by Andy Maslen
The shoulders and arms needed some work though, she realised that. Stella had no time for gyms. Too many yummy mummies with their dinky designer shorts and crop tops. She Googled “home weightlifting for women” and skim-read the results until she found a set of exercises she could do with what the American blogger called, “your kitchen cupboard weight room”.
After a few false starts, she settled on bags of sugar. Compact, good weight-to-volume ratio. Sets of ten bicep curls, lateral raises and overhead presses were easy, and she found herself powering through more and more reps, for more and more sets. She graduated to press-ups, ab crunches and pull-ups.
Soon, her deltoids, biceps and triceps had gained bulk and definition. Her stomach, never flabby, now looked as if six flat cobblestones had been laid just beneath the skin. She wasn’t just fit. She was strong. Powerful. She could feel it. But what to do with all that extra power? She lay awake at night sometimes, burning with a desire to find the truth about the death of her husband. Would get up at two, three, four in the morning, put on her running clothes and pound the streets till dawn, swearing continuously under her breath and occasionally startling early-morning dog-walkers with the vehemence of her oaths.
She did some research, made a couple of calls, and tracked down Doug Stevens, the sergeant who’d given her the change purse all those years ago. He wasn’t on the force any more. He’d taken his pension and set up a gym in the East End. He’d not gone for the easy naming options – “Sarge’s” or “Rocky’s” – instead calling his establishment TBL Fitness.
“It stands for Thin Blue Line,” he’d explained, when she’d met him there for a personal assessment at seven forty-five, one rainy September morning. The gym wasn’t huge, about the size of a school hall, but it was clean and painted white with a blonde wood floor polished to a satiny sheen. It smelled of soap, sweat, and something else – a tangy top note she recognised as adrenaline.
“It’s cool, Rock– I mean, Sarge,” she said.
He smiled. “It’s OK, DI Cole. Most of my clients call me that. I never minded. I mean, pretty good role model for a fitness freak, wouldn’t you say?”
She shrugged. “I guess, so. If I’m going to call you Rocky, you’d better drop the DI Cole stuff. Stel’s fine. You remember Marv?” she said.
“How could I forget him? I seem to remember I taught you how to hit him properly, didn’t I?”
She nodded. “That’s why I’m here. I want you to teach me how to fight. Properly.”
He folded his arms and narrowed his eyes. “And by properly, you mean?”
“Dirty. That’s what I mean. Not what PACE says. Not what the Marquess of fucking Queensberry would say. I mean how you used to do it. You know–”
“You mean in the army.”
“Yes, I mean in the army. If you wanted to put somebody down. For good.”
He looked at her then. Hard. She returned the look. Maybe he detected a resilience in her unblinking gaze. Or maybe something else. Something determined.
“Maybe you should tell me why you want to learn how to fight.”
“Self-defence. London’s not getting any safer. I’m a single mother. I need to be able to protect myself.” She did all but add, “Your Honour” at the end of this statement.
Stevens smiled. “And what instructor could resist that little speech?” he asked, with a grin.
“So you’ll teach me, then?”
“Fine. I’ll teach you how to fight, Stella. But there’s something else you need to learn first.”
“What’s that?”
He whipped his right hand up, palm out, fingers stiff, and slapped her, hard across the face, knocking her sideways with the force of the blow.
“How to take it.”
She rocked back on her heels, eyes wide with shock, tears starting from the inner corners. Her hand flew to the flaring red cheek where his blow had connected with a flat crack in the silent space of the gym. She sprang at him, right hand curled into a fist. He slid around the incoming punch with a lithe, twisting motion, caught her hand and pulled her over his outstretched foot so that she landed in a heap at his feet. Then he dropped to a crouch with his right knee pressing against the side of her neck, and stuck a pointing index finger into the soft place just under her jawbone.
“You’re dead, Stel,” he said. “Again. Come on, let’s get you up.”
He pulled her to her feet, and after she’d recovered a portion of her control and self-respect, they talked about a plan.
