by Andy Maslen
A speck of something greyish-brown and glistening – like porridge he thought – landed on the sleeve of Ramage’s suit jacket. He looked down and flicked it away with a fingernail.
A minute later, a plain grey transit van pulled up. Three black-clad men got out and approached Ramage, walking in step.
The lead man, shaved head, early forties, expressionless eyes, spoke: “Best you leave now, sir. We’ll tidy up.”
Ramage nodded, went back to his Bentley and drove off. He switched on the radio and began singing along to the music. It was The Magic Flute, on Radio Three. His favourite opera.
Wrapped in heavy-duty, welded steel chain secured with two fat brass padlocks, Lorna Hammond sank to the bottom of the Thames in a deep basin unaffected by the tides. Her little car exploded in a fireball ten minutes after that.
As the clean-up crew were brushing themselves off and climbing back into their van, a lone figure entered the kill zone carrying a black nylon bag. She nodded to them as she skirted the blazing car, feeling the heat warm her left cheek, and walked over to the Portakabin that had so recently formed the backdrop to her seventh unofficial kill.
The brass cartridge was already secured in a zipped pocket of her tactical vest. She smashed the lock on the door with a crowbar and entered. Judging the trajectory as the round had left the target’s skull, and looking back at the hole in the door, she began her search at ground level. She scattered a loose pile of dusty junk mail spreading out from the rear of the door. At the pile’s furthest edge, she saw that one of the envelopes had a neat round hole in its upper-left corner. She brushed the envelope to one side as her fingertips grazed the plywood floor.
“Hello, you,” she said. Then, pulling the large blade from a penknife, she dug the bullet out of the flooring. The .308 calibre Winchester round was essentially in the same condition as it had been when it left the muzzle of her rifle. It was smeared with blood and striated from the lands and grooves of the barrel’s rifling, but the copper jacket that ensured it would fly true over such long distances had maintained the shape and dimensions. It joined the brass in her pocket. Then she straightened and walked back to climb into the van, sniffing the smoke-filled air like a gun-dog.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Forensic Assistance
REG HAD BEEN signed off for two weeks with a confirmed case of Salmonella. Stella felt a pang of guilt when she took the call from Karen, but the feeling passed like a twinge from a sensitive tooth. A fortnight to do some serious digging around without Reg looking over her shoulder the whole time. Top of her list was the flake of paint.
She wandered down to the forensics office. Normally she avoided it – too many brainiacs sitting at computers showing each other coloured bar charts. Today, she actively wanted to be there. Just before she pushed through the door, she undid the scrunchie round her ponytail and shook out her hair. She’d put a spray of perfume – L’Eau D’Issey – down her cleavage that morning, happy to see that her boobs had come back. Now she undid that strategic second button, flicked the fabric apart with her thumb and forefinger, and went in.
As one, the six men and two women in the office looked up. Like meerkats, she thought, as sixteen eyes swivelled in her direction.
“Don’t stop,” she said with a cheery smile. But they hadn’t. Clocking her as “that light-duties DI” from some inter-office memo or other, or maybe just from the station grapevine, they’d all returned to their computers, gas chromatographs, microscopes or surgical tools to resume whatever it was they’d been doing before this copper had interrupted them.
Stella made her way to a guy she’d worked with on a murder case a year before the accident. His name was Lucian Young. A black guy with a posh accent, a good six-two in height, an athlete’s body and a neatly trimmed moustache and goatee. Station gossip held that he was an African prince. Bollocks! Stella knew he’d grown up in Oxford, the son of a university professor there. An expensive private education and a degree from his mother’s university had seen to the accent. His friendly, optimistic outlook on life was all his own.
“Hey, Lucian,” she said now, with a smile.
He looked up. “Oh, hello DI Cole. How are you?”
“I’m fine, all things considered. And please, call me Stella.”
