The First Stella Cole Boxset

by Andy Maslen

  Then she sat up straight, and smacked herself hard on the forehead. A horrible realisation was dawning in Stella’s brain. Normally she’d think of it as a hunch. Only that sounded too much like a good thing. The look Deacon had given her as he was being led off to start his pathetic three-year sentence. It wasn’t just the smirk of the affectless killer. It was smugness. He was grinning because he’d got one over on a cop.

  “Fuck!” she said. “You told me. You didn’t say, ‘You’ve been bad,’ did you? You said, ‘You’ve been had.’” She slammed her fists down on the desk, making a plastic pot of chewed biros rattle and spill its contents. “It never was you, was it? Death-by-careless, death-by-dangerous, you didn’t give a flying fuck one way or the other, did you?”

  She reclined in the chair and let her head hang over the back. She stared at the ceiling and listened to a little, quiet voice inside her head.

  Go back to the evidence, Stel, it said. It all starts with the evidence.

  14

  A Bad Day

  Amid the molecular gastronomy and playroom antics of London’s more adventurous chefs, Vivre Pour Manger in Soho’s Goslett Yard stood out for its utter lack of pretension. It was neither fashionable in its location nor experimental in its cuisine. It catered to a demanding, and loyal clientele who wanted traditional French haute cuisine, didn’t mind what they paid for it, and would have been horrified at the idea that their beloved restaurant had resorted to anything so vulgar as advertising.

  They came for the privacy. They came for the discreet but efficient service. But, above all, they came for the food, which a famous critic had dismissed in the pages of The Times with the phrase, “unadventurous food for people whose pockets are deeper than their thirst for new experience”. Inside, soft, burgundy-coloured velvet curtains hung against the white brickwork to soften the acoustics of the room.

  The two men eating at a dimly lit corner table were munching escargots served on stainless steel plates, the snails drenched in miniature baths of liquid, garlic-infused butter. The silver-haired man with his back to the wall was straight-backed, his deep-brown eyes gleaming healthily from a tanned complexion. He was a High Court judge, and very definitely of the old school. A man who, before the policymakers banned it, would have taken great pride, and pleasure, in being known by the populace as “a hanging judge”. What was left to him now? No flogging. No birching. No stocks, stake or pillory. Even “life means life” – or a “whole life order” as the less poetic legal code had it – was a rarely available privilege these days. Sometimes it seemed to him that every multiple murderer and paedophile could be relied upon to start bleating about their “rights” within seconds of grasping the polished wooden rail of the dock before him.

  Opposite him sat a younger man. Dark-brown hair cut short and parted on the left. Startling cobalt-blue eyes that contrasted sharply both with his dark hair and the swarthy complexion. His cheeks were heavily shadowed with stubble. His hands were flat and square with immensely thick, blunt-ended fingers. He looked as though a circus strongman lurked inside the soft grey, wool and cashmere suit instead of its rightful owner.

  In a way, he was a circus strongman. The ring he performed in was the courtroom. His feats of strength were verbal, rather than physical. And his stage rig, rather than a leopard-skin leotard knotted over one shoulder, was a sweeping black legal gown – smooth, starched, white lawyer’s bands at his throat – and an off-white wig that he’d found in a chest in his grandfather’s attic as a boy. Only up-and-comers purchased new wigs. Serious lawyers, from serious legal families, inherited theirs, or else had the sorts of connections that could procure a suitably distressed item that gave its wearer the appearance of having been practising law since the times of Oliver Cromwell.

  The lawyer was speaking now.

  “Did you hear about Stella Cole?”

  The judge dabbed a slick of grease from his lips with a thick, white napkin. “Stella who?”

  “Cole. Detective Inspector Stella Cole, Judge. It was her husband–”

  “Oh, that Stella Cole,” the judge interrupted. He steadied another cream-and-caramel-striped snail shell with his left thumb and forefinger. With a tiny, bone-handled fork he picked the delicious curl of dark-brown meat from its interior. “Forgive me, Charlie. One meets so many people.” The judge let his remark hang between them like smoke.

