by Andy Maslen
The light at the tunnel’s arched entrance dimmed as the man turned left and entered. His arms hung loosely, not straight down but spread away from his torso. Too much time with the free weights, Stella thought. That’s going to slow you down, friend. Time slowed down to a crawl as he came closer. Stella waited, balanced on the balls of her feet. Ready to practise.
The smile had changed to a grin. The knife was pointing at her throat. Then the man spoke.
“Powerful people want you dead, little missy. Rape-murder, they said. You’re my meal ticket. Foxy Moxey’s going to–”
Stella didn’t wait to find out what Foxy Moxey was going to do to her. She got her retaliation in first, which the law was more than happy for citizens to do. Pre-emptive action, it was called. Basically, if you saw a man coming towards you with a bloody great butcher knife, you didn’t have to wait until he stabbed you before fighting back. You could act with reasonable force to defend yourself. Stella knew her law, as every good DI did. However, the level of force she planned to use was more in the nature of being unreasonable.
Even in soft, air-sprung running shoes, her feet were vicious weapons, thanks to Rocky’s teaching. She leapt forward, knee raised, and stamped with all her might on the side of Moxey’s right knee with a full-throated yell of aggression. Screaming, he toppled over as his cruciate ligaments sheared with the sound of bubble-wrap crackling.
He slashed the knife at Stella's legs. The serrated blade whished past her left shin.
Stella swung her right hand out, so that the discarded Thunderbird bottle she held by its neck smashed against the slimy green Victorian brickwork.
Without pausing, she reversed the swing, swiping it down at Moxey’s knife-hand with another battle-cry, knocking the weapon from his grasp and cutting through two fingers altogether, which spurted blood in jetting arcs from the tiny arteries she’d just severed.
He screamed again, struggling to get to his feet, swinging at Stella with his undamaged hand.
She stood, waiting, and as he straightened, she took her head back a little way then snapped it forward, ramming her forehead straight onto the point of his nose.
“Bitch!” he yelled – it came out Bish! – as the thin bones inside his nose smashed and blood jetted from his nostrils. He crumpled to his knees, screaming more obscenities at her.
The bottle was in motion again. Stella was stabbing it down at his face. Up and down the jagged crown of glass leapt, twice, straight towards his eyes. His bloodied mouth emitted a low moan.
“Oh, you cunt! Foxy Moxey don’t take that from a bitch like you.”
He was wiping at his eyes with both palms, trying to clear the blood sheeting across them from the circles of deep, jagged-edged wounds in his forehead and cheekbones. The finger-stumps were still bleeding profusely, though adrenaline had constricted the blood vessels, choking off the squirting.
That was when Stella bent, ducking under a roundhouse punch from the tautly muscled right arm, and retrieved the knife from the tunnel floor.
Dancing back from another swing, she moved behind Moxey and slashed the back of his right thigh, cutting deeply into his hamstring.
Another scream, gurgling with the blood he’d just swallowed.
As Moxey sank to the ground, she sat astride him and jabbed the knife underneath the point of his jaw. Reaching back she punched down hard into his groin, twice, riding him as he bucked and twisted with the pain.
A push of the knife sent the tip half an inch into the soft tissue between the wings of his jawbone. Blood pooled around the blade and trickled downwards past Moxey’s ears.
“Answer me, or the rest goes in,” Stella said, panting. “Who sent you?”
“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
She pushed another inch of steel into the stubbled skin below Moxey’s jaw. He ground his teeth together, but a groan still escaped from his pulled-back lips.
“Who?” she barked.
“Fuck you, bitch!” he said, though the tip of the knife protruding into his mouth below the root of his tongue made it sound like, Huck oo, gish!
She placed the wicked points of glass from the Thunderbird bottle against his staring eyes.
“They killed my husband, you know. And they killed my baby. They sent you to kill me too. But the story doesn’t end that way.”
She pushed down hard on the bottle, gripping it around the neck so tightly her knuckles turned bone-white as she twisted. Over Moxey’s high-pitched scream, and the grating of glass on bone, she murmured to him:
“Tell them, I’m coming. I’m coming for all of them.”
