The First Stella Cole Boxset

by Andy Maslen

  Stella blinked. “I’m sorry, sir, but do you two know each other, then?”

  “We do. Barney and I are both patrons of the little outfit holding this shindig. Small world, eh? And as we’re both off-duty, why don’t you call me Gordon, then I can call you Stella, and it’ll all feel a lot friendlier, eh?”

  “Yes, of course. Certainly.” A moment’s pause. “Gordon.”

  He smiled again. “There, that wasn’t so difficult, now was it? But now it’s my turn to ask you a question.” He took a sip of his champagne. “Mmm, bloody good stuff, though I’d rather a couple of fingers of Glenlivet and a drop of stream water. So, without wishing to sound rude, what’s a nice girl like you doing at a bunfight like this? Especially being squired by young Mr Riordan here?”

  Stella looked round at Riordan, but he seemed happy to listen.

  “I’m looking into a cold case, sir– I mean, Gordon, and I needed to interview Barney and he was busy and we came here.” Realising, as she finished, how lame this sounded, she continued, though she could feel the sides of the hole she was digging for herself getting steeper and steeper. “It’s not a date, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I assure you I wasn’t. Or not until now, at any rate.” He winked at her. “Your secret’s safe with me Stella, though you might need to use the back door if you’re to escape the attentions of the vultures out the front later on.”

  “Don’t tease her, Gordon,” Riordan said. “I think she’s about as far out of her comfort zone as it’s possible to get.”

  Wade touched Stella briefly on the shoulder. “Don’t mind me, Stella. I’m an awful tease. But seriously, if you need any help on this cold case of yours. Off the record, I mean. You know, someone to talk to. Well, after your work for me on that corruption case, I owe you one. Two or three, as a matter of fact.”

  She looked down for a second. An ally. Far away from London.

  “Yes, Gordon. I would like that.”

  “Here, then,” he said, and gave her a business card and winked again. “Take this. Break glass in case of emergency, eh? Any time. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and rescue my wife, who seems to have fallen into the clutches of our major donors director.”

  Stella turned to Riordan, who was busy signing autographs.

  “Barney, I need to talk to you about your car. It can’t wait any longer, I’m afraid.”

  He smiled, shook hands with the final well-wisher and followed her away from the throng of donors, celebrities, charity staff and black-and-white-clad waitresses.

  “I’m all yours,” he said, when they’d reached the sanctuary of a Steinway grand piano that occupied an entire corner of the ballroom.

  She put her empty flute down on the piano’s mirror-polished lid.

  “First of all, can you tell me, please, where you were on the sixth of May last year?”

  “Yes,” he answered straight away, surprising Stella.

  “Go on, then.”

  “I was in Qatar. Playing a demonstration match for the sheikh, or the prince, or whoever’s in charge there. He’s a friend of our owner. It was his birthday. The whole team flew out for it. First class all the way, air conditioned stadium. Fuck knows how much it all cost. We all got half a million and a gold Rolex, just for a kickabout.”

  “And you’re sure about the date?”

  “Absolutely! Want to know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s my birthday too. The sheikh found out, and he gave me a Ferrari as well. Bit over the top, but money doesn’t mean the same to them as it does to us, does it?”

  Resisting the impulse to ask him which ‘us’ he was talking about, Stella pressed on.

  “Anyone have the keys to your Bentley while you were away?”

  He shook his head. “Not a chance. Locked up tighter than a duck’s arse with my other cars. Why are you asking all this, anyway? You never told me.”

  “Hit and run. We believe the man–”

  “Or woman.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You said, ‘the man’, but it could have been a woman, couldn’t it?”

  Stella remembered a case she’d worked on as a newly promoted detective sergeant. A woman had killed another woman in a hit and run. The victim had been the wife of a police officer; the perpetrator was married to an organised crime boss. The search for the driver had continued for six years. When they finally found her, she’d told them that by six p.m. on the day it happened, she was under the knife in the clinic of a Dutch plastic surgeon, having her face changed.

