by Andy Maslen
“Stay there,” he commanded them. Then he ran back to his car.
Thirty minutes later, the concrete parking area in front of the lockups was filled with a second chequered police car, a Skoda Yeti this time; a dark grey Ford Mondeo with a scuffed front offside wing and a layer of fine yellow dust masking the condition of its paintwork; and a white VW Transporter van, from which two crime-scene investigators had climbed out, donned white Tyvek hooded suits, masks, booties and white latex gloves, and gone into the unit.
Jackson and the woman, whose name turned out to be Susan Olivanska, were being interviewed outside the office by two detectives. As this was happening, a second unmarked car nosed its way into the limited space still left by the units. Jackson looked over. A fan both of German car marques and TV cop shows, he figured the occupant for a DCI at the very least. Nobody below that rank could afford to tool around in a nearly new Mercedes C-Class.
A woman got out, swinging her legs round through ninety degrees and executing an elegant exit from the car that showed nothing above the knee. She wore a tailored suit in light grey material with a fine white pinstripe, and a crisp white blouse beneath it.
She approached the knot of detectives and witnesses, holding her warrant card out.
“I’m DCI Jacqui Duveen. Oxford CID. I’m the senior investigating officer.”
23
Change of Plan
After killing the man inside unit 7, Stella had ridden southwest, hard, for three quarters of an hour. She pulled into the carpark of a pub on the approach road to a little village called Lambourn. The Queen’s Head was a brick-and-flint building that looked as if it had been there for hundreds of years, which, she reflected, it probably had. On her way through the village, she’d passed the local police station, no more than a cream shopfront with a blue-and-white Thames Valley Police fascia. Probably kept office hours only, just there for people to report lost dogs or graffiti on the bus shelter.
She decided to keep clear anyway, what with the recently fired Glock and a couple of million quid in stolen money strapped to the back of her bike.
The arrangement with Ronnie’s friends on the boat was that she’d text them when she had the money and was ready to leave for Spain. They’d reply with a time and a place, and they’d pick her up at the rendezvous. But she’d decided to change the plan. Or adjust it, anyway. There were things she wanted to do while she was in England.
After checking in under the name Jennifer Stadden, she’d taken the bags up to her room and stashed them in the wardrobe. The room was standard fare: off-white paint, splashy abstract above the bed, usual flat-screen TV and tea-making tray. She consulted the list of PPM members she’d transferred to her phone from Ramage’s. That particular piece of evidence now sat in a left luggage locker in a privately-run location on Belgrove Street on the other side of Euston Road from King’s Cross station.
Collier, she was saving till last. She wanted him to know his friends were all gone before he had to face his own death. But there were others. She didn’t really need to look at the onscreen list; she’d committed them to memory.
Fieldsend. A CPS lawyer.
Ragib. A barrister.
Howarth. A senior barrister, a QC.
De Bree, another QC and a ‘Sir’ at that.
There would be others. She knew that. You couldn’t run the kind of operations that they’d been running without people on the ground to do the dirty work. The police markswoman up in Scotland, Van Houten. Clearly she was involved. There’d be people in the Prison Service and the firearms command. That would explain how Edwin Deacon had been ghosted from HM Prison Bure, reclassified as a Rule 45er – a paedophile – then murdered by prisoners inside Long Lartin. But these four were the people pulling the strings. Remove the puppet masters, and their marionettes would collapse to the ground.
She’d stayed offline since leaving the UK, not wanting to leave a digital trail that spooks could home in on. Now she needed to start researching. Using the newly acquired smartphone she’d bought, she logged in to the pub’s free Wi-Fi and opened a web browser.
“Right, let’s see who’s got a public profile, which should be all of you,” she said to the screen as she peered at it with screwed-up eyes.
She tapped “Debra Fieldsend CPS” into Google’s search box.
In 0.73 seconds, Google told her it had found 54 pages mentioning her chosen combination of search terms. The first was all she needed: the About Us page of the Crown Prosecution Service website for London. Listed on a page headed The Senior Management Team, and directly beneath a subheading Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutors, was a photograph and biography of Debra Fieldsend. No contact details, but then, as she already had the woman’s mobile number and personal email address, that wasn’t a problem. Stella cut and pasted the office address into a newly created notes file, then did the same with Fieldsend’s photo.
Fieldsend had an oval face with blonde hair swept back from a high, unlined forehead. Deep-set, slate-grey eyes below finely arched eyebrows. A long, straight nose and lips curved into a semi-smirk, the top lip marked with a dark mole. She looked as though she was rather pleased with herself for knowing something nobody else did.
Stella repeated the process with Hester Ragib and Charlie Howarth. It was laughably simple, and she found herself smiling at the ease with which she was building mini-dossiers on the PPM members.
Then she tapped “Sir Christopher De Bree QC” into Google.
The first hit was a news item from the BBC website. As she scanned down the other listings on the screen her eyes widened. The Guardian, The Times, ITV, Channel 4, Sky News – they all carried the same story.
