The First Stella Cole Boxset

by Andy Maslen

  Collier paused with a forkful of deep-red sirloin halfway to his open mouth. He put the fork down again. “There’s nothing to poke into, is there? We got rid of a nosy human rights lawyer, Deacon took the fall for the hit and run, Leonard did his patriotic duty for the year, case closed.”

  “And you think the money will be enough to buy Deacon’s silence? Permanently?”

  Collier dabbed his lips with the napkin before settling it over his knees again.

  “What, Eddie ‘Looselips’ Deacon? Not a chance. In fact, I’ve been thinking about him all this week. I don’t think he’s going to last till the end of his sentence. It’s really not worth the trouble of letting him out and finding him a halfway house and a probation officer, and then monitoring him to make sure he doesn’t start telling tales out of class about how he suddenly came into enough cash to buy a new BMW. Which is why he is going to find prison life becoming rather uncomfortable in the next day or two.”

  Howarth smiled. “How about that glass of Margaux now?”

  9

  Death in Custody

  “Deacon!” the fortyish prison officer called across the dining hall in HM Prison Bure. The prison squatted like a toad in the flat and unexciting countryside of the parish of Scottow in Norfolk. The locals didn’t much care for having a prison on their doorstep – who would? – but the staff all drank in the village’s two pubs and patronised the few little shops, so an uneasy peace reigned.

  At the guard’s yell, a head poked up from a knot of prisoners gathered round a table playing cards with a grimy, much-handled deck that emitted the cheesy, sweaty smell of old banknotes. His narrow, suspicious eyes flicked around trying to locate the shouter. Seeing who had summoned him, he stood and untangled his left leg from the bench seat, accidentally knocking his neighbour’s card hand with his knee and earning a “Fuckin’ ’ell, Deacon!” Then he made his way over to the officer, a burly man with a shock of coarse, ginger hair and a mess of adult acne across his cheeks.

  “Mr Rooker, sir. You called?” Edwin Deacon said, his words smeared with false respect like cheap ketchup on a burger.

  “You’re being transferred. Get your things and be at the guardhouse in fifteen minutes.”

  Deacon’s eyes lost their slitted look and widened. “What? Transferred? Why? Where?” he spread his hands wide, palms towards the prison officer. “I’ve been keeping my nose clean, haven’t I?”

  Rooker stared at him, then leaned in close. “You heard. Yes. No idea. Long Lartin. Yes, but I don’t care.”

  “Long Lartin? You’re having a laugh, Mr Rooker. That’s Category A. I’m C. There must have been a mix-up.”

  Rooker glared at Deacon then lowered his voice to a half-growl, half-whisper. “Get your fucking things together, you little cunt, or there’s going to be a mix-up between my baton and your thick skull.”

  Frowning, and with a sense of unease growing in the pit of his stomach at being ghosted like this – no warning, no time to inform family and friends – Deacon mooched back to his cell and gathered his possessions into a pile. There wasn’t much to carry: a couple of paperback books; a washbag containing a small tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush, a razor and shaving foam, and a greasy black plastic comb, and a silver transistor radio with a cracked case. He formed the objects into a pile and made his way along the walkway, down the clanging steel steps, through the assembly hall and out into the yard. A few men were playing football, but the wind was driving sharp pellets of sleet almost horizontally across the yard, so the game was down to three a side.

  Beside the guard house, a prisoner transport van was waiting. Operated by one of the proliferating private contractors who ran much of Britain’s creaking prison infrastructure, it was painted a dark brown, with opaque Plexiglas windows lined on the outside with steel mesh. The engine was running.

  A screw was waiting for him and pulled opened the rear door. He smiled as Deacon climbed in. “Have a nice trip,” he said. “Hope you like your new home.”

  Four hours later, the van drew up at HMP Long Lartin’s gatehouse. It was little more than an oversized phone booth with a chair and a control panel for the security barrier. Papers were checked, looks exchanged between driver and officer on duty, and then Edwin Deacon’s descent into hell was almost complete.

