by Andy Maslen
Stella laughed and was gratified to see Hutchings smiling back.
“So where are all the guns, then?” she asked, looking around the functional room with its desk and antiquated desktop computer.
“Come on, I’ll show you.”
He led her through a fire door and flicked on a row of light switches. The room was huge: maybe thirty metres by twenty. It was racked out with steel shelving and wall-mounted frames. The smell was a mixture of gun oil and burnt propellant, a harsh aroma that prickled the back of Stella’s nose and made her frown. Everywhere she discerned the dull metallic gleam of black, dark-grey and blued weapons. The Glocks, she knew, had plastic frames and other parts, but they still shone like steel in the light from the overhead lamps.
“On the shelves, you’ve got your Glock 17s. I’ve got a rolling contract with Glock to supply these.”
“Why a rolling contract?”
“It sounds a bit funny, OK, but they’re only guaranteed for five years. After that, they say if we fire one and there’s a problem, it jams or something, or there’s a misfire, they won’t cover it under warranty.”
“Warranty?”
“I know, right? Just like your family hatchback. But that’s the way it is. So I order them in batches of twenty five, usually, and decommission them at the five-year mark.”
Stella motioned to a nearby pistol. “Can I?”
Hutchings nodded. “Seeing you’re with me, that’s not a problem. Don’t point it at me, though, will you?”
She winked at him. “Well don’t say anything to upset me then, Danny, eh?”
She hefted the pistol. It was heavier than she remembered it. She adjusted her grip and weighed it in her hand. Then turned away from Hutchings and held the pistol out in front of her in a one-handed grip.
“Shoot one like that and you’ll almost certainly miss, and probably break your wrist into the bargain,” he said. “Here, let me show you.” He came up behind her and reached round to take both her hands and place them on the grip. “Right hand on the butt. Left hand cupped round it to support and guide.”
“You better keep your right hand off my butt, Danny, or I bloody well will shoot you.”
He released her and she turned to face him again. “You said if Deacon had used a gun, it would’ve been game over. But it’s got a lot harder to put your hands on one these days, hasn’t it? I mean despite what they show on the telly?”
“Well, as you know,” Danny said, his voice dropping into an instructor’s measured cadences, “since 1997, when Parliament passed the latest Firearms Act, the only people legally allowed to own handguns are the military and the police. Villains own them illegally, of course, but to be honest, it’s not the guns that are the problem – it’s the ammunition. It’s why they make their own and end up blowing their own hands off, silly fuckers.”
Stella grinned. “Yeah well, makes it harder for them to point another one at someone, doesn’t it? So, what other weaponry do you have to show me?”
He smiled. “Come with me and I’ll show you.”
At the rear of the room was a long steel rack of assault rifles and shotguns.
“Those,” Hutchings said, pointing at one end of the rack, “are Heckler & Koch MP5 carbines. Basically, infantry weapons, only with shorter barrels for urban work. The ones next to those are Remington 870 shotguns. Twelve gauge magnums. That means they’re specced to take a higher propellant load.”
Spotting a skeletal, matte-black rifle in the far corner, Stella pointed. “What the fuck’s that for? It’s taller than I am.”
He grinned. “It’s Czech. A CZ 550 bolt action rifle. Fires a round called a .600 Nitro Overkill. It’s for shooting big game.”
“Fuck off! I mean, I know we have some nasty villains, but I’d hardly say they need something that looks like a cannon to put them down.”
“No, seriously. It’s an elephant gun. Because of London zoo, right? Anything bigger than a monkey ever gets loose from there, we get a call from the zoo director or their head of security and a firearms team is despatched with that beauty over there to take it out. Can’t have elephants stampeding down Oxford Street or a rhino overturning a bus. Bad for London’s image. The Mayor’d probably have the Commissioner fired.”
“What’s that frame with it?”
“Bipod. You need that to stabilise it. Pull the trigger just holding the rifle and you’d put you and anyone behind you into the middle of next week.”
