The First Stella Cole Boxset

by Andy Maslen

  “Actually it is, but how—”

  “You’ve been talking in your sleep. Last night you said, ‘Not me, Stella. Not guilty.’ I met her once. The barbecue you organised just after you moved to Paddington Green. She seemed nice.”

  “She was. But when,” he sighed, “when we killed her husband, her daughter was in the car with him. She died too. It sent Stella over the edge. She basically lost it while she was on sick leave. She came back but she was changed. Basically insane. She’s been on a killing spree.”

  Lynne finished her wine, topped up both their glasses, then reached across to stroke his cheek.

  “Darling, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “About her?”

  “About everything. The organisation that recruited you. Her … everything.”

  This is going better than I hoped.

  “Honestly? I thought you’d disapprove at best, and ask for a divorce at worst. Then when she started the killings, I was frightened she’d come after you. I’ve been trying to sort it out but she’s just, I don’t know,” he rubbed a hand over his face, suddenly aware that he wasn’t acting. “She’s a bloody monster. I can’t stop her.”

  “Then let’s go. Right now. Let’s go and pack. We’ll live in a hotel or rent somewhere till you get your transfer to the FBI sorted out.”

  Collier thought back to their early-hours conversation three days earlier. About Crispin Radstock – aka Simon Halpern.

  “OK. Book us flights to Chicago. As soon as you can. Tomorrow if possible. Pack for me, too. Just the basics. We can buy new clothes when we get to Chicago.” He stood up.

  “Why? Where are you going?”

  “Leeds.”

  32

  Journalistic Ethics

  Stella’s mouth dropped open. She shut it again with an audible clack from her teeth. Glanced over Vicky’s shoulder to see Other Stella winking before vanishing.

  “Sorry. Did you just say what I think you said?”

  Vicky’s mouth was drawn into a straight line.

  “Let’s kill him. PPM murdered my godparents. After my parents died, Bea and Ralph brought me up as their own. They gave me everything. Helped me get my A levels when I could’ve just gone off the rails. Supported me at university. And those fuckers,” she hissed out the obscenity, “killed them just to intimidate me. You’re right. They’ve put themselves above the law. Beyond it. What would be the point of calling the police? No offence, but how can we be sure there aren’t more bent cops on the PPM payroll?”

  “Honestly? We can’t. And none taken, by the way. If I am still a police officer it’s more by luck than judgement. I think Adam, I mean Collier – shit! How did I ever go around chumming up to him and using his Christian name? Anyway, he can’t use official channels to instigate disciplinary proceedings, let alone charge me. He knows if he did it would blow back in his face like the ultimate shit-fan combo.”

  “Right, so I say we track Collier down and kill him” Vicky whispered, though they were alone on this stretch of beach, and the waves shushing over the sand and shingle at the water’s edge would easily drown out their conversation.

  “Whoa, slow down. I’m in this up to my neck. I’ve pretty much chosen my path. Plus when it’s over I’m … I’m going to leave anyway. But you’re a journalist. A bloody good one. I’m fairly sure committing murder is against journalistic ethics.”

  “Yes, and look where they got me. Nobody will touch the story. I can’t get my hands on Richard’s source material. And the two people I loved the most in all the world are dead. All because I wanted to win a bloody journalism prize.”

  Vicky bent to pick up a flat stone, then crouched and skimmed it expertly across the flat surface of the water between two incoming waves. The stone skipped half a dozen times before seeming to slide over the surface then sink out of sight. She straightened and brushed her hands off against her bottom.

  “Nice,” Stella said. “The skimmer, I mean.”

  “Ralph taught me.”

  “Vicky, listen. You’re a writer. You tap keys for a living. Even before I got myself some additional training I was on the streets, dealing with the scum of the earth, day in, day out. I’ve got my hands dirty and I know I can do it. You can’t. I bet you’ve never even hit someone, have you?”

  Vicky frowned, then her eyes widened.

  “Actually I have!”

  “When?”

  “In Year Ten. Philippa Gray kissed my boyfriend at the school disco right in front of me and I slapped her.”

