracked through on high speed. One hour, two hours.
At 20.02 they began to leave.
First out was a bespectacled young man, followed thirty seconds later by a very thin young woman with straight black hair, wearing a denim jacket and black leggings.
They left one by one, at intervals of thirty seconds. Belsey checked the women’s hair. Not dishevelled. He checked the men’s shirts and suit jackets. Two hours in a twenty-four-strong orgy should leave its marks. All looked fairly neat.
‘Let me see the suite again,’ he said.
They went back up. The room was unchanged. In total there was just enough space for twenty-four people to gather. If this was really where they wanted to be.
Two hours in here, Belsey thought. Something had occurred worth filming. Worth £750k. Amongst the complimentary bottles of Highland Spring and the dog-eared edition of South East Tourism magazine.
He opened the curtains, pushed the netting aside and peered through the double glazing down to the car park.
‘Are there any cleaners still about?’ he asked.
‘I think they’ve just finished.’
‘Could you see?’
Habiba disappeared. She returned with two women in jeans and coats. One clutched a purse; the older of the two held a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
‘I’m interested in the people here last Friday,’ Belsey said. ‘Do you remember? Quite a lot of people. They left around eight-thirty p.m. Did you clean it?’
‘Yes.’ The older one spoke.
‘When? That night?’
‘The morning.’ Her English was limited but she understood him well enough.
‘How was it? Was the room dirty?’
‘No problem.’
‘Clean?’
‘Very clean. Very good.’
‘Had the bed been used?’
The cleaner shrugged. She consulted her partner, who looked puzzled. ‘Very clean,’ she said, eventually.
‘Rubbish in the bin?’
She shrugged again. Both cleaners glanced around the room, wondering what they’d missed.
‘Do you think they cleaned the room themselves?’
‘Maybe.’
‘And the bed was made? Like this?’
‘Yes.’
Belsey told them to talk amongst themselves. He stepped into the corridor, shut the door, listened to their voices. He wandered the landing, couldn’t hear much. It wasn’t soundproof though. He knocked and they let him back in.
‘Was there anyone else staying up here?’
‘I can check,’ Habiba said and led him back down to reception. He went into the back office while she typed something at the main desk.
‘No,’ she said, walking into the office. ‘Just them.’ Belsey was connecting the CCTV monitor to the printer.
‘Did the manager say that’s OK?’ Habiba asked.
‘Graham said I’d be doing him a favour.’
What he had: twenty-four people but in varying degrees of anonymity. Of the thirteen cars that came into shot, eleven had licence plates that he could read. Fourteen of the faces hurrying past were in clear view of the camera. Seven he already knew: Amber, Mark, Harper, Chloe, Stanford, Conor’s parents. The rest he wanted to know.
‘Do cars using the car park need to register?’
‘No.’
Which meant he was limited to the licence plates he could see on camera.
‘What is this?’ Habiba said.
‘I have no idea. Tell Graham to call me if he’s got any suggestions.’
Belsey stepped outside. He looked up towards the inscrutable orange curtains of the Finchley Suite. He crossed the car park to the 24-hour McDonald’s.
Five minutes to ten p.m. It was quiet. Blank, immutable light, a homeless sleeper, a family with suitcases. He got a black coffee, took a seat in the corner and called Stefan Keydel.
‘Can you talk?’
‘Just about.’ Keydel changed rooms. A door shut.
‘Have you got anything yet?’
‘I went through bank statements. I couldn’t see anything. There’s more I can look at in the morning.’
‘How’s Sisco’s access to the DVLA database?’
‘What do you want?’
‘I’m going to give you eleven registration plates. They all connect to people who were with Jason Stanford at the Comfort Hotel on Friday evening. I need you to get me their details.’
‘Eleven people?’
‘Out of a total of twenty-four. These are just the ones I can get registrations for right now.’
‘Doing what?’
‘I’d really like to know. I’m thinking that if we establish who they are it might help us find out.’
Belsey gave him the information.
‘Get everything you can, from dates of birth to points on the licence. Cross-check with the PNC and any other databases you can access.’
‘The DVLA won’t be open until eight.’
‘The details will all be on the Police National Computer. I’m sure you can get access to that. And it’s open all night.’
Keydel muffled a groan.
‘Just call me as soon as you’ve got anything.’
Belsey finished his coffee facing the window, but couldn’t see much beyond the reflected glare of the fast-food restaurant: a black smudge of car park, occasional headlights. What did he have? A group. A little crowded for a book club. A little heavy on the counter-surveillance. A group engaged in planning a crime of some kind, maybe. Is that what was filmed – a plot? Or a renegade meeting of AA, NA, some anonymous pain which only fellow sufferers could get you through. Was that a £750k revelation? He had never known an AA group meet in a hotel suite. But he’d never attended any with pop stars or premiership footballers.
A group takes co-ordination. Someone sent the invites out.