  “Yes,” she said. “It could have been a woman. We believe the person who committed this crime was driving a purple Bentley. The same shade as yours.”

  Riordan’s eyes widened for a moment. Then he rubbed his knuckles over his chin, frowning.

  “You’re saying someone killed some people, and he was driving a car in Viola del diavolo?”

  “Or she. And, yes, I am. A man and a baby girl.” My baby girl. Little Lola.

  Riordan frowned and wrinkled his nose, as if he’d tasted something bitter. “That’s bang out of order, that is. That’s not right. Look, it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t my car, all right? But this mate of mine, plays for Manchester United, right? He was really taking the piss out of me the other week. Says I’ve gone to all this trouble and I’m not even the only bloke in London with a Bentley in that colour. He texted me a photo he’d taken.”

  While Riordan was getting his phone out and scrolling through his photos, Stella kept very still. She could feel her pulse throbbing in her ears, as if she was deep underwater. Her palms felt sweaty and the tips of her fingers were tingling.

  “Here it is!” Riordan said. “Look. Right there. He took it a couple of weeks ago.”

  It was a shot of the same car as she’d seen on the CCTV feed at Urban Oversight. There was the number plate. And there, clearly visible behind the wheel, was Sir Leonard Ramage.

  “I’ve got you, you bastard,” she whispered, so quietly that Riordan frowned and moved his head closer to Stella’s.

  “What did you say? Is that him?”

  She looked at him, her eyes glistening in the light from the chandeliers. “Yes. It’s him. Thank you, Barney. Thank you, so much. She’ll get justice now.”

  “Who will? The little girl? Did you know her?”

  Stella fought back her tears. Shook her head.

  “She was someone else’s daughter.”

  Halfway through her dinner – Thai-spiced tiger prawns, lemon sole, French beans – Stella’s phone rang. Excusing herself, she took it out to the lobby. It was Vicky Riley.

  “Vicky? Are you okay?”

  Riley’s voice was high-pitched, breathy. She was panicking.

  “Oh, Stella, thank God! There’s someone outside my house. I think he’s trying to get in.”

  “Right. First of all, I want you to stay calm. You panic, you lose. Have you got anywhere in the house with a locking door?”

  “Yes. My office. It’s the back bedroom.”

  “Go there now. Lock yourself in. Do not speak to anyone who calls your name. No, wait!”

  “What?” Riley’s voice was still breathless, but she sounded like she could follow instructions.

  “Get a weapon. A kitchen knife, a big torch, a fire iron. Then go. I’m coming as fast as I can.”

  She ran back to Riordan. “How do you fancy being a knight in shining armour?”

  He put his knife and fork down and swallowed the lump of steak he was eating. “What’s going on? You’re all pale.”

  “I need to get to Hammersmith. Fast. That car of yours move, does it?”

  He grinned.

  They ran to the front door of the hotel, drawing wide-eyed glances from the people on their side of the ballroom, stopping just long enough to get the concierge to phone for the valet parker to bring the car round.

  “Right, it’s a terraced street just off the Goldhawk Road. You know how to get there?”

&nbs
p; Riordan nodded, lips set now into a grim line. “More or less. Give me directions too. That way I won’t fuck up.”

  27

  Sending a Message

  Ramage jabbed his knife at Adam Collier’s face. He was scowling. While Stella and Barney were waiting for his car, the two PPM members were dining at an Italian restaurant just three hundred metres to the east, in Soho.

  “I’m telling you, Adam, it’s time you pulled your bloody finger out. I was confronted in my own robing rooms at the Old Bailey, for God’s sake. My sanctum sanctorum! One minute I’m preparing to sentence some lowlife pimp procuring underage English girls for Russian oligarchs, the next I’m being interrogated by one of London’s finest about my whereabouts for the night I dealt with Richard Drinkwater.”

  “What did she say her name was?”

  “Black. DI Stephanie Black.”

  “Which station?”

  “West End Central.”