A few days earlier, Sir Christopher De Bree QC, head of 15 Ramilies Court Chambers, Lincolns Inn, had died of a heart attack in the sitting room of his Belgravia town house. Beyond the bare bones of the story it was just background. De Bree had enjoyed a meteoric rise to prominence as a leading figure within the legal community, and was being tipped for a judgeship, before his untimely death.
Stella closed the browser and sat back on the bed. It sounded like the sort of thing she had planned for him herself.
“Maybe someone beat you to it, Stel,” Other Stella said, leaning against the wall and lighting a cigarette. “Someone killed him and just made it look like a coronary. Now, who do you think that could have been?”
“I don’t know. A burglar, most likely. Some junkie looking for a Rolex or some cash. Or someone targeting rich bastards living in ten-million-quid houses with Picassos on the wall.”
Other Stella took a drag and blew a thin stream of smoke up towards the smoke detector in the ceiling. “It could be that. But don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence? You do Ramage and a week or so later one of his right-hand men drops dead of a heart attack.”
“What are you saying? It was one of them? Why? What’s the motive?”
“How the fuck should I know? A power play? Ramage was their leader. He gets killed. That leaves a vacuum. We’ve seen it before. Remember when Old Man McTiernan popped his clogs? Freddie and his cousin, Brendan, they went at each other like cats in a sack. Ended up with Freddie’s men using a shotgun then a chainsaw on Brendan one Sunday night. Jesus, the blood. You must remember.”
“Looked like a bomb had gone off in an abattoir, yeah, I remember. So De Bree’s out of the game. Fine. One less for me to deal with. Now leave me alone, can’t you? I need to think.”
Other Stella winked, then drifted up to the ceiling, intertwined with her final plume of blown-out smoke.
Alone again, Stella closed her eyes and lay back on the bed. There was something, someone, she wanted to see, before she could do anything about the remaining members of Pro Patria Mori.
Reluctantly, she raised her phone above her head and tapped in her brother-in-law’s number.
As the distant rings began, she framed the words she needed.
“Jason Drinkwater?” There was a hint of a question mark at the end of his n
ame. A ‘no caller ID’ message would make a person sound like that.
“Jason, it’s Stella.”
“Stella! My God! We all thought, I don’t know, that you hated us or something. You never called or came to see any of us after the funeral. I left a few messages, so did Mum and Dad, but after a while, when you didn’t call back, well, we just assumed …”
“It’s OK, Jason. It wasn’t you, it was me.” She sighed and it turned into a sad laugh, “I know that’s such a cliché but it’s true. After Richard, I mean, after Richard and Lola were killed, I think I had a breakdown. I thought she was still alive. I think I went mad for a while.”
Jason interrupted her. “Oh, Stella, that’s understandable, anyone—”
“No, listen. I had some sort of psychotic break. I built this fantasy world. I thought Kristina was still living with us. Me, I mean. It was the only way I could go back to work and keep the fantasy alive. Then, one day, I realised.”
“I’m so sorry. How did you realise? What happened?”
What happened was I split in two and my alter ego spoke to me out of a mirror and told me my baby was actually her old teddy bear.
“I guess it was just too much work to keep the fantasy intact. Something must’ve shaken loose. So that’s why I’m calling.”
“Why? What can I do to help?”
“I want to visit her grave. But—” Tears started to roll down Stella’s neck and drop onto the coverlet. “I can’t remember where’s she’s buried.”
Jason’s voice was soft.
“They’re buried next to each other. In Putney Vale Cemetery.”
“Oh, OK. Can you, I mean, would you take me? To them?”
24
Courtesy Call
Collier picked up the phone on his desk and dialled the number he’d retrieved from the inter-force directory on the Met’s intranet. After a few rings, a female voice answered.
“Jacqui Duveen. Who is this, please?”
“DCI Duveen, this is Detective Chief Superintendent Adam Collier, Met. I believe you guys caught a murder earlier yesterday. I saw your press conference.”
“Yes, sir, someone gunned down a bloke in a lockup on an industrial estate. He turned out to be some a sort of sleeper for a London gang. The—”
“McTiernans, yes, I know. And please, call me Adam. No need for the ‘sir,’ Jacqui. What are you thinking?”
“Thank you. Well, like I said, it was probably a gang-related thing. Rival crime families getting in each other’s faces. The lockup was stuffed full of money and stolen goods. We’re working on tracing it, but at least part of it came from a bank job committed last year by the McTiernans. Was there something in particular you wanted?”
Collier paused. He needed to get this right. He knew regional police forces were suspicious of the Met. The service had, perhaps justifiably, earned a reputation for arrogance as it stormed in to take over other forces’ cases.
“We’re looking into levels of gun crime across the Met’s jurisdiction. It’s called Operation Juno. I don’t get to do any of the exciting stuff anymore, more of a glorified committee man than a proper cop these days. Part of my remit is to cross-match any ballistics from shootings in the Home Counties. I don’t suppose you could send me photos of the slugs, could you?”
Sounding relieved that she’d still be running the case, Duveen readily agreed to his request.
“I’ll make a call. Should be with you in ten or fifteen minutes. I’ll put a priority flag on it. My boffins like to keep me happy.”
Then she was gone.
