by Andy Maslen
“Gem, Skipper, sit,” he said.
The dogs sat immediately, their tails sweeping the tarmac behind them.
“Paw.”
The dogs lifted their right forepaws off the ground, heads cocked to one side. “Take Skipper’s,” he said to Stella. “He’s nearest to you.”
Stella extended a hand, ready to snatch it back if the dog’s head moved a millimetre towards her. But nothing happened. It waited, paw trembling slightly. She took it and, not knowing what else to do, gave it a little shake before letting go. The pads under its foot were rough, like sandpaper. It replaced its paw on the ground. Stella straightened.
“Okay, so you’ve won Crufts, and I’m not nervous any more. As I was saying–”
“You’ve come from Danny Hutchings with a consignment for decommissioning. It’s all right, me and Danny go back a long way. He and I served together, if you can believe that. Iraq. He went into the police; I went into the rent-a-cop business.” Stella felt her cheeks flushing. “Don’t worry, we call it that too. The management like to talk about ‘security solutions’ but that’s just for investors and the press.”
“Do you want the paperwork?” she asked. “He told me to ask for Maurice.”
He held out his hand. “Please. If you don’t mind me asking, how come you’re doing a D61? I mean that’s pretty low-grade work for a detective inspector, isn’t it?”
Stella smiled as she handed over the despatch note, registering a small scar on the guard’s chin, just to the right of a cleft darkened with grey stubble.
“We’re investigating a possible gun-running operation. Albanians. Kosovans. Turks. Kazakhs. You name it, they’re in on it. I’m familiarising myself with all the possible supply routes.”
He scanned the front of the sheet.
“That’s all in order, twenty-four Glock 17s for decommissioning, cleared and checked.” He pulled a biro from his breast pocket and added his signature to the form. “You won’t find anything wrong here, DI Cole. Place prob’ly has better security than your nick.” Then he stood back and pointed to a loading bay. “Park up over there with your doors against the ramp. You don’t actually need to see Maurice; the warehouse boys’ll unload the weapons for you. Then you collect a receipt and another signature on your despatch note, they make a copy, give you the original, and you’re done.”
Stella climbed back into the transit, started the engine and moments later was standing by as a couple of brown-overalled storemen unloaded four holdalls from the back of the van. They placed them on the concrete floor of the loading bay, unzipped them and pulled out the Glocks one by one and laid them out.
In four neat rows of six.
One man – beautiful olive skin, maroon turban, black moustache and beard – came over with a sheet of computer-printed stationery. He pulled a biro from his breast pocket and added the make, model and quantity of weapons in three blank boxes, the date and his signature, then handed it back to Stella. She held the despatch note out to him, wordlessly. He seemed a man more inclined to silence than his garrulous friend on the gate. He signed across the bottom, then spoke.
“Be back in a minute, yeah?”
She watched his back as he stuck the sheet of paper under the lid of a photocopier, then grabbed the original and the copy and brought the former back to her. “Yours,” he said. As she took it, she heard a high-pitched, metallic shrieking.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Grinder, innit? We’re doing some assault rifles. Shame really, pretty nice weapons. They’ll be in school furniture or a motorway bridge a month or two from now.”
With that bizarre image in her head, Stella thanked him and turned on her heel to leave.
The ex-soldier on the gate saluted with a grin as she passed, his mirrored lenses obscuring what she felt sure were eyes crinkled in amusement, and she waved in return, smiling as she left for Heathrow and the cargo terminal.
She looked over and down, into the footwell of the passenger seat. There, almost invisible, was the fifth black holdall.
At Heathrow’s cargo terminal, the digital display in the waiting area informed her that the plane bringing in the new Glocks had been delayed by thirty minutes. The room was furnished with hard plastic chairs in a shade of industrial grey that would never have passed the design committee for the passenger terminals. Low tables scattered with magazines bearing such titles as Airfreight, Cargo and Freight Forwarding dotted the room. Thinking that working for Reg the Veg might actually be more interesting than reading one of these, she wandered over to a pair of vending machines against a wall.