“Very well. Stella. I haven’t seen you since the Tool Box Murders.” He drew air quotes around the three-word phrase. It had been coined by the media for the crimes of a serial killer who’d despatched his victims with a selection of DIY tools, ranging from screwdrivers to a claw hammer, and then hacked the bodies up with a cordless power saw.
“No. That was some work you did on those bones, though. I think that’s what got him convicted.”
Lucian looked down, smiling, his hands resting lightly on his computer keyboard. He had long fingers with pale pink nails. A pianist’s hands, Stella thought. “It was a team effort,” he said. “Your interviews were legendary.”
“Well, now we’ve inducted ourselves into the Paddington Green Hall of Fame, I wonder if you can do me a favour.”
“If I can, I will. Ask away.”
“How are you on car paints?”
“Identification, you mean?”
“Yes. Tying a flake of paint back to a make and model.”
He spun his chair round so he was facing her. She’d sat on the corner of his desk and was now regretting the cheap move with the hair and the button. Lucian was far too nice to need that level of buttering up.
He frowned.
“I’m good. There are the usual databases, of course, and I did do some of my own work a few years back, building a samples file. You know, scanning and categorising paints from the major suppliers and cross-referencing them to the car makers. But you shouldn’t get your hopes up too high. You know they all use the same paints, don’t you?”
She nodded. “You could look for me though, couldn’t you? If I had a flake for you to analyse?”
“Of course,” he said, turning to his screen, long fingers poised over a keyboard. “What’s the case reference?”
She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear.
“Oh, it’s not from a live investigation. It’s a cold case. I’m not really supposed to be working any cases, but, you know, I’m trying to stay sane down there and–”
He smiled. “Do you have it now?”
Stella pulled the plastic evidence bag from her jacket pocket and handed it to him. Their fingertips brushed as she handed it over and Stella jumped as a minute crack of static electricity discharged across the gap between them.
He grinned up at her. “Nylon carpets.”
“No expense spared,” she retorted.
He held the bag up to the light. “It’s not a bad size for an identification. And I can give you one piece of good news already.”
“What’s that?” she asked, taking the opportunity to refasten her blouse button.
“It’s not black. That knocks out twenty-five percent of the cars currently on Britain’s roads. Nor silver, blue, grey, red or white. That takes out another seventy percent or so. What is it? A purple?”
“I think so. Sort of twinkly. Metallic. But a finer grain than in most metallics, wouldn’t you say?”
“Let’s get it under a microscope and then we’ll be able to get a better look at it.”
Stella stood. “You’re sure you have time to do this now? I don’t want to take you off a case.”
“I was completing an online learning course in communications skills. Something the geniuses in HR believe makes us better employees. So, please, take me away.”
She smiled as she remembered the bumptious woman who’d interviewed her on her first day back. “I think I preferred it when it was called personnel and they just dealt with hiring cleaners and receptionists. Come on. Let’s do some science.”
Science had been one of Stella’s favourite subjects at Queen Mary’s College in Maidenhead, where she’d grown up. She’d gained eleven GCSEs at the top grade of A*,
including physics, chemistry and biology. She’d gone on to study psychology at A-level, along with English, Spanish and History. Then a first-class honours degree in psychology at the University of Bath, with a focus on abnormal psychology. While her friends had been boozing it up in the student bar or the city’s pubs, Stella had been reading FBI reports on cannibalistic serial killers, wondering what made someone decide killing and eating people was a good idea.
She’d taught in secondary schools for a couple of years after graduating, but joining the police was always the plan. She’d seen herself as a top profiler, constructing detailed pictures of psychopaths and helping the front-line detectives bring them to justice. But within a year of joining the Metropolitan Police, that dream had been exposed as a callow fantasy.
A series of sexual attacks on poor women in the streets of East London had brought the media down in greedy flocks. The locations, not a million miles away from the Whitechapel locations of Jack the Ripper’s kills, had produced, within days, the nickname, “Jack the Second”. Initially confined to slashes across the buttocks, the attacks escalated when a street prostitute named Kacey Slater had been found dead in an alley off Mitre Square. Her throat had been cut and her tongue removed.
