Let The Bones Be Charred

by Andy Maslen

  She willed herself to breathe shallowly and strained to hear something from beyond her prison. And she did. The rumble of the backhoe’s engine, clearly in gear and getting louder with each passing second.

  The bang was deafening. Above her head, the appliance sealing her in thumped downwards by six inches. Panicking, she pulled herself forwards on her elbows and tried to push out at the back of the fridge. It might have been part of the bedrock beneath the yard.

  Sparks danced in her vision.

  She flinched as another grinding crash shook her prison cell, and from somewhere above, clangs and the screech of metal against metal told her the whole unstable tower was collapsing. Then the engine noise died. In the silence, Stella could hear a ringing in her ears. She knew she was hyperventilating, but was unable to slow her breathing down.

  Miriam’s mocking voice came to her.

  ‘Cosy? You won’t be soon. I’m going to dig you out and then I’m going to burn you alive. Do you know how painful that is, Stella? Do you? I’m going to roast you on my barbecue and, when you’re done, I’m going to chop you into tiny little pieces and burn them until the bones are charred and nothing is left but ash.’

  A few seconds passed, then the engine started up again. Stella looked over her shoulder again, then at the unyielding grid of metalwork in front of her.

  She thought of Lola, dying of thermal burns in Richard’s car. And of the years of therapy and sheer bloody hard work she’d endured to free herself of Other Stella: the demonic spirit of vengeance that had consumed and then inhabited her.

  She thought of Polly, and how close the little girl had come to seeing her Auntie Stella with her brains blown out on her mummy and daddy’s stripy lawn. She thought of Vicky, of Elle and Jason and Georgie, and of Jamie. And she realised how frightened she was of dying.

  She filled her lungs with air and screamed.

  ‘No!’

  This is not my day to die. Not here. Not now. I’m not giving in to you.

  101

  FRIDAY 14TH SEPTEMBER 12.33 P.M.

  BECKTON, EAST LONDON

  Feeling as clearheaded as if she’d just woken from a long night of dream-free sleep, Stella shuffled backwards, letting her knees bend until they were touching both confining metal walls.

  Your strength’s in your legs. Push!

  Stella pressed the soles of her boots against the sheet of metal hemming her in. Grunting with the effort, she exerted even more pressure, sweat stinging her eyes.

  As the screech and grind of the shifting appliances above her continued, she shoved and kicked out in a series of draining moves.

  Stella folded her knees up again, wriggled backwards another eight inches and resumed shoving and kicking at the appliance blocking her one and only way out. It shifted back in a sudden slide.

  Pushing, wriggling, kicking, shoving, working her way back on her elbows and belly, Stella kept up her assault on what she could now see was some sort of commercial microwave oven.

  With a cry of triumph, she booted it backwards. Over her shoulder, she saw light streaming down onto the ground. A black space beckoned. No pipework, no jagged sheets of steel, no lumps of concrete designed to stop washing machines doing the cha-cha across the kitchen floor.

  She reversed out into the black cavern and sat up. In front of her, the narrow tunnel she’d just extricated herself from collapsed with a tearing bang as God knew how many tons of discarded steel crumpled it like an eggbox.

  Slithering sideways, her face often less than an inch from the side of a cooker or tumble dryer, Stella pushed her way out of the place where she’d thought she was about to die. A narrow crevasse led all the way out onto the far side of the block of scrapped machines.

  She looked around for a weapon. And she smiled, grimly.

  As if placed there by a medieval armourer, spike-topped steel fence posts lay in a pile several feet tall beside a mangled silver Porsche. She ran over and picked up the nearest post. Six feet long from its squared-off base to its razor-sharp split tip, it was satisfyingly heavy in her hand.

  She turned and strode back towards the sound of the backhoe. Stella yelled over the roar of the engine.

  ‘Miriam Robey! Give yourself up! You need help!’

  And she heard, from the place she didn’t want to look at, her other voice. The voice she’d banished as a separate presence in her world, but which, from time to time, made its presence felt between her ears.

  No she doesn’t. She needs to be put down.