  Collier pulled out his phone. “I’m calling Nick Ashley. He runs CID there.”

  Ramage sliced another piece of pink lamb, daubed it with mint sauce and pulled it off the fork between his teeth as he waited for Collier to dial. He watched, and waited. Collier waggled his head from side to side and mouthed, “Still ringing.” Then he nodded.

  “Nick, it’s Adam Collier. How are you?”

  Ramage wanted to grab the phone from Collier and ask the question himself. It took much self-control to sit, eating, while Collier bantered with his opposite number. Finally, he asked.

  “Listen. Have you got a DI working there, goes by the name of Stephanie Black?”

  Ramage scrutinised Collier’s face for any sign of what his colleague was telling him, but it was still. Then a minute frown, just a momentary drawing together of those heavy, black brows.

  “Well?” Ramage said, when Collier ended the call.

  Collier shook his head. “No. There’s nobody in his command called Stephanie Black.”

  “She had a warrant card. There’s no way Shirley would have let her anywhere near me otherwise, however insistent she was.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “Didn’t ask. Quite honestly, Adam, when some wild-eyed harpy bursts into my private chambers, bearding me in my lair, as it were, and asking for alibis, I don’t always think as straight as I should.”

  Ramage realised he’d made a mistake. Not asking for the officer’s warrant card was a stupid error. Shirley would have to go.

  Collier smiled. “We all make them from time to time, Leonard. Even you, the father of our chapel, as it were. What did she look like? Did she have an accent? Anything we could use to track her down?”

  Ramage put his cutlery down and took a sip of his wine. Then another, larger, gulp. He shook his head, exasperated at his inability to remember anything useful. “Look, Adam, this is actually the second time I’ve been questioned by a police officer in the last forty-eight hours, and I can’t say I care for it. She was a youngish, white woman. Brownish hair. Tied back, I think. Slightly built. One of those dreadful, lower-middle-class accents that’s been improved by three years at some provincial university. That’s all.”

  “You’ve just described about three-quarters of the female detectives working for the Met. There’s nothing else?”

  “No!” Ramage snapped. “As I said, I was surprised.”

  Suddenly, Collier’s eyes popped open wide. He leaned back in his chair and smiled, looking at the ceiling. Back on Ramage again, he spoke.

  “We’re a couple of idiots, do you know that?”

  “What the devil do you mean?”

  “It’s obvious. God, I’m getting too comfortable behind a desk. Who would have the most to gain by investigating you for Drinkwater’s death?”

  Ramage frowned. “Someone who wanted to shut Pro Patria Mori down?”

  “No! His wife! It wasn’t Stephanie Black. It was Stella Cole. Coal-black, do you see? And Stephanie-Stella. Amateurs always give themselves away when they choose aliases.”

  “I thought you said she was chained up in a filing office somewhere.”

  “I did. Obviously, she’s decided to return herself to active duty. In fact, she’s been poking into the case. She logged in to our autopsy files to look at the PM on her daughter.”

  A deep frown spread across Ramage’s features. “I hate to say this, but I think it’s time we convened the committee.”

  Collier swallowed his mouthful of veal. “What about our founding principles?”

  Ramage leaned across the table, not fast, like a snake striking; more like a crocodile easing closer to its prey.

  “I did my duty and removed a dangerous threat to our very existence. Now his wife is coming after me. She has to be dealt with. Before she goes any further. If you think I’m going to let myself be arrested, charged and brought to trial, Adam, you don’t know me very well. Not very well at all.”

  Collier nodded. “Very well. I’ll convene the committee for six tomorrow morning.”

  Cocooned by soft, quilted leather, deep carpet, and what she assumed were many square metres of sound insulation, Stella felt cut off from the traffic. The engine seemed far away, little more than a murmur from somewhere ahead of the vast raked windscreen. Yet her glance at the speedometer told her they were travelling at sixty miles per hour as they overtook a line of stationary cars and taxis.