The senior investigating officer was a media hound of a detective superintendent known for his admiration of all things American. He had personally hired and signed off on the budget for a clinical psychologist to help develop a profile of the murderer. Her conclusions were that the police should be looking for a white, working-class male in his early- to mid-thirties. He would have low literacy and numeracy and possibly communications problems, a speech impediment of some kind, even a cleft palate. The report was long and detailed and the investigation was reinvigorated as, led by their enthusiastic SIO, the murder investigation team began tracking down local men who fitted the profile.
The end came while the detective superintendent was giving another press conference on the street outside his own station. He was promising that, despite the fact that two more murders had been committed with the same MO and nobody had been arrested for the crimes, the profile would yield a result. At the precise moment he began taking questions from the gathered reporters, a female Indian doctor named Gita Desai walked into Brick Lane Police Station, five miles away, and confessed. In cultured and perfectly modulated tones, she told a DS that she had committed the murders, and that she had been inhabited by the spirit of the goddess Kali.
After that, the young detective constable had sighed, packed up her dreams, and flushed them down the toilet. From that day, she concentrated on learning how to find, test and interpret evidence, conduct interviews, develop confidential informants and, generally become the best copper she could be. The hard work paid off. She passed her sergeant’s exam the year after that and, on a fast-track programme, was promoted within six months. The rise to DI had taken another year, during which she’d earned a reputation as a no-nonsense detective who could booze it up with the boys when needed but was also sensitive enough with terrified victims or reluctant witnesses to draw them out to the point they would provide useful intelligence.
Useful intelligence was what she desperately needed now. She stood beside Lucian and watched as he mounted the chip of paint on a glass slide and pushed it under the stainless steel spring clips that held it still on the microscope’s stage. His breathing was audible as he twirled the ridged plastic wheel on the side and adjusted the eyepiece – a soft whisper through his nostrils as he concentrated on bringing the tiny piece of paint into focus. Finally, he leaned away from the eyepiece and looked round at Stella.
“Want a look?” he asked. Then he scooted to one side on the wheeled chair so she could lean over the scope herself. As she did, his scent reached her nostrils: sandalwood, but soap, not aftershave. She had to make a tiny adjustment to the focus before the paint chip was pin-sharp. It looked like a shard of sheet metal under the intense magnification. Almost as though part of the bodywork of the car was lying twenty centimetres below her eye. It was beautiful in the harsh, white light from the LEDs shining down on its glossy surface. A deep violet colour with flecks of diamond embedded in its surface that reflected the light in six-armed stars.
She stared down the steel-and-brass tube, and the sounds of the forensics office faded to silence. The humming of centrifuges, the tap of fingernails on keyboards, the rattling of papers being spat from laser printers, the hubbub of any office where people are asking each other questions, discussing last night’s TV or arguing over the significance of this email or that directive all disappeared as the razor-edged, irregular octagon of purple automotive paint seized control of Stella’s mind.
You came from Deacon’s car. You were there.
As she stared at the twinkling surface, registering the jagged edges and the layer of dark grey primer beneath the top coat, she found herself remembering her last moments with Richard. She’d been feeding Lola while he was stuffing some papers from the previous day into his briefcase. Lola’s large blue eyes, fringed with impossibly long, up-curled lashes, were locked onto her own, and she could sense a deep connection that seemed to stretch back further than birth, further even than conception.
Stella jumped as Lucian laid a large, gentle hand on her shoulder.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his face troubled, brow scored with five parallel lines of concern.
“Yes, fine. Why? Do you want your toy back?”
“You’ve been there for ten minutes. I went off to get us coffees.” He gestured to the desk next to the microscope where two mugs steamed with the station’s infamous muddy brew.
