Deep Shelter by Oliver Harris

Author:Oliver Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

28

BELSEY SAT IN HIS CAR BESIDE TERRY CONDELL’S drawbridge. A new hobby sounded a fine idea. It had gone 8:30 p.m. and Hadley Wood was easing itself into a night as quiet and empty as any other time of day. Kirsty Craik would be processing his arrest warrant: either Jayden Culler had made a tasty accusation, or she’d chased up the CCTV from Costa and seen what it had to show, or both. He had nothing but a puzzle.

J.I.G.S.A.W.

He called Jemma’s phone. It went to voicemail. He looked at Terry’s markings on the A-Z, then drove back south, into the city. One last look, he thought. The next time he passed through London it could be in the back of a Serco van.

It felt too bright for the hour. Light was thickening rather than dispersing. After-work drinks were over and those remaining seemed to have run aground. It was Wednesday. Belsey kept his A-Z on the dashboard and followed the tunnels. Drove the X-Ray. Chancery Lane, past the Prudential Building. 1952 the GPO gets sued for tunnelling under the Prudential Insurance offices on High Holborn without permission. The offices were still there, silent in their Victorian pomp. A few metres further east he saw the winch on Furnival Street, like a giant gallows folded away. On, through the Square Mile to the river. The sun was dipping behind Baynard House, the telephone exchange’s long layers of concrete stacked in silhouette. A plaque told Belsey he was on the site of a Norman castle. He tried to remember what Terry had said about the building. Three floors down, the lift opens, cardboard coffins . . .

Belsey walked around the windowless concrete of Baynard to the Thames and looked across the grey ripples to the southern embankment. He imagined the tunnel as it passed beneath, to the exchange under Waterloo. He had a sense that if he could just find the right way in, the front entrance, he would have access to it all. That you could break through, as Ferryman had done, and the kingdom was yours to wander.

He got back in his car. His phone buzzed: a message sent from Jemma, supposedly.

Find me.

Attached was a blurred photograph of tall, narrow silhouettes against a low sun. Tower blocks? But they were too rough and misshapen. And there were no buildings either side. Belsey adjusted his sense of perspective. He thought they looked like standing stones. That book, he thought: Guide to the Standing Stones of Wiltshire . . . What was Ferryman saying?

Then the message was replaced by an incoming call. Kirsty Craik.

He let it ring. He followed the tunnel along the river to Westminster. The Houses of Parliament looked soft as cake. He imagined London crumbling until only the tunnels remained, like the veins of an anatomical model. A minute later he arrived at Westminster Green, the old hospital. You wouldn’t have guessed its previous existence from the neat red bricks of the apartment block. A guard sat in the lobby.

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