She levered herself off Moxey’s writhing form and shook herself like a dog trying to dislodge a troublesome fly. Picked Moxey’s bloodied head up by the ears and slammed it down onto the concrete, putting out the lights. She stripped the black running vest off, wiped her face and arms with it, and turned it inside out, which hid most of the blood. Then she walked back to the canal, tossed the bottle and the crimsoned knife into the middle of the turbid stream and ran off towards home.
“Clever of you not to kill him,” other-Stella said while Stella showered. “No body, no forensics. He’ll find a way to get patched up and disappear.”
Stella shrugged as she washed the blood off her hands. “Doesn’t matter either way. Stella Cole is already dead.”
“Fair enough. Ready to adopt your nom de guerre?”
Stella dried herself and dressed. Jeans, hoodie, denim jacket and her bike boots.
From a shelf in her wardrobe she lifted down a carrier bag, which she emptied onto the bed. A blonde wig, coloured contact lenses in a tiny transparent plastic case and a tube of theatrical spirit gum tumbled out.
“Twenty minutes in front of the mirror and voila! I’m Jennifer Amy Stadden, born January fifth, 1978.”
Dressed all in black, Stella cut an unobtrusive, if severe, figure at King’s Cross Station. She paid cash for her ticket, queuing in line at a booth rather than using a machine. Twenty minutes after arriving, she slung her bag into the overhead rack and slumped down into her seat, facing backwards.
The wig itched, and she scratched at her scalp through the nylon mesh skullcap beneath the blonde hair. Her eyes were sore, and blinking only partially relieved the irritation. The girl in the tattoo shop where she’d bought the coloured contacts had recommended eye drops, “Murine, or something”, and now, Stella was grateful for the advice. She fished out the bottle from her jacket pocket, tilted her head back and squeezed a few drops into each eye, dabbing away the surplus with a paper tissue.
As the engine hummed into life some dozens of metres ahead of her seat, she relaxed, just a little. Keeping her cap on, she plugged a pair of cheap earbuds into her phone and closed her eyes. The audiobook’s narrator began reading to her – just like she and Richard used to read to Lola, even though they knew she couldn’t understand – and she allowed his deep, northern voice to insinuate itself into her brain.
“Call me Ishmael–” he began.
At some point after showing the guard her ticket, she dozed off. Passengers got on, sat next to her, got off again, and Stella slept on. In her dreams, the members of Pro Patria Mori sat ranged around her like a medieval court, bewigged and masked with black porcelain faces that ended in sharp-pointed beaks.
“State your name,” the tallest figure shouted at her from behind his mask.
“I have no name.”
“What do they call you?”
“They call me lost.”
“Lost?”
“Because I lost everything. You took them from me. You took her from me.”
“We can’t call you lost. State your name.”
“My name? Call me Ishmael. I am coming for you.”
A squat figure sitting to the first speaker’s left interrupted. It spoke with a woman’s voice. Well educated. Sarcastic. Cold.
“Really?” it drawled. “Let me remind you, it is you who is on trial here. Read her the charges.”
The figure on Stella’s extreme right spoke up from behind its mask. She noticed that the hands protruding from the sleeves of its snowy white robe were studded with thick, curling, black hairs.
“You are charged with being a bad mother. A disloyal wife. That you did wilfully and negligently endanger the lives of your baby daughter and husband. That you recklessly and with malice aforethought watched them die. Didn’t you, Stella? You watched. And you enjoyed it.”
“No!” she screamed, or tried to, although the noise that emerged from her constricted throat was little more than a whimper. “I was on duty. I couldn’t help.”
Another of the masked figures piped up. “Don’t interrupt! Us girls should know our place.”
The central figure stood and pounded its taloned fist down on the wooden bench. It shouted at her.
“You failed them! You should have been there for them. Now they’re burning still. Him and her.”
“There was nothing I could do. Please! Let me explain. I loved them.”
