by Andy Maslen
Linda smiled. Stella felt the anger boiling up in her throat again. She held her temper. Just. “Let’s not run before we can walk. I need to type up my report for Adam, I mean, Detective Chief Superintendent Collier. Won’t be too long, though. I’m a fast typist.”
“We’re done, then?” Stella asked.
Linda nodded, already turning away from Stella to her monitor and tapping those glossy red nails on the keyboard.
Twenty minutes later, Stella was sitting opposite The Model in his immaculately tidy office. A large, blood-red, glazed pot stood in its matching oversized saucer on the carpet. Stretching from the surface of the compost almost to the ceiling was some kind of palm tree. Stella wasn’t good with plants. Names of them or care of them. She’d had a spider plant at home, but after the accident she’d stopped watering it. For a while it clung on, turning paler and paler until its leaves lost their green and white stripes and became translucent. Then it bolted, throwing out dozens of babies on runners like a mobile. Finally, it turned brown, withered and died.
He looked up at her and smiled. His full lips parted, revealing the unnaturally white and even teeth that office gossip held had appeared during a Collier family summer holiday in Florida. As always, his hair was clean, shining, and parted with military precision on the left, the narrow white strip of scalp an even two millimetres in width all the way from hairline to crown.
He motioned for her to take a seat opposite him. Then he folded his large hands on the desk. She glanced down at the wide gold band on his wedding finger and a large gold signet ring topped with an oval of incised red stone on the middle finger of his right hand. Coarse black hairs curled on the backs of his knuckles. She wondered, as she often had before, why he didn’t pluck them out; they were so at odds with the rest of his tailored appearance. He spoke.
“Welcome back, DI Cole. Stella. How are you feeling?”
“On a scale from one to ten, sir?”
He frowned. “I beg your pardon?”
“Sorry, sir. Just come from an interview with occie health. I don’t think I ever realised how thorough they are.”
“Linda? She’s new. Has a doctorate in occupational psychology, and an MBA if you can believe it. Part of our professionalism drive to elevate operational standards. Don’t worry. It’s PBP now across most of the Met. Came in while you were, ah, away.”
“PBP, Sir?”
“Professional Best Practice. It’s a new one. You’ll get used to it. Now, I expect you’ll want to know about your new assignment, yes?”
Stella frowned. “New, sir? I thought I’d be back on my old duties.”
Collier frowned. “The murder investigation teams are all operating with a full complement of detectives, Stella. I’ve taken a good, hard look at our orgchart, but they’re all fully resourced. In any case, I’m not entirely convinced that’s our best course of action for you right now.”
“What do you mean, sir? You must have read my pre-return psych eval from the shrink at the hospital. I’m fine. I’m off the pills, and the booze as well. Going to meetings. The whole works.”
Collier leaned back and stared at the ceiling before returning his cold gaze to Stella. “I did read it. And it’s very encouraging. Really encouraging. You have made amazing progress. But–”
“But?”
“But I don’t want you on the front line. Not yet. Give yourself time to reacclimatise to the job. It’s not like going back to work as a librarian, after all.”
“But I need it, sir. Please. There must be an MIT that needs me. Or what about another command? Special operations. Counter-terror. Sexual offences.” Now give me the bad news.
“No, Stella. My mind’s made up. I’m giving you an easy run in. There’s a new cross-divisional administrative task force been set up. You’re being temporarily reassigned there for a few months. Just until we can see how you’ve settled in. Light duties.”
Stella barked out a short, sharp, bitter laugh. “Admin, sir. Really? You’re putting me on the filing cabinet task force?”
Collier leant forward, fixing Stella with those dark eyes of his. “Yes, I am. Effective immediately. Report to Christine Flynn on the seventh floor. Corporate affairs. She’s got the reins on this one. Now, if you’ll forgive me, and it is good to have you back, believe me, but I have a meeting at the Home Office in forty-five minutes and I need a fresh shirt.”
Stella stood. Swallowing hard, she looked down at Collier.
“Thank you. Sir.”
CHAPTER SIX
Descent into Purgatory
FRANKIE O’MEARA MADE Stella a cup of the station’s barely drinkable instant coffee – something to do with the water was the most commonly stated, and believed, explanation – and then leaned back against the counter, putting her lips to the rim of her mug and blowing.
