Free Deep Shelter by Oliver Harris

Belsey?”
    “Yes.”
    “It’s Chib, from Camden CCTV. Those tapes you wanted—can you come in?” He sounded nervous.
    “Do you see him park?”
    “A bit more than that.”
    “I’ll come in now.”
    “I think you better.”

11
    CCTV CONTROL. THE SPACE STATION, AS IT WAS known among police, hidden at the top of an anonymous office block behind Great Portland Street. It had nine rooms lit by banks of monitors, by the grey forms of oblivious individuals going about their business.
    He knew something was up because they’d given him a screening room of his own, with a dedicated CCTV officer running the footage. The room was dark, dominated by a desk of switches and digital displays. The officer on the controls, Chib Kwesi, was good. Belsey saw him often enough, pulling footage of street fights, phone grabs, car crashes. Kwesi wore a crucifix over his shirt and had a passion for his job that belonged either to a stern moralist or a dedicated voyeur. He had the tape lined up. The stolen BMW was coming into shot. It was frozen on the screen, approaching from High Holborn into the shadows beneath Centre Point, the tower block that dominated the intersection of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road.
    Time stamp: 04.19 a.m. Three hours, fifteen minutes before the parking ticket was issued.
    “It’s not a great angle,” Kwesi said.
    “Do we get his face?”
    “Not well.”
    “What do we get?”
    He hit play. The BMW parked across the road from the camera, facing towards New Oxford Street. For a moment the car just sat there. The footage was low res, black-and-white, five frames per second. The vehicle sat right at the back of the shot. It wasn’t going to give a clear account of anything, let alone a face.
    “Is this the only camera we get him on?”
    “Yes.”
    A couple of early morning revellers appeared, cutting unsteadily towards Charing Cross Road. Two more minutes passed. Then the driver’s door opened and a man got out. He wore a familiar grey hoodie, hood up.
    “Wait,” Kwesi said.
    Belsey expected the suspect to turn but he didn’t. He went to the rear door closest to the camera and opened it. There was someone else in the car. The driver reached in and they embraced. The passenger put an arm around his shoulder. Then, as the driver moved back, you saw that the arm was bare, his passenger naked. The passenger refused to release the driver, apparently trying to drag him back into the car. Finally the driver pushed backwards and the naked figure fell to the pavement. Kwesi hit pause.
    “Corpse,” Belsey said.
    “That’s what it looks like to me.”
    Belsey caught his breath. He seized implications. Firstly, whatever doubts he may have had as to the gravity of the situation, the intent of his antagonist, could be packed away. Here was someone who trafficked in dead bodies. It made Jemma’s abduction part of something bigger. How did they connect? Kill someone Saturday night, abduct someone Monday evening. Was she a bargaining chip? A last hurrah? Just the latest?
    More to the point, what was his suspect doing here, parked thirty seconds from Oxford Street? London wasn’t short of neglected corners to dispose of unwanted dead.
    They rewound and watched the extraction again—he couldn’t see if the body was male or female. The driver stood above the body, obscuring it. He spent a moment staring down. Then he crouched and dragged it into the road, then out of shot beneath the camera. He couldn’t have dragged it far. He came back into shot fifteen seconds later, looking around the sides of the surrounding buildings as if he planned to scale them. At 04.23 he reached into the car and retrieved something from either the glove compartment or the dashboard. He took it across the road, in the direction of the corpse, shaking it.
    “A can of something,” Kwesi said.
    “A spray can.”
    Eighty seconds passed. The suspect returned without the can, checked the doors of the BMW were locked and strolled off