The Hollow Man

by Oliver Harris

  “Why?”

  “They say you have to put your faith in a higher power. It’s the first step.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “So, do you?”

  “It’s not hard to find a higher power,” Belsey said. “It would be hard to find a lower one.” He laid his arm across the back of the sofa so that it was almost touching her. She was still thinking about his words, glancing around the room again.

  “Not meaning to be presumptuous,” she said, “but I’m thinking you’re quite a powerful man.”

  “I’m rich, and I know people, and people will do things I tell them.” Belsey felt light-headed talking like this. His fingers were brushing her shoulder. “But that’s not power. For many years I had all that and yet I couldn’t stop myself taking a drink, even though it was destroying me. So, money is not power. Money makes no difference.” He tried to remember what the leaflets said. “There’s no problem that a drink won’t make worse.”

  “Except sobriety.”

  “Take one day at a time.”

  “I don’t think you’re being entirely honest with me,” she said suddenly, turning to face him. His left hand froze half an inch from her skin.

  “Why’s that?”

  “You haven’t been dry ten years.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because I know people who have.”

  Belsey nodded. He sipped his coffee and looked at her.

  “Well, Charlotte,” he said, “what if I put it to you that you’re not a fashion buyer?”

  Now it was her turn to frown. “Go on, put it to me.”

  “How much writing does it involve?”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve got a writer’s bump on your right hand.”

  “Maybe I keep a diary.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So what am I then?” she said.

  “You’re a journalist.”

  “How do you make that?”

  “The bump, and you called it a popular high-street department store. That’s newspaper anonymity, no one talks like that. And you just called me on my lies and yet you’re still here. You’re not police, or you would have taken the edge off the private-school accent a long time ago. So I’m thinking you do investigations of another kind. You were nosing around the Hampstead drunks.”

  “So why were you there?”

  “I was looking to get laid.”

  She took a slow breath, as if regaining balance. “OK, which paper?”

  “If I get it right you take your clothes off.”

  She considered this.

  “Underwear?”

  “Of course.”

  “If you get it wrong?”

  “I take my clothes off,” Belsey said.

  “Shoot.”

  “The Mail.”

  She watched him carefully. “Why?”

  “Just an educated guess.”

  “I want you to tell me why.”

  “Am I right?”

  “Tell first.”

  “The clothes, the style. Some poor bastard’s got a drink problem and you’re set to shaft him.”

  She smiled. “So close.”

  “What is it?”

  “Mail on Sunday.”

  He looked at her. Then he started unbuttoning his shirt.

  “Wait,” she giggled.

  “For what?”

  “Just wait.” She laughed.

  “Well, in that case,” he said, and brought the cognac out.

  Charlotte fetched glasses from the kitchen and joined Belsey on the sofa, kicking off her shoes. She curled her stockinged feet beneath her. They drank a lot of cognac. With each top-up they leaned a little closer.

  “It’s a particular bastard with a drink problem,” she said after the third glass. “And it’s not just a drink problem.”

  “What is it?”

  “I shouldn’t be saying this. He’s probably your neighbour or something. Milton Granby heads the finances for the Corporation of London—the lot that run the City, the Square Mile.”

  “Not my neighbour as far as I’m aware.”

  “Well, that’s who I was looking for.”

  “Why?”

  “Have you ever seen him there?”

  “I wouldn’t know him to look at.”

  “Not many would.”

  “So what is it, if it’s not just a drink problem?”

  “It’s why he’s drinking.”

  “Go on.”

  “Oh, the usual. Rumours about a massive hole in the City’s finances. It’s a world within a world, as I’m sure you know. Ancient, eccentric. Some say more powerful than the government itself.”

  “I know a bit.” Belsey was familiar with the policing arrangement. City of London Police operated independently from the Met and the relationship was mixed. The first time Belsey went to a City station a white-haired inspector rapped his knuckles on the Metropolitan shield in Belsey’s wallet: Even the Queen has to ask permission to enter the City walls . . .

  “Half the time it thinks it’s in the twelfth century and the rest of the time it operates like a cut-throat venture capitalist,” Charlotte continued. “Recently, on the investment side, it’s been associated with several shaky funds. It’s a bit of an embarrassment, a hole in the Corporation’s own account books. Milton Granby’s one of the most powerful men in the Square Mile and no one’s heard of him. And he’s corrupt, that’s what I’m saying. I’m not just interested in screwing him for a drinks problem. He’s supposed to be planning something drastic. I shouldn’t have told you all this.”

  “I guess I’ve failed as an avenue of research.”

  “Yeah, I gave up on that a while ago.”

  They faced each other for a few seconds more. Then he leaned in and kissed her.

  Another door opens, he thought. The most mysterious. She pulled him close, then, after a moment, leaned back to see his face. A woman chasing sleaze, Belsey thought, and all she’d found was this. He wondered at his own corruption. It seemed a big word. He thought of the bent cops he had known: disappointed men, not without talent, harder than the criminals they chased. Usually there was a hole in one book or another, an addiction to drink or fast cars or women. The rumours would start, then one day the individual would disappear, transferred to desk work or off on sick pay. And then there was DI Neil Tanner, found hanged in a lock-up in Dalston before they’d had the chance to sack him.