“So, admin. Bummer. Thought we’d have you back with us, boss,” she said.
Stella shrugged, before taking a cautious sip of her coffee and grimacing. “Me, too, Frankie. But The Model’s got his mind made up, and you know what he’s like.”
Frankie stood straight and frowned at Stella. “I’m sorry, Stella. My mind’s made up,” she said, in a comically deep voice. “I have to consider what’s best for the command.”
They both laughed at the pinpoint accuracy of Frankie’s impression of DCS Collier, only to choke back their laughter as the man himself popped his head round the partition between Homicide Command and the kitchen area.
“That’s right, DS O'Meara,” he said with a disarming smile. “I do. A word, please.”
The immaculately groomed head disappeared and the two women glanced at each other, then snorted with more suppressed giggles. “Oh, shit, boss. I’m in for it now.”
“Don’t worry. Just do your ‘sorry, sir’ act and stick your chest out. You know he’s got the hots for you.”
“Guv! It was one drunken snog at a Christmas party. Two years ago!”
“I know. And look how it affected him. Must have been the pressure of your thirty-four Ds against that starched white shirt of his.”
Frankie blushed a fetching shade of plum-red. “Got to go, boss. Pray for me.” Then she winked and hurried off.
Stella blew on her coffee, took another sip, scowled, then carried the mug, which was decorated with the words, ‘Not Now, I’m Doing Paperwork’, along the corridor to the lifts. As she waited, she wondered why Frankie hadn’t thought to ask about Lola. Perhaps tiny babies weren’t her thing. Not all women had that maternal instinct.
She jabbed the call button and stood, looking at the digital number on the screen to the left of the doors as it flipped and shimmered downwards: 10 … 9 … a huge pause …
“Oh, come on, for fuck’s sake,” Stella groaned. “What are you doing up there, getting your old granny in with you?”
Finally, after what seemed like minutes, but was probably only ten or fifteen seconds, the lift was on the move again. Twenty seconds later, the control panel bleeped and the doors hissed apart. A group of detectives strode out, grim faced, one nodding at Stella before they wheeled left in lockstep and headed off towards SC&O Command’s CID office.
Stella stepped into the lift and poked the button for the seventh floor.
“Hold the lift!” a male voice called.
She looked down, flustered, found the Open Doors button, and held her fingertip on its impressed surface until the voice’s owner arrived and slid in beside her.
He was a bearded man in his early forties. More hair on his cheeks and chin than his scalp, which was shiny and pink from the forehead back to the crown of his head. He wore gold-rimmed, rectangular glasses on a thin, black, leather thong. His sizeable gut strained the thin, sea-green cotton of his shirt so that the spaces between the buttons gaped, revealing hairy ellipses of pallid skin.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t DI Cole. How’re you keeping Stella?”
Stella turned to face him. She smiled a thin-lipped smile and stared at his piggy little e
yes.
“Oh, you know, Pink, mustn’t grumble. Just started work again today, actually.”
“Listen, sorry about, you know. I mean, fucking awful way to go.”
Stella maintained her stare. “You weren’t at the funeral, were you?”
DI Howard “Pink” Floyd had the good grace to blush just slightly. “No. No, I wasn’t. Thing was, Carol had tickets to see Celine Dion. I wanted to come, Stella, really, but those things are like fucking gold-dust. I did send flowers.”
Stella looked up at the green dot-matrix display above their heads as the numbers worked their way to seven. Why is the lift so bloody slow?
“I know you did. Red roses. Very romantic.”
“It was all they had,” Floyd said.
“At the garage, you mean?” Stella closed her eyes. Please let me get out, God. Please speed up this fucking lift.
God evidently had other ideas. With a jerk that sent Stella sideways against Floyd’s corpulent belly and a squeal of machinery from somewhere far above them, the lift came to a halt. The lights flickered, went out, then came on again.
“Bollocks!” Floyd said. “I’ve got a meeting in five minutes.” He reached sideways and began jabbing his index finger at the button for the seventh floor. “Come on, come on,” he urged the button. Then he screwed up his face into a snarl. “Well, fuck you, then!” he shouted and kicked the doors with the toe of his pale-grey, slip-on shoe.
