by Andy Maslen
“How’s it going with Tasha?” Stella asked between mouthfuls of the curry.
He pulled a face, twisting his mouth sideways as if he’d bitten on something hard and hit a filling.
“Honestly? Not good. She’s got our bedroom, and I’m sleeping downstairs.”
“You think you’ll patch it up?”
“Probably not. We were only nineteen when we got married. Used to go out with each other at school. She stuck with me through the army, moving around, living on base, but I think whatever we had, we haven’t got any more.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m not exactly a choirboy, am I?” He grinned at her then, that boyish expression that had probably got him out of all kinds of scrapes in his life, from footballs kicked through neighbours’ windows to improperly polished boots.
“What about work?”
“Same old, same old. Keeping the Cowboys and Indians happy with their toys, you know how it is.”
“You ever hear any of them talking about what they do with all those toys?”
He shrugged.
“A little. Not much. They’re all grim and grit on the way out and sort of high on adrenaline when they come back. If someone’s discharged their weapon, it’s like, ‘Yeah! Saw action today!’ and then, ‘Shit! Now the paperwork begins.’ So, they’re mostly just in and out.” He took a mouthful of the fish. “Why do you ask”?
“Nothing. Just always wondered whether I should have gone down that route.”
He shook his head. “It’s not as glamorous as they like to make out. Mostly it’s sitting around waiting for shit to go down. In the army, we used to call it ‘standing by to stand by’. You know, like we say, ‘hurry up and wait’. That and a lot of practice on the range and safety briefings.”
“So, just for the sake of argument, supposing you wanted to make a movie.”
“OK.”
“A movie where there was like a rogue set of firearms officers who set up a death squad.”
His eyes narrowed. “In London, do you mean, or in America?”
She looked up at the ceiling and made a show of deciding. “Let’s say London. Why should the Yanks get all the fun? Could they use the weapons from the armoury, or would they need to get, I don’t know, untraceable ones?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Ammunition. Lots.
DANNY PUT HIS fork down. Stared at her long and hard. “No armourer worth his badge would let weapons get signed out for anything like that. Never.”
“But how would you know? If they came with the right paperwork, signed by a commander, you’d issue the weapons on the requisition form, wouldn’t you?”
“I suppose so. But all our weapons are logged, and we photograph the striations. You remember, you helped. So, it wouldn’t exactly be hard to find the weapon and trace it back to the police. Not very smart.”
She pursed her lips. “I guess not. Although if the commander was running the death squad, they could just steer the investigation in the wrong direction, couldn’t they? Lose the ballistics report or corrupt it somehow?”
He finished his food and placed his knife and fork together, dead centre, running north-south across the smeared plate.
“What’s going on, Stel? Why are you asking about death squads?”
“Just making conversation,” she said, brightly. “Another beer?”
“Sure. Let me help you clear up.”
As they cleared the table, Stella kept probing.
“You have to admit, though, there are times when putting some of those fuckers we’re hunting under the ground would be satisfying. A lot cheaper than dragging them through the courts only to see them let off by a bunch of idiots in the jury box.”
“You really think that?” Danny was frowning now. He’d stopped helping and was standing with his hands on the table, leaning towards her.
“No, of course not! But I mean, you never took people to court in the army, did you? Not the enemy. Kill or be killed, wasn’t it?”
“Listen. I served my country, OK? I did what had to be done. Yes, it was us or them. But there are still rules. It’s called the Law of War. Like, you can’t deliberately kill civilians. Or prisoners. Or use torture, despite what sometimes happens. And anyway, this isn’t war. It’s policing. You swear to uphold the law, not take it into your own hands.”
Stella held her hands up in mock-surrender.
“No, you’re right. Sorry. I’ve just been going mad down in the basement and started fantasising about shooting Reg the Veg and it sort of spiralled from there.”
“Well, now you mention it, if we’re talking about offing people at Paddington Green, I’ve got my own list. Maybe you and me should start our own private death squad.”
He laughed.
Stella laughed too.
Later, after the sex, Stella lay awake, listening to Danny’s breathing. Long, steady inhalations and exhalations. No snoring. No snuffling. No talking in his sleep. Not even a twitch. She prodded him on the shoulder, just above a tattoo of a bulldog standing on its hind legs and holding a flag of St George, the red cross on the white ground fluttering realistically. He didn’t move. She whispered his name close to his exposed left ear. Nothing. But then, after four lagers and a couple of large whiskies, one of which had a crumbled sleeping pill in it, that was only to be expected.
She checked the clock radio on her side of the bed. One thirty a.m.
She lay on her belly and slid her legs out wide to the right, letting their weight pull her torso out from under the duvet until she was kneeling at the side of the bed. She dressed, making no noise, and twirled an elastic band around her hair to fasten it into her usual ponytail. Danny’s leather jacket hung on the back of a simple wooden chair next to her vintage, white-painted dressing table. She’d noticed the way the right-hand pocket bulged and decided that was where he’d have his work keys. Two long, silent strides took her to the chair. Keeping her gaze fixed on his sleeping form, she reached down sideways and poked the fingers of her left hand into the pocket. They closed around cold, metal keys. Right first time! Have a gold detective’s sticker.
