by Andy Maslen
She’d been expecting something akin to a domestic garage, full of cardboard cartons labelled “old crockery,” “kids’ bedrooms” or “books.” Maybe a pink bicycle with purple sparkly streamers plugged into the ends of the handlebars. A place she and Richard might have had one day, gradually filling it with successive generations of outgrown playthings as Lola grew up. She sighed. That was then. Before. And anyway, the place didn’t conform to her expectations.
The space was twelve feet by fourteen. No shelves, no industrial racking. And certainly no pink bicycles. Instead there were suitcases, holdalls and sturdy cardboard cartons standing on wooden pallets, to keep them off the damp concrete, she assumed.
“Which one is ours?” Other Stella asked.
Stella jumped and her pulse throbbed uncomfortably in her throat. Her alter ego had been silent for a while and had picked the silence and cold of the lockup to make her presence felt again.
Stella answered nevertheless.
“It’s a black nylon zip-up bag with black-and-yellow-striped webbing handles.” She scanned the lockup, which she now realised, resembled the sort of left luggage room she’d seen in a certain type of budget hotel. “There, that one.” Even though it was a ridiculous gesture, she pointed.
“Let’s have a look, then. Make sure it is what it’s supposed to be.”
Stella walked over to the bag, which was half hidden behind a royal-blue Samsonite with an aluminium-effect handle. Squatting in front of it, she unzipped it and spread the sides apart.
“Good enough?” she asked, reaching in among the tightly banded bundles of fifty-pound notes and pulling a couple out to examine in the light from the plinking fluorescent tube above her head.
She riffled the edges of the notes across one thumb before dropping the bundle back into the bag and closing with a rasp from the zip. Standing again, she turned to go then looked over her shoulder at the other bags and cases.
“Curiosity killed the cat, you know,” Other Stella said, her voice lightly mocking inside Stella’s head.
“Yes, but satisfaction brought it back.”
She wandered over to the back of the space, where a large cardboard carton swaddled in several layers of bubble wrap stood against the rear wall. She peeled back the crackling material from the top and pulled the flaps up. They weren’t taped, just folded over and under each other. Seeing its contents, Stella let out a gasp.
“Fuck me, there has to be a lot more than Ronnie’s two-and-a-bit million in here. More like ten.”
Obviously Ronnie’s childhood friend had done rather better out of his chain of shops than he’d let on to Ronnie. She stood, hands on hips, and surveyed the left luggage with a bit more interest. She counted twenty-odd bags, cases and cartons, not including Ronnie’s holdall and the case she’d just investigated. Assuming each held an average of five million, she was standing in the middle of one hundred and ten million pounds in cash. That sounded like an awful lot of profits to be squirrelled away from a chain of convenience stores.
“He must have sold a lot of Mars Bars,” Other Stella said, the wry note in her voice now replaced by one of outright sarcasm.
Stella closed the flaps of the carton and began methodically opening and checking the rest of the bags and boxes. The fifth case she opened was more of a kitbag, about four feet long and eighteen inches in diameter. It was lying flat on the floor behind a pair of matching black suitcases on four wheels each. The heavy brass zip was stiff and she had to work the tag back and forth a few times before it finally gave with a loud buzz. The heavy canvas bag fell open under the weight of whatever was stored inside it.
Which turned out to be a pair of what looked to Stella to be assault rifles. She wasn’t sure of the exact type. But they bore a striking resemblance to the long gun she’d seen the assistant armourer at Paddington Green working on the day she wangled her way into helping Danny Hitchings decommission a batch of superannuated Glocks.
She lifted one of the guns out of the kitbag and turned it over in the light. A magazine protruded from the bottom, in front of the trigger. It reminded her of the guns they used in old Vietnam movies like Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and Hamburger Hill. She raised it to her shoulder and sighted along the barrel at a black smudge of mould on the back wall.
Then the door banged open, shattering the silence. A man’s voice followed the slam.
“Put that down or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”
21
Honour Amongst Thieves
STELLA FELT UTTERLY calm. Even when she heard the ratcheting sound as the man behind her worked a shell into the breech of what was clearly a pump-action shotgun. Bending at the knee, she laid the rifle on the top of the carton full of cash, then straightened again, raising her hands into the air above her head.
“Turn around,” the man said.
She complied, and got her first look at her adversary.
Her first thought was how very ordinary he looked. In the moments between his opening sally and her seeing his face, she’d formed a mental picture. One she now rebuked herself for, as it had come straight from the sort of TV cop drama they all laughed at in the nick for being so hopelessly out of touch. The man she’d pictured was tall, well over six feet, thickset, with a shaved head, a scar and a couple of tattoos, and dressed in standard heavy mob gear of black leather bomber jacket, jeans and black work boots.
The man training the barrel of a very efficient-looking, all-black shotgun on her was no more than five-eight. He had a paunch like a football, distending a mustard-coloured sweater, so that the white shirt beneath it was visible above his belt. His expression was serious, but there was no snarl, no bared teeth, no jagged red scar disfiguring his face. He had hazel eyes below sandy eyebrows, hair the same colour combed into a neat parting on the left, and if he had any distinguishing feature at all, it was the pair of schoolmasterish tortoiseshell glasses perched on his nose. He did, however, have a weapon gripped in his hands that, she knew, would take her head from her shoulders and paste it all over the back wall.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Stella. And you are?”
