by Andy Maslen
I paid you. You’re staying.
Not enough. We’re going.
*
Lucy watched with mild interest as the three men argued. It had been a good shot, and she was impressed by the other woman’s marksmanship. She recognised the silver-haired man now, and wondered whether the detective would kill him now or go in close to do it personally.
*
Ramage laid a restraining hand on the unwounded man’s right arm as he was bending to help his friend. He shook it free and pushed Ramage hard in the chest, sending him staggering back. Ramage turned and ran back into the house. Moments later, the men were inside the Land Rover and it was slewing around on the gravel, its rough-treaded tyres gouging four dark-brown curves through to the earth beneath, before roaring off back the way it had come and, Stella assumed, to hospital. The cover story would be easy enough to imagine. A stray bullet from a hunter while they were hiking.
Stella pulled the bolt back to eject the brass casing. It leapt from the action with a metallic ping. She’d worked enough crime scenes, read enough ballistics reports, hell, she’d read enough thrillers, to know that professionals never left their brass behind. She followed the twinkling, golden, metal cylinder as it flipped into the bracken, but as she moved to start searching for it, other-Stella offered her a piece of advice.
“Leave it. It doesn’t matter. The gun’s registered to a dead kid from the seventies. The brass won’t tell them anything.”
“Fair enough. Let's get down there."
*
Ramage had probably locked and bolted the heavy front door from the inside. Stella knew she would have done exactly same, faced with the imminent arrival of an armed intruder. Wanting to be as unencumbered as possible, she laid the Blaser in the bracken, bent some dry stalks over it, then walked down to the house with the shotgun in her hand.
The front door had two locks about a foot apart. One, a standard five-lever mortice, the other a more expensive Ingersoll. Tough for an opportunist thief to deal with, not so much for a determined police officer armed with a door-breaching shotgun.
She aimed at the Ingersoll first, keeping the Winchester’s muzzle a couple of inches back from the steel, and pulled the trigger. Bang. The recoil wasn’t too bad. Just a hard shove into her right shoulder. Then the mortice. Bang. Then she loosed off four more of the Hatton rounds to take out the hinges and any frame bolts locking the door into the frame.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
The semi-automatic action worked sweetly, propelling a new round into the chamber with each shot fired. Maybe five seconds had elapsed. Not exactly world record-breaking, but it did the job. Each of the Hatton rounds blew a six-inch diameter hole in the timber, showering Stella with chips of burnt wood that smelled of bonfires.
She leaned back and kicked the door at waist height. The massive slab of oak fell away from her, slamming onto a stone-tiled hallway with a crash, softened only marginally by the fast-escaping cushion of air pushed down and away by the two square metres of oak planking.
“Ramage!” she yelled, stepping over the fallen door and onto the hall’s polished herringbone parquet floor.
No reply, but then she hadn’t really been expecting one.
“Sir Leonard?” she called again, this time in a singsong voice as if they were engaged in an adults-only game of hide-and-seek. One where the loser was likely to end up with his brains splattered over the ceiling. “Remember me? It’s Stephanie Black here. Only I’m back to Stella Cole now. Well, technically I’m Jennifer Stadden, but it’s me anyway. You murdered my family. With your car. Now I’ve come for you.”
Striding around the ground floor, she pushed the doors of each room she came to with the muzzle of the Winchester. They were opulently furnished with huge, deep-red Turkish carpets on which stood sideboards, bookcases and chairs carved from richly figured woods in shades of dark chocolate-brown, a dark red that could only be mahogany, and golden honey. Buttoned leather sofas in cherry-red and bottle-green faced each other in front of huge stone fireplaces filled with dry logs, or, in one room, a vast arrangement of dried flowers including great swags of the local purple heather. Standing like a forgotten sentry at the foot of the stairs was a suit of armour complete with seven-foot-long pikestaff.