  Stella laughed at the absurdity of it, then started choking. Vicky administered a few good, hard slaps between her shoulder blades until Stella flapped her hand to indicate the fit had passed.

  “I also just hit a police officer,” Vicky finished.

  “OK, I’ll give you that one. But seriously, you can help me. That would be great. Fantastic, I mean. But leave the actual deed to me. It isn’t as easy as they make it look on the telly.”

  “Maybe. I’m not promising. If Collier’s the only one left then I want to tell him to his face what an evil bastard he is right before he dies. I want him to hear it from me.”

  “We’ll see. There’s quite a queue you know. You ever hear of Ronnie Wilks?”

  “What, Ronnie “The Razor” Wilks? Doyen of the Costa del Crime who claimed he was fitted up for his last stretch inside?”

  “The very same. Well he and Marilyn want revenge on Collier. As does Marilyn’s dad.”

  “And that would be?”

  “Freddie McTiernan. I’m staying with him at the moment, actually. He has a lovely house.”

  Now it was Vicky’s turn to splutter.

  “Excuse me? You’re staying with Freddie McTiernan? He’s, like, what, the biggest gang leader in the East End since the Krays?”

  Stella smiled, amused at Vicky’s wide-eyed look of amazement.

  “He’s retired. Sold his shares in the business and spends his days playing golf. He’s thinking about getting a dog.”

  Vicky shook her head, then swept her hair back from her face after the wind caught it.

  “I’m just trying to recalibrate, you know, literally everything I thought I knew about you, which admittedly isn’t much. You’re a house guest of Freddie McTiernan. You appear to be on first-name if not intimate terms with Ronnie and Marilyn Wilks. And you’ve put a dozen, no, thirteen, people under the ground. Stella Cole, should I be frightened of you?”

  Stella paused before answering. Because the answer was simple.

  Yes. Very.

  “Vicky Riley, are you a good person?”

  “Yes. I am.” She touched the skin at the notch of her throat. “I hope so.”

  “Then, no. You don’t need to be frightened of me. I’ll tell you what, though.”

  “What?”

  “I could murder a drink right now.”

  Over drinks – a glass of pinot grigio for Vicky, a large gin and tonic for Stella – the two women discussed how best to murder a detective chief superintendent serving in the Metropolitan Police Service. The pub was quiet, old couples mainly, enjoying their pints and schooners of medium-sweet sherry. In a corner, a skinny young dude, full sleeves of tattoos on both scrawny arms, was feeding pound coins into a fruit machine.

  “Have you got a plan?” Vicky asked, running her index finger down the bowl of her wineglass.

  “That’s a very good question. I did have a plan. I got as far as his office with a loaded Glock, then my sergeant Tasered me and I ended up in the loony bin fighting off the psycho bitch from hell.”

  “I’d run if I was him.”

  “Run where? He’s not exactly a drifter. He’s got the job, the pension, the career, everything.”

  “Yeah, and he’s also got you coming after him. He knows you won’t stop. Not after you’ve killed those people he sent after you.”

  “Can you look into that end of things for me?”

  Vicky nodded vigorously.

  “Yes! It’s what I do. OK,
so I may not be any good with the rough stuff, but I can wheedle information out of people like a toddler getting sweets from their parents – oh, God, I’m sorry.”

  Her face fell and she looked down in embarrassment. Stella reached across the circular table and closed her hand over Vicky’s.

  “It’s OK. I even smiled at a woman with a buggy today. Look, that would be great. If you can find out what Collier’s planning. If he’s going to run, I need to know where. And I have another idea.”

  “What?”

  “There are a few people I reckon I can still count on at the station. Well, two really, and one possible.”

  “Who are they?”

  “OK, first, Lucian. Lucian Young. He’s a forensics officer. Tall, black, extremely good looking, rich and great with computers. I had to test him out before I told him about PPM. Made out I was trying to recruit him. Jesus! He nearly had a heart attack.”

  “And number two?”

  “That would be Danny Hutchings. He’s the armourer. He’s—”

  “Deep Throat!”

  “Pardon?”