“I’m the man who watches the CCTV.” He jerked the shotgun’s barrel up, and when she followed the gaping maw of its muzzle, she noticed a small spherical camera tucked away in a corner, hidden except for its lens, behind a four-inch square steel conduit. “I’m the man who gets an alert on his phone from the motion sensor when anybody comes in here. The real question is, who … the fuck … are you?”
“I just told you,” she said with a smile. “I’m Stella. Stella Cole. I’m here to get something for a friend. I had the key, you can see that. He gave it to me. It’s his property and he asked me to get it for him. No crime in that, is there? So you can just put that … thing … down, and I’ll be on my way. OK?” She bent forward to grab the handles of Ronnie’s holdall.
“Stop!” he shouted, so loudly that the sound seemed to echo in the confined space. “One more millimetre and you’re red paint on the wall.”
So she eased herself back to an erect posture. Then she spread her hands wide.
“Look. It’s Ronnie Wilks’s bag. You know him? I shouldn’t really tell you this, but he’s kind of a big cheese down on the Costa del Sol.” She adopted a stage whisper. “He used to be an armed robber.”
“Yes, I know who Ronnie Wilks is. But I don’t know who you are and I don’t care. You’re coming with me. I need to phone someone. The person who owns this lockup now.”
“Now? I thought it belonged to an old friend of Ronnie’s. He died and nobody knows where it is except Ronnie.”
The man laughed. Stella caught a glimpse of black fillings in his upper molars.
“That’s fucking priceless. You know who owns this place? Seeing as you’re apparently in so thick with Ronnie Wilks? Freddie McTiernan. So if that’s your Get Out of Jail Free card, you’re in more trouble than you can possibly imagine. Come on, move.”
“That’s what I’m saying. I’ve just
come from Ronnie and Marilyn’s place. Freddie’s daughter?”
By way of an answer, the man took a step closer, the shotgun’s black muzzle pointing directly at her midsection.
“Last chance,” he said in a low, even voice.
Stella made a decision. She didn’t enjoy making it. But there was no way she was going to allow this tooled-up bank clerk to hold her prisoner while he called one of London’s most fearsome gangsters.
“OK, look. My name is Stella Cole, like I said. But I’m not a friend of Ronnie Wilks. I’m a detective inspector with the Met. I’ve got my warrant card in here,” she said, nodding downwards at her messenger bag, which was slung diagonally across her body, the flap facing inwards. “I’m gathering evidence against Wilks. I don’t need anything else and I don’t care about you, your money, your shooters or Freddie McTiernan. So you can let me go and we’ll say no more about it.”
The man shook his head.
“Do I look like I came in on the last banana boat? Do I?”
“No,” she said, smiling. “Not at all. You look like a very clever and a very sensible man. Which is why I offered you the truth, and sight of my warrant card to back it up. At the moment you’re threatening a police officer with a firearm, which puts you in a world of trouble. But if you check my credentials, and let me go, you can forget about this little, misunderstanding, and live out your life as Freddie’s security guard. Shall I?”
She reached for the flap of her bag, keeping her eyes glued to his and raising her eyebrows in a question.
He was thinking. She could see it. Had seen it many times before. Climb out of the hole he was in or keep digging. She waited, breathing steadily, holding him in her gaze. Preparing.
He decided to climb out.
“Fine. Show me. Then we talk.”
“He’s not going to let you go,” Other Stella whispered in her ear. “He can’t. Freddie’ll make him eat his own cock. Raw.”
I know, Stella thought.
She reached down and lifted the flap of the messenger bag. Then she looked inside. And back at the man.
“It’s here somewhere, there’s just a bit too much clutter. Us girls and our handbags, you know.”
She bent her head to look closer and rummaged around. As she did so, she turned so that she was sideways on to shotgun man.
“You better not be shitting me,” he said. “I’m going to count to three. Then you’re coming with me.” He began counting.” One. T—”
The rest of the word was drowned out by the shots from the Glock that Stella fired through the end of the bag. The three bangs were massive in the confined space of steel, stone and concrete surfaces.
The copper-jacketed hollow-point rounds tore into the man’s chest and he fell backwards without firing his own weapon. Back-spatter from the entry wounds sprayed into the air but none of it reached Stella. He was dead before he hit the ground, his skull smacking onto the concrete with a sound like a cricket bat hitting a ball for six.
“Fuck, that’s loud,” she said, and her voice sounded distorted as it competed with the ringing in her ears. The air was pungent with the smell of burnt propellant, and she sneezed twice.
The ejected bullet cases were confined inside her bag. The bullets themselves were a different story. She put the bag down and walked over to the body.
Up close she could see that two shots had hit the man on the left side of his chest, more by luck than judgement. She prodded at the red mush where his jumper and shirt had been obliterated and pushed into the wounds. The sharp ends of smashed ribs stopped her finger going more than half an inch deep. No chance of recovering the bullets, even with Richard’s old Swiss Army Knife she’d brought from her kitchen. The third round had hit him lower, in the stomach. But what was the point of trying to dig it out when the other two were buried deep in his chest cavity? She’d have to trust the work she’d done in Paddington Green’s armoury, disguising the pistol with a fake serial number.