  Climbing out of the cab, Miriam shouted back at her.

  ‘No I don’t! I need justice for Malachi!’

  She jumped down from the big yellow earth-mover and ran.

  102

  FRIDAY 14TH SEPTEMBER 12.59 P.M.

  BECKTON, EAST LONDON

  Stella wasn’t as fit as she had been in the year after Richard and Lola had been murdered by Ramage, when she’d run hundreds and hundreds of miles to keep her grief, and the truth, at bay. But she was still in good shape, unlike Miriam Robey, whose large-boned frame no athletics coach would have chosen for their runners.

  Carrying the fence post like a spear, Stella rounded the rusted carcass of a truck cab in time to glimpse Miriam vanish behind more squashed cars.

  She sprinted after her, almost losing her footing as she made the turn. Then, with a sudden sense of impending catastrophe, she ducked, fully expecting to meet a crowbar wielded by Miriam, coming in the opposite direction.

  No incoming ironwork whistled above her head. Miriam was halfway towards the hut housing the oil pit. Stella yelled at her again but Miriam didn’t waste any oxygen shouting back, closing in on the hut in an ungainly run.

  Stella reached the door just a few seconds after Miriam. She hadn’t closed it and Stella could see her inside the gloomy building, limping, and clutching her side, as she made her way round the pit.

  Inside, Stella glanced to the far end of the hut, where a huge steel roller shutter presumably gave onto an access road for the tankers. It was closed now, though, so the only way out was through the narrow door at Stella’s back. Her breath was coming in huge gasps and the stink of petrol on her skin was making her retch.

  ‘Miriam! Stop!’ she yelled, her voice echoing off the hard surfaces all around them.

  Miriam stopped on the far side of the pit from Stella. Twenty feet of crow-black engine oil separated the two women. She turned to face Stella, arms hanging by her sides, her lower half obscured by the wall. Her chest was heaving and her face was scarlet, as if the blotches that usually flared on her cheeks had expanded to fill all the available space.

  ‘It was Mother’s fault,’ she screamed. ‘Mal was a good boy, but she tortured him. She deserved to die! She deserved it! And so did all the others!’

  ‘Miriam Robey,’ Stella called out across the black mirror, fighting to keep her breathing under control. ‘I am arresting you for the murders of Niamh Connolly, Sarah Sharpe, Moira Lowney and Amy Burnside. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Now, come here. It’s over.’

  Miriam laughed.

  ‘Beautifully delivered. Just like they do on the telly. All right, I’ll come.’

  She turned to her right and began walking round the pit, never taking her eyes off Stella, a lopsided grin seemingly painted in place. Stella reached behind her for her folding handcuffs then swore as she realised Miriam had taken these along with her phone and Airwave.

  Miriam turned the second corner of the rectangular pit so that she was facing Stella. Stella shifted her grip on the fence post. Then Miriam spoke, and changed everything.

  ‘I’m coming, Stella, like you asked. But not so you can arrest me. I’m not going to spend the rest of my days locked up with the likes of Rose West and those freaks. They’re sadists, just like Mother. I was just avenging Mal.’

  In her right hand she held a mach
ete. She lifted it in front of her face and waggled the fearsome, foot-long blade from side to side.

  ‘I was going to use this on you after I’d cooked you. To make it easier to char your bones. But before will do just as well.’

  Then she shrieked, a discordant wail that had the short hairs on the back of Stella’s neck standing up as it bounced off the hard walls. Baring her teeth, Miriam raised the machete above her head and charged at Stella. Stella turned sideways on to Miriam, bent her knees, then lunged forwards, gripping the fence post two-handed.

  The bifurcated spike penetrated Miriam’s chest, just to the right of her breastbone. She swung out with the machete and Stella screamed as the heavy blade chopped into her left arm. She looked down and saw blood flowing fast from a deep cut in her jacket. But then, Miriam’s strength seemed to leave her abruptly. The machete fell from her open hand, clanging onto the concrete floor. Both arms hung limply at her sides.