They were standing directly in front of the elephant gun now. Stella reached out and ran her fingertips along the smooth steel of the barrel. She turned to Hutchings.
“Bullets?”
“What?”
“Where are all the bullets?”
“Oh. Well, for a start, we call them rounds. And they’re back there.”
He pointed at another door.
“How many rounds do you have back there then, Danny?”
“Oh, about half a million, give or take. Nine-mil, seven-point-six-two, five-point-five-six. The Overkills. Then we’ve got Hatton rounds for the shotguns, and some–”
Stella interrupted his paean to ammunition. “Hatton rounds?”
“You know when you go into a flat and one of the firearms team shoots the hinges off the door?”
“Yes.”
“Those are Hatton rounds. They’re lead powder and wax. At six-inch range, they’re powerful enough to blow off a lock or a deadbolt or do in the hinges, but then that’s it. No lead slug or shot travelling into the room and potentially injuring or killing anyone, or ricocheting back and injuring one of ours.”
“Basically, then, you have enough kit here to take out every villain in London.”
He grinned again. “Something like that. But only for people with a nice shiny ID on a lanyard.”
“Oh, well,” Stella said, then sighed theatrically. “I suppose I’d better start dealing with my villains with somebody else’s weapons, then.”
“I’m afraid so,” he said with a smile. “I mean, obviously, I’d love to kit you out with a loadout and a few sacks of ammo, but you know what they say, rules is rules.”
Smiling back, Stella made her play, the move she’d planned the previous night.
“You don’t fancy a drink after work, do you? I’m usually ready to strangle somebody, so it would be good to unwind with a friendly face.”
He nodded. “That would be great. But–”
“You heard about that too, right? I wasn’t going to suggest the pub, actually. I was going to suggest maybe you could come to mine.”
He frowned. “I’d love to, Stella. But me and the wife, well, we’re going through a rough patch at the moment, so that probably wouldn’t be such a good idea.”
She touched his right shoulder then withdrew her hand again. “That’s okay, but I’d still love that drink. Even if it is just lime and soda. I guess I could risk the pub if you swear to keep me on the straight and narrow.”
“Don’t worry, I’m a policeman,” he said. They both laughed and agreed to meet at the rear of the station at six that evening.
Back in the exhibits room, Stella opened her notebook. It was time to start answering her list of questions. The easiest one was the identity of the senior investigating officer. She realised she’d never seen the case records before. In the days immediately following the accident – No! She corrected herself. Not the accident. The murder. In those early days, she had been almost comatose with grief. Then, on leave that began on compassionate grounds and metamorphosed into sickness, she had no access to the Police National Computer and its systems. She logged into HOLMES and began clicking and scrolling through the menus until she found the case number. Working through half a dozen drop-down menus covering every aspect of the case, from exhibits to media, witnesses to victims, she clicked through to police personnel and then the SIO tab.
SIO: DCS Adam Collier.
She wasn’t really surprised. Adam was her boss and would have naturally wanted to be involved
. She added his name to the page of questions in her notebook. Then she leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.
A voice whispered in her ear. “He’d have had access to the evidence as well.”
“I know that. But Reg misfiled it, didn’t he?”
“Did he?”
“You know he did. Him and his bloody Fat Finger Syndrome.”
“Which you are the only detective at Paddington Green ever to discover.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe someone else misfiled it.”
Then the voice disappeared abruptly, leaving Stella with the eerie sensation of having gone deaf in one ear. Just as she was about to start searching for more answers, her phone rang. It was Christine Flynn.
“Stella, I’m sorry to interrupt your work but there’s a meeting starting in ten minutes that I’d like you to attend. Sort of a progress update on Operation Streamline. Could you make your way to the conference room on the fifth floor, please? No need to prepare anything, just fill everybody in on what you’ve been up to. Thanks.” Then she rang off.
“Perfect!” Stella said as she replaced her phone. “An Operation Streamline progress update meeting on the conference room on the fifth floor. How really, very exciting.”