Outside again, she checked her clothing for blood. Clean. She closed and locked the door, pitying whoever was next to check on Freddie McTiernan’s ill-gotten gains. It was a hot day, and the forecast she’d heard on the radio in Pouri’s was for an early spring heatwave. The weather was only going to get warmer. With her helmet and gloves retrieved, and the holdall secured under the cargo net, she started the bike.
She rode away from the industrial estate as if she were taking her bike test. Nice and steady, no flashy cornering, dead on the speed limit. She had to stop in a layby because something was irritating her scalp under her helmet, but once she’d sorted it, she was away, heading southwest.
22
Crime Scene
INDUSTRIAL ESTATE MANAGERS don’t lead exciting lives. It’s not that sort of a job. So when John Jackson met a prospective lessee of unit 5 at noon, two days after Stella had left, he was expecting the whole meeting to take no longer than fifteen minutes, including five at the unit itself. His estimate was out by a country mile.
The client was the first one to notice something was amiss. As they approached the row of units, the woman, who’d told him she ran a small antiques business from her home in the town, wrinkled her nose.
“What’s that smell?” she asked.
Jackson sniffed, and immediately wished he hadn’t. He’d worked as a pest controller for a few years in his thirties and immediately recognised the cloying, sickly sweet smell of something long-dead. Rats had probably got into the unit and then starved to death. He wanted to close the deal without getting closer to the door of unit 7.
“Probably muck-spreading. There’s a farm on the other side of the hedge there.” He pointed to a tall tangle of nettles, beech and blackthorn that surrounded the estate.
“Ooh, no. It’s not muck. I’d know that from walking the dog. It’s coming from that unit.”
She sealed the fate of both their afternoons by approaching the shutter, placing her long, straight nose against the gap between its left-hand edge and the wall and sniffed again. Which was a mistake.
Reeling back, she rushed round the side of the unit and vomited at the foot of the hedge. She returned a few moments later, wiping her lips with a paper tissue. Jackson had a bad feeling he wasn’t going to discover a dead rat behind the shutter. He’d heard rumours about the sorts of people who used unit 7. Just pub talk, but still, no smoke …
“Well, aren’t you going to open it, then?” the woman said, her smudged, burnt-orange lipstick unnaturally harsh against her waxy skin.
“I can’t,” Jackson said. “We don’t have keys for the units until somebody cancels their contract and hands them back. It’s part of the deal. Security.”
“Well haven’t you got a crowbar or something? Something’s obviously got in and died in there. A cat, or a stray dog, God forbid.”
“It’s more than my job’s worth,” Jackson said.
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake!” She pulled out her phone and before he could think of anything that might stay her hand, was dialling the emergency number.
“Yes, hello? Yes. Police, please.” There was a brief pause. Jackson stood helplessly by as the woman seized control of the situation, the unit and his life. “I am standing outside a lockup, number seven, on the Watlington Industrial Estate. It’s off the B4009 just after Britwell Salome.” Pause. “Yes, the manager. His name? Jackson, I think.” She raised her eyes to Jackson’s, who nodded glumly. “Yes, Jackson. Well, of course we’ll stay here. Something has clearly got into this unit and died. Probably of starvation, poor thing.”
Jackson and his new boss retired to his office while they waited for the police to arrive. It was an awkward ten minutes made just bearable by his offer of a cup of coffee, and the various small activities involved in making it for her.
The sound of a car engine alerted them to the arrival of the police, and they went out into the roadway in front of the office to greet them. A yellow-and-blue-chequered Ford Focus braked smoothly to a halt in front of them. Jackson wondered
whether the local plod got many emergency calls. Out climbed a uniformed police constable.
The woman explained the situation in brisk, clipped sentences and led the way to the unit.
On the second visit, Jackson breathed shallowly through his mouth, trying not to imagine particles of decaying – something – lodging in his lungs. The smell was stronger now, or was it just his imagination?
He tuned back in to the conversation between the woman and the police officer.
“Well, you’ll just have to force it then, won’t you?” she was saying.
Clearly, she was used to being in charge, and the young police constable had no chance against her bulldozer personality. Agreeing with her that, “it does smell bad,” he retreated to his car and reappeared with what appeared to be a medieval weapon. Spiked at one end and with a deeply forked flat blade and another spike at the other.
“Good heavens!” the woman exclaimed. “What on earth’s that?”
“A Hooley – I mean a Halligan bar, madam. From my method-of-entry kit.” He turned to Jackson. “All right if I go ahead, sir?”
Jackson simply nodded, grim-faced.
With a loud crack, the lock in the wicket door gave way. The constable stepped through. Jackson stayed where he was, although Madam Whiplash, as he’d christened the woman, stepped smartly through the narrow doorway on the constable’s heels.
Jackson waited. Heard the indrawn breath, the muttered “Fuck!”, and the scream as a trio of overlapping sounds. Waited.