Danny’s ID card was next. She found his wallet in an inside pocket and slid out the scuffed rectangle of white plastic. Should have been a dip, Stel!
With keys and card clamped in her hand, she stole to the door, took one quick final look at Danny and then stepped through. She made her way downstairs, where she pulled on her bike boots and grabbed her helmet, and was out through the door moments later.
With the keys and ID card zipped into the inside pocket of her jacket, she rode fast through the night-time streets. London is never quiet, but the traffic was mostly taxis and commercial stuff. Easy enough to wind through and around, filtering down the outside of the queues at traffic lights. She reached Paddington Green just before two.
Keeping to the shadows to avoid the station’s CCTV cameras, she swiped Danny’s ID at the staff entrance – so any Professional Standards snoops would only see his details on the access records – and was inside. She headed towards the armoury, running on her toes and looking left and right at every turn in the corridor. Nobody was about. Anyone on duty would either be out on patrol or in the CID Office. Budget cuts meant civilian police staff were kept to an absolute minimum overnight, and she reached the reinforced door to the armoury without seeing another soul.
Now for the only tricky bit of the whole operation.
Rules and regulations stipulated that the armoury, as a ‘mission-critical’ function of the station, was to be permanently staffed, 24/7, three hundred sixty-five days of the year. After all, it wasn’t as if armed robbers said, “We can’t do the job on Monday – it’s a bank holiday.”
She paused at a turn in the corridor just before it opened out into a small rectangle of space that accommodated the lifts from the other floors, and the door to the armoury itself. Peering round the corner, she could see the two assistant armourers wandering back and forth beyond the barr
ed window.
She withdrew her head, backed up a few feet and then slammed her elbow into a fire alarm’s glass window.
The effect was textbook. As the electronic klaxons hooted, the door to the armoury opened, and the two men came out. The second one through turned and locked it before they walked at a smart clip, past the lift doors to the stairwell at the far end of the corridor. Stella ran to the door, checked the make of the lock, and selected the only key that matched it.
She knew she had to be fast. Emergency services would probably have a link to the armoury’s fire alarm. There could even be a lockdown.
Inside, she jogged past the racks of long and short weapons, the pistols, rifles, shotguns, submachine guns and all the rest, and headed straight for the shelves of ammunition. With the klaxon blaring and her heart racing, she stood in front of the shelf she’d earmarked on her previous visit. She was staring at hundreds of boxes of 9mm ammunition. Shelf-edge labels divided the ammunition into ‘FMJ’ and ‘HP’. Full metal jacket and hollow point. She lifted down two boxes marked HP, rearranged the remaining boxes so that the gap moved to the very back of the shelf, stuffed them into her rucksack and moved away. She’d heard Danny talking about six-weekly audits. “Like a stocktake,” he’d said. The audit was supposed to ensure that the equipment listed on the computer matched what was actually present on the shelves. But that was somebody else’s problem. As she was leaving, a second shelf-edge label caught her eye.
HATTON ROUNDS
Danny had said they were what the tactical entry teams used to blow the hinges and locks off doors they wanted to get through. Stella reckoned she could bluff or charm her way into Ramage’s house, but what if he had a panic room? Or just barricaded himself in somewhere before she could deal with him properly? She grabbed a box, did another camouflage job, and was on her way.
The following morning, she made Danny breakfast: bacon and eggs, toast and coffee, and more or less shoved him out the door at seven fifteen.
Back inside, she climbed the stairs, went into her bedroom and closed the curtains. She fished her rucksack out from under the chair where Danny’s jacket had so recently hung and dumped its contents onto the bed. The three boxes of ammunition were heavy enough to make the mattress bounce a little before they settled into the soft embrace of the duvet.
Next came the Glock, which she’d placed in a shoe box at the bottom of her wardrobe. It smelled of gun oil and the metallic, industrial stink of the armoury: burnt propellant, steel, brass and sweat. She dropped the magazine from the butt into her left palm and placed it, and the pistol, side by side on the bed.
She slit the tape securing the lid on one of the boxes of 9mm ammunition. The hollow point rounds inside were almost comical in their physical insignificance. She’d taken multivitamins that were almost as large. She rolled it on her palm: a slim brass cylinder no longer than the top joint of her little finger, tipped with a snub-nosed cone of copper-covered lead. Except that the bullet wasn’t completely covered, was it?
The copper sheath ended in a sunken pit of pale, silvery-grey lead, like the pupil of an eye. Danny, and firearms instructors before him, had explained all about that innocent-looking lead eye. How, on impact, the copper sheath would split along four precisely cut grooves and splay outwards like the petals of a flower. And how the lead, freed from its jacket, would flatten and deform as its kinetic energy searched for a way out. Hollow points were supposed to be beneficial because they didn’t pass through the target’s body, so they couldn’t injure a member of the public. And to that extent, they worked. They weren’t so beneficial to the target, however, bouncing around and travelling a random path through muscle, bone, blood vessels and organ tissue, creating a monstrous wound cavity as they slewed to a stop. Shouldn’t carry a shooter, then, should you? Stella thought.