The figure shook its head. It turned to the right and waved a clawed hand at twelve blackened humanoid figures sitting crammed together inside the smoking ruin of a silver Fiat Mirafiori.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what is your verdict?”
Struggling to his feet, the jury foreman, smoke rising in greyish-green curls from the top of his split scalp, eyes criss-crossed by jagged red wounds, spoke:
“She did it. Guilty as sin, your honour. Foxy Moxey says so.” Black scraps of charred flesh tumbled free from the outstretched index finger that jabbed at Stella.
“Well, well. It seems we have a conviction,” the chief judge said, not bothering to conceal the satisfaction in his voice. “And as it’s sweet and right to die for your country …” He reached into a pocket and withdrew a square of blood-red silk, which he draped over his thinning silver hair so that one corner dangled between the eye slits of his beaked mask. “You will be taken from here to a place of execution, where we’ll cut your fucking head off, douse you in petrol and set you alight for all the boys and girls to see.”
Stella tried to speak, to remonstrate, but her lips were stuck together and she could feel the thin skin tearing as she fought to form the words. She stretched out her arms in supplication, but when she looked at them, they were the short, pudgy arms of a very young child. A toddler, really. Screaming soundlessly, she regarded them with horror as first the fingertips, then the soft, barely-lined palms, the wrists, forearms and upper arms scorched, split and smouldered into a dull orange glow before igniting with a soft pop like a distant balloon bursting.
Her strangled groan as she dragged herself out of the nightmare caused the elderly couple sitting opposite her to lean solicitously across the table.
“Are you all right, dear?” the woman asked, her papery skin mottled with beige liver spots. “You were talking in your sleep.”
Stella swiped her sleeve across her face, which was wet with tears and sweat. She straightened herself in her seat.
“I’m fine, thank you. Just a bad dream. Really. No problem.”
Still frowning, the woman sat back, although her husband was looking closely at Stella.
“Are you sure, you’re OK?” he asked. “You said ‘they killed her’. That was just before you woke up, wasn’t it, Marjorie?”
He turned to his wife for confirmation. The woman nodded.
“I said I’m fine,” Stella snapped. “Look, thanks for your concern, but let’s leave it. Please.”
She turned away and pressed her cheek to the cool glass of the carriage window, leaving the couple to their newspapers. Probably think I’m an ungrateful cow, when all they were doing was trying to help. She pulled her face away from the rain-streaked widow and turned to face the couple again.
“I’m sorry,” she said, in a much softer voice. “I have nightmares. Bad ones sometimes.”
“Army, are you, love?” the woman asked. “Only George and I read an article about how those poor boys and girls come back all knotted up inside. Psychologically, like. Didn’t we, George? Like Doreen’s Nick did last September.”
The man nodded.
From Waverley Station in the centre of Edinburgh, Stella caught a cab to the city’s outskirts then waited at the side of the road, thumb out. Perhaps because she was small, and not an obvious candidate for an article titled, “My Psycho Hitchhiker Tortured Me”, she managed to find a ride in under twenty minutes. It was a car transporter heading north with eight hatchbacks in different shades of silver and grey.
Two hours later, the transporter huffed and grumbled to a stop on the edge of a small village called Calvine. Set back from the road was a stone-built, slate-roofed house. A slate sign screwed to the gatepost announced that the owners of ‘Braemar’ took in guests for B&B and that they had vacancies.
Thanking the driver, Stella retrieved her bag from behind her seat and walked up the path to the front door. The landlady was all smiles and waved to the truck driver as the huge vehicle pulled away.
Formalities dealt with, Stella found herself in a large bedroom furnished with a four-poster bed, a small desk with a hard kitchen chair tucked underneath, a cheap flatpack wardrobe in some sort of wood-grain finish, and a matching chest of drawers. The small en suite bathroom smelled strongly of lavender, and indeed, a bunch of dried stalks of the herb stood in a purple glass on a shelf above the sink. The towels, flannel, liquid soap and curtains were all in matching shades of purple.