After that, they’d gone to work straight away. Stella told him she intended to keep up with her home weights and strength-building programme. She wanted him to focus completely on unarmed combat.
The gym had yet to open officially, so they had the whole space to themselves. Standing facing Stevens in the centre of a square of four scarlet crash mats, Stella felt, not happy exactly, but in control. As if she had rediscovered a sense of purpose. He was wearing pale-grey marl shorts and a black, sleeveless T-shirt with a regimental crest over the heart. She had on a plain, navy-blue T-shirt and matching baggy shorts with black Lycra cycling shorts underneath.
“The first thing you need to know,” Stevens said, “is that fighting in real life is nothing like what you see on the telly. You know that from the job, but now you’re learning to do it yourself. It’s nasty, messy and very short. Thirty seconds, tops, and it’s all over.” Stella nodded. Watching him like a hawk in case he decided to throw out another surprise attack. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. “The second thing is, only idiots and amateurs punch the face. Why?”
“Like you said in training. It’s a brick in a skin mask.”
“Yes, I did. And yes, it is. You’ve got a centimetre of skin, fat and muscle, then a thick, bony container designed by Mother Nature to protect the brain. The weight of a human head is?”
“About five kilos,” she said, almost adding, “Sarge” at the end.
“Yes. So, like I said, only an idiot’s going to throw a punch with his bare hands at a human head. But they all do it. And they get broken fingers, blood poisoning from where a tooth breaks off in their knuckles and all the rest of it. Where are you going to hit them instead?”
“One, the throat. Two, the solar plexus. Three, the groin. Four, the kidneys.”
“Not bad. You really did pay attention, didn’t you? It’s true, those are all good places. But there are other things you can do to a person’s face that can really, really hurt them. Things you can go to prison for. But I’m assuming as this is all for self-defence, that won’t present a problem for you?”
She shook her head, still watching his hands, keeping her weight on the balls of her feet. “Like I said. A woman alone.”
“Good. Okay, I’m a rapist. I’m coming at you. I’ve got your wrists held tight.” He took hold of her wrists and squeezed tightly enough that she couldn’t pull them free. “Now what?”
“I don’t know. Kick you? Knee you in the balls?”
“Both good options. But there’s something they never expect, especially from a woman. A headbutt. You’re close. He’s taller than you so he’s not expecting it, and his face is unprotected.”
“But won’t it hurt me?”
“Not if you do it properly. Let’s break it down. First of all, pick your target. Go for the nose: it’s well within range. It’s mostly soft tissue and cartilage, and it’s full of blood vessels and nerve endings. Even a glancing blow’ll sting like crazy and bring enough tears to his eyes that he’ll be blinded. Get a good one in, and he’s going to bleed like fuck and possibly go down. Then you stick the boot in where it really hurts.”
Stella fixed her gaze on Rocky’s nose. It was a good nose. Straight, no breaks, despite his legendary career as a regimental boxing champion. “Okay, now what?” she asked.
“The backswing. Whoa! Not all the way back there!” Stella had taken her head back so far, her throat was exposed. “He could bite you, stab you, anything. Just enough to get so
me force behind it. Get some height, too, jump if you can. You’re not very tall, so you need to put some extra effort into it.”
This time, Stella pulled her head back a few degrees. “And now?”
“And now you hit him. You want to tuck your chin down so you use your forehead as the striking surface. The trick is to stop the forward motion of your head at the moment of impact. That way you transfer all the kinetic energy from your head to his. Keep going and you’re basically trying to push him over.”
“Blimey, Rocky! I never knew there was so much physics to butting someone,” she said, before snapping her head forward.
Stevens was ready, and simply let go of her wrists and stepped back smartly to let her descending head pass harmlessly in front of his face.
“Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all. We’ll make a street fighter of you yet.”
After that first session, Stella had visited the gym twice a week, always after hours, or before, when nobody would be around to see this slightly-built yet muscular woman learning how to eye-gouge, fist-hammer and headbutt.
