In reality, the suite was a former breakfast room with photographs of London buses on the walls, now hosting a glass-topped table, two PCs, an old printer and a set of phone directories.
That was enough.
He opened his emails. Keydel had sent through the list of vehicle owners. It was a strange collection. Two with particular edge.
Sajit Rajikumara, reported missing aged twenty-three. He’d made the news four years ago, though not extensively, which was telling. ‘Concern mounts over gifted maths graduate last seen on way to work.’ Described as polite, shy, obsessed with chess and cricket, Sajit had just started working at Merrill Lynch and, while he’d expressed some worry about settling into the environment, colleagues believed he would excel. He’d been living in Wapping at the time of his disappearance. His family were in Hounslow. They appealed to him directly in the press: ‘Let us know you’re safe.’
Reading between the lines, it suggested this hadn’t come out of nowhere. There’d been some kind of disagreement, warning signs.
Juliet Turner, missing three and a half years, left a husband and two children. Only the Bournemouth Reporter saw this as newsworthy. Maybe because Juliet had had previous issues with drugs and mental health. There was ‘concern’ from her friends and family, but not enough to secure any more press coverage.
The disappearances had been logged, investigating officers assigned. Keydel had gathered information about the police involvement but it didn’t amount to much. Going missing wasn’t a crime. Files would have been opened as a matter of course. No one would have sweated over them. Belsey knew the sharp divergence in how missing people were dealt with. One call from the possible victim, a postcard or the suggestion of a ticket bought, and the distraught relatives were pointed towards life’s small print: Sometimes adults who go missing may wish for their location to remain anonymous, and they do have that right which we must respect. As such, you can stop being missing without reappearing. Police couldn’t do much for the estranged.
Belsey worked through the CCTV screen grabs. He managed to match seven faces to names, using a combination of Keydel’s research and social media. The only thing they had in common was their randomness. Helen Woods, entering the hotel at 17.47. A Facebook page confirmed the identity, with a picture of Helen in a small, well-kept back garden with two dogs. She lived in Stroud Green, trained as a social worker, liked animals, good books and cake. There were forty photos of her life, none involving Amber Knight, Jason Stanford or the Comfort Hotel. Just behind her, parking a blue Volvo close to the hotel entrance, was Leon Brooks. A Dr Leon Brooks came up on the website for a dental surgery in Fulham. His photo matched the CCTV. Time of entry: 17.49. Neat brown beard, balding. Belsey printed out the screen shots and began putting pictures and personal details side by side. He got a computer programmer, a beautician and a tax accountant. He got an employee of the Retreat Boutique & Wellness Spa.
The connection gave him a moment’s pause. The Marylebone spa Amber and Chloe had frequented, the ones who went tight-lipped when he’d turned up asking questions. It felt like the beginning of a thread that might lead to something that finally made sense.
Christopher Duval was on camera entering the Comfort Hotel at a brisk pace, 17.57: tall, closely cropped hair. Belsey looked up Duval and got his own page on the Retreat website with a list of services: personal trainer, massage therapy, nutrition.
Belsey called the Retreat. He recognised the manager’s voice at once, the stern air hostess, sounding initially welcoming.
‘Good morning, the Retreat. How can I help?’
‘Is Christopher Duval there?’
‘I’m afraid he’s not in at the moment.’
‘I wanted to book an appointment with him today.’
‘He’s had to call in sick.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK. I haven’t trained with him before – can I just check: he’s experienced, isn’t he? How long has he been with you?’
‘Christopher’s been here since we opened.’
‘Is it true he treated Amber Knight?’
There was a long pause. He could hear the water feature trickling in the background.
‘You’re the man who came in yesterday,’ she said, finally.
‘No – when exactly did Christopher Duval call in sick?’
She hung up.
He went back to his research. Vehicles and faces. He sensed two tiers of guests: the randoms, then those with weight, the ones who pulled up in the BMWs and SUVs, the hire cars. The Addison Lee vehicle was a lead that should generate a name without too much digging. Ditto the Europcar hire vehicle. He called Keydel and chased both.