She picked up the round and pointed it at her own eye, rolling it between her thumb and forefinger. She let her mouth fall open a little and stroked the bullet along her lower lip. Then across her top lip. She pressed them together then. “You’ll do,” she whispered.
From the kitchen, she fetched a tea towel and a pair of thin latex gloves she used when she was chopping chillis. Back in her bedroom, she put the gloves on and used the towel to clean the rounds she’d handled.
Using her thumb, she pushed a round home into the magazine against the resistance of the spring. She worked another sixteen rounds into the rectangular plastic box, then slotted it home into the butt and pushed it all the way in until it latched with a double click.
The plastic grip felt cool in her hand as she picked up the pistol.
Curling her right index finger around the outside of the trigger guard, as she’d been taught, she extended her arm and sighted along the barrel, aiming at a print of a tiger, shown in profile, that hung above her bed.
Keeping both eyes open, as she’d been taught, she aligned the front and rear sights on the tiger’s left eye.
Then she uncurled her index finger from the guard, brought it inside, and, not as she’d been taught, rested it on the trigger. The instructor’s words came back to her, synchronised with her breathing. “If you’re touching the trigger, it’s because you’re going to shoot,” he’d said.
No, she wasn’t going to shoot. Not yet, anyway.
She dropped the magazine out again and thumbed every single one of the seventeen rounds back out and onto the duvet. She remembered the end of the argument between Danny and his assistant, about storing magazines. Empty was best long-term, Danny had said, because storing it full meant the spring could settle slightly and fail to push a new round cleanly into the chamber, causing a misfire. Stella wasn’t planning on storing the Glock long-term. She had plans to use it as soon as she was able. But she didn’t want anything to impede her operation, so out they came.
Next, she turned to the white cardboard box of Hatton rounds. It was labelled with several lines of crude black capitals. The only set that interested Stella read:
CLUCAS: HATTON ROUNDS (DOOR BREACHING) FIVE (5)
She opened the flap with her thumbnail and tipped the shells out onto the bed. They were much bigger than the hollow points, but just as unremarkable. Translucent plastic cylinders, flat at the top and set into a brass base. She could see the powder and lead projectile through the translucent plastic casing.
“What are they for, Mummy?”
Stella dropped the shotgun shells and spun round on the bed, heart jumping in her chest.
The little girl sitting upright on the bed behind Stella couldn’t have been more than eighteen months old. Brown hair, the same hue as Stella’s. Brown eyes. But something behind those eyes was older than it ought to have been.
Stella’s breath was coming in shallow gasps.
Stars were flicking and worming around the periphery of her vision.
A memory. But Lola was just a baby.
“Lola, is that you?”
The toddler smiled.
“Of course I’m me, silly! What are the breaching rounds for?”
Stella groaned instead of speaking. Ripping off the gloves, she screwed her eyes tight against the vision. Pounded her forehead with her fists. Then opened her eyes again. The figure of the little girl had gone. Stella scrambled across the bed and ran her flat palm across the duvet. No dent. No warmth. She bent her head to the place where Lola-not-Lola had been sitting. No smell.
Nothing.
Now she wept. Great, wrenching sobs. Curling into a foetal position, she let the grief overwhelm her, once again, until, drained, she slept.
*
Figuring after his dance of death with the Salmonella virus Reg would be sympathetic to a plea of illness, Stella called him the next morning.
“Reg, it’s Stella. I must have eaten some dodgy curry last night. I’m not coming in. Hope you can manage without me.”
“Sorry to hear that, Stel. The old Montezuma’s Revenge, eh? The old Aztec Two-step. Well, I’ve been there, my love, as you know. Take as much time
as you need, and we don’t need to involve those munchkins in occie health or HR either, do we? What happens in the exhibits room stays in the exhibits room, eh?”
“Right. And Reg?”
“What?
“Thanks.”
Stella showered, dressed and ate breakfast of toast and coffee, then made more coffee and took it through to her own, private, incident room. She called up the list of five Bentley owners that Robin Brooke had given her. Barney Riordan’s details were highlighted in yellow. She was due to meet him for lunch today at the Fulham ground. Shit! She’d arranged to leave with Daisy the exhibits room assistant at eleven from Paddington Green.
She picked up her phone.
Five minutes later, she’d agreed to a much better arrangement. Daisy was going to pick her up from Ulysses Road in her own car and drive them both to Craven Cottage on Stevenage Road.
“Now for the rest of you,” she said to the list on her screen.
She dragged Riordan's details to the bottom of the list and then called the name at the top. The phone was answered at once.
“Hello?”
“Mark Easton?” Stella asked.
“Yes, this is he.” The voice was cultured, deep, and bearing not even a hint of suspicion at this unidentified caller’s intrusion into his morning.
“This is Detective Inspector St–” No! Alias. Now. You already gave Riordan your name, which was a mistake. “Stephanie Black, with the Metropolitan Police, Mr Easton. I need to ask you a few questions.”
“I have a meeting in five minutes, Detective Inspector, so it will have to be quick, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll do my best, sir. At this stage a couple of questions will do. Can I ask, are you the registered owner of a Bentley painted in a special-order colour called Viola del diavolo?”
