Hit Back Harder

by Andy Maslen

  “See if you can find a utility room. We’re looking for a chest freezer, ideally.”

  Stella found herself back at ground level and walking through the house back towards the front door. She remembered seeing a door leading off the hall that might lead to what she realised would be Fieldsend’s penultimate resting place.

  She twisted the knob and went through the simple, panelled door. Beyond was a capacious room kitted out with workaday kitchen units in plain pine. In the far corner, a Miele tumble dryer sat atop a matching washing machine. High-end models, by the look of them. And, yes, on the facing wall, a tall, wide, white box branded Liebherr that had to be … she pulled open the door … a freezer. Six deep boxes, numbered for some reason, and illustrated for the hard of thinking with simple line drawings of animals, fish, fruits and vegetables and other food categories.

  She found herself back in the kitchen with no memory of making the short journey along the polished floorboards of the hall. She inhaled sharply as the sight, and smell, of what Other Stella had been doing during her absence assailed her senses.

  In front of her, Fieldsend’s body had been reduced to six separate pieces: head, torso, arms and legs. Because the heart had long since stopped beating, the quantity of blood was manageable. No spurts to decorate the walls and ceiling with a Jackson Pollock of scarlet droplets, just a steady outflow that was pooling in the troughs and valleys of the bin liners.

  Other Stella looked up from her work. She was naked, and drenched in blood. In her right hand, the large Porsche knife she’d used to slit Fieldsend’s makeshift gag glinted pinkly in the cold white light of the halogen downlighters. By her side was an electric carving knife, the twisted white cable snaking away to a power outlet just above the skirting board.

  She grinned, a devilish expression lent frightening intensity by the fine spatter of blood across the lower portion of her face.

  “Good job Grandpa was a butcher, eh, Stel? Remember how he used to take you to the shop and show you how to joint the carcasses?”

  She turned back to what remained of Debra Fieldsend and began the grisly work of reducing the limbs to smaller pieces, starting at the elbows, then the knees and, finally, the wrists and ankles. When she picked up the electric carving knife and placed its buzzing blade against the torso, Stella fled.

  She found herself emptying the freezer drawers. Most of them contained only frozen air. When she’d finished, she had created a neat stack on the worktop comprising a packet of minced beef, a bag of garden peas and another of sweet corn, a blue plastic bag full of lime segments, a bag of ice and bottles of Absolut Kurant vodka and Bombay Sapphire gin, both almost empty. She emptied the ice and the remains of the spirits into the butler’s sink next to the washing appliances. Everything else went into a sturdy carrier bag she found stuffed into a cardboard box beneath the sink. She knotted the handles together and left it by the front door. There was a grey-lidded plastic dustbin outside.

  Other Stella called from the kitchen.

  “Little help here?”

  Other Stella was taping closed the last of seventeen, oddly neat, black plastic parcels. She glanced up at Stella. She spoke in that cold, sarcastic voice again.

  “Ready to do a little heavy lifting? As you couldn’t stomach the wet work?”

  “Fine,” Stella said, bending to lift a cylindrical package maybe a foot long and four inches in diameter.

  “Great! Remember, she’s dead. There’s no ’arm in it.” Then Other Stella cackled and that fluttery feeling returned to Stella’s midsection.

  The package was manageable. Heavy, like a really big Sunday joint you might buy from the butcher. Memories of Grandpa flooded Stella’s mind as she walked the short distance from the kitchen to the utility room. How he took such pride in standing at the head of the table on Sundays when the family went over to visit for the day, sharpening the long-bladed carving knife on the steel with a practised flourish. How he had, indeed, taken Stella to the shop and instructed her on how to find the precise place to lay her blade by articulating the joint for her.

  “See, lass,” he’d said. “The only part that’s not moving is the hinge. Anywhere else is bone and you won’t get through that with a knife. But the joint itself, well it’s softer stuff. Still tough, mind, but you can get through the cartilage and ligaments with a properly sharpened blade. Now, off you go.”