  “This is OK, right?” Barney muttered, eyes glued to the road as he swerved round the leading car in the queue and jumped a red traffic light.

  “It’s fine. You’re assisting the police. Keep going. Don’t stop for anyone.”

  Barney kept his foot down, leaving a succession of drivers blasting him with their horns.

  “What if the police see me?”

  “I am the police. Just get us there and let me do the worrying.”

  “You’re the boss,” he said, slamming on the brakes to avoid T-boning a supermarket truck with a giant box of strawberries printed on its side.

  “Take the next right,” she said suddenly.

  “But that’s a no entry!”

  “It’s wide enough. Take it.”

  Barney braked and spun the steering wheel through his hands as he hauled the car through a turn its manufacturers had never intended it to make. Tyres squealing in protest, engine now very audible as the automatic gearbox fought to manage the revs, the Bentley slewed round the corner into the one-way street, losing traction for a second and sending Stella’s stomach flipping as the brick side of a department store rushed at her side window.

  She flinched and squeezed her eyes shut, bracing for the impact, but the big car righted itself and, as she and Barney chorused a few oaths and blasphemies, raced for the other end of the street.

  “Next left!” she ordered and was just starting to unjam her shoulders when a car turned into the road, blocking their path.

  “Shit!” Barney shouted and wrenched the steering wheel hard over to the right.

  The oncoming driver leaned on the horn and pulled as far over to his right as he could go.

  The two cars passed within a hand’s breadth of each other.

  Stella looked sideways and saw a woman’s face in the passenger-side window next to hers, pale in the street light, eyes wide, mouth frozen in a scream. The Bentley hit the kerb and crunched its transmission on the stone as it mounted the pavement, scraping the driver’s side bodywork along a brick wall with a hideous metallic screech.

  And then they were safe, pulling out into regular two-way traffic.

  “Where now?” Barney asked, breathing fast.

  “Second left then down to the end of the street.”

  Ninety seconds later, he pulled over into a residents-only parking space and both he and Stella swung their doors open and were out of the car.

  “Follow me!” Stella said and ran back down the street to Vicky Riley’s house.

  “Knock and ring. Call through the letterbox. Make a noise,” she ordered Barney. “Tell her who you are and say I’m going r
ound the back. And if anyone comes near you, warn them off once then hit them.”

  Then she was gone, leaving the bewildered footballer hammering on the door and ringing the bell, before crouching to bellow his name through the letterbox.

  The back of the house was protected by a six-foot wooden fence, overgrown with ivy. Stella took her shoes off and chucked them over the fence, then backed up a couple of steps, ran, and leapt, getting her hands onto the top edge of the fence and hauling herself over and into the back garden. As she dropped onto the soft earth of the flowerbed she felt the hem of her dress catch on something and heard a rip.

  The lights were on in the kitchen and the room next to it, which appeared to be a sitting room. The picture window overlooking the garden was smashed. Just a few triangular shards of glass remained in the frame. Stella pulled her little helper from her handbag and gripped it tightly in her right hand. Her breath was coming in gasps, despite her fitness, more from adrenaline than exertion.

  She looked at the kitchen door. The intruder could be in there. He could be armed. A knife, maybe even a pistol. Fools rush in, Stel. Yes, they do. So do police officers. She ran for the door, pushed the handle down and leapt through, swinging her head left and right, eyes probing the corners of the room. It was empty.

  She went left, through the door that led to the living room. Nobody. Finally, with Barney’s voice echoing down the hall as he called through the letterbox, she ran for the hallway, calling out as she took the stairs two at a time, ready to smack the little helper into any face that came towards her that didn’t belong to Riley.

  “Vicky? Vicky? It’s Stella. Are you, OK?”

  She reached the landing. It was narrow, with a dogleg halfway along marked by a flight of two steps. All four doors leading off it were closed. Panting, she put her hand on the brass doorknob of the closest door, twisted it and pushed through, little helper clamped in her fist.

  A black-clad figure rushed at her from the shadows, arms outstretched.

  28