She returned to a seat by a table and winced as she burnt her mouth on the coffee. Her tongue, now roughened by the scalding liquid, couldn’t tell her what it tasted like, which may have been a blessing. A KitKat eased the pain as she sat there, sucking the chocolate from the wafers and checking emails on her phone. One jumped out at her. It was from The Model.
Stella. Would love to catch up when you have a moment. Looked for you in the exhibits room this morning, but couldn’t find you. My office, five thirty this evening please. Adam.
Shit! What does he want? Well, she’d just have to play it calmly. Reg had been taken ill a few days earlier, and she’d been running the exhibits room. He’d shown her the ropes, so no major issues, and she’d just really needed a change of routine. That would do. It would have to. Wouldn’t it, Lola? Mummy’s getting closer now. Little by little.
Around her was the low buzz of conversation, and the beeping of electronic signatures being given as couriers came to collect shipments, mostly dressed in the branded uniforms of the big companies. Red and yellow for DHL, navy and purple for FedEx and Pullman brown for UPS. She noted a few drivers from local firms – no uniforms – and a handful of bike messengers in scuffed and scraped leathers. One rider had fashioned running repairs on his jacket with silver duct tape.
Finally, her name was called. A young guy with thick-rimmed glasses and a wispy black beard took a few details and had her sign in a box through a scratched screen protector on his silicon-clad tablet. Then he pointed to a gap at the end of the counter. “Yours is just coming out. Do you need a hand loading them?”
Stella turned to her right. A uniformed Heathrow cargo terminal employee was bringing out five cardboard cartons stacked on a bright-red hydraulic pallet lifter. Each carton was about a metre long, forty centimetres wide and thirty centimetres deep, and sealed along the top seam by a length of silver duct tape, just like the stuff holding the biker’s leathers together. Despatch notes were affixed to the sides inside clear plastic envelopes. No other printing, though. What did you think, Stel? They were going to bang bloody great Glock logos on the sides? Why not go the whole hog and put, “Contains handguns – please steal”? She grinned, despite her nervousness.
“No, thanks. I’m fine. Can I borrow the trolley?”
“Sure,” he said, with a smile. “Just bring it back when you’ve finished. You can leave it at the edge of the loading bay by the door.”
Then he was dealing with another courier, and Stella had clearly disappeared from his mind. She took the handle of the pallet lifter from the storeman and tugged the clanking contraption around until she could pull, rather than push it.
“Here you go,” an incoming UPS guy said, holding the door open for her.
She thanked him and dragged the load out into the loading bay and over to the transit van. The boxes were heavy, but not impossible, to lift, more unwieldy than anything else. She was glad of her weights work, though, as she hefted them into the back of the van.
Having arranged them in a flat rectangle, she took a moment to get her breath back, sitting on the nearest carton with her feet dangling over the edge of the loadspace. She reached for her cigarettes but then frowned as she saw a No Smoking sign on the wall next to a couple of fire extinguishers. She wondered whether the sign had been placed there with ironic intent.
This was a big moment, and she felt butterflies fli
ttering in her stomach as she contemplated the firepower all around her. But she had a problem. One she hadn’t considered until the cartons had been delivered to her. The guns were all stashed away behind duct-taped, and probably glued, cardboard cartons that appeared to be almost bullet-proof themselves judging by the weight of them. Then she thought of the biker. The solution presented itself in a flash.
Twenty minutes later, she pulled up outside a rundown hardware store on a dreary parade of shops in Hounslow. Planes roared overhead about every ninety seconds, so close to the ground she felt she could reach up and run her fingertips along their gleaming silver and white undersides. She could certainly smell the stink of them, the burnt aviation fuel raining down on her as a cloud of invisible particles that would probably give her lung cancer or asthma if she stayed for very long.
