by Andy Maslen
Dressed all in black, Stella cut an unobtrusive, if severe, figure at King’s Cross Station. She paid cash for her ticket, queuing in line at a booth rather than using a machine. Twenty minutes after arriving, she slung her bag into the overhead rack and slumped down into her seat, facing backwards.
The wig itched, and she scratched at her scalp through the nylon mesh skullcap beneath the blonde hair. Her eyes were sore, and blinking only partially relieved the irritation. The girl in the tattoo shop where she’d bought the coloured contacts had recommended eye drops, “Murine, or something”, and now, Stella was grateful for the advice. She fished out the bottle from her jacket pocket, tilted her head back and squeezed a few drops into each eye, dabbing away the surplus with a paper tissue.
As the engine hummed into life some dozens of metres ahead of her seat, she relaxed, just a little. Keeping her cap on, she plugged a pair of cheap earbuds into her phone and closed her eyes. The audiobook’s narrator began reading to her – just like she and Richard used to read to Lola, even though they knew she couldn’t understand – and she allowed his deep, northern voice to insinuate itself into her brain.
“Call me Ishmael–” he began.
At some point after showing the guard her ticket, she dozed off. Passengers got on, sat next to her, got off again, and Stella slept on. In her dreams, the members of Pro Patria Mori sat ranged around her like a medieval court, bewigged and masked with black porcelain faces that ended in sharp-pointed beaks.
“State your name,” the tallest figure shouted at her from behind his mask.
“I have no name.”
“What do they call you?”
“They call me lost.”
“Lost?”
“Because I lost everything. You took them from me. You took her from me.”
“We can’t call you lost. State your name.”
“My name? Call me Ishmael. I am coming for you.”
A squat figure sitting to the first speaker’s left interrupted. It spoke with a woman’s voice. Well educated. Sarcastic. Cold.
“Really?” it drawled. “Let me remind you, it is you who is on trial here. Read her the charges.”
The figure on Stella’s extreme right spoke up from behind its mask. She noticed that the hands protruding from the sleeves of its snowy white robe were studded with thick, curling, black hairs.
“You are charged with being a bad mother. A disloyal wife. That you did wilfully and negligently endanger the lives of your baby daughter and husband. That you recklessly and with malice aforethought watched them die. Didn’t you, Stella? You watched. And you enjoyed it.”
“No!” she screamed, or tried to, although the noise that emerged from her constricted throat was little more than a whimper. “I was on duty. I couldn’t help.”
Another of the masked figures piped up. “Don’t interrupt! Us girls should know our place.”
The central figure stood and pounded its taloned fist down on the wooden bench. It shouted at her.
“You failed them! You should have been there for them. Now they’re burning still. Him and her.”
“There was nothing I could do. Please! Let me explain. I loved them.”
The figure shook its head. It turned to the right and waved a clawed hand at twelve blackened humanoid figures sitting crammed together inside the smoking ruin of a silver Fiat Mirafiori.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what is your verdict?”
Struggling to his feet, the jury foreman, smoke rising in greyish-green curls from the top of his split scalp, eyes criss-crossed by jagged red wounds, spoke:
“She did it. Guilty as sin, your honour. Foxy Moxey says so.” Black scraps of charred flesh tumbled free from the outstretched index finger that jabbed at Stella.
“Well, well. It seems we have a conviction,” the chief judge said, not bothering to conceal the satisfaction in his voice. “And as it’s sweet and right to die for your country …” He reached into a pocket and withdrew a square of blood-red silk, which he draped over his thinning silver hair so that one corner dangled between the eye slits of his beaked mask. “You will be taken from here to a place of execution, where we’ll cut your fucking head off, douse you in petrol and set you alight for all the boys and girls to see.”
Stella tried to speak, to remonstrate, but her lips were stuck together and she could feel the thin skin tearing as she fought to form the words. She stretched out her arms in supplication, but when she looked at them, they were the short, pudgy arms of a very young child. A toddler, really. Screaming soundlessly, she regarded them with horror as first the fingertips, then the soft, barely-lined palms, the wrists, forearms and upper arms scorched, split and smouldered into a dull orange glow before igniting with a soft pop like a distant balloon bursting.