Rocky had finally signed her off one Monday night, ruefully rubbing the back of his head after Stella had dumped him on the mats for the tenth time in one session.
“Stella,” he said as she shouldered her gym bag and swung the door open, “stay out of trouble, yeah?”
She smiled at him. And left. Clean, sober – and dangerous.
Inside the front door, she sighed as the silent house embraced her. With her first week back at work behind her, she wanted that run so badly it was a physical ache.
She called in on the nursery. Lola was sleeping, and Kristina was sitting in an armchair reading a novel. She didn’t look up.
Ten minutes later, she was out on the street again, bike boots swapped for running shoes. As the burn in her lungs eased, to be replaced by a sweet sensation of oxygen being drawn in and used to burn blood sugar to produce energy for her muscles, she began to lose herself in the action of running itself. The outside world faded as her feet took her along one of her favourite routes. Along the residential streets, then a left turn down a narrow road that led to an industrial estate bordering the Regent’s Canal.
Here, a person could forget they lived in a city of eight million people, where at any one time, half of them seemed to be preying on the other half. A blackbird was singing in a hawthorn bush as she swept past it, the song eerily like a nursery rhyme she used to sing to Lola. She kept running, focusing on her inner voice, the one that whispered to her throughout the day, the one that kept her calm. The one that repeated the same word, over and over again. Justice. Justice. Justice. It kept pace with her, repeating the two syllables in time with her feet as they briefly took turns to kiss the towpath.
Ahead, she noticed a movement. A white man in his early thirties was coming towards her. Five-nine or ten. Maybe ten stone. Slight, anyway. Small white dog by his side. What were they called? Scotty dogs, her Mum used to call them. Funny how you remembered things like that out of nowhere. The guy looked fine. Bland features, as if a police artist had created an e-fit called “Mr Average”. Dog walkers weren’t really high on Stella’s list of “types”. He was wearing a grey zip-up jacket and stonewashed jeans. Black shoes, bright-blue baseball cap with an orange-and-white New York Knicks logo embroidered on the front.
As she drew level with him, she stumbled. Then two things happened simultaneously. From somewhere in the distance, a high-pitched whistle sounded, and a woman’s voice called out, “Angus! Come, Angus!” Stella looked down as the dog turned back the way it had come and scampered off. And the man in the cap turned and swung a fist out at her, landing a glancing blow on the side of the head. She stumbled, gasping in shock.
A knife appeared in his hand. A wicked-looking blade about six inches long with serrations along the top edge and a cross guard. He came towards her, fast, the knife held low in front of him.
Stella reacted. But not instinctively. Instinct was no help to her here. Instinct told her to run, to scream, to sink to her knees in blind terror. Instead, she reacted the way Rocky had taught her to react.
Fast.
Deadly.
And utterly without mercy.
She knocked his knife hand wide to his right, stepped inside his reach and butted him hard in the centre of his leering face. The impact broke his nose instantly, and she felt the hot splash of his blood on her forehead. As he staggered back, she kicked hard into his groin, drawing a high-pitched scream of agony from between his bloody lips. He stumbled, dropping the knife, and fell onto his back. Stella’s hand darted down and grabbed it. His hands were held over his crotch as she stood over him, leaving his torso unprotected. She straddled him, right hand clamped tight around the hilt until her knuckles turned white.
“Don’t,” he pleaded.
Do, the little quiet voice in her head said.
She slammed the knife down into his chest.
She felt the serrations vibrate as they sawed their way in between two ribs before the point punctured his heart and he died, blood welling out around the blade and pumping from his half-open mouth in a smooth, unbroken flow.
“Excuse me, are you all right?”
Stella looked up into the concerned eyes of a woman in her late twenties. Her brows were knitted together, and her mouth was pulled sideways as if she’d seen something troubling.
“What?”
“You must have fallen. Tripped or something. I was just coming along with my dog and you were on the ground. Did you hit your head?”
