Free Deep Shelter by Oliver Harris Page A

towards New Oxford Street.
    “He just leaves the car and body there?” Belsey asked.
    “That’s right.”
    Kwesi hit fast forward. At 04.44 a man and woman staggered into view; he pressed her up against a wall and she slipped a hand under his shirt as they kissed. Then she looked past him. You saw the woman recoil. The man turned, then also took a step back. You couldn’t see their expressions. You saw the woman fish a phone out of her handbag and speak without taking her eyes off the corpse.
    04.57. The windows of the car and the office block began to flash: an ambulance with high top lights arriving somewhere to the left. At 05.02 more bulbs began to gather in the glass: police. The concrete lit up. The BMW sat insouciant throughout it all. No one paid it any attention. By 05.20, crime scene technicians must have got there. An indistinct figure crossed into shot, non-uniform. Someone strung tape in the distance, blocking the road from Holborn. The activity went on for about an hour, building, then dispersing. Then nothing at all: 06.37.
    “What happened?” Belsey said.
    06.59. A man in T-shirt and shorts urinated against the wall to the right of the shot before staggering back to Tottenham Court Road.
    “Go to when it was ticketed,” Belsey said.
    07.29. A parking attendant waddled into view. He checked his watch, circled the vehicle, bit a pen. The clock hit 07.30 and he tapped away at his machine. Nothing appeared to alert him to the fact that he was a few metres from a recent body dump. The ticket was logged at 07.34. Belsey knew wardens: he could almost believe that the man’s attention to parking violations would eclipse any homicide concerns, but not quite.
    “That, my friend, is one hell of a quick clean-up operation.”
    Earnshaw Street, he thought. Back of Centre Point. Belsey brought up the email from Ferryman. The image of the building. The side of a tower block.
    “Look at this.” He passed the phone over. “What do you reckon?”
    “It’s Centre Point.” Kwesi read the subject line. “‘Did you get your badge?’ Who is this?”
    “I think the email’s from whoever’s leaving the body. Go back to when he drops it. Can you enhance his face?”
    “Not well.”
    Chib showed him. The image of the suspect’s face was grained almost to the point of pixelated anonymity. Belsey could see the corpse’s arm. It was thin. Still hard to tell if the flesh had belonged to a man or a woman. Belsey’s instinct was leaning towards male. No long hair visible anyway. Then it dropped.
    The spray can. Followed by the eighty seconds off camera. The stroll away.
    “Where does he go?”
    “Nowhere. That’s the strangest thing. There’s eight cameras within a couple of hundred metres and he’s not on any of them. I’ve checked.”
    “He disappears.”
    “Exactly.”
    Belsey felt a familiar combination of emotions: awe, frustration, total perplexity.
    “But he collects the BMW at some point,” Belsey said. “I was chasing it thirty-six hours later.”
    Kwesi skipped to 09.20 a.m. The man returned alone, walking fast, checking the street. He spent a moment beside the BMW, apparently admiring the clean-up. A school party crossed in front of him, young children holding hands. Then he tore the parking ticket off the windscreen and climbed back in. He pulled out hurriedly and disappeared towards New Oxford Street. Kwesi paused the tape.
    Belsey called in a check on the body. He didn’t remember hearing of any corpses turning up on Sunday morning. He was right: no bodies had been discovered at that time. Not according to Local Intelligence. He tried Central Communications Command and they knew nothing either. Nor did the Met-wide emergency response system or the Yard’s own call-handling centre. Belsey phoned the two squads that bordered the dump site: Camden Borough headquarters, then Westminster police at West End Central. He got flat denials.
    Belsey turned back to the tapes. This wasn’t