She pushed the door and entered the shop, looking over her shoulder. The thought of leaving twenty-five grand’s worth of brand-new and virtually untraceable semi-automatic pistols in an unmarked transit van had brought her out in a sweat. Now she wished the van was emblazoned with as much fluorescent yellow-and-blue Battenburg livery as would fit on its sides. Even a “no tools left in van” sign would be better than nothing.
A few minutes later, she was walking back to the van with a flimsy red-and-white-striped carrier bag dangling from her left hand. She fished out her keys and swung herself up into the cab.
“Now to find somewhere quiet, Lola,” she said. “Mummy’s got some makey-do to be getting on with.”
She found the perfect spot after swiping around on Google maps on her phone. She identified a little river called the Crane, and she could see a road that ran alongside it, with what appeared to be an access spur running almost down to the water’s edge. She slammed the van into gear and found the access road after a few more minutes’ driving. It must have been something the council had built for workers sent to clear the river: a single-track road bordered with rosebay willow herbs. She drove down to the end and turned round in the circle of concrete thoughtfully built just before the riverbank. Through the windscreen, she had a clear view of the track coming down from the main road. The rear doors faced the river, which was choked with reeds taller than she was, which wasn’t saying much, admittedly, but they provided a thick screen from any prying eyes on the far bank. Grabbing the holdall from the passenger footwell, she got out and walked round to unlock the rear doors.
In the back of the van, Stella pulled one of the cartons closer. She took a box-cutter from the carrier bag and slid it under the edge of the duct tape holding the top flaps closed. A few minutes of careful sawing of the blade back and forth and she was able to lift the tape away from the cardboard. The flaps were glued as well as taped, as she’d suspected, and she eased her fingers under the flaps to break the seal with a series of sharp cracks. Then she was in.
Each pistol was individually packaged in a charcoal-grey, blow-moulded, plastic carrying case. From appearances, a member of the public might expect the cases to contain socket sets or some kind of cordless power tool. She lifted one case out by the handle, placed it on the lid of a second carton and unsnapped the catches.
A whiff of gun oil curled into her nostrils.
Snug in a shaped cut-out in the grey foam “egg box” padding was a brand-new Glock 17.
Unfired.
Unchecked.
Unregistered.
She could shoot whoever she wanted to with it, and nobody would be any the wiser about the murder weapon. As far as the entire world, bar some technicians in an Austrian factory, was concerned, this pistol didn’t even exist.
Next to it, in another tailored compartment cut into the foam, was a spare box magazine. A small plastic ziplock bag containing a pale grey cleaning cloth, a tiny bottle of gun oil, and a black-bristled bottle brush completed the hardware.
From the nylon holdall by her side, Stella withdrew the Glock she’d brought from Paddington Green for decommissioning and then saved from the grinder and the furnace. One of twenty-five on the original paperwork but now, essentially, a gun with no documented existence.
Its overall condition was immaculate. The underside of the barrel was marred by a few tiny scratches, and she found a minute nick on the rear of the grip, but other than these imperfections it looked box-fresh. Silently, Stella thanked the engineers and designers at Glock for their dedication. The firm’s much-vaunted quest for the perfect handgun had resulted in their products being manufactured from incredibly tough polymers that resisted damage better than most metals. Only the essential working parts like the barrel were still made from steel. She rubbed it down with the cleaning cloth and a little gun oil and then switched it for the new gun, which she placed into the holdall.
A few squirts of superglue and a length of new duct tape and the evidence of Stella’s tampering with the carton vanished.
“Who’s got a clever mummy, Lola?” she asked the empty air. Then she drove back to the station, stopping briefly at her house to leave the newly anonymous Glock in a kitchen drawer.
*
Back at Paddington Green, having phoned ahead, Stella was met at the rear door of the armoury by Hutchings and Nick Probert.
“Everything go okay?” Hutchings asked. “You were gone a lot longer than I expected.”