  Belsey poured more cognac. After another three glasses they walked up the stairs to the bedroom and sat on the bed. She gazed at her reflection in the mirrored door of the safe room.

  “Come behind me,” she said. “Look at us. Anyone would think we knew each other.” Charlotte laughed. He was behind her, holding her, his arms beneath her breasts. She was drunk. “Do you like it here? In front of the mirror? Seeing the prey you’ve dragged in?” She lay on the bed, with her head hanging over the edge so she could see the mirror upside down. He ran a hand up her thigh. “You’re a bad man.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes.”

  He lifted her top and kissed her stomach. “Why?”

  She reached down to the floor and then curled up, brandishing a hair clip.

  “I don’t think this is yours.”

  He took the hair clip from her and lay back on the bed, wondering what exactly he had got himself into. She tutted disapprovingly. Then she crawled across his front, her fingers finding his shirt buttons, and he stopped thinking.

  They watched themselves in the mirror like they were watching two strangers. Afterwards she shut her eyes and he held her, listening to her breath slow down. She fitted well in his arms. It was a long time since he had slept with someone who didn’t know he was a policeman; it made him wistful, and at the same ti
me renewed his eagerness to move on. There was more reinvention ahead, he felt. Belsey untangled himself and went to the bathroom. He examined the hair clip. He stuck his head under the cold tap, and by the time he came back she’d rolled herself up in the duvet, out for the count. He opened her handbag, found a purse with a bankcard in the name of Charlotte J. Kelson and returned it to the bag.

  Belsey went downstairs and poured himself a large whisky. He felt better than he remembered feeling for a while. The whisky gave him a warm glow. For a while Belsey admired the study, with its fireplace and mahogany desk and worn Persian rug, and he felt a spreading gratitude for the rich. They were guardians of the world’s beauty, passing these fine houses and attractive streets down generation to generation. He had a sense that wealth could have made him a better person.

  He browsed Devereux’s shelves: biographies of statesmen, guides to London, books on antiques, English country houses and Russian history.

  He took down a book about the cavalry in Russia.

  The long hours on horseback were the happiest and most relaxed moments in this restless and strange existence. Never was the uncertainty of the day and of fate accepted with less care than in the early mornings when the squadrons assembled, when the cool morning breeze ruffled the manes of the horses and made the pennants flutter.

  Belsey would have liked to have been in the cavalry. He could have gone into the Met horse section. Riots, football matches—these were the places you found horses now. He thought of his riot training, as a cadet, in the ghost town in Staffordshire kept solely for the purpose. He saw the empty streets before him, the shells of homes and shops and pubs echoing with the rattle of truncheons on shield plastic. Older officers, friends of his father, would still sometimes speak of the miners’ strike, and Brixton, Broadwater; these were shared rings through their careers, battle scars.

  He took down the Everyman Illustrated History of London and imagined Devereux buying it after arriving here, excited by his new home. One page had been turned down at the corner, then turned up again, but the book retained the memory and opened.

  Boudicca.

  Perhaps the most total destruction London suffered was at the hands of the fierce warrior queen, Boudicca.

  Devereux had underlined her name. The book continued:

  Boudicca was a queen of the Brittonic Iceni tribe who led an uprising of the tribes against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire.

  Belsey skimmed the account.

  After a flogging and the rape of her daughters by the Roman Emperor, Boudicca rose up A.D. 60 or 61. The Iceni destroyed Camulodunum (Colchester) routing a Roman legion sent to relieve the settlement. On hearing news of the revolt, the Roman governor Suetonius hurried to Londinium, the twenty-year-old commercial settlement that was the rebels’ next target. Concluding he did not have the numbers to defend it, Suetonius evacuated and abandoned it. London was burnt to the ground.

  He read on until he got to Boudicca’s defeat at the Battle of Watling Street.

  The warrior queen poisoned herself to avoid capture. Legend has it that she is buried on Hampstead Heath.

  Belsey closed the book. He flicked the pages but no others had ever been folded down. No other names were underlined.

  He pulled on a pair of suit trousers and one of Devereux’s raincoats and stepped out into the garden. He followed the sculpted pathway, past the bandstand. Moonlight glittered the wet grass, which was slowly losing its manicured sheen. Belsey imagined Devereux in this garden, walking at night. He remembered the corpse on the gurney with its stitched throat. He felt the man’s clothes around his living body. Then he began to check for ways into the property from the outside, making a survey of the walls and calculating what lay on the other side: other gardens, the grounds of Highgate School, the back of an old people’s home. It wouldn’t be impossible to get into the garden, force a French window, slit a man’s throat in his sleep.

  Belsey walked past the tennis court, past the pond. The rain had cleared some dead leaves away from a patch of freshly turned soil in the far corner, beside the fence. Two thin conifer saplings had been planted six feet apart, each attached to a support stake with a buckle tie. He crouched down, stuck his hands into the soil and pulled out bulbs which had been planted an inch deep around the trees. They hadn’t started to sprout. The soil was a combination of topsoil and paler, clay-like subsoil and it stuck to Belsey’s hands.