  And Stella would bend to her task, slicing inexpertly but determinedly at the joint until it gave with a satisfying release of resistance beneath the blade.

  Now she was placing another kind of meat into the bottom drawer of the Liebherr.

  The remaining thirteen trips took a further quarter of an hour, with the last few packages requiring a degree of spatial dexterity as she repacked the drawers to accommodate everything. Finally, it was done. She rolled and squashed the improvised groundsheet into a bloody, reeking bundle, double-bagged it in more bin liners and knotted the handles together.

  Hands on hips, she surveyed the kitchen. That’s when she noticed she was alone, and naked. Other Stella had vanished. The corner where Fieldsend had fallen was a mess. She found a bucket, filled it with hot, soapy water and mopped and scrubbed until the scene was worthy of a show home. Next the implements. Into the sink went the knife where she cleaned it assiduously in water as hot as she could bear. A rinse with bleach, more rinsing under the hot tap, then a kitchen towel to dry it and back into the knife block with it. She used more bleach on the blade of the electric carving knife then realised too much blood would have spattered into the socket from which the oscillating blades protruded. She retrieved a new bin liner and dumped the knife in, along with the wad of kitchen paper.

  After half an hour of floor cleaning, bleaching and wiping down worktops and cupboard with a cloth soaked in antiseptic surface cleaner, she felt she could do no more. To a casual observer such as a cleaner, the place would look pristine. As a detective, she knew better. Under the scrutiny of a well-trained crime-scene investigator using alternative light sources, Ninhidryn and all the other paraphernalia of their trade, traces of evidence would reveal themselves that would cast doubt on any theory that Fieldsend might have decided on the spur of the moment to take herself off for a holiday. All budding detectives learned about Locard’s Exchange Principle – the mantra that at any crime scene, a perpetrator leaves traces of themselves behind and that the scene repays the compliment to the perpetrator. But these days, anyone picking up the latest Jeffery Deaver or Patricia Cornwell would know that.

  But it would do. For now. Fieldsend wouldn’t show up for work. She wouldn’t call in sick. That would ring an alarm bell. Calls to her mobile would be made. Probably to her home phone, too. None would be answered. Eventually, someone would call at the house. To find nothing. She’d be logged as a MisPer to start with. Eventually, some bright spark of a DS – or the SIO, if it got that far – would have a proper look around the property. And they’d find Fieldsend. By which time Stella would be long gone.

  Collier would know. Which was fine. She wanted him to know. He’d tell the others. Ragib and Howarth. But what could they do? Leave their comfortable, well-paid jobs and go on the lam? No. They’d keep conspiring together. Conspiring to take Stella out of the frame. Or to put her right in it, as a mentally unhinged serial killer.

  “Let them,” she announced to the empty kitchen, the bleach stinging her nose.

  Then she went upstairs to find the bathroom and take a shower.

  35

  Regrouping

  OUTSIDE, THE STREET was still quiet. Stella looked down at the knotted black bags of debris beside the dustbin.

  “Just chuck them inside,” Other Stella said.

  “You’re joking, right? I didn’t just spend an hour cleaning up in there to leave all this where her cleaner or a dogwalker dropping off a poo bag could find them. I passed a parade of shops near the station; there were a couple of takeaways. They have industrial bins over there, probably get a daily collection. I’ll
put it all inside one of them.”

  She looked down for a final hygiene check. No blood. Wait, some blood. On her right boot, she saw three narrow, elongated teardrops moving from her toe towards her ankle. She bent and wiped them off with a paper tissue, which she crumpled and dropped down a drain outside the house. She bunched the loose plastic at the top of the two bin bags in her fist and walked away.

  A white-haired woman walking a fluffy black-and-tan spaniel stopped in front of her.

  “Are you all right, dear? Only you look a little lost,” she said in a nasal voice.

  Stella looked up. The woman had a pale-pink vertical scar cutting through her top lip.

  “What? Oh, sorry. No, I’m fine. I thought I’d lost my phone.”

  “Never mind, dear. Worse things happen at sea. Oh, and by the way?”