Stella reached across and pressed the alarm button. “Relax, Pink,” she said. “What’s the matter, claustrophobia?”
“As a matter of fact, it is that,” he said. “I’ve had hypnotherapy and everything for it.”
“Take a few deep breaths then and try to stay calm. They’ll have us out of here in no time.”
Even though she would cheerfully kick the fat man’s arse all the way down the stairs from the top floor to the basement, Stella also had a compassionate streak a mile wide. She didn’t like to see people frightened, or in any kind of pain if she could stop it. Floyd was breathing steadily and deeply, though she noticed a film of sweat on his forehead and top lip. He’d closed his eyes too. Sweat patches had darkened under his arms, and she could smell the tang of his anxiety.
Then the speaker above the panel of buttons squawked into life.
“Hello? This is Orion Customer Response Desk. Who am I speaking to, please?”
To whom am I speaking? Idiot. “This is DI Stella Cole. Can you get this lift moving please?”
“Yeah, no worries, mate,” the speaker squawked again. “There was a power outage in the master control unit. Just rebooting it now. Be about three minutes. You all right in there?”
“We’re fine,” Stella said, looking across at Floyd. His eyes were closed, and he was leaning against the wall and clutching the polished, stainless-steel rail that ran round the three enclosed sides of the lift. “Just get a move on, will you.” She turned to Floyd, who had turned an unhealthy shade of pale green. “Hang in there, Pink. Help’s on its way.”
“I’m fine,” he gasped. “Doing a lot better than that Lord Psychopath who got his last month.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, come on, you must have heard. The Right-Fucking-Honourable Nigel Golding. Took a hit from the Cowboys and Indians Brigade trying to leg it from a prison transfer van. It was on the news, the web, Facebook, everywhere. What are you, a hermit or something?”
“Don’t watch a lot of TV, to be honest.”
“Well, you should have. You would have seen His Lordship take a few in the face. Bloody bastard. Got off easy if you ask me. Mind you–”
“Mind you, what?”
Floyd turned to Stella and leaned closer, beckoning her to lean in to hear what he had to say.
“It wasn’t as much of a coincidence as you might think.”
“What wasn’t?” she asked, breathing shallowly to avoid inhaling any more of his flop sweat aroma.
“What d’you think? Him getting drilled like that.”
“Like I said, Pink, I didn’t see the story.”
Floyd tapped the side of his nose, a typically comic-book response. “Look, I’m probably telling tales out of school, but let’s just say he got what was coming to him. He might have got some clever Oxbridge-educated brief to get him off on an insanity defence, but there are people who see through all that flimflam. Powerful people, who can make sure justice gets done whatever those numpties on the jury bench say.”
Stella was just about to ask him what he meant when the lights flickered again and the lift jolted into motion. Ten seconds later, the doors were opening on the seventh floor and, with a sigh and a shudder, DI Floyd squeezed through the opening doors like a cork leaving a bottle of cheap sparkling wine.
Frowning and shaking her head, Stella turned right out of the lift and walked the twenty metres along the green-painted corridor to her destination: an office door marked, “Christine Flynn, Corporate Affairs.” As she knocked and reached down for the handle, she smiled quietly and nodded. You did it. Stage One complete.
Stella had never had cause to visit the seventh floor before. The haunt of Corporate Affairs and its bastard offspring – Communications, Public Relations and, God help us, Stel!, Marketing – it was the sort of place hardworking police officers tended to avoid if they could possibly help it.
Christine Flynn’s office appeared to have been airlifted in from some other sort of organisation altogether. Whereas her operational colleagues of comparable rank enjoyed offices that reeked of officialdom, with photographs of their possessors shaking hands with the Queen or the current Prime Minister, a smooth-faced Old Etonian, Flynn’s was an intensely personal space. The walls, for a start, were a shade of dusty blue that made Stella think of early summer days at the beach, misty skies not yet burnt clear by the sun. On those south coast expanses of pale-blue paint were hung paintings – or were they prints? – anyway, pictures of children picking daisies in meadows, flying kites on windy hillsides or, again, squatting on the sand, wavelets lapping at their feet as they built castles or dug little moats. A bundle of saffron-coloured sticks stood in a glass cube half-filled with an oily-looking liquid. They perfumed the office with vanilla.
