The Hollow Man by Oliver Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

lighter. He glanced through the stolen AD Development paperwork and decided to study it in detail later, when he had time to concentrate. For the moment, at least, he still had a job. Work while it is day. The night is coming when no man shall work. There were messages for him: from the hotel where he’d been staying, a loans company, an ex, a second cousin he hadn’t seen since a wedding in 2004. People wanted to know why he wasn’t answering his phone.
    He called the ex from the office line.
    “I am. I just don’t have it.”
    “But I spoke to a man on your number.”
    “What did he say?”
    “He said he wasn’t you. Are things all right, Nick? Someone said you’d gone missing.”
    “Missing? I’m here at work.”
    “You sound different.”
    “I am different.”
    “Are you OK?”
    A note in his in-tray instructed Belsey to attend the headquarters of the Independent Police Complaints Commission at 3 p.m. They hadn’t wasted any time. Someone wanted him out. He looked at it and wondered if he’d gone missing. Maybe he was on the run. There were people on the run who were perfectly still. He folded the Internal Affairs note into his pocket, stood up and stretched.
    It was a relatively quiet day. Most of the other Hampstead detectives were at a training session in Enfield. The station was short-staffed and Belsey had to process a sixteen-year-old with a kilo of cannabis resin. Afterwards, he took the hash and bought some cigarette papers, begged a couple of cigarettes and returned to the station.
    He sat in the rape suite, smoking. It was comfortable there. That was the idea, he supposed: a sofa, some dried flowers, a side room behind a curtain. No one would look for him in the rape suite. He considered his plan as it stood and what he needed to do: investigate flights, locate his passport, raise a little travel money. Now he had decided on his course of action Belsey felt at peace. He hadn’t smoked hash since his early twenties. He thought of his expectations then, the thrill of police work, the crew he ran with. They would compete to see who could travel the farthest in a night, while supposedly on duty. One time he stuck the sirens on and made it to Brighton. He remembered standing against a rail beside the sea, feeling spray on his face and staring into the blackness. It felt like being on the edge of everything he knew. He had made it in forty-two minutes, down the M23. If it was this easy, he thought, how far could he go in a night? In a week? At that moment every cell in his body wanted to run. Looking out over the sea, he thought: Moving is the most important thing in the world . And he had forgotten that, as you do with the most important things.
    He spent five minutes gathering papers for a court visit next week that would not take place. He would be gone. The case concerned a husband who’d tried to kill his family after he’d lost his job. The bank had cut his overdraft facility, the neighbours smelt gas. Belsey was glad he would not be there to see it all unfold. The justice system would find itself temporarily without a cog, but it would survive. At twelve-thirty he returned to The Bishops Avenue.
    New shoeprints led towards the house, parallel with his own. Heath mud, size nines where he was size eleven: no treads, some pale dust on the outside of the left sole where they had tried to skirt the pink gravel.
    The visitor must have walked around the building, trying to see if anyone was in, then approached the bell. Belsey crouched to the bell. It was metal and would pick up good prints. He stepped back and looked at the windows. No lights on. None of the curtains had been moved. He emptied the mailbox attached to the front security gates. Then he climbed the steps and let himself in.
    “Hello?” he called. There was no answer. Belsey flicked through Devereux’s mail as he walked through the house, tearing open envelopes and discarding the junk. He thought there might be a PIN or, less