  Stella heard a roaring in her ears. Her vision telescoped down to a small circle surrounded by black, with Miriam’s face filling it. She leaned forwards on the fence post, twisting and pushing it deeper into Miriam’s chest.

  Miriam staggered back, blood gushing from her open mouth. Stella let go of the fence post and watched as Miriam folded backwards over the wall, swinging the remaining five foot of fence post in an arc so that the blunt end pointed at the ceiling.

  ‘Your fingerprints are all over it,’ Miriam gurgled through a mouthful of frothy scarlet blood.

  Stella shook her head.

  ‘None left. A lovely Greek man called Yiannis made them go away. Now I’m going to make you go away. Because maybe your brother was a tortured soul. Maybe your mother, who sounds like a complete bitch by the way, did screw him up for life. But you? You’re a cold-hearted killer. Pure and simple. The cat? The girls? I think you enjoyed it all. I think you got off on torturing those poor women to death. Revenge had nothing to do with it.’

  Then she grabbed Miriam around the shins and lifted her over the wall and into the waiting oil. The drop to the surface was about five feet. Miriam entered the viscous black soup with a slimy, plopping splash. The oil sucked her down and as Stella looked over, the surface was already smoothing out, a gentle wave traversing towards the four walls.

  Clutching her left bicep, and trying to ignore the blood flowing out between her clenched fingers, Stella returned to the house.

  Letting go long enough to struggle out of the jacket, and crying out with the pain as the damaged muscles tried to help, she ripped her shirt sleeve off, spun it into a makeshift tourniquet then wrapped it round her arm above the deep cut Miriam’s machete had opened.

  Working one-handed, and using her teeth, she managed to tie it off tight enough to slow the blood to a trickle. She folded a tea towel into a dressing, pressed it over the wound with her free hand, then bandaged the whole thing up with a second tea towel.

  Satisfied she wasn’t going to bleed to death, she looked around for a phone.

  She found a cordless phone in the sitting room. Stella sat heavily on a scuffed black vinyl sofa. She punched in Garry’s mobile number from memory, one of two or three she had stored away.

  ‘Boss! Oh, thank Christ! Where are you?’

  ‘I’m at Miriam’s house. It was her, Garry. She wasn’t the accomplice. She was Lucifer. Malachi Robey was killed last year. Murdered by vigilantes. It was her all along.’

  ‘Shitting hell, boss, are you OK? I sent you a text saying I thought she was MJ.’

  ‘I’m fine. But she took my phone.’

  ‘You’re really all right?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. I’m fine.’

  ‘You got her, yeah?’

  Got? How d’you mean, Garry?

  ‘She’s dead. She attacked me with a machete, laid my arm open halfway to the bone. I fought back and she fell into an oil tank in the scrapyard behind the house. Look, come over, OK? Soon as you can. And bring some paracetamol. This arm hurts like a bastard.’

  After she ended the call, Stella walked back into the scrapyard, holding her wounded arm above her head. She stopped at the pile of fence posts by the ruined Porsche and picked one up with her right hand. She walked with it to the hut containing the oil pit, and threw it in, near where she estimated Miriam would have landed. She repeated the process seven more times.

  Garry arrived forty-five minutes later. Stella heard the sirens as the marked and unmarked cars and an ambulance roared down Gasworks Lane and screeched to a halt outside 55. She’d cleaned her wrists up under the tap while she was waiting.

  She walked down the hallway and opened the front door. Garry was standing there, a look of concern on his face. He glanced at her blood-soaked arm, then back at her.

  ‘Jesus, boss! You look a mess. And you stink of petrol!’

  ‘Charmer.’

  He led her to the waiting paramedics, who took one look at her improvised dressing and were all for whisking her straight to the nearest A&E department. She shook her head.

  ‘Not yet. I want to look round the house. Just stand by, OK. Then I’ll come with you. She didn’t hit an artery or I’d have bled out by now.’

  ‘At least let me elevate it for you,’ one of them said.

  A couple of minutes later, sporting a blue sling fastened with Velcro, Stella made her way back inside as uniformed officers began setting up the outer and inner cordons.

  In a small back bedroom overlooking the scrapyard, Stella and Garry found Miriam’s records of her crimes.

