The First Stella Cole Boxset

by Andy Maslen

  “You’re in deep water, Stella. My water. I rule here. I could chew you up and swallow you, piece by piece and there’d be nothing left but a stain in the water. What are you doing out here in my domain?”

  “I have to be out here. For Lola. For Richard. I’m hunting them down, one by one.”

  “And you are ready for what follows? For them to hunt you back? To send others after you? Others like me?”

  “I have no choice. I want to punish them for what they did to us. I want revenge.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to die? I could arrange that.”

  “I used to. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “I could show you, if you like.”

  “Show me what?”

  “What it’s like to die.”

  Stella felt cold. The warmth in the water vanished as if someone had thrown a switch. The sun disappeared behind a bank of low, charcoal-grey clouds. Rain began to splatter down onto the surface of the water, raising millions of tiny splashes that froze in midair like miniature glass crowns.

  The creature rolled over, arching its white flank as it dove down beneath Stella. She struggled to turn herself over but could only twist her head to the side. Just far enough to see the creature rocketing towards the surface from deep beneath her.

  Its mouth was opening, wide, wider, until the rest of its torpedo-like body disappeared and all that was left was that white-rimmed, bloody cavern.

  Stella screamed.

  Then the, the—shark!—hit, ripping into her and crunching down on her spine, shaking her like a rag doll and pulling a great chunk of her free.

  No pain, just a feeling of something rummaging inside her, then a release and a flood of blood and viscera into the water.

  She began to sink, and as she slid beneath the surface, the shark curled lazily back towards her, grinning.

  “I’ll be waiting for you, Stella,” it said, in Tamit Ferenczy’s voice, then it flicked its great tail and shot past her, swirling her around in its turbulent wake, so that she shed scarlet spirals into the water until everything turned red and she breathed in and her lungs filled with water and she …

  … gasped and opened her eyes, to find Terzi staring down at her from the shark’s black buttons. She moaned in fear but then the black circles resolved themselves into Terzi’s brown eyes, complete with pupils, irises and whites.

  “We are done,” he said, quietly.

  Stella looked down at her right hand, which felt as if it were encased in a boxing glove. But all she saw was a regular set of fingers tipped with common-or-garden pink sticking plasters.

  “Did it work?”

  “We shall know in a day. You should come back to see me then. But there is no reason to suppose otherwise.”

  54

  Another Invitation

  Assistant Chief Constable Gordon Wade looked up from the slew of papers on his wide, computer-free desk. The knock was a familiar rat-a-tat pattern. He knew who was behind the door and was grateful for her interruption. He would have been grateful had it been a wet-behind-the-ears police constable, but the fact it was his trusted lieutenant was much, much better.

  “Come!” he said, loudly, ensuring he’d be heard and wouldn’t have to get up and cross the expanse of carpet.

  The door opened and Callie McDonald entered the office, closing it behind her.

  “Nice to see you’re catching up on your paperwork, boss,” she said, by way of greeting, sliding into the chair opposite Wade and crossing her legs.

  He grunted, and pushed the nearest pile of documents to one side.

  “And how was your wee trip to Madrid? Were our Spanish colleagues as helpful as you’d hoped?”

  She smiled and shrugged at the same time. The expression didn’t fill Wade with confidence.

  “Some and some,” she said.

  “Well, it’s a long game. Now. Tell me about your meeting with our DI Cole. Is she interested in working with us?”

  Callie frowned and ran her fingers through her hair.

  “Honestly? I’m not sure. Once she got over her shock, she confessed to killing Ramage, and she didn’t seem particularly surprised to learn we were after PPM ourselves. But—”

  “What?”

  The frown deepened, drawing deep lines into the skin above the bridge of her nose.

  “I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “Och, stop hedging, Callie. You know I’ve always trusted your instincts. If your spider sense was telling you something, then I want to hear it.”

  “OK. She seemed to be only half there. Like, oh, what’s a good comparison? Right, so when you’re talking to someone at a party and they’ve really had a skinful but they can hold their whisky, you know?” Wade nodded. “And you feel like you’re talking to two people at once: the drunk one and another one who’s alert to the way you react to them and spots if you’re amused by their drunkenness and calls you on it.”

  “She was drunk, you mean? Or high?”

  Callie shook her head.

  “No, not that. Not exactly. Just the way she was there and sort of not there. I felt, oh, I don’t know, like I was talking to two people at once, the one doing the answering and the one monitoring what the first one was saying.”

  Wade was silent for a minute. He steepled his fingers under his chin. Callie’s description of Stella Cole’s demeanour was ringing a bell. He knew exactly what she was talking about. He’d met men, and very occasionally women, on active service who’d displayed similar behaviours. No, similar symptoms. That was the word he wanted. He’d arrested them for their own safety, taking a loaded rifle off them or talking them down from a roof. And escorting them, gently, but firmly, to the MO. He sighed. He thought he knew what the problem was with Stella Cole.

  “She loses her husband in the most terrible circumstances. Has some kind of breakdown and takes a year off on compassionate leave. Then, at some point after she returns to work, she discovers they got her daughter as well. I think the shock overwhelmed her. She may be suffering from some sort of mental condition. Some of those psychotropic drugs can produce pretty bad side effects. I think that’s what you were picking up on.”