Her strangled groan as she dragged herself out of the nightmare caused the elderly couple sitting opposite her to lean solicitously across the table.
“Are you all right, dear?” the woman asked, her papery skin mottled with beige liver spots. “You were talking in your sleep.”
Stella swiped her sleeve across her face, which was wet with tears and sweat. She straightened herself in her seat.
“I’m fine, thank you. Just a bad dream. Really. No problem.”
Still frowning, the woman sat back, although her husband was looking closely at Stella.
“Are you sure, you’re OK?” he asked. “You said ‘they killed her’. That was just before you woke up, wasn’t it, Marjorie?”
He turned to his wife for confirmation. The woman nodded.
“I said I’m fine,” Stella snapped. “Look, thanks for your concern, but let’s leave it. Please.”
She turned away and pressed her cheek to the cool glass of the carriage window, leaving the couple to their newspapers. Probably think I’m an ungrateful cow, when all they were doing was trying to help. She pulled her face away from the rain-streaked widow and turned to face the couple again.
“I’m sorry,” she said, in a much softer voice. “I have nightmares. Bad ones sometimes.”
“Army, are you, love?” the woman asked. “Only George and I read an article about how those poor boys and girls come back all knotted up inside. Psychologically, like. Didn’t we, George? Like Doreen’s Nick did last September.”
The man nodded.
From Waverley Station in the centre of Edinburgh, Stella caught a cab to the city’s outskirts then waited at the side of the road, thumb out. Perhaps because she was small, and not an obvious candidate for an article titled, “My Psycho Hitchhiker Tortured Me”, she managed to find a ride in under twenty minutes. It was a car transporter heading north with eight hatchbacks in different shades of silver and grey.
Two hours later, the transporter huffed and grumbled to a stop on the edge of a small village called Calvine. Set back from the road was a stone-built, slate-roofed house. A slate sign screwed to the gatepost announced that the owners of ‘Braemar’ took in guests for B&B and that they had vacancies.
Thanking the driver, Stella retrieved her bag from behind her seat and walked up the path to the front door. The landlady was all smiles and waved to the truck driver as the huge vehicle pulled away.
Formalities dealt with, Stella found herself in a large bedroom furnished with a four-poster bed, a small desk with a hard kitchen chair tucked underneath, a cheap flatpack wardrobe in some sort of wood-grain finish, and a matching chest of drawers. The small en suite bathroom smelled strongly of lavender, and indeed, a bunch of dried stalks of the herb stood in a purple glass on a shelf above the sink. The towels, flannel, liquid soap and curtains were all in matching shades of purple.
After a long, scalding-hot shower, Stella wrapped a bath towel around herself and went back to the bedroom to unpack her gear. The juxtaposition of her underwear and the array of weaponry struck her as funny and a short laugh escaped her throat. Then it died.
“I’m coming for you, Ramage,” she muttered, picking up the Glock and dropping the
magazine out of the butt with a practised flick of the release catch. First putting on the nitrile gloves she'd packed, she inserted seventeen of the hollow point rounds into the magazine, enjoying the way the spring resisted the pressure of her thumb before swallowing each new brass-jacketed round. When the magazine was full, she slid it back and pressed hard until the catch engaged with a soft clack.
The Hatton rounds caught her eye. “No good without something to fire them from, Stel,” a voice said from behind her right ear. She turned. In the wardrobe mirror she could see the other Stella. The cold-eyed one. The one with a sardonic smile on her red lips. “We passed a gun shop in the last town before this godforsaken place, did you notice?”
“Campbell’s Gunsmiths,” Stella said. “Halfway down the high street on the right-hand side. Tartan fascia, shotguns in the left display window, boots and jackets in the right.”
“Very good!” other-Stella replied, stepping out of the mirror and raising her hands to offer a gentle round of applause.
“First stop in the morning,” Stella said.