  “Oh. I shouldn’t tell you but … oh fuck, where I’m headed, worrying about protecting my sources is probably going out the window. Your friend Danny is … was … my source on the PPM story. I call him Deep Throat. I spoke to him the last day I saw Bea and Ralph alive.”

  “Huh.” Stella drained her gin and tonic. “Small world. So, Danny’s one of the good guys. I may have taken advantage of him, just a teeny-weeny bit. Stole a pistol from his armoury and a box of hollow points too. Probably got him into a shitload of trouble when they did the stocktake.”

  Vicky sipped her wine.

  “You said one possible.”

  “Frankie O’Meara. My sergeant.”

  “Wait. What? The one who zapped you with a Taser?”

  “It’s complicated. I’m sure she thought she was doing the right thing. That’s Frankie all over. But I’m convinced Collier got to her. If we can set up a meeting between all five of us, I think I can get her to see what’s been happening. Then she’ll be onside and we have someone on the inside who works in the same place as Collier. It has to be worth a try, don’t you think?”

  Vicky shrugged.

  “You know her. I don’t. But if she’s as upstanding as you say she is, then I can’t see her volunteering for anything as desperate as killing her boss.”

  “No. But she might be persuaded to help get us information. I can always tell her we’re gathering evidence.”

  They sat over more rounds of drinks, picking at the scab of how to get to Collier. Then they ordered some food from the bar and a bottle of wine. At ten-thirty, Vicky announced she had to go to get the last train back to London. After Stella had repeated her belief that it was safe to go home, Vicky had agreed to head back to Chiswick and wait for Stella to call her.

  “You going back to Freddie’s tonight, then?” Vicky asked.

  “Nah. I may have had slightly too many G&Ts. It’s a long drive and I don’t want to throw up in a minicab.”

  Stella kissed Vicky goodbye outside the pub then headed back inside. A small blackboard in an A-frame stand by the front door announced “Rooms. Sky TV, tea and coffee facilities, en suite.” A few minutes’ conversation with the landlady and she was heading up the uneven, carpeted stairs holding a blue rubber dog toy shaped like a bone with a brass Yale key dangling from a split ring.

  Stella awoke with a ferocious hangover. She countered it with two ibuprofen, two paracetamol, three mugs of excellent tea in the pub’s dining room and a full English breakfast.

  At one point during the interminable taxi ride from Westcliff-on-Sea back to Ingatestone, as the driver swung the ageing Nissan out of a roundabout, Stella thought she was going to throw up. But by breathing deeply, and staring fixedly out of the window, she managed to keep her breakfast down. The car had not been optioned with air conditioning by its first owner, and the heat inside had been stifling when she’d first climbed in. A strawberry-shaped air freshener swinging gaily from the rear-view mirror only added to the cloying atmosphere, made worse by the driver’s aftershave. The rear window motor had apparently failed with the drop-glass halfway down, but even that was better than nothing.

  It was with no small measure of relief that Stella paid the fare and exited the sauna-like interior. She punched in the code on the intercom box and stood back while the gates swung open. Above her head, a blackbird trilled and warbled somewhere in the thick, waving branches of a copper beech tree.

  Mindful of Freddie’s privacy, she waited for the gate to close behind her before making her way up the drive to the front door. The Rolls was parked in its usual spot, a gold-painted behemoth in the centre of a smooth, undisturbed circle of pale gravel. Rose petals still lay across its roof and bonnet.

  Stella frowned. Something about the big car bothered her. But whatever it was would have to wait. She needed to pee.

  Once inside she called out.

  “Freddie? You in?”

  No answer. All the doors leading off the hallway were closed. She took the stairs two at a time, heading for the guest bathroom and its gold-plated taps. Once she’d finished and washed her hands she came downstairs at a more leisurely pace and sauntered into the kitchen. Nothing out of place. Not a cup or side plate, apple core or leftover glass of wine.

  “Freddie?” she shouted again. Louder this time.

  33

  Crime Scene

  Returning to the hall, Stella turned right to enter the dining room that Freddie had told her he used as a study from time to time.