  “Maybe so. She didn’t say yes, though, Gordon, that’s my point.”

  “Did she say no?”

  Callie shook her head, before offering a small smile.

  “She did not.”

  “Well then. Let’s leave her to it for now. She’ll be back before too long, I suspect. We’ll pick her up at some point and when the time’s right, maybe I’ll have a talk with her myself.”

  55

  A Call From a Cousin

  Ferenczy was relaxing, or trying to, in his office above his club in Shoreditch. On the desk in front of him stood a chunky cut-glass tumbler a third full of hundred-quid-a-bottle cognac. He took a swig and replaced it on the desk top. Sitting opposite him, biting his thumbnail, sat one of his enforcers, a veteran of the Serbian militia that had been so active during the 1995 Bosnian War. Bogdan’s eyes were cold, and his face was a mask of stone, but Ferenczy had keyed in on the nail-biting and wasn’t fooled. The man was nervous.

  “Tell me again what happened,” he said.

  “We were collecting last week’s rent from the boys in Clapton. They were trying to delay, said the money was in a store room. Then two guys came in with shotguns and started shooting. Azel and Miroslav were killed. Me and Goran got away, but you already know he took a few pellets in the back.”

  “And what exactly did they shout at you when you ran away?”

  Bogdan’s eyes fluttered shut for an instant on “ran away,” but he answered quickly.

  “They said, ‘Freddie says he’s not ready to retire yet.’”

  “Fuck! Seems our Mister Collier might not have worked out all the angles.”

  “Maybe he worked them out too well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, maybe
he’s playing you and McTiernan off against each other. How do we know he hasn’t promised McTiernan our territory in exchange for doing his dirty work?”

  It was a good point. To his chagrin, Ferenczy realised he’d not considered a double-cross. Bogdan may have run from McTiernan’s men, but he had a good strategic brain.

  “I need to think, Bogdan. Go get yourself a drink.”

  With the Serb gone, Ferenczy finished his own drink and leaned forward, closing his eyes and pressing his fingertips into their inner corners. As the blue and orange blobs coalesced in his inner vision, he struggled to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. Why had McTiernan suddenly upped the violence level? Had Collier tipped him off? Or was there another reason?

  His swirling thoughts were interrupted by the ringing of his phone. He snatched it up and looked at the screen. It was one of his many cousins. He answered at once.

  “Lorik, you have something for me?”

  “Yes, Ferry. I think two of my boys, Bashkim and Dritan, they met the cop you’re looking for.”

  His cousin’s voice sounded strained.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah, but the bitch shot them both. Kneecapped them and put one through Bashkim’s eye. Dritan only escaped because he fell down a fucking ravine. Took him a whole day to make it back to me.”

  “You’re sure it was her? Cole?”

  “Dritan got a good look at her. She was English, right build, height, everything. He said her face matched the picture you sent. Only her hair was different. Really, really short. Blonde.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “I don’t know. She took their car. We’re in Marbella, though. She can’t have gone far.”

  Once the call ended, Ferenczy leaned back in the expensive leather executive chair and stared at the ceiling. Marbella. Home to McTiernan’s daughter and her husband. Another connection.

  56

  The Vanishing Police Officer

  The following day, Stella was sitting at Yiannis Terzi’s dining table, a cup of tea at her right elbow. She was sitting sideways at the table, on which stood a modernistic desk lamp, all cantilevered aluminium and shiny chrome springs. Sitting next to her, his chair swivelled through ninety degrees so he faced her, Terzi was in a good mood. He was telling her stories about growing up in Athens as he first soaked her fingers in warm, salty water from a blue-and-yellow china bowl, then began peeling and easing the plasters away from her skin. He may have been a heroin addict, but he was, as Ronnie Wilks had said, a “bloody good doctor.”

  After the procedure to remove her fingerprints, Stella had returned to her hotel and holed up there with a pile of cheap pulp thrillers she’d bought at a shop selling English-language books. As the local anaesthetic wore off, she’d been expecting pain, certainly, maybe burning, or who knew what? It wasn’t every day you had your fingerprints removed by an anti-cancer drug.

  But they’d been fine. The sensation was more like the aftereffects of too much sun, a sort of dull throbbing that she didn’t even feel warranted paracetamol to dull. Despite the looks a couple of the hotel staff had given her on glimpsing her oddly dressed fingers – “Put my hands out in the water and found a sea urchin,” had been her excuse – she’d resisted the temptation to unpeel the sticking plasters and have a look at Terzi’s handiwork.

  Now, she sat with the bloody good doctor, sipping English Breakfast while he teased and picked at the gluey fabric, separating it from her fingertips. The first plaster, surrounding her left thumb, came free and he folded it into four and laid it on the table beside his own cup and saucer. He took a white washcloth from a pile beside the bowl of water, soaked it, squeezed it out and began, methodically, to clean her thumb tip, which was crusted with dark-red, dried blood. When he had finished, nodding to himself, he placed the used cloth to one side. Finally, he rubbed at the edge of the patch of cleaned skin, which was white and puffy as if she’d spent too long in the bath. To her initial horror, then fascination, the entire pad peeled away from the thumb tip.