  As a Category A prison, Long Lartin housed men judged by the legal system to present the greatest risk to the public or to national security should they escape. Basically, murderers, rapists, the worst sex offenders, armed robbers, terrorists and major-league drug dealers. The population at Long Lartin regarded themselves as hard men, but as basically sound men. Men for whom prison was an acceptable and unavoidable risk of doing business. Or at the very least, a place where you did your time and didn’t whine about it. One other thing: they didn’t like paedophiles. And there were plenty of them on F Wing. Animals, beasts, bacons, wrong uns, nonces – the general prison population had plenty of words to describe them. And plenty of ways of dealing with them.

  As a man convicted of causing death by careless driving, Edwin Deacon was surprised to find himself at Long Lartin at all. When the screw on duty pointed at the corridor that led to F Wing, Deacon’s eyebrows shot up. And his mouth dropped open.

  “That’s for Rule 45ers, sir. That can’t be right. They must have got the paperwork wrong or something. You can’t put me with the nonces.”

  The screw just grinned. He leaned close to Deacon and placed his mouth against his left ear. “You’re fucked, mate,” he whispered.

  Deacon had just finished unpacking his few possessions when he heard the scrape of his cell door opening. He whirled round. The doorway was filled by a barrel-chested prisoner whose biceps bulged so tightly against the sleeves of his pale-blue prison shirt, they threatened to split the seams. He was stone-faced, with dark, emotionless eyes like a shark’s staring straight at Deacon. His shaved and shining scalp bore tattoos of lizards on both sides, crawling from the nape of his neck towards his rumpled forehead.

  The man eased himself into the cell, to be followed by two more. They were well built, though not on the scale as their leader. Both had the same shaved skulls and the same cold, calculating look. The second man, taller than the other two, closed the door behind him. That’s when Deacon noticed the table legs that slid down the inside of each man’s right arm and into his fist.

  “You’re a nonce,” the first man said, in a low growl, his accent from somewhere in the northeast, “which normally means we start with a welcoming committee, followed by the fines you have to pay. But given what you got sent down for, we decided to skip that bit.”

  Deacon stood, hands raised, palms outward, shaking, his mind racing to find the words that might save him.

  “Look, there’s been a mistake. I’m death by careless driving. I’m not a n–”

  The table leg, which had been fashioned in the prison’s woodwork shop, was not an elegant, lathe-turned affair. It was cut from square-profile stock and apart from six inches at the end where the man’s beefy hands were wrapped around it, yet to be sanded. The crunch and snap as it connected with Deacon’s right elbow were almost immediately drowned out by his scream. Two follow-up blows from the second and third men broke Deacon’s knees. He collapsed forward onto his face, weeping and screaming. From that point, his life was forfeit. The three shaven-headed men took turns to smash their clubs down onto Deacon’s back and head. When a pool of deep-plum-coloured blood welled suddenly from beneath his ruined face, they stepped back, looked at each other and nodded. Then they left.

  In the basement, the next day, Reg the Veg was frowning and rootling about in the paperwork that threatened to engulf his desk.

  “What’s up, Reg?” Stella asked as she walked up to him between two rows of filing cabinets.

  “Forgot my sandwiches, didn’t I?”

  “Didn’t Karen pack your briefcase this morning, then?”

  Reg’s face puckered into a deeper frown. His trademark, I’m-mad-me grin had ent
irely disappeared. “Err, no. We had words this morning. Told me I could make my own lunch. I did, but I must have left it on the kitchen counter. You know, with the stress of it and everything.”

  “Tell you what, Reg. I was just about to go out and get something for myself. I’ll buy you lunch. M&S sandwiches all right?”

  His face brightened and he smiled. “That’s very kind of you, Stel. I mean, you know, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  Oh, no, Reg. It’s no trouble at all. Not for me, anyway. “It’s fine. Egg mayo, right? That’s your favourite, isn’t it?”

  “You noticed, then? Great little detective you are, and no mistake. Yep. Good old egg mayo. Preferably no cress, but I’m not fussy. I can always pick it out.”

  “Okay. I’ll get some crisps and a drink. What do you want?”

  “Salt and vinegar and a Diet Coke please. I’ll pay you when you get back.”

  “Don’t be daft,” she said, smiling. “I said, my treat.”

  She left then, checking the contents of her bag on the way out of the door.

