by Andy Maslen
CHAPTER SEVEN
Spring Cleaning
THE GENERAL PUBLIC have three basic ideas about the inside of a police station. Take the good, honest citizens, the ones who keep their noses clean and say “yes, officer, of course, officer, won’t happen again, officer,” when stopped for speeding, the ones who smile good naturedly at uniformed bobbies on the beat. They have a picture in their heads from the telly. Basically, the CID operations room. Lots of whiteboards and desks, and, if it’s made by a particularly stylish director, some impossibly modern or, frankly, just plain impossible technology involving floor-to-ceiling glass panels with computer displays whizzing across them.
The same crowd, when called on to bail out their partied-out teenaged sons and daughters, or dodgy friends in the motor or jewellery trades, see more of the uniforms and fewer of the suits. Lots of foul, machine-made coffee and fouler tea. The faux politeness of overworked police officers who know your fence of a brother-in-law or car-stereo-boosting BFF is guilty as sin and why do they have to go through all this malarkey when banging them up now would save the taxpayer a shitload of money?
And the bad, dishonest citizens? The ones mugging, murdering and raping their way through life, or stealing other people’s possessions and peace of mind, or generally acting like arseholes just because they can’t say no to a final pint? Well, they know about the cells, with their smell of vomit, piss and disinfectant. The weeping and screaming from the sobering-up, the panicked and the mad. The barely concealed contempt from the custody sergeant and the bored routine of the fingerprint technicians and cheek swabbers.
But none of them know about all the background stuff that keeps a police station functioning as a building, a home for a massive public-sector organisation, and a machine for preventing, detecting and solving crime. Why would they? Sure, forensics is the new glamour job, with middle-class kids applying to study it at university. And maybe the odd computer tech gets a minor role in the latest cop drama, but basically, admin is admin the world over. Necessary, relentless and very, very boring.
Not to PC Reg “The Veg” Willing.
To The Veg, admin was about order. Precision. Tidiness. He’d spent twenty years on the beat. He’d pounded the pavements in the East End, breaking up fights between skinheads and gangs of Asian youths who’d decided enough was enough and had started carrying knives and baseball bats. He'd walked through the leafy avenues of Kew and Richmond, reassuring distressed, middle-class “ladies who lunch” that the police would do everything they could to recover their nicked Mercedes convertibles and BMW four-by-fours. Generally, that meant issuing a crime report number so the cashmere-clad ladies could visit a showroom in the fullness of time and replace the Merc or the Beemer. And he’d finished the active phase of his career as a foot soldier of the Metropolitan police, strolling through the shopping streets of the West End, giving tourists directions to Madame Tussauds, listening sympathetically to tales of bags snatched and wallets filched, and complacently accepting folded twenties and fifties from Arabs, Chinese and Russians who thought this was the way to treat police officers who were helpful.
But then came the breakthrough. The job Reg knew he had been born to do. Managing the records office and exhibits room at Paddington Green nick. After an interview at once laughably easy and the most stressful of Reg’s entire life, he had been awarded the crown. His kingdom stretched over a floor the size of a city-centre supermarket, and the fact that it had no natural light or ventilation bothered him not. His remit covered all historical paper case files, the hundreds of thousands of exhibits from criminal cases, supplies – which sounds dull but in fact covers everything from toilet paper and pencils to tear-gas grenades and the paperwork from incoming shipments of new weapons for the station armoury – and personnel files, HR not having yet got round to digitising the records of the station’s two thousand one hundred and seventeen employees, both civilian staff and police officers.
Reg was busy planning his next raised-bed planting scheme on a sheet of squared paper, tongue tip protruding from between his incisors, when the heavy door on its pneumatic closer hissed. He looked up. And smiled. Smiling was Reg’s go-to facial expression. Partly because he was, at heart, a happy man. Partly because he had found, over the years, that it disarmed people, sometimes literally, and offered him time to think, a slow process at the best of times. Today, as he registered the two faces peering at him through the gloom, the smile widened into a genuine expression of good humour and welcome.