  “Even a pensioner still has a bit of paperwork to do now and then, Stella,” he’d said, winking.

  The room was as immaculate as the kitchen. The sitting room, then.

  As Stella reached for the polished brass door knob, something caught at her brain. The Roller. Freddie had been to play golf. But there weren’t any tyre marks through the gravel. A heavy car like that would leave bloody great trenches, surely? And the rose petals. They looked as if they’d been there since the day she arrived.

  She looked down at her hand twisting the door knob. At her wedding ring and the eternity ring next to it.

  Something felt off.

  The Rolls.

  The gravel.

  The petals.

  The silence.

  As the door opened, it sucked a few litres of air out of the room beyond. Air contaminated with the scent of decay. With the gases that form inside corpses and start to issue forth like a ghastly warning of what lies ahead for each and every human being born of woman. Stella inhaled. The smell was familiar from a thousand crime scenes. A fly buzzed out through the gap, almost colliding with Stella’s right cheek.

  “Oh, fuck,” she said, pushing the door wide and stepping into a nightmare.

  Stella’s first murder case had been “a proper Tarantino” as her then boss, Detective Sergeant Roman Harper, had called it. In the murder squad at the time, a few of the senior detectives, all film buffs, had devised a scale of goriness that they delighted in applying to murder scenes, and then arguing over in the pub after work. Deaths caused by blunt force trauma, poisoning and strangulation were all classified at the lowest level. Hitchcocks. Basically, horrible but anaemic. Conquer your fear of the unknown and they weren’t too bad to look at. Common-or-garden stabbings, attacks with edged weapons, shootings with small-calibre firearms: these were Leones. Moderate bloodshed but confined to pools, runs and spatters. Then you moved into altogether bloodier territory. Shotgun wounds. Large-calibre handguns. The more frenzied knife attacks. Peckinpahs. Finally, at the top of the tree, the Tarantinos. Dismemberings. Multiple victims. Body parts. Brain matter. Lakes of sticky red blood. Jackson Pollocks of the stuff all over the place.

  The scene confronting her was a Leone. No question. At first, all she saw was the blood. Pools and runs had soaked into the rug and the carpet beneath. And both leather sofas were now more red than green.

  Then her traini
ng kicked in. Two victims. One male, one female … Oh, no, not “a female.” Frankie! Oh, Jesus, girl, what the fuck happened? You poor, poor thing. He shot you. Freddie shot you!

  Standing back, and breathing deeply, despite the smell of blood and decay, Stella observed the scene. Frankie lay on her back, one leg twisted beneath her. The front of her white shirt was soaked in blood all the way from her collar to the waistband of her black trousers. Blowback had painted the underside of her jaw with a stippling of red.

  Freddie lay on his back, too. Sprawled across the leather sofa. Arms outflung as if he was keen to prevent anyone joining him. Not that anyone in their right mind would want to, seeing as half the contents of his abdomen had tumbled from his stomach in a slew of dark blood.

  His right hand was clutching the pistol he’d used on Frankie. Skirting her fallen sergeant’s body, Stella edged closer to Freddie and bent to sniff the muzzle. No doubt about it. This was the murder weapon. The whiff of burnt cordite said all that needed to be said. No need for ballistics. Except. Except …

  “Except the old man told you he didn’t have a pistol,” Other Stella said, standing behind the sofa and resting her elbows on the blood-spattered backrest. “And, what, he shot Frankie then stuck a couple of rounds into himself to prove a point?”

  “You’re right. She must have shot him first. But then—”

  “How did he get the pistol off her? Good question, because old people with abdominal gunshot wounds are always beating fit young police officers in wrestling matches. Plus, look. The one to the heart would have been fatal on its own. So if she shot him there first, he couldn’t have got the gun off her. And—”

  “If she didn’t shoot him in the heart, then who did?”

  Other Stella pushed herself upright and strolled around the end of the sofa. She came to a halt right in front of Stella, her shoes squelching on the blood-soaked carpet. She put the tip of one finger to her chin and looked up at the ceiling.

  “Hmm. What did that text she sent say?”