‘No luck yet,’ Keydel said.
‘Listen. Addison Lee will know who ordered that job. To open an Addison account you need to give bank details. They see a bank statement, proof of ID. You can do a lot of things with cash and PO boxes, but you can’t open an Addison Lee account. So lean on them.’
‘OK.’
‘What about Europcar? Any more on that?’
‘No. But the licence plates definitely have it belonging to Europcar. It’s just we haven’t got an in with them.’
‘An in?’
‘I’m thinking we might have to hack into their system or something. It will take a few hours.’
If you need a job doing . . .
Belsey found a number for Europcar and called.
‘This is Detective Constable Nick Belsey. Got a Toyota Corolla here, registration GUV 47W, coming up as belonging to you.’
He heard typing. ‘Yes, that’s one of ours.’
‘Bit of a situation here. The car’s on Edgware Road. There’s a child locked in the back.’
‘Right?’
‘Yeah, little chap been here a while, starting to look a bit hot and bothered. We can’t find the driver anywhere. Have you got contact details?’
‘We’ve got the car rented by a Ms Lindy Voskuil.’
Belsey asked her to spell out the name.
‘Nationality?’
‘Dutch.’
‘Good. Great. Know where she’s staying?’
‘At the Park Grand in Kensington.’
‘I’ll take her mobile if you’ve got it.’
The girl gave it to him. ‘Who does that?’
Belsey promised he’d have a word.
The number had a foreign prefix. No answer when he called. One prominent Lindy Voskuil came up online. Giving a talk in 2009 on ‘The Future of Security Technology in Europe’ for the Global Research Council. Its programme listed her as ‘an employee of the Government of the Netherlands’. No department specified. He googled her name again, combining it with ‘Government of the Netherlands’. Nothing else came up. But here she was, staying in expensive hotels well off the tourist track.
‘Morning.’
One of the Junction’s guests came in and sat at the other PC. He cast a curious eye over Belsey’s research. Outside the window, the day was bright. Thursday. The computer screen said 13.15. Belsey gathered up his sheets and left the hotel.
He checked the street. No sign of anyone tailing him. He got a coffee and breakfast at a greasy spoon behind the old town hall, took a copy of the Sun from the adjacent table. News, courtesy of Damian Drummond’s sister paper: ‘Death of Star Publicist’. Shaun White had never gained himself so much free publicity: four pages of photos, eulogies and expressions of horror. The suggestion by an unnamed police source that his death could be linked to the Chloe Burlington murder was buried cautiously in the middle.
It had been a good couple of hours’ work. Eleven of the twenty-four Comfort attendees identified. Belsey was curious as to what kind of explanation they’d come up with. Where to start? He looked through his notes again until he got to the Shaws and their people carrier. Definitely the tail vehicle going to Epping the night Harper’s corpse was dumped in the woods. He thought about the trail that had led him to the Shaws in the first place – Amber�
�s phone conversation: She said it was Conor she was worried about. Chloe’s lawyer, the debonair Mr Strauss, thought he heard the boy’s name in the background when Chloe called.
He’d start his enquiries with the Shaw household.
31
THE LIGHTS WERE ON AT 5 Tonbridge Drive. No radio playing. No movement visible.
No answer when he rang the bell.
He gave a knock on the front door and it creaked open. The Shaws’ dog lay in the hallway with a Sainsbury’s carrier bag over its head, rubber bands sealing the bag around its neck, flies circling above the corpse.
Belsey stepped over the dog.
‘Hello?’
Toys sat neatly in the corner of the living room, brightly coloured books had their own shelf. A wooden chest sat open, empty, in the centre of the floor. Three bin bags had been stacked in the kitchen, next to the bin. Crockery gleamed in the drying rack. On the kitchen table were three sealed envelopes, two bunches of keys, a child’s inhaler, packaging for three disposable barbeques. The envelopes were addressed: to ‘Mum and Dad’, ‘Fiona’, ‘Mr Philip Shaw’.