The house smelled of furniture polish, a strong, sickly perfume; she wondered how Ramage could bear it. After completing a search of the ground floor, she concluded he must have run for the top floor. Hell, there might even be an attic. The stairway beckoned. It rose from the centre of the hall, directly opposite the now-ruined front door. The architect had designed it so that it appeared to rise, unsupported, to the first floor. There were no cupboards behind it, just a couple of narrow wooden columns.
First, she adjusted the Glock; it was digging into the flesh at the small of her back. Gripping the Winchester in one hand, she began to climb, pausing on each step as she scanned the upper hallway, which ran in a square above the hall below. The stairs were well made – silent – so it was easy to listen for movement on the next floor. Then, on her seventh step, the tread beneath her foot emitted a loud squeak. She flinched and swore. She waited longer this time but heard nothing, and continued.
At the top of the stairs, she pulled out the Glock. Leaning the Winchester against a bureau for a second or two, she racked the pistol’s slide then continued, one weapon in each hand in the gloom at the end of the hall. Her breathing was fast and shallow and she was tensed, ready to shoot if Ramage should show so much as a whisker in the crack of a bedroom door. She wasn’t scared. The feeling was more of a heightened sense of readiness, a lioness closing in on a kill.
She stopped at the first door on the right. Stuck the Glock into her waistband, at the front this time. Twisted the brass knob while standing to one side so her body was protected from any outbound fire by the wall. No shot came, so she plucked the Glock out and, holding it level with her eyeline, pushed the door open with her foot.
Still nothing, so she went in at a crouch, pistol aimed upwards, shotgun at a matching angle. The room was a bedroom. Not the master bedroom, to judge by the plainly dressed double bed and serviceable but unmemorable wooden furniture standing around the edge of the room. Stella scanned the four walls. No more doors, no en suite bathroom where a cornered householder might be waiting with a weapon of his own.
She retreated and walked on another eight feet to a second door. She repeated the process with the knob and the tactical entry. Another guest bedroom. Another empty guest bedroom.
At the third door, she sighed and reached for the knob. Another brass sphere, this one engraved with three concentric circles around its waist.
Already imagining the empty room beyond, Stella twisted and pushed the ball of cold metal, shifting her weight forward as she did so to make a fast entry into the room beyond the door.
Her forehead banged into the unmoving door with a soft clonk.
The door was locked.
She backed up, stuck the Glock away and raised the Winchester to her hip, pointing it at the lock.
“Are you in there, Ramage?” she shouted. “Is this your hidey-hole?”
The Winchester roared.
The Hatton round punched a fist-sized hole in the door’s midline that took out the lock.
Silver-grey smoke curled out of the shotgun’s muzzle. The air was full of the sharp smell of gunpowder, mixed with the sweet, sawdust smell of freshly exposed wood. But of Ramage there was no sign. No fusillade of shots peppering the inside of the door. No screams for mercy. No breaking glass as he jumped through the first-floor window.
Faster than the previous time, Stella blasted away at the hinges and corresponding sites high and low on the lock side of the door. Her ears rang with the explosions, and her nose itched as the tang of the burnt propellant irritated its soft lining.
This door fell inwards on its own with a deep whuff onto a thick jade-green and rose-pink Chinese carpet.
<
br /> And there
(you)
he
(murdered)
stood
(my family.)
In the centre of the carpet, clutching a shotgun and fumbling two shells into the barrels, was the man who had destroyed Stella Cole’s family, and with them, her sanity.
A faint whisper made her pause for a second. Are we the same as them now, Stella? She shook her head. “They made me like this,” she whispered.
She brought the Glock up and shot him in the right bicep.
Blood spurted out of the wound as the hollow point slammed home.
Ramage screamed and dropped the shotgun, clamping his left hand over his injured arm.
“That worked well. Let’s do the other arm as well,” other-Stella said with a smile. “And forget about the cases. You loaded it with gloves on, didn't you?"