  “She’s back at work. I spoke to Adam. I gather she’s been put on light duties. They’ve bumped her down to administration. With any luck, she’ll have a breakdown caused by acute boredom and get pensioned off the force.”

  The judge grimaced. “I wish it hadn’t come to this, Charlie.”

  “Come to what?”

  “PPM going after civilians, even troublesome lawyers and their families. Look at us. We’re discussing how to force a detective inspector – a good one if my sources are correct – out of her job in the Met. We were never supposed to be about that, were we?”

  Howarth paused, his fork halfway to his mouth.

  “Not at the beginning, no. Of course not. But things change, you know that. Drinkwater was going to expose us. Either he or some journalist he’d enlisted for his crusade. Just remember why you got into this in the first place.”

  Ramage swallowed his last snail. He glanced up at the ceiling. He was remembering.

  It had been 2007. July. A case at the Old Bailey. A sexual predator called Peter Moxey had raped and then murdered two women within a week of each other. He’d assaulted a third the following week, but somehow the woman had survived the attack. She was in a coma for two weeks then – miraculously, the doctors said at the time – she recovered. The police had their witness, plus physical evidence. Moxey had no alibi. It was, or should have been, an open and shut case.

  Throughout the proceedings, Ramage had watched as Moxey had stood in the dock, winking at his friends in the public gallery as they arrived. He was smart, though. Never spoke unless spoken to. Maintained a head-down, eyes-lowered pose that Ramage could tell impressed at least two jurors.

  As the evidence piled up against him, Moxey appeared to lose a little of the swagger that he had carried with him into the dock. But then, the star witness, the third woman he’d raped, faltered in the witness box under cross-examination. In seconds, under some respectful but clever questioning from the defence counsel, the Crown’s case fell apart. It appeared that the police had coached the witness.

  Despite his own clear belief that the man was guilty, and the unassailable weight of evidence, Ramage was forced to halt proceedings. He consulted with counsels for prosecution and defence in his chambers, then returned to the courtroom and announced, in a disgusted tone, that owing to certain legal complication he would decline to go into, he had no option but to dismiss the case and free the prisoner.

  Two weeks later, a nineteen-year-old woman, home from university for the long summer holidays, was raped in Hyde Park. She went to the police and gave a perfect description of the man who had attacked her. It was Peter Moxey. Every scar and tattoo, every speech mannerism, every physical characteristic described as clearly as if he’d been standing in the rape suite with her. She returned home to her parents’ house in East London while the police geared up to find and arrest Moxey.

  They did find him. And they did arrest him, though not before he’d given one uniformed officer a broken nose, and a second a five-inch laceration to his face. And this time, the trial ended with a guilty verdict. But it was too late for his final victim. Leanne Wray took an overdose of antidepressants and tranquillisers in her bedroom the night after the trial finished. Her parents found her body the following morning.

  Frankie O'Meara appeared at the entrance to the exhibits room. She signalled to Stella, beckoning her over.

  “Hi Frankie. What brings you down to the Epic Pits of Doom?”

  Frankie smiled, her eyes focusing on the floor. She brushed at a stray hair at her neck.

  “I was wondering if you fancied coming round to min
e for a pizza after work tonight. I thought you might like some company.”

  She touched her fingertips to the notch between her collarbones as she said this, and Stella observed the flush of red spreading out from the notch into the soft skin of her throat.

  “I can’t, Frankie. Sorry. I left Kristina alone with Lola just the other night.”

  Frankie’s smile slid from her face to be replaced by a look of concern, or was it sadness? Stella found it hard to tell these days, even though they’d been friends for years. Frankie’s mouth was turned down at the corners, though. Definitely sadness.

  “Well, how about I come to yours then and we order in?”

  “I’d like that. It’s been ages since you’ve been to mine. You can see how much Lola’s changed.”