Belsey checked the bin. No food packaging. Vegetarian cookbooks lined the kitchen shelves. The barbeques didn’t make sense.
He took a set of keys from the table. There was a remote beeper for a garage.
When he went back outside a middle-aged woman was standing beside the garden gate, staring into the Shaws’ hallway where the dog lay.
‘Know John and Melissa?’ Belsey asked.
‘Yes. I – I live next door. Who are you?’
‘When did you last see them?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘Where’s their garage?’
She led him down a path between the two houses, to a row of lock-ups at the back.
He smelt the charcoal from outside.
‘Go back to the front of the house,’ he told the woman. When he was sure she’d fully retreated, Belsey covered his nose and mouth and raised the garage door.
Most of the smoke had dispersed. The people carrier sat in the tight, concrete space, two people leaning together on the back seats, as if they’d fallen asleep on a long journey and the driver had thought it best to get out and leave them there. He didn’t risk opening the doors. The barbeques were on the front seats. Upholstery singed and the roof blackened.
No Conor.
Belsey returned to the house. Walked past the neighbour sitting on the garden wall. Gave her a grim smile.
‘Just stay put, OK?’
He searched through the rooms until he heard whimpering in the bathroom.
Conor sat on the floor beside the bath, his breathing laboured. Belsey checked his pulse and air passages. He was dehydrated. Nothing more serious. Belsey took the boy downstairs, grabbed the inhaler from the kitchen table. Got out of the house.
He handed Conor into the care of the neighbour, gave her a look which she seemed to understand.
‘No—’ she said, managing to stop herself.
‘Stay out here. Wait a minute, then call the police.’
‘Where are you going?’
He returned to the living room, checked the empty chest: key in its lock, empty cardboard folders and plastic ring-binders around it, an unlabelled CD snapped in half.
He dashed back to the kitchen, tore open the bin liners and emptied a pile of ash onto the floor. A lot of paper had been burnt, along with what looked like an oxygen mask and heat-resistant silver clothing. This hadn’t burnt so well. He found a couple of singed scraps of text caught up in the material, still legible. One contained a graph, headed ‘Performance over Time’. The other seemed to be part of a cover sheet: ‘For group-selected trainees embarked on Stage Three training only’. Belsey took the scraps, headed out past the neighbour.
‘Have you called them? Call the police. And get an ambulance for the kid.’
He jumped into the Bentley, drove fast, east again, towards the centre of town. He stopped by Paddington station and tried to figure out what he’d got.
The graph. It plotted ‘Signal Noise’ against ‘Threshold of Awareness’. That didn’t tell him much. There were only a few words legible beneath the title of the cover sheet: ‘. . . the level of resolution with which we are able to view our surroundings. Knowledge is contingent on data . . .’ Both items had been printed from a website. Across the top of the scraps was a familiar URL: www.advancelogin.com.
He brought up the website again. The map of Europe, the box asking for username and password. Behind that, he felt sure, was what he needed: names, places, a suggestion of who was in charge of whatever this was, and what Belsey could do to halt a run of premature deaths. He thought through hackers he’d arrested. There weren’t many. One now toured with a sound system, one had resettled in Berlin. Then there was Maya.
He called a mutual acquaintance, Dimitri Passadakis, an anarchist chef in Deptford.
‘Is Maya in London?’
‘Yeah. The Language Centre.’
‘Still at Theobalds Road?’
‘That’s the one.’
Belsey kept an eye on the mirrors; the Hampstead break-in had him paranoid. That and the lack of sleep, the small matter of West End Central having a warrant on him – and Geoff McGovern on his case again.