“No! I was attacked. Look.”
She twisted round to point at the body then froze. No corpse. No crimson pool of blood. No hunting knife. The little white dog was there, nosing around a tuft of long grass before cocking his leg over it. The young woman placed one hand on Stella’s shoulder and offered the other.
“Come on,” she said, “let’s get you up, there’s a bench back there.”
Despite the woman’s concern that she must have banged her head, Stella insisted she was fine. She eventually persuaded the woman to take her dog and go by, promising she would take it easy and go home for a bath and a lie down.
Alone once more, Stella sat shaking on the bench. Cold clammy sweat broke out all over her body. She could feel panic gathering behind her like an oily black wave, primed to engulf her and send her screaming to the bottom. She stared at her left palm, willing there to be slash marks. Better bloody knife cuts than the alternative. The smooth pale skin was slick with moisture but otherwise unmarked. Her breathing was fast and shallow, and white stars were sparkling in her eyes. No! Not now. I’m not having this.
She stood. Grabbed the backrest of the bench as black curtains swung towards each other across her vision, then parted again. Squatting, she let her head droop between her knees and took a couple of long, slow breaths. Cautiously this time, she straightened her legs. No stars. No tunnel vision. She shook her head like a dog then trotted off, back along the towpath, towards home.
Later that same day, while Stella was sneezing amid the dust of the records of countless crimes, both solved and unsolved, two members of the legal establishment were having lunch. The restaurant hostess, a tall Slovenian blonde in a crisp white blouse, tailored black trousers and high-heeled black suede shoes that took her height to a towering six-feet-three, showed her two customers to a corner table.
“Thank you, Sabina,” Charlie Howarth said, pulling out the beige upholstered chair facing the wall and sitting down.
His guest on this particular lunchtime was Adam Collier, who took the seat facing the room.
Moments later, burgundy leather-bound menus arrived, offered to each man by a male waiter with a sharp-pointed moustache and goatee and wearing nineteen-fifties-style circular tortoiseshell glasses that magnified his dark-lashed eyes. With a quick, sharp movement like a crow plucking at something it suspected might be good to eat, he snatched the thick, cream, linen napkin from the space in front of Collier and flourished it
cleverly so that it came to rest across his lap. He repeated the act for Howarth, then smiled, stood to attention, eyes directed heavenwards, and began a recitation.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen. Today’s specials. To start, we have crevettes à l’ail. The prawns were netted yesterday evening in Port-en-Bessin-Huppain and flown in this morning. The garlic is grown in our own kitchen garden in Buckinghamshire. For the main course, we have wild, line-caught turbot with samphire and braised heritage fennel, and also some very fine organic veal cutlets in a brandy and cream sauce with capers and Seville orange slices.”
Leaving them to ponder their choices, he spun on his heel and was gone.
“Something to drink, Adam?” Howarth asked, peering at the wine menu, which had just been delivered by an equally attentive sommelier.
“Can’t, I’m afraid,” Collier said. “Meetings all afternoon including one with the Assistant Chief Commissioner.
“Pity. Well, fizzy water for you then, and I think I will have,” he pulled his lower lip between thumb and forefinger, “a bottle of the ’83 Margaux. You might have to help me out a little or I’ll be asleep in front of His Honour Mr Justice Josephson.”
Collier grunted.
Once the food had arrived and the wine and water had been poured, Collier spoke again, quietly so that only Howarth could hear him.
“I’ve stuck her in the basement. She’s on our admin task force. I give her a week, two tops, before she freaks out from the boredom and either has another breakdown or quits in disgust.”
“You seem very sure. What if she just sticks it out until she’s passed fit for active duty?”
“Won’t happen. My contact in occupational health is a supporter of our aims. We’ve agreed that DI Cole will stay down there until she leaves, rots away or dies.”
“I hope you’re right. I was talking to Leonard earlier this week, and he’s mightily concerned that she’s back in the frame. What if she starts poking her nose into things she shouldn’t?”