“Look out, Reg! Hide the weed!” he called out. “A DI and the head of Corporate Affairs. You’ll be out on your ear!” Then he stepped out from behind his desk, manoeuvring his gut round the corner with a grace borne of weekends entering – and often winning – ballroom dancing competitions with his wife, and came forward to greet the two women. He brought himself into a comical approximation of an at-attention stance, held his pudgy hands wide and smiled again. “Ladies, to what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”
Flynn sighed. “Reg, I think you know DI Cole,” she said. “She’s assigned here for a short adjustment period. A secondment.”
“Yes, of course.” Reg looked down, coughed to mask his embarrassment at being caught clowning inappropriately, then looked up again to give Stella a direct stare. “Sorry for your loss, DI Cole. Very sorry.”
“It’s OK, Reg. And there’s no need to call me DI Cole. Stel’s just fine.”
Glancing at her watch, something in rose gold, Stella noticed, Flynn became all business.
“Well, I think I can leave you two to get acquainted. Reg, perhaps you could give DI – Stella – the tour and then show her what needs doing.”
“Naturellement!” Reg said in a French accent so ludicrous it made Stella smile with genuine good humour. “Operation Sort This Effing Lot Out needs all the manpower – and womanpower – it can get.”
Flynn left, and in the silence that followed the hissing of the automatic door closer, Stella could almost hear Reg’s brain working. She broke the silence just as uncomfortable threatened to morph into downright painful.
“Going to show me around, then, Reg, or do I just set off with a ball of red string?”
“What?”
“You know, Theseus and the Minotaur. He unwound red wool so he could find his way out of the labyrinth again.”
“Oh, yes, of course. No, you won’t need anything like that. Just scream if you get lost and Sir Reginald of Recordsia will come galloping to the rescue.”
He turned on his highly polished black heel and led her off into the bowels of the exhibits room. As they passed a desk cluttered with gardening magazines and a loose pile of various kinds of order forms, receipts and shipping notes, he pointed.
“That’s where you’ll find me if I’m not roaming my kingdom, Stel. Normally, I eat my lunch there; saves time compared to going out.”
“What do you do for lunch?”
“Normally bring something from home that Karen makes me. Egg mayonnaise, that’s my favourite. Now,” he said, approaching a floor-to-ceiling steel mesh partition. “In there’s your exhibits. Evidence, in other words, as you obviously know,” he added as she opened her mouth to speak. “Everything that goes in or out gets signed for and countersigned by yours truly. And now by yours yours truly, as well.” He winked. “There’s enough illegal guns, Class A drugs, counterfeit cash and bloodstained clothing in there to start our own series of CSI. Mind you, we might need to work on the title a bit. CSI Paddington isn’t very sexy, is it?”
Stella shrugged. The man’s relentlessly cheery disposition and wisecracks were already wearing her down, and she’d spent less than ten minutes in his company. Next, he led her through to another room.
He pointed out dozens of rows of dented black steel filing cabinets. “Every original paper document from 1976 onwards is in them,” he said. “Nowadays, they get scanned and entered into the system before shredding, but what with cuts and everything, there’s a teensy weensy bit of a backlo
g. Plus, in the racking, you've got every bit of paperwork from all our current cases. Even after they’re typed in, the originals have to go somewhere, so we get them all to log in and store.”
“Who does the logging in?”
He shrugged. “I try to avoid it, get one of the assistants to do it. I’m not the world’s most accurate typist.” He dropped his voice to a murmur and looked theatrically up and down the empty room. “I suffer from FFS, you see.”
“What’s that, then? For Fuck’s Sake?”
He shook his head, smiling. “Fat Finger Syndrome.” He held out his hands palms upwards. His fingers looked like raw pork sausages. “Can’t make them do what I want. For example, I’m always getting numbers round the wrong way, so thirty-four comes out as forty-three. Or ‘witness’. Always comes out as ‘wintess’.”