  “What?” Stella asked, desperate to get away.

  “I think you have lovely eyes. Remember that, next time someone stares.” Then she looked down at her dog. “Come on, Dudley. We’ll let this lady be on her way.”

  Once the elderly woman had toddled off down the road with her dog, Stella pulled out Fieldsend’s phone from her pocket. She entered the code and tapped the Contacts icon, then H.

  Sure enough, after a single swipe, Charlie Howarth’s name slid onto the screen. She decided to save the business of texting until she was back in her room at the hotel, a Holiday Inn Express outside London where she had checked in once again under the name Jennifer Stadden.

  Two hours later, she was pouring boiling water from a tiny white plastic kettle into a mug, before adding a tea bag. She observed her reflection in the screen of Fieldsend’s phone. Her disguise had been remarkably effective, she thought. Apart from the old woman outside Fieldsend’s house, not one person during her trip to London had made proper, unwavering eye contact with her. They’d looked down, at her hairline, off to one side, at the coffee they were serving her or the ticket they were selling her: anywhere but the livid, purple-red patch of skin on her face. It was almost like being invisible. She could walk among normal people but they didn’t see her, or didn’t want to. Those who did look, looked away again quickly, as if by lingering they might catch whatever it was that had cursed her with ugliness.

  Stella shook her head. Unless they had their families wrenched away from them, they could never catch the virus that had infected her soul and made it a thing of ugliness. For she recognised that this was the change Ramage and his friends had wrought in her. They had taken away from her all thoughts of beauty, of love, of warmth, of compassion, and substituted only this cold, unflinching hatred. An ugly emotion that had seared her to her core. But what else was there? She did not intend to become some sort of lightning conductor for the suddenly bereaved, writing self-help books and appearing on television to counsel forgiveness and self-love as the twin remedies for every torture the world might inflict. Since she had put the first bullet into Ramage, she had passed from the realm of convention, through a membrane of civilised restraint, to a world where revenge was not mere venting on social media or in blog posts, but a way of life.

  And it was time to take the next step.

  She muttered the digits of the security code as she tapped them out on the screen: “Nine-eight-zero-zero-three-seven.” Then called up Howarth’s contact details. His surprisingly comprehensive contact details. Not only his, but key members of his chambers. Including his clerk.

  Charlie Howarth strode along the flagstone path that surrounded the immaculate lawn at 7 New Square, a tiny rectangle of Georgian streets on the southwest corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Red-and-yellow brick buildings lined the square, whose central lawns were dotted with copper beeches, their leaves in full, deep-red foliage. He loved the fact that the buildings had been there for centuries before he had been born, and would comfortably outlive him, too. A wide smile creased his cheeks and put crinkles into the corners of his pale-blue eyes. He slowed as the figure of the chief clerk emerged from a passageway between two of the five-storey listed buildings that comprised the accommodations of Woodward Chambers. David Burney was, as usual, dressed to kill: sharply tailored three-piece suit in a pale-grey-and-black houndstooth fabric; crisp white shirt with a cutaway collar; fuchsia-pink silk tie held in place against his breastbone with a solid gold clip; and mirror-polished black Oxfords. His blonde hair was held in a sharp style by a wet-look gel, and about his cunning features there played a smile that said, “Oh, what would you give to know what I do?” He spoke now.

  “Evening, Mr Howarth, sir. Good day in court?”

  “The very best, David. Guilty on all counts and sent down for fifteen years.”

  “Congratulations! Now. I have something that’ll put an even bigger smile on your face.”

  Howarth focused his full attention on his clerk. When David Burney made those sorts of pronouncements, it paid to listen. Though technically a functionary to the eminent lawyers whose fees paid everybody’s salaries, the chief clerk was the power behind the throne, schmoozing Government lawyers to put lucrative cases his way, or rather his lawyers’ way.

  “Don’t tell me,” Howarth said, “I’m up for a K.”

  Burney laughed, showing sharp canine teeth.