  Frankie’s eyes were hooded by their shimmery green lids, but Stella couldn’t help but notice the way her plump lower lip was trembling. Ever so slightly.

  “Shall I come round about seven thirty? I’m guessing you guys keep office hours down here.”

  Sure,” Stella said brightly. “That would be great. We can download a movie to watch, too. A real girls’ night.”

  Stella’s doorbell chimed at seven twenty-eight that evening. She bent to the cot and stroked Lola’s cheek, smiling at her sleeping daughter’s pudgy face, then walked down the hall to open the front door.

  Frankie stood there clutching a bottle wrapped in crinkly, pink tissue paper. She stuck her arm out as if she was holding a fizzing stick of dynamite.

  “Here, it’s apple and pomegranate. Sparkling.”

  “Top woman,” Stella said. “Come in. Let’s order, I’m starving.”

  With the pizzas ordered – American Hot for Stella, Giardiniera for Frankie – the two women sat facing each other at the scrubbed pine kitchen table, sipping the sweet, bubbly drink.

  “Stel,” Frankie said, holding the glass tumbler between her outstretched fingertips, “is everything okay? With you, I mean?”

  Stella shrugged. “Obviously, being a widowed single mum isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and the job is driving me round the twist, but, you know, I manage. I miss Richard so much, but at least I’ve still got Lola to remind me of him. They’ve got the same smile.”

  Frankie gulped some of her drink down, then coughed.

  “Sorry, bubbles went down the wrong way.”

  “Muppet! Listen, I want to talk to you about Edwin Deacon.”

  “Why? He was killed up at Long Lartin. Everyone was talking about it. Aren’t you, you know, relieved? Pleased, I mean? He got what was coming to him.”

  “That’s just it, Frankie. I don’t think he did.”

  “But there’s not much more anyone can do to him, is there? I mean, once you’ve topped somebody, that’s basically it.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Sorry, maybe I’m being thick here, but I’m not getting you.”

  “I don’t think it was him at all. I think he was put up to it. Not the FATACC itself, just being charged and sentenced for it.”

  Frankie frowned and she tapped the table in front of her.

  “Why? Who’d do that? It would have to be somebody with a ton of clout. Deacon was scum, we all agreed on that, but he wouldn’t just roll over unless it was someone he feared.”

  “Maybe he didn’t have to fear them. Maybe he was paid to do it.”

  “But why? Why would anyone pay Deacon to take the fall for a hit and run? If it was … sorry to say this, boss,” she stuttered, “I mean, Stel, but if it was someone who actually planned it, why not just keep driving?”

  “Because there’d be evidence left behind, wouldn’t there? Cop’s husband, it stands to reason there’d be heat on securing a conviction. So they put Deacon up to clear the case quickly. Before I could find out who really did it.”

  “OK, just for the sake of argument, we go with it. How do you know it wasn’t Deacon in the first place?”

  Stella finished her drink. “Here’s why. One, he more or less admitted it to me.” She waved away Frankie’s protest with outspread fingers. “Not literally, but he spoke to me from the dock. He mimed it: ‘You’ve been had.’ Two, I found the physical evidence. It was misfiled, but I found it anyway. It was a paint chip. Off a Bentley.”

  “But how could Deacon afford a Bentley? No, he must’ve nicked it.”

  “It’s possible. But there are only five in that particular colour. I’m going to get onto Bentley HQ and get the owners’ names. Then, if none of them had their cars nicked last year, we’ll know, won’t we?”

  Their conversation was interrupted by the doorbell. Stella collected the pizzas, tipped the young delivery guy three pounds and brought the food back to the table. The rest of the evening was the sort of back-and-forth cops go through when they’re trying to get an angle on a case. All the what-ifs. All the yes-buts. All the, if-we-can-justs. It got to ten, and Frankie announced she had to leave.

  The two women embraced awkwardly in the narrow hallway, and then Stella closed her front door and went back to the kitchen. She cleared away the boxes and the discarded crusts, washed up the glasses and put the empty bottle in the recycling box, then went up to take a look at Lola before turning in.