More like witless in your case, Veg.
The following day, on her own in the exhibits room, Stella consulted the computerised listing of items logged under ‘drug paraphernalia’. It took less than a minute to find what she was looking for. Halfway down the page was a reference number corresponding to a location on a rack and shelf. Nestling between bags of weed and assorted, brightly coloured pills was a white, cuboid cardboard box. It was about ten centimetres to a side and bore the logo of a medical devices company. The top had been slit through a shipping label that announced the contents:
BD Emerald 2ml Syringe with 23G X 1.25” Needle (100).
Inside the box were small plastic pouches, white on the back, clear on the front, each containing one slim syringe and a pre-fixed needle in a turquoise plastic sheath. Stella removed a single pouch. Then she went back to the computer and made a tiny correction to the record, adjusting the remaining quantity from “69” to “68”.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Fight or Flight
BY THE END of her first week back on the job, Stella had learned three things. First, that the art of growing prize-winning vegetables was a lot more complicated than most people gave credit for. Second, that given the state of police record-keeping, it was a miracle any cases were successfully brought to a conclusion. And third, that she would cheerfully strangle Reggie Willing with her bare hands. His relentlessly upbeat outlook was no doubt a direct result of the full-fat pension heading his way, but it still grated.
Home at six p.m., she heaved the Triumph onto its centre-stand in her tiny, precious square of off-street parking, fitted the canary-yellow lock through the front brake disc, then headed inside to change, calling out “Hi, Kristina!” to the nanny, going to find her in the nursery and then giving her precious Lola a cuddle.
In the old, old days, Friday nights were special. She and Richard would have hugged, swapped news – his skirmishes with opposition lawyers, her dealings with arsey thugs – and opened a bottle of something cold from the fridge. If it was before Lola was born, they might have opened a second to drink with the Chinese food they had ordered. After she came along, they were both so tired it would be astonishing if they managed not to fall asleep in their microwaved ready-meals.
In the old days, after the accident, she would have still opened a couple of bottles of wine. Still have ordered the Chinese food. Then finished the evening by pouring a large vodka and sitting in front of the TV, staring at the inane, grinning presenters and their celebrity interviewees and wishing they were all dead.
But that was then. This was now. Stella Cole, clean and sober.
*
She couldn’t remember exactly why she’d decided to get herself back together. But at some point in that year off, she’d gone to see Dr Samuels, who’d referred her to a specialist.
“Break the routine that makes drinking easy,” her counsellor had told her. So she had. Every night, she’d go out running. A couple of miles at first, before she had to stop, doubled over and retching, before hobbling home, side pierced by a stitch, feet burning with blisters. Then, as she’d persevered, the mileage count grew. Five, six, seven … into double figures sometimes. Along with her sobriety, she’d developed a taste, even an addiction, for running. The London streets disappeared under her feet as she racked up tens, then hundreds of miles.
After each run, she’d stand naked in front of the full-length mirror inside the wardrobe door, pink and sweating, and evaluate her physique. Her legs got stronger. The calves, quads and hamstrings took on the definition of a racehorse’s muscles. Her stomach tautened and flattened. She couldn’t stop. Not even if she wanted to.
The shoulders and arms needed some work though, she realised that. Stella had no time for gyms. Too many yummy mummies with their dinky designer shorts and crop tops. She Googled “home weightlifting for women” and skim-read the results until she found a set of exercises she could do with what the American blogger called, “your kitchen cupboard weight room”.
After a few false starts, she settled on bags of sugar. Compact, good weight-to-volume ratio. Sets of ten bicep curls, lateral raises and overhead presses were easy, and she found herself powering through more and more reps, for more and more sets. She graduated to press-ups, ab crunches and pull-ups.