*
Back in London, Frankie O’Meara was having second thoughts. She was a good cop, and a good Catholic, and something about Stella’s behaviour had frightened her more than she was initially willing to admit. Whatever anyone had done to Stella and her family, and God alone knew it was sinful as well as criminal, taking the law into your own hands was crossing a line. A big, fat line, marked with blue-and-white police incident tape that snapped in the wind. A line that flashed with bright blue lights and emitted the screech of sirens if you got within spitting distance.
She hesitated for just a second outside Adam Collier’s office door, then straightened her back, hitched her trousers and knocked, smartly, three times.
“Come!” Collier called from beyond the varnished wood.
Frankie pushed open the door and went to stand in front of Collier’s desk.
“Sorry to interrupt you, sir.”
Looking up, Collier frowned. Then turned on his professional smile.
“Take a seat, Frankie. It looks as though there’s something you need to get off your chest.”
Frankie sat. “There is, sir. Something I really think you need to know about.”
“And that would be?”
“Oh. Sorry, sir. It’s Stel. I mean, DI Cole, sir.” Frankie was aware she was babbling. She wasn’t normally this easily flustered, but a night of broken sleep while she turned over her last conversation with Stella in her mind had frayed her nerves. She cleared her throat, touching the soft place between her collar bones where she knew a blush was creeping up towards her throat. “I think she’s going to do something,” she paused. What, Frankie? Stupid? Dangerous? Career-limiting? What? “I think she’s going to do something that might not be the best course of action, sir,” she finished. It even sounded lame to her as the words left her lips, which, annoyingly, had begun to tremble.
Collier leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers and placing their tips under his chin. He pursed his lips.
“Is she going to join the Communist Party? Or buy a more powerful motorbike? Or start dating a witness? They would all, in my opinion, not be the best course of action for a serving police officer.”
“No, sir. Of course not.”
“Well, spit it out for goodness sake. I have work to do here.” With a sweep of his hand he indicated a slew of papers that covered his desk. “As you can see.”
“I think she’s going to kill someone, sir!” Frankie blurted, feeling, as she did so, the hot blush storming up her neck.
Now she had Collier’s attention. He leaned towards her across the desk.
“Explain. Now. Quickly and clearly.”
“She told me she’d found out who killed Richard and Lola, sir. Who really did it. Because Edwin Deacon was just the fall guy. I asked her if she was going to do anything stupid, and she said she was just gathering intelligence.”
Collier’s dark-brown eyes stayed locked onto hers. His face was expressionless.
“Did she tell you any names? Or how she’d tracked them down?”
“No, sir. She’s not going to get into trouble over this, is she, sir? I mean, she’s still grieving, obviously. Probably it’s depression. She needs help, sir.”
Collier frowned. “Let’s save the amateur psychology for when we can talk to DI Cole again. You did the right thing, Frankie. Thank you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to make some calls. Urgently.”
Relieved of her burden, Frankie heaved a great sigh, levered herself out of the chair and left the office.
*
Collier scrolled through his contacts and called a woman named Lucy Van Houten. She was a serving member of SCO19, and a decorated one at that. She was also an unofficial resource for Pro Patria Mori. It was she who had helped the group deal with the prostitute attempting to blackmail Leonard Ramage.
“Yes, sir?”
“I have another job for you.”
“Of course, sir. Anything. When and where? Target identity?”
“Now. Scotland. A woman called Stella Cole. Though I suspect she’s using the alias Stephanie Black.”
“With respect, sir, Scotland’s a big place. I need a location,” she said.
“Of course, you do,” he snapped. “I was coming to that.” Then, realising her particular personality defect meant she neither understood other people’s emotions, nor displayed a great deal of her own, he softened his tone. “Forgive me, Lucy. Under pressure here.”
“That’s perfectly OK, sir. I understand.”
He doubted she did, but continued nonetheless.
“I want you to get yourself to a place north of Edinburgh. Today. It’s a house called Craigmackhan, I’ll text you GPS coordinates. It belongs to the man you saw with the prostitute the other day. You set up and wait. She’s going to kill him. Once she’s done it, you put her down, then leave the scene. Understand?”