  The baby was sleeping, emitting little snuffles through her upturned nose. Gently, she lifted Lola out of her cot and, cradling her against her chest, took her from the nursery and into her own bedroom.

  Stella sat on the bed with her daughter, rocking gently and humming a snatch of an old lullaby her own mother had sung to her.

  A voice from the other side of the double bed startled her. She clutched Lola tighter, causing her to emit a little mew of protest. The fitted wardrobe that filled the side of the room that had been Richard’s had a central sliding door faced with a mirror. Stella looked into it now.

  She could see herself holding Lola. Then she, the other Stella in the mirror, spoke.

  “Did you hear what I just said?”

  Stella’s heart rate accelerated so fast she thought for a moment she might faint. Tiny stars were sparking in the outer edges of her vision.

  “Who, I mean, why are you talking?”

  “I’m you,” the reflection said. “The real you. The you that knows what’s going on. You were going to have to face it sooner or later. Your DS knows. Frankie’s a clever girl. She’ll go far.”

  “Face what?”

  “It’s Lola. She died that day as well.”

  Stella Cole’s breathing is fast, and shallow. It’s playing havoc with the gas balance in her bloodstream. Her neural circuits are having trouble adjusting too. She holds her baby tighter. The baby emits another bleat of protest.

  “Don’t say that! Lola’s right here, on my lap. On your lap, for God’s sake. Look!” Stella’s voice has taken on a strident tone. Defensive. She can hear it, and she doesn’t like it.

  Her heart feels jumpy, and it seems to miss one beat in four.

  Her mouth suddenly becomes very dry. It tastes of metal.

  She holds Lola out in front of her, her palms gripping her under her armpits, and watches as the reflection does the same.

  “Look,” she says to her reflection.

  The reflected woman holds up a baby. She turns it to face Stella.

  As she does, Stella experiences a visceral jolt of fear.

  What has happened to Lola’s baby-pink skin? It is golden brown, the colour of toffee. Now she looks closer, it isn’t skin at all, but fur.

  Her breathing is coming in ragged gasps.

  “Look down,” the reflection says, not unkindly.

  Stella looks down at her daughter.

  “Wake up Lola,” she whispers, urgently. “Wake up for Mummy, please.”

  Then she shudders, and her breathing stills.

  Lola’s eyes are glossy, translucent, amber discs, with big, black pupils. Slightly domed and comically oversized in that furry face. Her beautiful button nose has been transformed into a black triangle, stitched on somehow. And her ea
rs stick out on each side of her head, pink-lined in silk, and furry like the rest of her fat little bear’s body.

  Stella grips Lola tighter, and the little bear emits one final, plaintive squeak from the sound box sewn into her belly.

  Stella shakes her head, then finds she can’t stop. “No,” she whispers. “No,” louder this time, a normal speaking volume.

  Her hands are clasped together so tightly around the soft toy, the fingers are bloodless. “No, no, no, no … what have you done to my beautiful baby girl? Kristina!”

  Stella shrieks this last word. Then again, even louder. Nobody comes. There is nobody to come.

  Stella woke up the next morning with no recollection of having undressed, washed or got into bed. She swung her legs over, and as her bare toes sank into the sheepskin rug by the side of the bed, it hit her. Hit her hard. Like a punch.

  Lola.

  Is.

  Dead.

  She sat there for two hours, maybe three, looking at the way her toes dug into the long white hairs of the sheepskin. Pulling them out and then burying them again, wondering what to do next. Inside she felt empty. Hollowed out.

  Perhaps a drink would help.

  Or a tranquilliser.

  But she realised.

  She wanted neither.

  Didn’t have them in the house anymore, so would be pointless looking.

  “Well, if you don’t want a drink or a pill, Stel, what do you want?” The voice in her head was her own, but it sounded like a separate person. Like the woman from the mirror.

  Stella rubbed her palm over her face, scrubbing hard.

  “What I want is to find the man who murdered my husband and my daughter.”