The flat crack of the Glock smacked out again and Ramage’s other arm sprayed blood back against the wall. He was retreating now, eyes wide with pain and shock. His white shirt sleeves were soaking with blood, but there didn’t seem to be any actual fountains of blood, so the brachial arteries were obviously intact. That was good, because Stella didn’t feel like giving this … this creature first aid.
*
Lucy had been waiting patiently for some time now. She’d listened to the shotgun blasting away at the front door and then an internal door. Felt herself becoming aroused at the thought of what was about to happen.
She watched through the scope as the detective aimed the Glock at the silver-haired man. Slowed her breathing. And centred the cross-hairs on the woman’s left temple, just as she had with the tart.
The woman fired twice. Not a double-tap. Too slow. Probably one to the body and a coup de grâce to the head.
Lucy readied herself for her own shot.
*
Ramage’s back made contact with the dark wooden panelling behind him and he stood, legs trembling, his arms limp at his sides, blood dripping from his fingertips and pooling on the carpet.
“You can’t just kill me,” he said, panting as the adrenaline constricted his chest muscles. “You’re a police officer. You’ll go to jail. Kiss your job goodbye, and your police pension too.”
“You’re a High Court judge. It didn’t stop you, did it?” Stella retorted, pointing the Glock’s smoking muzzle at his face.
“That was an accident!” he squealed.
“Then why didn’t you report it? Why did you set up that half-wit Edwin Deacon to take the fall for you?”
“I was frightened,” he blurted through bloodless lips. “The media would have had a field day. You know what those jackals are like.”
“Yes. I do. In fact, I’m friends with one of them. Someone sent her a nasty message, wrapped round a brick. That wouldn’t have been one of your little chums, would it? One of your,” here it comes, Stel, get your comic timing right, “Pro Patria Mori friends, warning her off?”
Ramage’s face had already taken on a deathly pallor, but she could have sworn it paled still further. He blinked rapidly.
“Wh-what do you mean, Pro Pat–”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Sir Leonard. Don’t insult my intelligence. I know about your little crew of vigilantes. How do you think the media’ll like that story?”
*
Lucy took up first pressure on the trigger.
*
“Fine,” he said and she saw him try to raise his arms in a placatory gesture. His palms opened up, but the arms swung uselessly at his sides and he yelped with pain. Blood dripped more freely off his fingertips onto the carpet. “But then, if you know what we do, what we stand for, surely you can understand that we’re doing good. We’re actually helping you.”
Stella heard a snap inside her head, an electric shock in her brain. She shot him again, this time in the right knee. The brass cartridge case bounced off a Tiffany shade on a table lamp – plink – and skittered away underneath a nearby roll-top desk.
Ramage screamed again and collapsed sideways, banging his head on the corner of the desk as he went down. He ended up in an untidy heap, slumped sideways and folded at the waist, with his neck bent where his head rested against the side of the desk. His trouser leg had exploded outwards at the knee when the hollow point round hit the patella, smashing it and the ligaments and joint beyond. Fresh blood blossomed through the ridges of the fabric, turning the colour from rose to an angry red that, were it a sunrise, would herald the worst kind of day for shepherds.
*
Lucy kept both eyes open, despite the scope. She was enjoying managing the images of the two differently-sized women. The tiny one in her left eye and the large one, so close Lucy could reach out and touch her, in the right.
*
A triangular cut had opened on Ramage’s right temple. It was bleeding freely: a delta of scarlet streams running down his cheek, along his jawbone, over his neck and into the collar of his shirt.
“Such a lot of claret, Stel. Careful. We don’t want him bleeding out before we’re done with him, do we?”
Stella turned to other-Stella. “He won’t bleed out. They’re bad, but they’re not going to kill him.”
Ramage gaped. “Who are you talking to?”
“Me? Nobody.”
“But you, you were just talking to somebody. Are you wired up, is that it?”
Stella bestowed a pitying smile on Ramage, much as one would if speaking to a particularly stupid child.
