Hit Back Harder

by Andy Maslen

  Hit Back Harder

  The Second Stella Cole Novel

  Andy Maslen

  Copyright © 2017 Andy Maslen

  Published by

  Tyton Press, an imprint of

  Sunfish Ltd

  PO Box 2107

  Salisbury SP2 2BW

  T: 0844 502 2061

  www.andymaslen.com

  The right of Andy Maslen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Requests for permission should be addressed to the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover illustration copyright © Darren Bennett

  Cover design by DKB Creative

  Author photograph for the print edition © Kin Ho

  Edited by Michelle Lowery

  Formatted by BB eBooks

  Created with Vellum

  For Vikki Ross.

  Acknowledgments

  Writing a book is a solo effort. Finishing one takes a team. I am so grateful to the following people who helped me finish this one.

  Jo Maslen and Charles Kingsmill for their brilliant first readings.

  Ross Coombs and Sean Memory for their generous help with the facts and feelings of police life.

  Michelle Lowery for her usual skill and deft touch with editing.

  Crystal Watanabe and Carla Pinilla for eagle-eyed proofreading.

  Ann Finn, Simon Alphonso, Sandy Wallace, Yvonne Henderson, Vanessa Knowles, Nina Rip and Bill Wilson for being my “sniper spotters.”

  Darren Bennett for yet another fantastic cover design.

  Paul Salvette and his team at BB eBooks for super-slick formatting.

  My family, for their patience, advice and love.

  Andy Maslen

  Salisbury, 2017

  “And though the villain ’scape a while, he feels

  Slow vengeance, like a bloodhound, at his heels.”

  Jonathan Swift

  1

  Sail Away

  PORTSMOUTH, 24 April 2010

  DIESEL FUMES, FRYING meat and salty air: the three dominant smells as Stella Cole made her way up clanging steel steps, along a blue-carpeted corridor, up some more stairs, then out onto the deck where crying gulls wheeled overhead, occasionally swooping down in an attempt to snatch an ice cream from a toddler’s hand, or a sandwich from an adult’s.

  Her scruffy, silver, Japanese hatchback, which she’d bought for three hundred pounds in cash at a secondhand dealer on the outskirts of Portsmouth after handing in the rented Golf, was sixty feet beneath her on the car deck. Its boot – dirty, but roomy – contained a holdall with the clothes she’d taken up to Scotland on her mission to execute her family’s killer. It also held a rifle, a Blaser .308 with a sound moderator and telescopic sight; a Winchester semi-automatic shotgun; a Glock 17 pistol; and a substantial quantity of ammunition for all three weapons.

  All three guns had been acquired illegally. She had stolen the Glock, and its 9mm hollow-point ammunition, from the armoury at Paddington Green, as her boss, Detective Chief Superintendent Adam Collier, had rightly suspected. The long guns she had bought in a shop in Pitlochry, using a genuine Metropolitan Police-issued firearms certificate. It was genuine in the sense that it was printed on a genuine blank on a genuine Met computer. But it was issued in the name of Jennifer Amy Stadden, a girl who had died in 1980, three months after her second birthday, as were the passport and driving licence in Stella’s messenger bag.

  She found a spot on the rail where she could look back towards the port. Hers was not the casual gaze of a tourist, searching for family or friends who’d come to wave them off. She was watching. Observing. Checking that she hadn’t been followed. On the drive down from Scotland, she’d chosen the anonymity of A roads for as much of the journey as she could manage. But she’d had a ball of tension in her stomach for the entire journey, as she wondered whether the dead judge’s friends would have sent someone after her. But no. The waving crowds filming the boat on their phones seemed innocent enough.

  “Why? What were you expecting? A bloke with a sniper rifle dressed in tactical gear?” a mocking voice whispered in her right ear. She didn’t turn towards the speaker, knowing the voice belonged to the split-off half of her own personality she’d christened Other Stella. She didn’t know which was more frightening: the thought of more of the Pro Patria Mori vigilantes coming for her, as they’d come for her husband, or the fact that at times of stress she seemed to be increasingly under the influence of this malign alter ego.

  As the crew made ready to leave Portsmouth harbour, Stella reflected on the circumstances that had brought her to this precise moment, this exact spot. The murders of her husband and baby daughter. The move to northwest London she’d managed, despite her drinking and pill-popping, in an effort to rebuild her life. Her pursuit and eventual killing of Leonard Ramage.

  Now she was running. She doubted they’d involve the police. Hah! The police who weren’t actually in on the whole corrupt business. Too much at stake. So it would be her against them in a dirty fight where the victor would be the one willing and able to keep raising the stakes until nobody else was left standing.

  But she wasn’t running blindly.

  She wasn’t running away.

  Stella was running towards.

  2

  Standing Ovation

  LONDON, 24 April 2010

  THE FIVE MURDERERS stood to applaud the golden-gowned soprano as she curtseyed low before the ecstatic crowd. Blood-red roses pattered onto the stage before her. The applause grew in volume, and a few calls of “Bravo!” swelled into a roar.

