Free Deep Shelter by Oliver Harris Page B

right.
    “Run it from when the police arrive, triple speed.”
    They watched the empty space, lit by the refracted lightshow of an emergency. The comical high-speed blooming of the incident—the shadows of someone , some people on the concrete. Then the departure.
    “See how fast they leave?” Belsey said. “Police, SOC; they just pile out of there.”
    They watched the whole thing from start to finish, three times. Kwesi crossed himself. Belsey crossed himself. They spent a few seconds staring at their reflections in the blank screen.

12
    BELSEY HEADED TO CENTRE POINT WITH A CD OF THE footage in his pocket, wondering what story it contained.
    He arrived as the day hit noon, parked on the corner of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road, pushed through the mesh of pedestrians towards the tower block. What a place to leave a corpse: the spiritual centre of the West End, which was a contradiction in terms. Centre Point was thirty-four floors of bleak, latticed concrete. It marked a meeting of the ways—the retail purgatory of Oxford Street, Soho to the west: bars and clubs and strip-shows. To the south was theatreland, to the east the museums and universities of Bloomsbury. You could see the tower block for miles, stuck in the middle of all this, its name lit up across the top as if it meant something. A beacon. A lighthouse warning you away from the rocks.
    Everything converged on Centre Point, including the traffic which knotted at its foot. The area around the base was dismal, its confusion currently exacerbated by the endless construction site for a new rail link. Heavy grey columns elevated the first floor of the building and created a maze of dark passages, leading seamlessly into a grim subway. As a child Belsey had associated this burrow with the sleeping homeless who filled it. As a young man, with the pool hall that led off the same loveless underpass.
    Earnshaw Street, where the body had been left, was part of this mess, a cut-through created by the crash-landing of the tower block. It was a gap, with three Korean restaurants and a lesbian bar, all huddled together in deep shadow, as if there was strength in numbers. He saw the bloodstains immediately. They were on a stub of pavement beside the stairs up to Centre Point’s main entrance. They’d been scrubbed into strange patterns: pale, interlocked circles that Belsey decoded as an attempt to clean the paving stones with a sponge of some kind. Garters of police tape clung to railings. Tiny silver fragments of a foil ambulance blanket remained caught in the spikes of some dead shrubbery potted at the base. They looked like futuristic blossoms. He saw fingerprint dust on the glass behind it. The place had evidently received full forensic attention at some point.
    He plucked a scrap of foil from the shrubbery. The corpse can’t have looked that old if they’d tried to wrap it. He stuck a toe into the mulch of old carrier bags and cigarette packets behind the plant pot and saw something wedged there. A spray can. Belsey pulled it out and shook it. The brand was “Hycote,” colour: “Colorado Red.” It was still heavy with paint. Whoever had done the clearing must have been in a hurry.
    But not too hurried for a bit of redecoration. Belsey sniffed. He touched the wall in front of him. It was tacky with a fresh coat of grey paint. He stepped back, then crossed the road to gain a better vantage. Sprayed in upper case letters three feet high, on the concrete underbelly of Centre Point itself, was the word “CAVE.” The attempt to hide the word with a rushed paint job only made it seem more significant. Letters seemed to be emerging from the concrete itself.
    Belsey took the spray can to his car and threw it in. He checked with Dispatch once more. No record of a body came up. He tried three officers who might have been patrolling the area. None had heard of anything. There are clean-ups and then there are cover-ups, he thought. To wipe a record from the