After a long, scalding-hot shower, Stella wrapped a bath towel around herself and went back to the bedroom to unpack her gear. The juxtaposition of her underwear and the array of weaponry struck her as funny and a short laugh escaped her throat. Then it died.
“I’m coming for you, Ramage,” she muttered, picking up the Glock and dropping the magazine out of the butt with a practised flick of the release catch. First putting on the nitrile gloves she'd packed, she inserted seventeen of the hollow point rounds into the magazine, enjoying the way the spring resisted the pressure of her thumb before swallowing each new brass-jacketed round. When the magazine was full, she slid it back and pressed hard until the catch engaged with a soft clack.
The Hatton rounds caught her eye. “No good without something to fire them from, Stel,” a voice said from behind her right ear. She turned. In the wardrobe mirror she could see the other Stella. The cold-eyed one. The one with a sardonic smile on her red lips. “We passed a gun shop in the last town before this godforsaken place, did you notice?”
“Campbell’s Gunsmiths,” Stella said. “Halfway down the high street on the right-hand side. Tartan fascia, shotguns in the left display window, boots and jackets in the right.”
“Very good!” other-Stella replied, stepping out of the mirror and raising her hands to offer a gentle round of applause.
“First stop in the morning,” Stella said.
Back in London, Frankie O’Meara was having second thoughts. She was a good cop, and a good Catholic, and something about Stella’s behaviour had frightened her more than she was initially willing to admit. Whatever anyone had done to Stella and her family, and God alone knew it was sinful as well as criminal, taking the law into your own hands was crossing a line. A big, fat line, marked with blue-and-white police incident tape that snapped in the wind. A line that flashed with bright blue lights and emitted the screech of sirens if you got within spitting distance.
She hesitated for just a second outside Adam Collier’s office door, then straightened her back, hitched her trousers and knocked, smartly, three times.
“Come!” Collier called from beyond the varnished wood.
Frankie pushed open the door and went to stand in front of Collier’s desk.
“Sorry to interrupt you, sir.”
Looking up, Collier frowned. Then turned on his professional smile.
“Take a seat, Frankie. It looks as though there’s something you need to get off your chest.”
Frankie sat. “There is, sir. Somethin
g I really think you need to know about.”
“And that would be?”
“Oh. Sorry, sir. It’s Stel. I mean, DI Cole, sir.” Frankie was aware she was babbling. She wasn’t normally this easily flustered, but a night of broken sleep while she turned over her last conversation with Stella in her mind had frayed her nerves. She cleared her throat, touching the soft place between her collar bones where she knew a blush was creeping up towards her throat. “I think she’s going to do something,” she paused. What, Frankie? Stupid? Dangerous? Career-limiting? What? “I think she’s going to do something that might not be the best course of action, sir,” she finished. It even sounded lame to her as the words left her lips, which, annoyingly, had begun to tremble.
Collier leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers and placing their tips under his chin. He pursed his lips.
“Is she going to join the Communist Party? Or buy a more powerful motorbike? Or start dating a witness? They would all, in my opinion, not be the best course of action for a serving police officer.”
“No, sir. Of course not.”
“Well, spit it out for goodness sake. I have work to do here.” With a sweep of his hand he indicated a slew of papers that covered his desk. “As you can see.”
“I think she’s going to kill someone, sir!” Frankie blurted, feeling, as she did so, the hot blush storming up her neck.
Now she had Collier’s attention. He leaned towards her across the desk.
“Explain. Now. Quickly and clearly.”
“She told me she’d found out who killed Richard and Lola, sir. Who really did it. Because Edwin Deacon was just the fall guy. I asked her if she was going to do anything stupid, and she said she was just gathering intelligence.”
Collier’s dark-brown eyes stayed locked onto hers. His face was expressionless.
“Did she tell you any names? Or how she’d tracked them down?”
“No, sir. She’s not going to get into trouble over this, is she, sir? I mean, she’s still grieving, obviously. Probably it’s depression. She needs help, sir.”