Soon, her deltoids, biceps and triceps had gained bulk and definition. Her stomach, never flabby, now looked as if six flat cobblestones had been laid just beneath the skin. She wasn’t just fit. She was strong. Powerful. She could feel it. But what to do with all that extra power? She lay awake at night sometimes, burning with a desire to find the truth about the death of her husband. Would get up at two, three, four in the morning, put on her running clothes and pound the streets till dawn, swearing continuously under her breath and occasionally startling early-morning dog-walkers with the vehemence of her oaths.
She did some research, made a couple of calls, and tracked down Doug Stevens, the sergeant who’d given her the change purse all those years ago. He wasn’t on the force any more. He’d taken his pension and set up a gym in the East End. He’d not gone for the easy naming options – “Sarge’s” or “Rocky’s” – instead calling his establishment TBL Fitness.
“It stands for Thin Blue Line,” he’d explained, when she’d met him there for a personal assessment at seven forty-five, one rainy September morning. The gym wasn’t huge, about the size of a school hall, but it was clean and painted white with a blonde wood floor polished to a satiny sheen. It smelled of soap, sweat, and something else – a tangy top note she recognised as adrenaline.
“It’s cool, Rock– I mean, Sarge,” she said.
He smiled. “It’s OK, DI Cole. Most of my clients call me that. I never minded. I mean, pretty good role model for a fitness freak, wouldn’t you say?”
She shrugged. “I guess, so. If I’m going to call you Rocky, you’d better drop the DI Cole stuff. Stel’s fine. You remember Marv?” she said.
“How could I forget him? I seem to remember I taught you how to hit him properly, didn’t I?”
She nodded. “That’s why I’m here. I want you to teach me how to fight. Properly.”
He folded his arms and narrowed his eyes. “And by properly, you mean?”
“Dirty. That’s what I mean. Not what PACE says. Not what the Marquess of fucking Queensberry would say. I mean how you used to do it. You know–”
“You mean in the army.”
“Yes, I mean in the army. If you wanted to put somebody down. For good.”
He looked at her then. Hard. She returned the look. Maybe he detected a resilience in her unblinking gaze. Or maybe something else. Something determined.
“Maybe you should tell me why you want to learn how to fight.”
“Self-defence. London’s not getting any safer. I’m a single mother. I need to be able to protect myself.” She did all but add, “Your Honour” at the end of this statement.
Stevens smiled. “And what instructor could resist that little speech?” he asked, with a grin.
“So you’ll teach me, then?”
“Fine. I’ll teach you how to fight, Stella. But there’s something else you need to learn f
irst.”
“What’s that?”
He whipped his right hand up, palm out, fingers stiff, and slapped her, hard across the face, knocking her sideways with the force of the blow.
“How to take it.”
She rocked back on her heels, eyes wide with shock, tears starting from the inner corners. Her hand flew to the flaring red cheek where his blow had connected with a flat crack in the silent space of the gym. She sprang at him, right hand curled into a fist. He slid around the incoming punch with a lithe, twisting motion, caught her hand and pulled her over his outstretched foot so that she landed in a heap at his feet. Then he dropped to a crouch with his right knee pressing against the side of her neck, and stuck a pointing index finger into the soft place just under her jawbone.
“You’re dead, Stel,” he said. “Again. Come on, let’s get you up.”
He pulled her to her feet, and after she’d recovered a portion of her control and self-respect, they talked about a plan.
After that, they’d gone to work straight away. Stella told him she intended to keep up with her home weights and strength-building programme. She wanted him to focus completely on unarmed combat.
The gym had yet to open officially, so they had the whole space to themselves. Standing facing Stevens in the centre of a square of four scarlet crash mats, Stella felt, not happy exactly, but in control. As if she had rediscovered a sense of purpose. He was wearing pale-grey marl shorts and a black, sleeveless T-shirt with a regimental crest over the heart. She had on a plain, navy-blue T-shirt and matching baggy shorts with black Lycra cycling shorts underneath.