The woman behind the empty desk was about forty. Auburn hair cut short. Minimal makeup. Her wide mouth was curved upwards into a smile so radiant Stella felt the heat of the woman’s personality from across the room. She stood and walked round the corner of the desk, hand outstretched. Her long legs were encased in tailored trousers cut from some soft, dove-grey fabric that broke gently across the fronts of dark-green, snakeskin print shoes. All in all, a statement.
They shook hands, and Flynn gestured for Stella to take one of two low armchairs, upholstered in pale grey suede, opposite each other across a coffee table made from a single slab cut through a very large tree-trunk. Its rings of age were enhanced by some sort of staining process.
“DI Cole, welcome back. I know this will mean very little, but I am so sorry for your loss. Would you like some coffee? Or tea? I have chamomile, peppermint, ginger and–” she paused “–builder’s, if you’re like me and can’t get on with all that hippy shit.”
Stella’s eyes popped wide open and she choked out a sudden laugh, caught out by the woman’s earthy expression, the more so for its having been delivered in a cultured drawl from somewhere in the Home Counties. Maybe there were normal people in CA after all.
“Builder’s. Please. And please call me Stella.”
“Very well, then. Stella. And please call me Chris. Only my Mum and Dad call me Christine. Makes me feel ten years old.”
The tea made and poured, Flynn spoke again. “I won’t dress this up for you, Stella. You’re a frontline detective, and a damn good one from what Adam tells me. So working in admin must feel like a prison sentence to you.”
Stella took a sip of her tea, which was made from fresh leaves and so fragrant she could almost picture the hillsides of Sri Lanka where they had been picked. She shr
ugged and raised her eyebrows. “It wouldn’t have been my first choice after a year of compassionate leave.”
“No, I’m sure it wouldn’t. However, this is a temporary posting, as I’m sure DCS Collier made clear. To give you some time to acclimatise.”
“But what does it actually involve, this task force? I’m not going to be difficult, but me and meetings? Let’s just say I have a low tolerance for boredom.”
“The task force itself, which, by the way, the brass have decided in their wisdom to call Operation Streamline, is very much about meetings. But you personally won’t be required to attend any.” Flynn stopped again and frowned. She put her teacup down, dead-centre in its matching saucer. “It’s records management we want you for.”
Feeling some sort of show of disgust was called for, Stella clinked her own cup down, making sure to spill a little tea as she did so. “A filing clerk!” She let her voice rise upwards. “I’m a DI in the Met with eight years under my belt, and you’re putting me in the fucking basement sorting out paperwork?” Her blue-green eyes flashed as she widened them, and she was gratified to see Flynn pull her head back under this mild assault.
“In a nutshell, yes. There are still files that haven’t been digitised down there. The Evidence Room looks like something from the eighties. I want you to sort it out for me. By the time you’re done, we should be ready for another psych eval. Then, all being well, you’ll re-join your colleagues on an MIT and off you go, hunting down the bad guys. And girls, of course.” Flynn risked a smile. She really was very attractive, Stella thought. Good skin. Epic haircut: all angles and sharp edges. Must cost her a fortune.
Enjoying her role, Stella reluctantly began to wind it down again. “It’s not as if I have a choice, is it? When do you want me to start?”
“No time like the present. Why don’t we finish these, then I can come down with you and introduce you to Reg.”
Oh, shit! Reg the Veg. The most boring man in Paddington Green.
Police Constable Reggie Willing, the Exhibits Manager was well known in the station, if not well liked. Fifty-one years old, but acting many years older, cruising towards his thirty and a comfortable, pensioned-off life playing golf and tending his allotment. Ambition was to Reg as winning the Grand National was to an old carthorse. Not. A. Thing. It said a lot that the powers that be had stuck him there when most other stations had a civilian running their exhibits rooms. He’d been shuffling about in the basement for as long as Stella had been working at Paddington Green nick. Now she’d be working alongside him. Where, don’t forget Stel, we want to be. Oh, yes. Sorry, Stel. My bad.