“Jesus! Really? Okay, well, yes, you should have it back.”
Stella took a sip of the coffee and perched on the edge of the desk. Lucian stood, arms folded, looking down at her. He spoke.
“It’s actually a pearlescent paint, rather than a metallic. The crystals are ceramic, not metal. Normal metallics have coarser edges to the flakes of reflectant metal. They’re rougher, too, so they don’t reflect as much of the visible light back at the viewer. Plus, this colour is unusual. At first glance, I would say it’s something high-end.”
Something pinched at the muscles in Stella’s chest. High-end? On whatever piece-of-shit motor Deacon was driving? Pimped somehow?
“That’s great. What about makes, models?”
He smiled and put his hands out. “Not so fast! This is just a preliminary visual inspection. Just to get the gross physical characteristics. I’ve got a battery of tests I can do on it after this. Chemical, electrophosphorescence, conductance, laminar decomposition, then there’s my trusty database.”
Stella smiled, remembering why she liked the man, with his confusing mixture of upper-class manners and deep-brown skin that had thrown more than one police officer into a social tailspin before now.
“So, when, then?”
“It’s always ‘when’, isn’t it? You guys never give us time to do a thorough job.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do,” Stella protested. “You tell me when, and I’ll go away and leave you to do your thorough job.”
“I’ll need the rest of the day and maybe tomorrow as well. But–”
“But what?”
“Maybe I could share my findings over dinner? My place?”
Stella’s eyes widened. “That’s rather forward of you, Mr Young, don’t you think?”
His eyebrows knitted together instantly. “Oh, I’m sorry. I just thought–”
She laughed then, a natural sound, full of warmth. “Just kidding. Yes, I’d like that. You can do the science bit for me. I’ll even let you draw diagrams.”
He smiled. “Tomorrow, about eight, then? Here,” he scribbled down an address on a piece of paper, “this is me.”
“Me” turned out to be a flat in a converted Docklands warehouse overlooking the Thames. The ride over took Stella thirty minutes, and as she reached Docklands, she wondered what had happened to all the original inhabitants when the
developers moved in and built luxury flats right in front of the little cheek-by-jowl terraced houses that until then had at least had the benefit of a river view. Had they complained? Moved out? Or just suffered the arrival of the yuppies with working-class stoicism? And what did that make Lucian? He didn’t seem like a yuppie – horrible, outdated term anyway.
She heeled out the kickstand and leant the Triumph over until the bent steel flange at the tip grated into the tarmac under the big bike’s weight. She looked up and down the street; it was deserted. But it looked safe enough. Plenty of BMWs and Mercs parked outside their owners’ homes. Still. You never knew. She bent to fix the chunky yellow lock over the front brake disc, threading the shackle through one of the holes and then plugging the key blank into the ignition, so the curly yellow plastic lanyard stretched tight between front wheel and handlebars. She’d only ever once driven off without undoing the disc-lock. A quarter-revolution before the half-kilo of forged steel hit the front forks, toppling the bike over and Stella to an ignominious tumble into the gutter.
Lucian opened the door dressed in faded Levi’s, soft, brown, suede loafers – not Gucci, Stella was relieved to see – and a navy silk shirt that seemed to glisten in the soft light of the hallway.
“Hi, Stella. Come in. Can I take your jacket?”
She shrugged off the bike jacket and watched as he hung it on a brushed aluminium hook just inside the front door. It nestled between two other garments. A long, black, belted overcoat, made from some sort of fine wool-cashmere blend to judge from the softness as she let her fingers trail across it. And a tailored leather jacket, scuffed and battered but clearly not a chain-store item, judging from the cut and the way the distressed leather seemed to have been improved by its treatment. You seem to be doing very well for yourself on a forensic tech’s salary, Lucian.
Stella wandered over to the huge window facing the river. Canary Wharf’s towering bank and insurance buildings dominated the skyline. “You have a really nice place here.”