  “Have a look,” he said.

  Then he turned her thumb so she could see it.

  Stella peered at the ball of her thumb. It looked smooth. She moved in closer, squinting as Terzi angled the desk lamp down over her hand. She exhaled loudly.

  “Fuck! It’s gone.”

  It was true. Under the harsh white light of the halogen bulb, her skin was almost glowing. But where there should have been ridges and furrows, folded in on themselves like the work of a crazy ploughman, there was simply a shiny expanse of glassy-smooth, pink skin.

  “As I said,” Terzi said with a smile, “I have never had any complaints. Shall we do the rest?”

  He worked in the same measured way on the other nine digits, soaking, picking, teasing, peeling back, easing away, until a triangle of folded squares of pink sticking plasters occupied a small space beside the base of the desk lamp. He got up from the table a couple of times to refill the bowl with clean water, but otherwise sat quite still, his face bent over Stella’s hands.

  When the last finger – right, little – was free and cleaned up they both examined it, and then its nine siblings. Each pad was utterly devoid of prints. The only remaining imperfection in the smooth surfaces was a crescent-shaped scar running across the pad of her right middle finger.

  “I’m afraid even capecitabine can’t do much about scars,” he said.

  Stella shrugged.

  “To be honest, Yiannis, I wasn’t really expecting it to work on the prints, so I think I can live with one identifying mark.”

  His eyebrows lifted at these words.

  “Yet you still went ahead and paid the price I asked for the procedure?”

  “I don’t like people like that. I don’t like what they did to your daughter. Not everything’s about you-scratch-my-back. Sometimes there’s something deeper there. Something worth fighting for.”

  He gave her a long, appraising look then.

  “Justice?” he asked, finally.

  “Justice.”

  “Well, well, you have more in common with the Greeks than you imagine. First revenge and then justice. These are ancient concepts. Perhaps you are an ancient Greek goddess reborn in human form. Aphrodite, perhaps. Or Artemis.”

  Stella laughed, and it felt good.

  “Are you flirting with me, Doctor Terzi?”

  He smiled back, eyes crinkling and put a hand over his heart.

  “Me? That would be most unwise. I could be struck off!”

  Their shared laughter at this ridiculous statement was genuine, and long. When her spasms had passed, Stella wiped her eyes.

  “Listen, thanks. I mean it. I’ve got to go now, and I don’t suppose we’ll meet again. But try to keep out of trouble, yes?”

  Terzi nodded sadly.

  “You too, my dear Artemis. You too.”

  57

  Pro Patria Mortem

  To the homeless man chancing his arm and waggling a dented Starbucks cup at the trio of smartly dressed strollers across a patch of sun-bleached grass in Hyde Park, it must have felt like a worthwhile punt. They looked rich, basically. Sharp suits on the men, killer heels on the Indian woman. All with that easy, confident air he’d observed on the midday walkers taking the sun as they wandered between this government building and that one, or to and from one of the police or security forces establishments that dotted this part of London. It was a bad bet.

  “Fuck off,” the woman hissed at him, smacking the bottom of his cup so that the meagre collection of change inside leapt upwards to patter into the dry grass at his feet.

  “Steady on, Hester,” Howarth said in an undertone.

  “Steady on?” she shot back. “Adam’s just told us he’s disbanding PPM on account of that … woman … and you’re telling me to go easy on a filthy tramp?”

  “Assaulting members of the public, even scruffy down-and-outs like him, is hardly going to help, is it?” he replied.

  Collier broke in.

&n
bsp; “Shut up, both of you! Hester, did you miss the part where I explained that DI Cole – oh, and by the way, she is, still, a serving detective inspector unless I can find a clever way to fire her – that DI Cole killed the hitter sent by our Albanian friend to despatch her? Who was his brother, by the way. That it appears she has also killed Freddie McTiernan’s man over in Oxfordshire? And I haven’t been able to make contact with Debra, either, so I think there’s a very good chance she got to her, too.”

  Ragib looked over towards the Serpentine, where tourists were scudding about in rowing boats they’d hired for an hour. Her face was taut with anxiety.

  “No, Adam, of course I didn’t. I just think you’re being premature. What about our goals? What about all the people who help us? Are we just going to walk away?”

  Collier snorted.

  “Right now, walking away sounds a rather pleasant option compared to what I expect we’re going to have to do. Look, nothing’s certain, OK? I spoke to Ferenczy, and he’s after her himself. Some bloody Albanian vendetta. They’d be after her family too, if we,” he paused for a beat, “hadn’t already killed them.”

  “So, what do we do?” Howarth asked.

  “For now, just be as careful as you can. Carry on as normal. Or as normal as you can manage. One way or another we’ll deal with her and then, maybe, we can resume operations. Although we still have the small problem of that freelance journalist sniffing around. Ferenczy’s brother also failed to deal with her, so that’s a second front we’re fighting on.”