“This isn’t official business, Sir Leonard. I didn’t do all of this just to arrest you, you stupid prick. Have you forgotten? You killed my husband. You murdered him. And my poor baby too. Lola, her name was. Did you even know that? She was five months old when you killed her. Do you know how she died?”
*
“Any moment now,” Lucy whispered, squeezing the trigger a little more with each passing second.
*
Ramage shook his head. He did know, though. How could he not have known? He’d read the papers. He’d even arranged to read the pathologist’s report, though it had started the nightmares where the burnt and bleeding baby clamoured for him to hold her, and his fingers popped through the crackling, blackened flesh like so much bubble wrap.
“I think he does,” other-Stella said. “I think he knows exactly how she died.”
“So do I,” Stella said. She turned to Ramage whose eyelids were fluttering. “She was strapped into her car seat. The petrol tank ignited. Richard died instantly. But my Lola … you burned her alive!”
*
Now. Lucy squeezed off the shot. The rifle jerked back into her shoulder, and the explosion echoed off the stone wall of the house with a double crack.
*
Stella lunged violently towards Ramage and shoved the barrel of the Glock hard against his mouth, splitting his lower lip and smashing a couple of his lower incisors. “She burnt to death, you fuck!” she screamed into his face.
At the same moment in time, Lucy Van Houten’s .308 calibre, copper-jacketed Winchester round burst through the window, showering Stella’s back with fragments of glass. The space where her head had been was penetrated by the copper-jacketed bullet, which flashed through the Stella-shaped absence and buried itself in the wall opposite.
Aware of, yet unable to process, the explosion of sound and stinging specks of shattered glass, Stella continued across the short gap between her and Ramage and hit him hard across the side of the head with the Glock. Ramage’s head lolled forward as consciousness deserted him.
Now she turned. Now she registered the broken window, and the twinkling fragments of glass and scraps of lead on the carpet.
The other Englishwoman! She must be here. A PPM shooter sent to silence me.
Stella used thick cable ties to bind Ramage’s wrists together around a pipe beneath a huge cast-iron radiator.
“Stay there,” she whispered. “I’m not done with you yet.”
*
“Shit!” Lucy Van Houten said. “I mi
ssed. I never miss.”
She stood and brushed the leaves and bracken fragments off her tactical outfit, then started walking towards the house.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Hunter/Hunted
STELLA DROPPED TO her belly and crawled away from Ramage. She kept her hands off the glass-strewn carpet, using her elbows, knees and feet to propel herself to the doorway. Once she reached the fallen door, she got to her hands and knees, covered the last six feet in a second or two and was out into the hallway. She darted along to the neighbouring room and went in. It was a guestroom, though clearly unused for many years, as the furniture was covered with sheets, giving the room an air of being occupied by ghosts. The floor-length, plum-coloured velvet curtains were drawn. She crossed the room in a handful of long strides, knelt by the window, and inched back the right-hand curtain from the side, rather than the centre.
Peering out through the narrow slit she’d created, she saw the shooter approaching the house. It was a woman, five-six maybe, and stocky. Blonde hair tucked under a black baseball cap with POLICE stencilled across the front in white. Fuck, Stel. They’ve sent the Cowboys and Indians after us.
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” other-Stella said. “It looks like a single cowboy. Oh wait, it’s a cowgirl. Not very pretty is she?”
The face under the baseball cap was pale, even under the shadow cast by the long peak. Slabby was the word that sprang into Stella’s mind. The details weren’t clear, but she could see wide, flat cheeks and a thick nose. Mouth a straight, lipless line. She was wearing full tactical gear that bulked her frame out still further. And in her right hand, she carried a long gun with a telescopic sight. It looked very like the Blaser Stella had left behind in the woods. But she was swinging it by her side as she walked, and her gait was relaxed, almost as if she were a weekend guest admiring Craigmackhan’s grounds.