She logged out of HOLMES and kicked back from the desk, toppling the ancient swivel chair. She righted it with a violent yank and marched off to the lifts.
The meeting took the rest of the afternoon. At 5.45pm, Stella scooted off to the ladies’ toilets on the ground floor. She nodded to a couple of uniformed PCs chatting at the sinks and moved down to the end of the row.
She placed her battered, conker-brown leather messenger bag on the countertop to the left of the sink and took out a hairbrush. Remembered her mum brushing her hair out when she’d been in a long-hair phase at thirteen, a hundred strokes every night, lulling Stella into a trance as she chatted about her day at the council offices, working in the transport department. No time for a hundred now, Stel, just enough to get a bit of a shine into it. She watched the woman in the mirror performing this mundane action, and wondered if it were really her. She seemed so calm. Face unlined, blue-green eyes clear and bright. Dark-brown hair beginning to straighten and shine before she pulled it back into a ponytail and rewound the black scrunchie around it. She leaned closer and peered into the woman’s pupils. Yes. There she was, just visible in the distance. A thin woman screaming: her head thrown back, tendons taut in the neck, hands tearing at that shining brown hair. Hello, you.
Next, the lippy. Not too much. Don’t want to look like I made a special effort. Just enough to take the death pallor out of them.
She put the cosmetics away and looked down. Plucked at the top of her white blouse. Undid another button. Then did it up again.
“Is he worth it, ma’am?”
Stella turned round. It was one of the female PCs. Freckled complexion, frizzy ginger hair scraped back from her face. The woman was smiling and her friend, skinny with coffee-coloured skin, was, too.
“Definitely,” Stella answered.
“Well, it never hurts, does it? Bit of boob, eh, Maria?”
“She’s right, ma’am,” the other WPC agreed. “Two buttons’ll do it.”
Stella rolled her eyes. “Yeah. We could have brains the size of planets and bank balances to match, but it’s ‘tits out for the lads’ and they’re happy.”
The three women laughed, rank and duty forgotten for a moment or two.
*
The King’s Head was quiet. Stella and Hutchings took their drinks to a corner table under a window constructed from the bottoms of wine bottles, which let multi-coloured light in, staining their table top with patches of green and red. In a corner, a lone gambler was playing a fruit machine. Its bleeps and whistles, mini-tunes and bells competed with some brewery-approved, early-evening jazz-funk issuing from ceiling-mounted speakers.
“Rough patch, then?” Stella asked, taking a sip of her lime and soda.
Hutchings put his pint down. “You don’t go in for small talk, do you?”
“Life’s too short, Danny. If you want to talk about your IKEA dining suite, I’m probably not your girl.”
He ran a hand over his face. “Fair play. Yeah. I’ve been a bit of a naughty boy. Playing away from home. Tasha found out ’cos of my phone. Threatened to chuck me out.”
“Your phone? What was it, sexting?” He took another pull on his beer, looking down. “Oh, Jesus! What are you, fifteen?”
He grinned. “Can’t help it, can I? If I see a good-looking woman, I just got to let her know. Not my fault if they come on to me, is it?”
“Would you let me know?”
“Sorry? What do you mean?”
“Would you,” she poked him gently in the chest, “let me know,” she let her fingertip drift across and onto his arm, “if you thought I was good looking?”
“Yes. Of course. But, you know, you being widowed and everything.”
“I’m a widow, Danny, not a nun. I won’t faint if you pay me a compliment.”
He looked her up and down then, not furtively, taking his time. She noticed the way his smooth glance stuttered over her cleavage before returning to her face. Thanks, girls.
“You’re fit, Stella. No mistake.”
“There. That wasn’t too difficult, was it?”
After leaving the pub, Stella suggested a stroll along a stretch of towpath on the Regent’s Canal that ran between two streets near the pub. It was time to strike. She threaded her arm through his and leaned in towards him.
“I like you, Danny,” she said. “I feel I can talk to you. It’s nice. Uncomplicated.”