As good as her word, Duveen’s email dropped into Collier’s inbox ten minutes later.
He double-clicked on the images of the slugs and sent them to print on the colour laser printer in his own office rather than the generic black inkjet in the CID office.
Enlarged to fit on an A4 sheet, the bullets looked like artillery shells, albeit shells with their tips flattened and expanded and bent back on themselves. Behind the petals of the copper jacket, the base of the bullets remained undisturbed by the impact, and the striations from the lands and grooves in the gun’s barrel were clearly visible. These were what interested Collier. Ever since hearing of the shooting in Watlington on the radio news, he’d been turning the possibilities over and over in his mind. Eventually, he’d settled on what he felt was the most plausible scenario. Leonard Ramage was killed by Stella Cole with a hollow-point round from an illegally acquired handgun that he was sure came from his own nick’s armoury. Less than two weeks later, one of Freddie McTiernan’s men gets iced in a rural Oxfordshire industrial estate by a shooter using a handgun. And hollow-point rounds. He didn’t believe in coincidences. Not in his police work, and not in his PPM activities, either. In fact, the latter had caused him to be more suspicious than the former.
He slid the two prints into a plain white envelope and left his office.
The armoury was busy. As Collier arrived, he could see the armourer, Danny Hutchings, an ex-Army type, countersigning firearms requisition forms for a couple of detectives from the Counterterrorism Command. He knew one of the officers slightly and acknowledged her with a brief nod before standing aside so she and her colleague could leave the counter with their pistols and spare magazines. Behind the counter, one of the assistant armourers was tapping away on a computer, while a second was stripping an assault rifle on a workbench.
Hutchings looked up from his form. Collier was gratified to see the man’s back straighten and his expression become watchful as he realised who had come to see him. The watchfulness disappeared, though, to be replaced with a grin.
“Don’t see you down here very often, sir. Come for some firearms practice? We have some brand-new Glock 17s if you’re feeling the urge.”
“No, thank you, sergeant. I need you to do something for me.” He opened the envelope and withdrew the two sheets of paper, placing them on the counter between the two men. “I want to know if these bullets, or the gun they were fired from, are on our firearms database. I know it’s technically a job for forensics, but I thought you might have a special insight.”
Hatching looked down. He frowned.
“Where did these come from, sir? I mean, I haven’t had any official requests for ballistics images recently. Is this one of our investigations?”
“Just tell me, please. It’s confidential.”
Hutchings shrugged. “Of course, sir. I’ll need some time. I’ll have to scan these and run a computer programme to see if anything matches.”
“How long will that take?”
“An hour or so, tops. I can call you if you like? Or email?”
Collier shook his head.
“No, it’s fine.” He checked his watch. “I have a meeting in five minutes. It should last no longer than an hour. I’ll drop by after it finishes.”
With Collier gone, Hutchings relaxed. A little. Running ballistics matches for a Chief Super definitely didn’t fall within the normal scope of his job, but over the years, he’d made it his business to know everything about how the police service worked with firearms, and that included the forensics side of the equation. First things first. He placed one of the images on the glass bed of the scanner connected to the fastest PC in the armoury, laid a sheet of black card on top to minimise show-through, then closed the lid and pressed the glowing green start button. The machine emitted a quiet hum, and Hutchings watched as the glow of the lamp moved in a smooth sweep from left to right along the length of the bed.
It beeped once, when the scan was finished, and a window opened up on the PC’s screen. Danny hit a few keys and imported the scan into a photo-editing program. He set up the second photo on the scanner then returned to the PC.
“Now,” he said, his Welsh accent deepening as he became absorbed in the fiddly task, “let’s just get you cleaned up, my little beauty, and then we’ll see where you came from.”
After ten minutes of clicking and dragging the mouse over parts of the image while simultaneously
selecting image-enhancement functions for the onscreen toolbox, he pronounced himself satisfied.
“Perfect! Now for your little brother.”
He repeated the process with the second scan, faster this time.
The assistant armourer who’d been working on the assault rifle ambled over to her boss’s work station. Like Hutchings himself, and Nick Probert, the other assistant armourer, she was ex-Army. In her case, eight years’ service in the Yorkshire Regiment. She’d been with the Met for less than a year and was always curious as to what her colleagues were doing.
“What are you doing, skipper?” she asked, tucking a stray blonde hair behind her ear.
“Running a ballistics match query. Normally it’d be the forensics team doing it, but I got one of them to show me how it’s done. You might want to stay and watch, Colette. Don’t think you’ve run one of these before, have you? In fact, why don’t you drive and I’ll move aside here and tell you what to do?”
“Thanks, skip,” she said as he scooted his chair sideways.
She pulled up a chair and sat in front of the screen, hands automatically going to mouse and keyboard. Hutchings spoke.
“OK, before we get going, have a look at the slug and tell me what you see. Describe the features and your conclusions.”
Colette stared at the screen for perhaps ten seconds. Hutchings watched her long-lashed eyes scanning the image, settling for a moment here and there.
“Hollow-point, obviously. Copper jacket split along the pre-cut grooves.”
“What about the calibre?”