  Once the curtain calls had ended, the group made their way through the crowd of dinner-jacketed and gowned patrons of the Royal Opera House and out into Bow Street. From the outside, they turned briefly to admire the classical architecture. Six towering columns supported a triangular pediment, the whole thing bathed in bright creamy-white light that gave it the appearance of a giant wedding cake. They turned right and walked past the iron and glass Floral Hall before turning right again into Russell Street and into the starlit piazza of Covent Garden, more or less deserted now the fire-eaters, jugglers and unicyclists had packed up for the night.

  The excited chatter and laughter of the crowd gradually faded as groups of well-dressed opera goers went their separate ways to restaurants, bars, clubs, or just in search of taxis home.

  “I asked cook to prepare oysters,” the tall man at the centre of the quintet said. “We’ll stand a better chance of getting a cab to my house from Garrick Street. We can walk it in five minutes.”

  The blonde woman to his left threaded her arm through his and looked up at him.

  “That’s all right for you, Christopher. But Hester and I are in heels, and these cobblestones are bloody lethal.”

  She turned to smile at an Indian woman beside her, resplendent in a sky-blue, raw silk dress. Her three-inch stilettos increased her height to five foot eight.

  “Here, Hester,” one of the two remaining men said, offering his arm.

  That left the fifth member of the group, its third man, to walk alongside the two couples from the piazza into Henrietta Street, a narrow road of Georgian stone and Victorian brick buildings that towered above
them.

  These five – four lawyers and one senior police officer – had conspired to murder first a human-rights lawyer and then his wife, a detective inspector. They’d been successful in the case of the lawyer, less so in the case of his wife. Not only had she escaped death at the hands of a convicted sex murderer freed from prison especially for the job, she had also defeated a rogue Metropolitan Police firearms officer, a sniper no less, leaving her with half of one foot blown off by a shotgun round. Having incapacitated the sniper, she had proceeded to torture and kill a High Court judge – The Right Honourable Mister Justice Leonard Ramage. He was the man this splendidly dressed group had looked to for leadership. He had also been behind the wheel of the Bentley that killed the husband – and the couple’s baby daughter.

  As they walked along the deserted street, the group’s laughter echoed off the walls of the shops and the flats above them. A light rain had begun to fall, and the road surface glistened under the orange glow of the streetlamps.

  “Slow down, Charlie!” Hester said, as she stumbled on an uneven paving slab. “You’re going too fast.”

  Then she gasped.

  From an alley no wider than a man’s shoulders, two youths had emerged. One white, one black, both with dead-eyed stares as they blocked the passage of the five. Their eyes were shaded by dark hoodies, and they were carrying knives.

  The white youth held his knife out in front of him, a long, slim blade with a narrow point.

  “Give us your wallets and your phones before we cut you,” he hissed, looking left at his accomplice.

  “Yeah. Make it quick. Fucking posh bastards.”

  The black youth flashed his own blade, a six-inch hunting knife with a serrated top edge.

  “I’ll deal with them,” said Adam Collier, a detective chief superintendent with the Metropolitan Police Service. He was the man without a woman on his arm. “OK, boys, we don’t want any trouble. I’ll start.”

  He reached into the inside breast pocket of his dinner jacket. As he did so, the two other men, Charlie Howarth and Sir Christopher De Bree, both criminal barristers, unlinked their arms from Hester Ragib and Debra Fieldsend, also lawyers. They, too, reached into their pockets. The two women opened their handbags.

  “Please don’t hurt us,” Ragib said.

  Collier turned and saw her eyes wide, her face taut with fear.

  “Shut the fuck up, bitch!” the white youth said, waving his knife at her.

  Meanwhile, the black youth had sauntered over to De Bree and was circling the tip of his hunting knife around his face, which was even paler than normal.

  “You rich, then, mate?” he asked, and he trailed the knife down over the black pearl shirt studs.

  “What’s it to you?” De Bree said in a shaking voice. “If you knew who we were, what we could do to you, you’d show a bit more—”

  The youth pulled his knife-hand back and headbutted him. De Bree cried out in pain and went down hard onto the cobblestones. The youth kicked him in the ribs then stepped back.

  “Anyone else want some?”

  “That’s enough!” Collier said, loudly. “We’re cooperating, all right? You want our money, our phones, fine. But the longer you hang around here, the more chance you’ve got of being caught by the police. So calm down, and we’ll hand over our valuables.”

  “Fine by us,” the white youth said, grinning and showing small, uneven teeth. He shrugged a small black rucksack off his back and presented it to Collier. “Put it all in there. Watches, phones, cash, cards, everything.”

  The two women were tending to De Bree, Fieldsend trying to stanch the bleeding from his nose with a paper tissue, Hester cradling his head against her chest.

  Collier turned to Howarth. “Come on, Charlie,” he said, emphatically. “Give them what they want.”

  “Adam! Why? This is a Patek Philippe. It cost more than these two little shits could make in a year between them.”

  The black youth spoke, his voice urgent, commanding.

  “Shut up, cunt. Put it in the bag unless you want some plastic surgery.”

  He flashed the hunting knife at Howarth’s face, causing him to rear back to avoid the whipping blade.