  He went and rinsed them in the pond while he considered this. He didn’t feel particularly inclined to investigate further. He wandered to a garden shed that contained two spades, a coiled hose and seven bags of peat but nothing else, around to a veranda he had not seen before, on the northern side of the house, with a swing seat and an abandoned ice bucket, then back to the tennis court.

  There was a bang at the front of the house.

  Belsey turned. Three more bangs—the side of a fist on wood. Someone was there.

  Belsey left the lights off as he stepped silently back inside. He found a towel and wiped the rest of the clay off his fingers. Another three thumps: someone persistent; someone who believed the house was occupied. Belsey must have left the gate to the street open. He tried to think what the place would look like from outside. The study light was on but not the front rooms. Would the study be visible from the road? He moved back to the corridor, where Charlotte stood with a sheet wrapped around her.

  “Who is it?” she said.

  “I don’t know.” He realised he was speaking very quietly. She stared at his raincoat.

  “You can answer it if you want.”

  “I’d rather not. I don’t know who they are or why they’re here.”

  “You don’t want to find out?”

  “The house can attract attention.”

  She looked at him curiously and wandered back to bed. Belsey checked the security screen in the front hallway. It showed a smart young man in frameless glasses and an expensive overcoat holding a newspaper over his head, and the emergency lights of an Audi convertible ticking at the kerb. The man glanced nervously up and down the street. Rain slashed the lenses of his glasses. He didn’t look like he’d chosen the house by chance.

  Belsey found Devereux’s wallet, took out the clipping from the Arabic newspaper and unfolded it. He looked at the fair-haired man on the left of the photograph, shaking hands. He checked the screen again. He thought it might be the same man; it was hard to tell. Belsey waited in the living room. Eventually he heard the Audi start. The next time he checked the screen the man had gone.

  He took the scrap of newspaper to Devereux’s study and placed it under the desk lamp. The two men grinned back at him. The image had been cropped close, but you could see sky beyond them and the tops of buildings, office blocks, a church spire. So they weren’t in the Middle East. It looked like London. At the very edge of the picture you could make out stonework, as if they had been posed in the doorway of a church, looking out to the city.

  He leaned back in Devereux’s chair. Again, the dead man’s possessions seemed to gather to tell him something, but it was more urgent now: the artworks and junk mail and bare branches tapping the windows—trying to pass on a message he could not hear but needed to.

  Belsey returned to the bedroom and saw the white sliver of a half-open eye.

  “Who was it?” Charlotte asked.

  “No one,” he said. She pulled the duvet over herself. He eased the door shut, went downstairs and lay on the floor, feeling his own lies and those of the dead creeping closer.

  19

  Belsey woke up early. through a gap in the living-room curtains he could still see night. It was not yet six: one-night-stand early, with the familiar jolt of recollection. He went to the bedroom and watched Charlotte sleeping with one bare leg hooked outside the duvet, then he stepped back downstairs and put coffee on and tried not to remember his dreams. Images surfaced: Gower, Northwood, a for
est. They were out of uniform, in casual clothes. They carried spades and walked with purpose. Belsey wondered if Northwood ever dreamt of him. How did he appear in Northwood’s dreams? How would he appear once he had fled? It was strange, he thought: that part of our existence which is in other people’s dreams.

  Belsey knew his way around the kitchen now. He had settled in. He’d had sex in the house; not just had sex in it but used it for the procurement of sex. If that was not confirmation of tenancy, what was? Today he needed to raise six grand off the sale of Devereux’s possessions and set himself up with the financial infrastructure to empty the dead man’s accounts. He had a sense that something was catching up with number 37 The Bishops Avenue. Ideally he’d skip the UK by nightfall, but Belsey suspected he would have to lie low until tomorrow morning. He was on his second cup of coffee when he heard a door open upstairs. He went to the hallway to see Charlotte descending the curved red stairs in one of Devereux’s robes. She had a sleepy smile.

  “I love these stairs,” she said. “What a way to start the day.”

  “Sometimes I slide down the banister,” Belsey said. “It’s still very early.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s just gone six. You should go back to sleep.”

  “I’m awake now. I figure I’ll go home and change before work.”

  “Would you like coffee first?”

  She walked towards him. He didn’t know what she was going to do. She kissed his cheek. Then she sat on a stool at the breakfast bar and they drank coffee, with the darkness loitering outside and the kitchen reflecting off the black windows.

  “How are you feeling?” Belsey said.

  “Good. Better than I have in a while. I enjoyed myself last night.”

  “Me too.”

  “It was unexpected.”

  “That’s my favourite kind of night. Would you like some breakfast? I don’t know what I’ve got.” The fridge display was flashing a list of items: milk, eggs, fruit. He opened it. He couldn’t see a breakfast in there.

  “Who’s Alexei Devereux?” she asked.

  Belsey turned round. She was holding a clothing catalogue still in its plastic wrap, reading the address label.