  In the local branch of Marks & Spencer, Stella mingled with the office workers buying their lunches, watching as outstretched hands hovered between the reduced-fat options and the salads or the New York-style deli specials and two-inch-thick, high-fat sandwiches that actually filled you up and tasted of something else besides virtuous self-denial.

  “Excuse me,” she said, squeezing an arm between a fat guy in an ill-fitting grey suit that strained across the shoulders and a pair of twenty-something girls teetering on six-inch heels and wearing that species of full, matte makeup that always reminded her of shop-window dummies. She snagged an organic egg-mayonnaise sandwich with watercress – sorry, Reg – and a pastrami on rye for herself.

  After the almost surgical cleanliness of the supermarket, Stella’s next stop felt more like the sort of place where she’d find what she was looking for: a drab convenience store lit by soul-destroying neon strip lights that gave even the fresh vegetables a deathly pallor. She headed towards the back of the shop where a couple of noisy chiller cabinets were squeezed between racks of toilet paper and disposable nappies. At the back of the left-hand chiller, sitting in a puddle of sticky, pink liquid, was a shrink-wrapped, black polystyrene tray containing a chicken quarter.

  Her route back to the station took her past a small urban park, little more than a square of scrappy grass bordered by beds full of daffodils and a handful of birch trees. It was too early in the year for people to be eating their lunches outdoors, and the park was deserted apart from a handful of snaggle-toothed boozers at one end laughing and coughing in liquid gurgles as they swigged from cans in green, gold and black. You got pretty close, Stel, don’t forget that. Stella shuddered.

  She chose a bench as far away from the winos as possible. It backed onto a beech hedge, still rustling with the previous year’s brittle brown leaves, which shielded her back. Ahead, she had a clear view of both entrances to the park. She took the pouch containing the hypodermic syringe from her bag and ripped open the top edge with her teeth. Holding the portion of shrink-wrapped chicken steady inside the carrier bag, she inserted the needle through the black plastic tray and into the blood. She tipped the tray a little and then withdrew the plunger, watching as the bloody juice fountained up inside the plastic body of the syringe against the green rubber stopper.

  Out came the needle with a tiny high-pitched squeak against the polystyrene tray. Next, she pulled out Reg’s sandwich. Finding a glued join in the outer, she pushed the needle between the two thin sheets of cardboard and into the soft, whitish-yellow filling of the sandwich. Using her thumb, she pushed the plunger down with a steady pressure, easing the needle out as she did, so that its payload wouldn’t be concentrated in one spot. Finally, it was done. She squeezed the join in the cardboard between thumb and forefinger and pushed the sandwich packet back inside the bag. One of the winos had noticed her. He looked over and called out in a voice roughened by booze, fags, or just hard living.

  “Hello, darlin’! Come over and have a swig if you like. It’s Special Brew 2010 – a particularly good year!”

  His friends cackled at this flight of wit, then turned back to their drinking. Stella wrinkled her nose, shook her head and left the park. On the way back to Paddington Green, she dropped the syringe, minus its needle, down a drain. The needle she placed inside an empty drink can she found resting on the top of an overflowing rubbish bin, crushing the can to trap the evidence at the bottom. The portion of chicken went into a second rubbish bin, a large commercial number in thick green plastic at the back of a fast food place. All that remained was lunch.

  “Here you go,” Stella said with a smile, handing over the carrier bag to Reg, who was staring intently at the monitor of his ageing Pentium III desktop computer when she arrived back in the basement at just after twelve thirty.

  He barely looked up, acknowledging her gift with a perfunctory “Cheers, Stel,” reaching out for the bag, which she hooked over his outstretched fingers.

  “Enjoy!” she said, retreating to her own desk. It was a cheap, battered, plywood-and-steel construction with a dodgy screw-in foot on the front right corner that needed a folded wad of paper to keep it from rocking.

  Even though she knew the raw chicken blood would take a while to work its mischief in Reg’s digestive system, she couldn’t help but keep an eye on him as he opened the packaging and took out the sandwich. He tutted as he saw the broad, flat leaves of the watercress. Over the next two-and-a-half minutes, he picked out every single leaf and stem and deposited them on the thin, cellophane film window. Content that he wouldn’t be ingesting anything green, he took a huge bite, chewed it with his mouth open, then swallowed. Stella was mesmerised by the way his prominent Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. He caught her looking.