Someone organised the silence.
Someone called up and booked the Finchley Suite in advance.
Andreas Majorana. His card used for booking. He was the ‘dad’ coming up with Katja Dabrowska’s rent money, whoever she was.
Belsey saw them all filing into the lifts one by one. Silent amongst themselves. It seemed an unnecessarily deep discretion.
The spread of arrival times, most in the ten minutes before six o’clock, suggested a group convening for a schedul
ed meeting. If it started at six then it lasted two hours exactly. Harper gets a recording worth £750k. Next day he takes it to Shaun White. Both killed within twenty-four hours.
Chloe’s at the hotel. And that weekend Chloe panics.
Stanford’s walking through Fitzrovia wet with ‘tears’.
Mark Doughty’s gone AWOL.
And at Loulou’s, maybe Amber Knight’s trying to stab her way out of a predicament.
Belsey looked again at the CCTV images he had. None carried luggage, but two individuals – a blonde woman in a long, padded jacket, and a man with glasses and a checked shirt – were carrying equipment of some kind. It was hard to see, as their bodies obscured it – a stick with two loops on the end, about the size of a ping-pong bat.
It looked familiar. Belsey stared at the shots for a minute before he realised where he’d seen it before. Katja Dabrowska’s Facebook. Feeling much better. That picture, in the towel, in Chloe’s bedroom: the same contraption was behind her on the bed.
He searched for the picture online. He found her Facebook page. The picture had been taken down.
Belsey sat back. The travelling family were getting up to leave, one child crying, gripping a portable games console. Belsey thought of Stanford. Shutting out the world, just playing his computer games. He looked through his pages from the Sisco file until he got to Stanford’s Internet history – webpage details, wads of screen grabs. It wasn’t the kind of gaming he’d expected. Not shoot-em-ups: brain teasers, puzzles, memory tests. Belsey took his phone out, tried one of the memory tests. It showed you twenty symbols, each above a number, then changed the order and asked you which number they’d originally been above. You had thirty seconds to do it.
Belsey got six.
‘Do not expect to remember them all,’ the test warned.
But Stanford did.
According to the screen grabs, out of ten exercises he got seven fully correct – twenty out of twenty – two more with just a single mistake, and on his final attempt he dropped three to get a score of seventeen.
There were similar exercises in perception, finding duplicates in a series. Stanford was getting incredible scores.
Most of the puzzles seemed to come from the same website. The URL came up repeatedly in Sisco’s notes: www.advancelogin.com. It struck Belsey as an odd URL. He typed it into his phone’s browser. The home page didn’t mention puzzles. It showed a map of Europe. The continent appeared in luminous green against a black background, cross-hatched with lines of longitude and latitude, national borders marked. Orange dots illuminated select locations, several in Germany, a single dot in the Netherlands, three in France, a couple in Scandinavia. He searched the screen for tabs. No ‘About’. No ‘News’ or ‘Contact’. In the top right corner: ‘Members Login’. He clicked and a box appeared asking for username and password.
It was tantalising and opaque. Belsey looked across the locations and paused on the Dutch dot. Northern Holland. Not Amsterdam.
He knew where, though.
He brought up the Mail story: ‘Dutch Police Plea for Mystery Woman’. Found in Spier, north of Hoogeveen. That was his dot. Belsey found a map of Spier online. It was nothing special: a small village on the east side of a major motorway. There were two hotels marked, a restaurant and a campsite. Nothing else; few streets even. Only, half a kilometre away was a network of grey blocks, a facility marked ‘Onderzoeksinstelling’. Belsey posted it into Translate. It came back as ‘research institute’.
He pushed away the dregs of his coffee. The homeless man slept on. A few new customers ate steadily, leaning into their burger boxes.
He walked back to Price’s Bentley and drove to Hampstead.
30
AS SOON AS HE WAS close to the station, Belsey saw that someone had been in. An upstairs window was open. He climbed the fence into the car park. The back door was ajar, his padlock lying on the ground.
Belsey listened at the threshold. No sounds or movements. He took a step inside, stepped cautiously through the darkness. The canteen was empty. His clothes hung down in the courtroom like bedraggled bunting. He continued silently up the stairs.
Things had been moved: the gas stove, bottles, his sleeping bag. He returned downstairs, checked the door they’d breached. The wood of the latch was splintered. There was nothing else he could fasten the padlock to, no alternative way of locking the door. And even if there had been he couldn’t see himself getting another good night’s sleep in the place.
He pulled a set of spare clothes down from the courtroom, packed his sleeping bag, the Teach Yourself Spanish book, took the half-bottle of rum that remained.
He drove north, checking the mirrors. There was no one following; roads empty. Past the East Heath car park, up to Whitestone Pond. He slowed as he reached Sandy Heath: marshy woods, birch and beech standing ghostly amidst the hollows. One access road for a private estate led away from the street lamps into seclusion. Belsey took it, pulled into the trees, killed his lights.