  Moments later, the rucksack was loaded with five high-end watches, three slim but well-filled wallets, two purses and five mobile phones.

  The youths glanced at each other then darted forwards in unison, each pushing one of the women hard in the chest, causing them to scream and tumble backwards. Howarth spun round to help them. Collier alone among the quintet watched the youths sprint to the end of Henrietta Street and turn left into Garrick Street.

  As the others got to their feet, he set off towards a phone box. He called over his shoulder.

  “Wait for me there.”

  A few minutes later, he rejoined them.

  De Bree was dabbing at his nose, which was swollen and turning purple. His breath was still coming in gasps, and he looked pale. Fieldsend and Ragib were bracketing him, their arms linked with his. Howarth was standing a little apart from the trio, his eyes blazing.

  “What the fuck, Adam?” he said. “We’re supposed to be dishing out justice to the likes of them. You just let them mug us, for God’s sake. That was a twenty-five-thousand-pound chronometer I just gave away. Calling nine-nine-nine is hardly going to help now, is it?”

  “Relax, Charlie. I’m sure you have it insured. And don’t worry. Now come on. Christopher looks a little peaky. We should get him home.”

  They walked to the end of the street and hailed a black cab that had just switched its orange “for hire” light on.

  “Home” for De Bree was a six-storey Georgian townhouse on Eaton Place, at the heart of a couple of square miles of London’s most expensive property. He had paid £8.5 million for it ten years earlier; it was now worth fourteen. De Bree showed the group into the dining room. From the room’s twelve-foot ceiling, an ornate crystal chandelier threw hundreds of refracted rainbows onto the walls, which were painted a deep, glossy red, as if a slaughterman had changed profession mid-career and gone into interior design.

  Collier glanced at the gilded face of the grandfather clock. The muggers had run off less than half an hour earlier.

  “How about some champagne, Christopher?” he asked De Bree. “We could do with a drink after that shock.”

  De Bree rose from his seat with a grimace, placing a hand over his left bicep, and returned from the kitchen with a bottle of Taittinger, opened it with a professional twist of the cork and poured five glasses. He raised his own to the room.

  “To justice, which as we have seen tonight, still falters from time to time.”

  “To justice!” they chorused.

  De Bree pressed a bell push set into the wall behind his chair.

  3

  Mistaken Identity

  STELLA LEANED OVER the white-painted starboard rail of the ferry. She had a six-foot stretch all to herself, and she must have been radiating “stay away” vibes, because none of her fellow passengers had encroached on her space. It could have been her fierce expression, or the tense way she was holding herself. As the ferry slowly increased its speed, she was watching the port recede and trying to stay calm. Dominating the view was the 560-foot Spinnaker tower, a soaring, white construction that did, vaguely, suggest the yacht sail for which it was named. To Stella, however, the white mast and transverse struts resembled some kind of skeleton, of a monstrous prehistoric fish or aquatic reptile.

  The sun was warm on her right cheek, and she tried to enjoy the sensation. All around her, families and couples were laughing and taking selfies with the port in the background. A group of men in their midtwenties were bantering over their first beers of the day, holding the green bottles by the necks. One of them, clowning around for his friends, walked backwards and almost tripped over a buggy carrying a baby swaddled in a puffy pink jacket.

  “Hey!” the baby’s mother shouted.

  Stella took a step towards the pair, expecting
the young man to have a go at the woman, swearing, hurling abuse, maybe pushing her or the buggy. She reached into her jacket pocket and curled her hand around her little helper, a leather tube filled with thirty one-pound coins. Her heart was racing.

  “Sorry, sorry!” the young man said, his tone apologetic, his face creased with concern. “Is she all right?” He knelt down in front of the baby, who looked up at him with huge blue eyes. “You all right, darling? Dave’s a clumsy boy, isn’t he? Isn’t he?” He pulled a face, grinning and crossing his eyes, much to the baby’s delight. She gurgled happily and waved one tiny hand around.

  Leaving the mother to fuss over her offspring, he rejoined his friends, who greeted him with a chorus of good-natured jeers.

  Stella’s heartbeat slowly returned to normal, and she resumed her stare across the growing expanse of water and the shore.

  “Cheer up,” a woman’s voice said, close by. A Scottish accent. “It might never happen.”

  Stella turned. A woman in her mid-forties was leaning on the rail to Stella’s right. She wore a white blazer with gold buttons over a striped top and navy trousers. Very nautical, Stella thought. Red slash of lipstick. Penetrating, elliptical eyes. Auburn hair cut in a short, choppy style.

  “Maybe it already has,” Stella said, unsmiling.

  Maybe I just killed a High Court judge. Maybe he murdered my husband and baby daughter. Maybe there’s a conspiracy to enact vigilante justice in the legal system, but hey, cheer up. It might never happen. Yeah, right.

  “Sorry,” the woman said, her face serious now. “Stupid thing to say. My name’s Callie.” She held out her hand.

  Stella shook briefly. “Jennifer. People call me Jen.” Then she returned to staring over the rail, hoping the woman would get the message.