  “What’s the matter, Stel? Never seen a man eating before?” Then he blushed. “Shit! God, I’m so sorry. What an eejit. I was just, you know–”

  “It’s fine,” she said, with a reassuring smile. Given I’ve just fed you poison. Knock yourself out.

  After this, they ate their sandwiches, crunched their crisps and swigged their drinks in companionable silence, with just the whirring of the computers’ cooling fans to break it.

  The first intimations of disaster came about ninety minutes later. Stella had been keeping Reg under observation, flicking her gaze away from the spreadsheet she was updating to check on his skin colour, and look for any obvious signs of intestinal discomfort. Then, bingo!

  He pulled a face, twisting his lips and frowning, while placing a hand carefully over his stomach. He belched loudly, then frowned.

  “You all right, Reg?” she asked.

  “Not sure. The old guts are sending up smoke signals, and I don’t think it’s to announce a party.” His eyes widened, suddenly. “No, actually, gotta go, Stel, ’scuse me.”

  For a big man, Reg could move fast when he needed to. And he obviously needed to now. He skirted the corner of his desk, skimming it with his left hip, and was off down the canyons of filing cabinets, heading for the door to the corridor beyond and the toilets.

  She screwed her eyes tight as she strained to hear any audible signs of distress, but only caught the bang of the door closing behind Reg.

  Ten minutes passed. She nibbled the second half of her own sandwich while wondering just how rapidly Salmonella bacteria could multiply in the human gut and at what point their numbers would cause someone to feel the effects of their burgeoning population growth.

  Just as she was worrying that she might have overdone it and Reg was dying on his knees in front of the toilet, he reappeared in the doorway of the exhibits room. His face was gleaming wetly in the light from the fluorescent tubes overhead. It was the colour of fresh putty. His mouth was hanging half-open, and he was clutching the door jamb as if it were the only thing between him and death. Which she reflected, perhaps it was.

  “Oh, my God, Reg. What happened? Are you okay? Yo
u look like a fucking corpse.”

  “Not sure,” he groaned. “Must have been the egg mayo. That’ll teach me to get shop sandwiches. No offence.”

  “None taken.”

  “Oh, God!” he moaned before executing a smart about-turn and darting back to the security of the gents’.

  The second time he appeared, Stella took charge.

  “Give me your keys, Reg. I’m taking you home.”

  Until this point, she hadn’t considered how she would remove Reg from the station. Now she found herself behind the wheel of his eight-year-old Honda CRV four-by-four, and she wasn’t happy about it. Although compared to Reg, she was ecstatic. He was writhing now, clutching his stomach and moaning softly, his face smeared with sweat, while he gave off a sickroom odour that made her buzz the windows down on her side and his.

  Somehow, she controlled her own feelings of incipient panic as she negotiated the three-mile drive to the semi-detached house he shared with the homely Karen, his wife of thirty-one years. Having got him in through the door and up the stairs to their bedroom, Stella beat a retreat, promising to call in the morning to see how he was getting on.

  Forty minutes later, she was back in the exhibits room. On her own. Finally.

  It was two fifteen. She pulled up HOLMES – the Home Office Large Enquiry System – and entered a search term.

  “Richard Drinkwater + hit and run + 2009”

  Moments later, she was staring at a home screen for the case that had turned her life upside down just thirteen months earlier.

  Hit and run: 06/05/2009–CASE NO. F/PG/658832/67

  File created by: P Evans

  Ignoring the entries relating to the prosecution and conviction of Edwin James Deacon for causing death by careless driving, she clicked on the tab for evidence and then drilled down to the physical evidence window. She scanned the list of items recovered from the scene. Nothing much to go on. No fingerprints, obviously. No DNA, ditto. Not even any rubber from the road surface. Deacon hadn’t even touched the brakes to scuff his tyres on the tarmac. She ground her teeth together as she imagined, once again, the movie projected in her head of Deacon, pissed or tweaking, barrelling into Richard’s car and snuffing out the life of one of the only two people in the world who meant anything to Stella. Apart from glass fragments and bits of Richard’s own car, the evidence list was empty.