Stella nodded. “Uh-huh. Your friend at Frame’s a bit of a talker. Had me learning to shake hands with the Hound of the Baskervilles. Then the plane was delayed. Spent an hour reading magazines about freight handling. I tell you, there are some sad, sad people out there doing jobs you would never, in a million years, want to do. So, what do we do with this lot now?”
“First I book them in. Then we take them down to the range and test fire them. We photograph the slugs for the striations and log them on the database, then they just go on the racking until they’re needed.”
“Or five years goes by and they get turned into garden tools.”
Hutchings laughed. “They tell you that at Frame’s did they?”
“I like to learn, what can I say? Listen, I haven’t been as good as I should have been at keeping up with my firearms training. Why don’t you let me help with the test firing?” She looked around. Nick was inside the van, scanning barcodes on the shipping labels with his phone. She held her breath.
Hutchings grinned. “Why not? We can see how good your shooting is, can’t we?”
As they were unloading the Glocks from the cartons, Stella positioned herself with her back to the two men. Then she picked up a screwdriver and nicked the corner of the case containing the rogue pistol.
When all the weapons were unpacked and booked into the computer, and the cartons stamped flat and piled in a corner, Hutchings turned to Stella.
“We’ll do them in batches. Grab two cases and follow me down to the range.”
She walked over to the bench and casually selected the marked case, along with a second, then followed Hutchings out of the room.
At the firing range, they laid the six plastic cases in front of them along the plain wooden bench that ran the width of the room. The range was five metres wide by twenty long, with a low ceiling striped with neon tubes. At the far end, a set of black-and-white, paper “aggressor” targets stood waiting in frames, pointing weapons back towards the shooters’ bench. Hutchings spoke.
“We fire a handful of rounds from each pistol. Then I give the command, ‘stop firing’. We place our weapon down on the bench. Then we walk down to the end and retrieve the slugs from the ballistic foam behind the targets. You log the serial number of each weapon on the computer, photograph the round using the rig over there,” he pointed at a plinth-mounted, digital SLR pointing down towards a polished steel platen, “then log that with the same serial number to match it to the weapon. Hit ‘save’ and you’re onto the next weapon. Clear?”
“As mud,” Stella said.
Even with the black ear-defenders clamped over her head, the noise of the three Glocks firing unsuppressed in the concrete range was br
utally loud. Stella enjoyed the way the weapon fitted into her hand, and the recoil that jolted her wrists as each 9mm round exploded out of the muzzle with a huge bang and tore a hole in the
(hit and run driver)
aggressor snarling at her from the target. The sharp tang of burnt propellant and the hot brass smell of the spent cartridges tinkling round her boots made her smile.
“Stop firing!” Hutchings yelled. The guns fell silent.
Stella pulled her ear defenders off and laid them on the bench in front of her.
“Enjoy that, did you, DI Cole?”
“Loved it!” she answered. She really had.
They walked the length of the range and, using penknives, or in Nick’s case an impressive-looking hunting knife he produced from a sheath at his belt, dug the bullets out of the dense black foam that backed the targets.
Stella dawdled on the way back so she was last to reach the computer. Once the other two had logged their weapons, photographed the spent slugs and returned to the shooters’ bench to begin loading their second set of weapons, Stella approached the computer terminal.
She typed in the serial number stamped onto the right-hand side of the barrel.
MP151977UK
The form field turned red and an error message popped up on the screen.
WEAPON ALREADY REGISTERED
Her cheeks burned and her stomach flipped. How could you be so stupid? She looked over her shoulder, but Hutchings and his assistant were chatting as they thumbed rounds into the Glocks’ magazines.
She cleared the field and tried again.
1MP151977UK
The computer accepted this bogus serial number without a qualm. Thank Christ for free-text form fields.
She took the spent round to the camera, photographed it, then returned to the terminal. Under magnification, the striations where the six grooves cut into the inside of the barrel had marked the copper jacket of the bullet were as clear and defined as the furrows on a ploughed field.