  “I expect you’ll have to wait a few years for your knighthood, Mr Howarth, sir. No, I’d say for where you are at the moment in your legal career it might be something even better. The old man’s going to announce his retirement in two weeks’ time.”

  Howarth’s eyes popped wide open. “The old man” was Crispin Montfort, head of Woodward Chambers since it was founded in 1993 and a block to Charlie Howarth’s ambitions from the day he’d arrived as a newly qualified barrister. If he was retiring, then the comfortable leather chair his bony rear end had occupied was about to fall vacant. As was the role from which one might light a rocket under one’s career. A rocket an ambitious lawyer could ride all the way to the very pinnacle of the legal establishment.

  “You’re sure about this?” he asked. “He’s confided in you?”

  There was that wily grin again, a feral expression that would make small furry animals scurry for cover were he a fox and not a law clerk.

  “Not in so many words, he hasn’t. But I’ve got an understanding with his new PA, Julie, and she told me he’s set his mind on a leaving do where he’s going to drop the bomb. Could be good for you, sir, don’t you think?”

  “It could. Or any of the other silks here. I can think of a couple of them who’d love to slide in before the office has lost the smell of that disgusting pipe tobacco of his. They’ll be angling for Crispin’s favour.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it. Not for a minute. But what if, how shall I put it, one of the candidates had some kind of leverage over the others?”

  Howarth looked around, an involuntary gesture. The courtyard was empty.

  “What kind of leverage?”

  “Information. Of a personal nature. Maybe about certain aspects of his opponents’ private lives that wouldn’t play so well if the old man got wind of them.”

  “Such as?”

  Burney paused before answering. Then he leaned a little closer to Howarth and dropped his voice.

  “Such as I possess. And such as I might be willing to share with my preferred candidate.”

  Howarth smiled. He was on familiar, and comfortable, ground now.

  “What do you want, David?”

  “Aston Martin Vantage. New—”

  “Which would be fine—”

  “—and you take me with you.”

  “With me where?”

  “Wherever. Your own chambers. Judgeship. Supreme Court. Parliament. I don’t care. But if you rise, then I rise with you.”

  “And if I don’t rise?”

  Burney smiled once more.

  “Mr Howarth, sir! Have a little more self-belief!”

  Then he held out his hand.

  And Howarth shook it.

  The next morning, as David Burney was arranging a few bits of
court business with a friend in a neighbouring set of chambers, his phone rang. He frowned at the “unknown caller” displayed on the screen.

  “Hello?”

  “David Burney?”

  “Yes. Who’s this, please?”

  “My name is Jessica Schubert. I’m a journalist. British Law Review.”

  Burney relaxed. Journalists were easy to deal with, especially posh-sounding female journalists like this one.

  “And what can I do for you, Jessica?”

  “I’m doing a piece on rising QCs. Tomorrow’s judges, today, that sort of thing. I’ve had my eye on one of your silks for a while now, Charlie Howarth. I’d love to do an interview and I thought, in your position, you’d be best placed to advise me on his availability over the next few weeks.”

  Burney doodled a crown on a pad of lined paper, and added a large diamond.

  “I think I might have good news for you. How are you fixed two Fridays from now? Evening.”

  36

  The Stalker, Stalked

  LYNNE COLLIER STIRRED as her husband slid out from under the duvet. She peered at the clock on her side of the bed.

  “Jesus, Adam, it’s three o’clock. Again.”

  “Go back to sleep. I need some fresh air.”

  She raised herself on one elbow.

  “What’s the matter, darling? This is the fourth night in a row.”

  “It’s just, I have so much pressure on me at work. I can’t sleep. Walking helps me get my head clear. I’ll be fine. It’s just for an hour. Go back to sleep.”

  He closed the front door behind him softly then blipped the fob to unlock the Audi. Thirty minutes later, he was pulling into a space on Ulysses Street. He had been following this routine for a handful of days now, unable simply to do nothing while his nemesis was alive and calmly going about her business, which, he knew, was devoted solely to killing off the inner circle of PPM.