He parked on Great Ormond Street, walked swiftly through the residential streets to the south, then turned off Theobalds Road into an alleyway filled with metal bins. It was closed at the far end by the back of the former language centre, a tall, narrow building that was boarded up now, boards covered with eviction notices, upper windows covered with tin foil, flags and a painted bedsheet: ‘Gentrification is Class War’.
Belsey checked he was alone, then banged on the steel door. The bedsheet twitched. A first-floor window opened and a bearded man stuck his head out.
‘I need to speak to Maya,’ Belsey said.
A minute later the steel door opened and the same man admitted Belsey into a hallway filled with bicycles. The place smelt of hash and garlic and bike oil.
‘Top floor,’ he said.
Belsey continued past the old reception counter. A lot of people were sitting around a table of candles in a kitchen at the back. He went up to the third floor, stepping over drying laundry and camping equipment, knocked on the door of what used to be the administrative office and entered.
A reptile tank in the far corner gave the room its only light. Mandala wall hangings obscured the windows. Books on physics and computer programming were piled beside the wall. A desk supported two monitors. Belsey crouched beside the figure in the corner wrapped in a sleeping bag.
‘Maya, it’s Nick.’
She half opened her eyes. ‘Am I under arrest?’
‘I need a hand.’
‘Want to climb in?’
He passed her one of the burnt sheets of paper, pointed at the URL.
‘I need to get into this website. It’s password protected.’
She glanced at the sheet, put it aside. ‘What time is it?’
‘Daytime. I’ll make some coffee.’
Belsey gave her the second sheet and went downstairs. He fixed two instant coffees in the kitchen, declined the spliff, declined involvement in a debate over consensus democracy, put a fiver in the communal box and took the coffees upstairs.
Maya was sitting up when he returned, studying the scraps of paper more attentively. She’d found a hoodie and her glasses, put her hair up in a bun.
‘What is this?’ she said.
‘That’s what I want to find out. If you can get me into the site, we may be a step closer. Do you think you can do anything?’
‘Yeah – I’ll have a go.’ Maya went over to her desk and turned her computer on. Belsey took a beanbag in the corner.
After ten minutes of playing around she said, ‘OK. So this isn’t particularly secure.’
‘No?’
‘No. Do you care if they know someone’s attempted access?’
‘I don’t think so.’
&nb
sp; ‘This will show up in traffic and log entries, though.’
‘My priority is seeing what’s there, who they are, what they’re doing. It doesn’t need to be subtle. Just work your magic.’
She spent another few minutes typing; ran a program that filled her screen with rapidly moving text. Belsey stared at the scraps again. ‘For group-selected trainees embarked on Stage Three training only’; ‘Performance over Time’. Performance of what?
After five minutes Maya said: ‘I think we’re in.’ She sat back. The screen showed what looked like any desktop: rows of folders against a white background. Belsey took a seat beside her.
‘You’re a genius,’ he said. But Maya looked unsettled.
‘It really wasn’t very well protected. Are these people big?’
‘Why?’
‘Because when something’s that easy to hack, it sometimes means they’re monitoring you. If it’s a government site, or a bank.’
‘I don’t think it’s either of those. What’s there?’
Maya angled the screen towards him. There were tabs across the top of the screen, opening three separate pages with further files. The pages were titled ‘Home’, ‘Research’, ‘Training’.
‘It’s a shared drive. There’s a network of other groups and individuals who can access it remotely. We’re in Group 9, apparently.’
‘Of what?’
‘The Bridge Foundation.’ She pointed at the screen. Belsey saw the name in the directory heading. He thought of Chloe Burlington’s final posting, a bridge over blue water. ‘Heard of them?’ he asked.
‘No. You?’
‘Not directly.’ Belsey clicked a folder marked ‘Introduction to Methodology’. A message appeared: ‘Do not save on unencrypted software.’ He closed the message and read on.
If you are reading this, you have been chosen to participate in ground-breaking research. Our work concerns the comparatively new area of bio-magnetic fields. Please familiarise yourself with the central tenets of our methodology.
The House of Fame Page 20