Looked at the map of Spier again. Onderzoeksinstelling. ‘Research institute’. Nature of research unspecified. He looked at the CCTV screen grab, the contraption being carried into the hotel.
Only one person came to mind who might have an idea. Gordon Douglas was twenty-five years old with his own technology start-up doing something involving transport and artificial intelligence. At the age of nineteen he invented a fold-up satellite dish and made a lot of money off the military, some of which went on Amazonian psychedelics. That brought him to the attention of Hampstead constabulary, which brought him to the attention of Belsey. Douglas’s studio flat was crowded with everything from old transistor radios to DIY virtual-reality headsets. Belsey had spent good times there. He made a call.
‘Gordon, did I wake you?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve got a weird bit of kit you might be interested in. I’m going to send through a picture.’
‘Sure.’
‘If you’ve got any idea what it is I’d appreciate the insight.’
Belsey emailed the shot and waited. Tried Keydel. No answer. Left a message. Warm in bed with his wife, no doubt. Belsey stepped out of the car and breathed the night. A bird flapped, cawing into the branches above. He spent another few moments feeling the darkness, listening to nature, then returned to his car.
His phone rang twenty minutes later. Startled him.
‘I wasn’t sure,’ Douglas said, ‘so I woke up a doctor friend. She says it’s a Transcranial Magnetic Stimulator.’
‘What does that do?’
‘What it says on the tin: stimulates the cranium, using magnetism.’
‘Why would you want to do that?’
‘A number of reasons. Maybe it helps with mental illnesses, depression. There’s always research going on for that kind of thing.’
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulators. Belsey thanked him, put his seat back and watched the trees starting to appear from the gloom like a developing Polaroid.
At 5 a.m. he opened his eyes. More trees, still no call-back from Keydel. There was enough light to make him feel conspicuous. He drove back to Hampstead Lane and into town, not sure where he was going until he got to the Edgware Road, where he descended the ramp into the underground car park of the Grosvenor Hotel and walked up three flights to its 24-hour casino. Nowhere felt more secure than a casino. And it was low-key: free entry, coffee shop, smoking terrace, some big old poker tables and a room of fruit machines. Not a place you’re ever going to feel underdressed or conspicuous.
It was quiet, fruities jingling softly. Belsey drank two large whisky sodas, played some slots. He had a conversation at the bar with a sweaty man who told him solemnly never to fall in love or invest in currency. A bit after seven he went and slept in a toilet cubicle.
His phone rang at 10.30. Belsey sat up, answered.
‘I’ve got DVLA records for the vehicles,’ Keydel said. Belsey took the pen from his jacket, found a receipt for this morning’s drinks and turned
it over.
‘Go for it.’
‘Are you saying these people were with Jason Stanford?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can I get that footage?’
‘It’s all at the hotel. Who are they?’
‘One’s Peter Blayney. He’s a financier, has ties with the Confederation of British Industry, lives in Holland Park. That’s the Aston Martin Rapide. The Ford Galaxy belongs to Addison Lee. We’ve got someone there getting us the account holder. The Toyota Corolla is hired from Europcar.’
‘Europcar do airport hire.’
‘Yeah, mostly. I’m checking on it. There’s a couple of strange ones.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Two vehicles connect to names of people reported missing.’
‘Recently?’
‘No, a few years ago.’
Belsey saw that strange, silent parade into the hotel again – it was becoming rapidly more sinister.
‘Who?’
‘The white Kia Sportswagon is owned by a Sajit Rajikumara. Twenty-three years old. If I’m right, then he’s the Sajit Rajikumara reported missing in 2011. But the DVLA issued him a licence two years ago – same name and date of birth as the missing man.’
‘Who else?’
‘Juliet Turner, forty-six years old, from Bournemouth. She owns the L-reg Citroën Aura. Again, the name and date of birth match that of a woman reported missing five months after Sajit. Missing from Bournemouth.’
‘Have you looked into their stories at all?’
‘There are a couple of pieces online. Nothing recent. Juliet Turner walked out on her family. Sajit was at Merrill Lynch. There’s no ongoing investigation into either of them.’
‘What else?’
‘I can send it all through. Nothing that stands out.’
Belsey gave his email address. ‘Keep going,’ he said. ‘We need whoever’s in charge. That’s the jackpot. Cross-check with police lists, the electoral roll, HMRC. If you get any sniff of anything that might tell us what’s going on call me. And try this name: Andreas Majorana.’
He dropped into King’s Cross, to the tattered sanctuary of the Junction Hotel. There were few traces of its nocturnal misdemeanours in the late-morning dust. The manager gave Belsey a wink when he entered. Belsey went up to the first floor, showered in the gym, cleaned his head wound and changed into his spare set of clothes. Then he continued along the corridor to the business suite.
The House of Fame Page 19