  Photographs of her victims cut from newspapers and magazines, or printed out from websites and social media profiles, and stuck to the wall with Blu-Tack. Below the row of women, their faces obscured by thick black crosses, Craig Morgan and Ade Trimmets smiled out at them, each man’s features disfigured by a red X.

  ‘She did Morgan and Trimmets as well,’ Garry said. ‘No wonder we haven’t seen them hanging about at the station or muscling in on the guvnor’s press conferences.’

  Stella turned to a tatty, self-assembly wardrobe with a wonky door that had refused to close. With a gloved right hand, she pulled it open. She lifted clear a coil of flax bell rope with a black and gold sally and placed it on the narrow single bed’s worn pink coverlet. She turned back to the wardrobe.

  Resting on a shelf at waist height was a shoebox. Stella lifted it out, revealing a second, smaller, carton, which she also collected. She sat on the bed to open them. Garry looked down as she lifted the shoebox lid away to reveal syringes, plastic bottles of clear liquids labelled Temaz. and Ket. and a dozen or so pairs of nitrile gloves and the thin, blue nylon overshoes provided in public swimming pools. It also contained her phone and Airwave.

  She opened the smaller carton. It contained five matchboxes. The boxes were marked in black pen: NC, SS, ML, AB, CT.

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Trophies?’ Garry asked, voicing their shared thought.

  ‘Let’s find out, shall we?’

  She picked up one of the little boxes and held it out to Garry.

  ‘Do the honours,’ she said.

  Garry poked a gloved finger against the end of the drawer. In the silence the soft rasp as it emerged was clearly audible. Seeing what was inside, she nodded. Then she and Garry opened the other four matchboxes and Stella laid them in a row.

  The box marked CT was empty. The boxes marked NC, SS, ML, AB each contained a small crucifix: three gold, one silver.

  Each crucifix lay on a bed of tangled, curly hairs. Dark-brown. Black and grey. Tawny. Greyish-white.

  103

  FRIDAY 14TH SEPTEMBER 2.00 P.M.

  NEWHAM, EAST LONDON

  While the other units were cordoning off the house and the scrapyard behind it, Garry drove Stella to Newham University Hospital. Fifteen minutes later, she was sitting on a bed in the A&E department, watching as a junior doctor, young, male, stressed-looking, injected her with anaesthetic.

  ‘That’ll ease the pain. It’s a nasty cut. What was it, a mache
te?’

  ‘Yes. Get a lot of those down here?’ she asked.

  He smiled ruefully.

  ‘Too many. It’s too deep for me to do it here. There’s some muscle damage. We’ve got a theatre waiting for you.’

  Stella opted for sedation and local anaesthetic over a general. Ever since a schoolfriend’s brother had died during a routine operation to repair a detached retina after a rugby game, she’d tried to avoid general anaesthesia.

  As the anaesthetist injected a sedative dose of midazolam into a vein in her right arm, Stella smiled up at her and drifted away from the operating theatre.

  She found herself in a church. Sunlight streamed in through the stained-glass windows, tinting everything in rainbow colours. She walked towards the altar, pausing to look at four tombs, on top of which statues of women, hands placed together in prayer, reclined. She recognised their faces. Niamh, Sarah, Moira and Amy. All smiling. All at peace.

  A woman who looked like Stella approached her from the direction of the altar, a bottle of wine in one hand, two silver goblets encrusted with jewels dangling by their stems from the other.

  She smiled at Stella and set the goblets down on the closest tomb before filling them with red wine until it brimmed over. Handing one to Stella, she spoke.

  ‘Nice one, babe,’ she said. Then she winked.

  When Stella came round, it was to find Garry at her bedside, checking his phone.

  ‘Hello, Garry,’ she said.

  He smiled down at her and took her hand.

  ‘Hello, boss. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Yeah. Pretty good. My arm’s a bit numb.’

  ‘Probably the anaesthetic. I checked with the surgeon. He said you had peripheral nerve damage. It’ll take a couple of months to return to full sensation but, other than that, you’re good to go.’