The Hollow Man by Oliver Harris

coming in and out?”
    “Cleaners, gardeners. That’s all.”
    They both watched a moped idling at the roadside, checking a map, trundling on.
    “Is your boss in?” Belsey said.
    The guard waved him towards the front door and lifted a radio to his mouth. Expensive set-up for a doorbell, Belsey thought. The owner answered in a camel-hair coat and silk scarf, holding his car keys. He was thick-set, broad-shouldered, with a lot of children running around in the background.
    “I’ve got some questions about the man who lived opposite,” Belsey said, badge out.
    “What happened?”
    “He died.”
    The neighbour glanced briefly at the sky and muttered Hebrew. He bounced his car keys but didn’t say anything, looking at Belsey, waiting to hear what the proposition was.
    “Did you know him?” Belsey asked.
    “No. I only spoke to him once. He seemed a very cultured man. He said I should come over for drinks, but I’m rarely in the country.”
    “Do you know his name?”
    “Mr. Devereux.”
    “What do you know about him?”
    “He had a hard time of it.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “All his family, I believe, perished in Russia many years ago.”
    “Perished?”
    “Prisons. I don’t know. I heard this from Russian friends of mine. Everything he had he made himself. Every penny.”
    “How did he make it?”
    “He was an entrepreneur. I’m not sure of the details. But he believed in capitalism.” The neighbour gave a slight smile. “Before it became fashionable over there.”
    “When did you last see him?”
    “I haven’t seen him since that first time. I’ll ask my wife, she sees everything on this street.” He went to ask his wife and came back shrugging.
    “Never seen him. Have you asked the guard?”
    “Yes.”
    “Let me know if I can do anything else to help.”
    B elsey walked to the shops and bought superglue, Sellotape and talcum powder. It left him eleven pounds of Cassidy’s twenty. He asked for a shopping bag. That was everything he needed for a DIY fingerprint kit. Back at the house he took one of the jars from the fridge. Glass is every detective’s dream , as an instructor at a CID forensics training day had put it. Belsey had never forgotten the phrase. He took the desk lamp from the study and covered the bulb with glue, then switched it on and wrapped the bag around the lamp with the marmalade jar inside. The glue vapours would stick wherever there was grease, and then you could dust the surface with a little talc and it was as good as anything a lab would send you.
    Nothing. Belsey checked another jar, then a toothbrush, then the cover of a catalogue. He peeled Sellotape samples of lamp switches and TV screens. There were no prints. Devereux didn’t like using his fingers. Belsey took a flashlight from the garage and patrolled the house, searching surfaces, anywhere he knew he hadn’t made contact himself: the handles of drawers, the rim of the Jacuzzi, window frames, the underside of toilet seats. There wasn’t a print in the place.
    He sat in the living room and thought. Maybe death was not enough for Devereux. Maybe he had to wipe all traces of himself from existence. I have tried to ensure that all paperwork is in order so that you have no cause for further aggravation. The Marquis de Sade left instructions in his will: he was to be buried in a copse, in the woods of his property, the ditch covered over and strewn with acorns— in order that the spot become green again and my grave may disappear from the face of the earth as I trust the memory of me shall fade out of the minds of all men . . .
    Bullshit. The place was scrubbed clean. Someone had done a job on it.
    The cleaner would be a place to start. Belsey called three cleaning companies in Hampstead. Eventually he found the company that employed Kristina—Sprint Domestic Cleaners—and reached her on her mobile.
    “Mr. Devereux’s home, on The Bishops Avenue—did you clean it before you called the police?”
    “I