He turned to face her as they wandered on. “I like you too.”
“Come for dinner. Tonight. Tell Tasha you’ve pulled a double shift.”
He wrinkled his nose. “I don’t know, Stella. I mean, like I said before, me and the missus, well, it’s not going so well right now.”
“So maybe giving her some space would be the smart thing to do. Come on, Danny. Like I said before, life’s too short. I fancy you, and I think you feel the same way about me. A bit of pasta and maybe snuggle up in front of the TV, see what happens. It’s not the end of the world, is it?”
He grinned and squeezed her arm between his bicep and chest. “Not even close.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
How to Vanish a Pistol
STELLA STOOD AT the hob, stirring the pasta sauce. She wasn’t dressed for cooking. Beneath the butcher-striped apron, she’d put together an outfit she felt sure would have Danny right where she wanted him: tight black T-shirt with a scooped neck, orange suede mini-skirt and black tights, and black stilettos. Perfume on the pulse points behind her ears, on the insides of her wrists and a quick mist down the front of the T-shirt for good measure.
The recipe was one she and Richard had come up with together. Shallots, diced finely and softened in butter and olive oil, with lots of fresh garlic mashed into a paste with sea salt flakes; fresh tomatoes, diced; a tin of baby clams – fresh were better, but she didn’t have any; a sprinkle of dried chilli flakes, and cracked black pepper; and, to finish it off, stir it through the spaghetti and fling some chiffonaded curly parsley over it for that ‘pro-chef’ look. The only wobble came when she added the glassful of white wine to the sauce.
Everyone said you had to ditch every last drop of alcohol from your house if you were an alcoholic. But Stella believed you couldn’t prepare certain dishes without a splash of wine, especially not strategic meals like this one. She steeled herself as she twisted off the screw top. Looked across to the dresser with the wine glasses. Then shook her head violently. No! Not tonight. Not ever. Not until Richard and Lola are avenged.
Hutchings came up behind her and encircled her waist with his right arm. The left held a glass of chardonnay. He put his lips against her right ear.
“Smells fantastic.”
She smiled, without looking round. “Me, or the clams?”
“Both. When’s it ready? I’m starving.”
“You have to be patient. You can’t rush it. Couple more minutes for the spaghetti, then we’re good. Make yourself useful and lay the table. The cutlery’s over there.” She pointed with a free hand to a drawer under the worktop.
They sat opposite each other at Stella’s scrubbed pine kitchen table to eat.
“Penny for them?” Danny was looking at her, smiling.
“What? Oh God, sorry, Danny. Miles away.” She looked at his plate. Empty. Her own too. That’s odd. When did that happen? “I haven’t got anything for pudding, I’m afraid. There might be some ice cream in the freezer, I think. Haven’t looked for a while.”
“I wasn’t really thinking of ice cream.” He winked, a sleazy expression that he managed to pull off. “Remember what you said earlier?”
“Oh, that. Pour yourself some more wine, and then why don’t we adjourn to the sofa?”
She could feel his hand on her breast. He wasn’t a bad kisser either. She reached for his lap and gave him an encouraging squeeze and was rewarded with a sudden inhalation. Now let’s think. How am I going to get what I need out of him? He was panting heavily now. Let’s take him to bed. Maybe the Mata Hari option could be the way forward.
“Come on, you,” she whispered. “How about trying out my new bed?”
He tried to manoeuvre himself on top of her, but Stella slapped his arm away. “Oh, no you don’t, soldier,” she said in what she hoped was a commanding tone of voice. “On your back. Now!”
He grinned up at her, eyes half-closed from the wine, which she’d taken care to keep topping up through the evening. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. Then he complied, arms folded behind his head, watching as she straddled him. She’d kept her T-shirt on, the better to tease him. Now she crossed her arms in front of her, gripped the hem and drew it up and over her head in a single, flowing movement.
“What’s that?” Danny asked, craning up to look at her left shoulder. “Got a tattoo, have you?”