“I understand, sir. I’ll have to fly. What about my rifle?”
“You can’t take a weapon with you, it will raise too many flags. There’s a gun shop in the town nearest to the house, Pitlochry. Leonard, I mean the owner, took me there once. Get yourself whatever you need.”
“Understood, sir. Will it be all right if I claim for it on expenses?”
Collier sighed. “Yes, of course. Keep all your receipts.”
“I always do, sir, you know that.”
“Oh, one other thing.”
“Yes, sir?”
“She’s a serving police officer. A DI. That going to be a problem?”
“Is she an opponent of our aims, sir?”
“Effectively, yes.”
“Then, no it’s not, sir. Not at all.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
A Dead Child Buys Guns
AFTER A BREAKFAST of porridge with cream and a dash of Scotch over the top, followed by bacon, eggs, grilled tomatoes and some odd, but delicious, square potato pancakes, Stella thanked her landlady and walked into the centre of the village to find a taxi. Tucked away behind the village store was a single minicab office – James Duggan Taxi. Finding nobody behind the counter, Stella looked around, wondering whether she could use her ID to persuade some obliging local to ferry her into Pitlochry, but decided against it. As she turned to go, an elderly man came up beside her, walking a dachshund.
“Looking for Jim, were you, dear?”
“Yes, I need a cab.” As opposed to an airship. Idiot.
“He’ll be on a job. Probably the school run. He takes little Holly Baylis in every day. He’ll be back in a wee while, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Stella thanked the old gent for his information and strode off, heading out of the village, intending to return in an hour.
An hour and fifteen minutes later, she returned to find the office manned by a young guy in a red, black and yellow tartan shirt and a cable-knit cardigan in thick, oatmeal-coloured wool.
Forty minutes after that, she stepped out onto the pa
vement in Pitlochry’s high street, a few doors down from the gunsmith’s. She turned away from Campbell’s and sought out a smaller shop sandwiched between a pharmacy and a newsagent. She went in and bought what she needed, then walked back up the street.
She stopped, made one final, nervous, check that the document she’d stamped and signed at Paddington Green was there, folded in the inside top pocket of her jacket, then walked the final twenty yards and pushed through the door to the interior of Campbell’s. A brass bell above the door jangled on its steel spring.
Inside, the shop smelled like the armoury at her station. Gun oil, steel, brass and a faint but unmistakable whiff of gunpowder. Overlaying the hard, machine-made smells was a softer, more organic aroma: leather polish. She wandered around, getting her bearings. A woman was pulling on a pair of shiny black, knee-high riding boots while a pretty brunette of seventeen or eighteen in a pleated skirt and a white blouse looked on. Two portly gentlemen in superbly tailored outdoor gear – plus fours and matching waistcoats and jackets in a pale, sage-green tweed – were laughing loudly with a young male shop assistant as they examined some fly fishing rods. A chocolate-and-white springer spaniel lying at their feet wore a matching tweed coat. It raised its head and sniffed at Stella’s calf as she squeezed past the group.
To the left of the door was the area that really interested Stella. Behind a wood-framed counter, topped with an inset sheet of thick glass, was a wooden rack holding a couple of dozen long guns. Shotguns, rifles, even a handful of air guns on the far right of the rack. Under the glass, she could see boxes of shells, circular tins of lead pellets for the air guns, and a small selection of hunting and skinning knives, their steel blades gleaming dully in the light from the overhead pendant lamps. A stuffed and mounted stag’s head regarded her morosely from a space between two of the shotguns, as if to say, “I only stepped out to get something to eat and now look at me.” The thought made Stella smile.
A young man, maybe twenty-five, emerged from a doorway to the right of the counter. He was dressed in a sleeveless Fair Isle pullover in pinks, purples and browns, with a white shirt beneath, its sleeves bunched up against silver armbands like an old-time barman in a speakeasy. His eyes were a dark brown, almost black, and they were fringed with long, dark lashes.
