by Andy Maslen
Back then, when she was doing the rounds of all the major commands, armed police were SO19. Since then, the command had undergone another couple of the Met’s endless name changes, emerging as SC&O19. Everyone in the job thought the ampersand was fussy and just called it SCO19.
Her firearms instructor was ex-army, like a lot of the firearms officers themselves, although by no means all of them. He’d patiently guided her through the loading, operation and care of handguns, rifles and shotguns. His words on shooting rifles came back to her now, floating down through the intervening years like gun smoke on the outdoor range.
“Breathing’s key. In all the way, let it out as you squeeze the trigger to first pressure, wait a single heartbeat, then squeeze off the round.”
Stella waited, trying to calm her thoughts and with them, her heart rate, which was still fluttery and fast. Other-Stella lay down next to her and placed a calming hand in between her shoulder blades.
“You heard what he said, Stel,” she said. “Breathe. Nice and easy.”
While Stella focused on breathing, other-Stella pulled a pair of compact binoculars from her pocket and brought them up to her eyes.
“They’re coming back, look.”
Stella raised the rifle and looked down at the gravelled circle through the scope. The two guards, or whoever they were – Pro Patria Mori muscle, presumably – were walking towards each other, shotguns resting over their left arms, right hands on the trigger guards. They stopped a foot or two apart and exchanged a few words. Then one leant his gun against the side of the Land Rover and fished a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from his jacket pocket.
“What a kind chap,” other-Stella said, “offering his mate a fag. Now would be a good time if you felt like testing their loyalty, you know.”
The two men stood close together, blowing clouds of steel-grey smoke into the air above their heads. Talking and laughing.
Stella worked the smooth, straight-pull bolt to chamber a round. She wound the webbing sling around her left hand and adjusted her grip on the wooden fore-end so that the webbing held her arm tight with an enjoyable tension. Using her right thumb, she released the safety catch with a soft click and brought her right eye to the rear end of the scope.
Through the optically perfect lenses, the man appeared to be within arm’s reach. She traversed the cross hairs down from his head, through his chest and his stomach, to his right thigh. He was sturdily built, at least fifteen stone, and the broad expanse of sand-coloured corduroy made a reasonable target. Sorry, mate. But it’ll only be a flesh wound. Not like the kind your boss and his friends have been dishing out.
She began.
Breathe in, all the way.
She checked her aim. The cross hairs were rock-steady.
Let it out, nice and smooth.
She let her index finger curl round the trigger as she held the cross hairs steady on his leg.
Tighten the pressure.
She squeezed the trigger until she felt it resist, ever so slightly: first pressure.
Wait for a beat.
Her heart sent another charge of blood coursing through her arteries.
Fire.
33
Fire!
The report of the rifle as the bullet hurtled from the muzzle was loud, despite the sound moderator, and the recoil bumped the rubber heel pad hard against Stella’s shoulder. A sharp whiff of burnt, smokeless powder caught in her nostrils and made her blink.
Deep inside Lucy Van Houten’s skull, her limbic system, that primitive organ responsible for modulating risk and reward behaviours, squirted a shot of dopamine into her brain. The neurotransmitter flashed through her system, making her feel good in a way she could never put into words. Gunshots always did that to her, and once, as a teenaged girl, she had actually experienced an orgasm as she shot a new rifle.
She knew her moment was approaching and began checking over her weapon.
One hundred yards away from Stella’s sniper nest, the soft-point bullet penetrated the man’s corduroy trousers, the skin of his leg, the thick layer of creamy yellow fat beneath, the silvery fascia enveloping his quadriceps, and finally the solid meat beyond.
Before he knew what was happening to him, the partial copper jacket that shrouded all but the tip of the bullet peeled back into jagged petals. The force of impact compressed the lead, which spread out in front of the copper petals, quadrupling its original surface area and tumbling through the soft tissue before stopping dead against the femur.
The man fell sideways, his mouth stretched open in an ‘O’, his eyes wide with pain and fear. Stella heard his cries, though the fractional time delay between his mouth moving and the sound waves reaching her ear drums lent them a comical air as she watched through the scope. The trouser leg was turning from beige to red as he lay, writhing, on the ground, hands clamped over the wound.
“Not turning red very fast, though, Stel. You missed the femoral artery, whether you meant to or not,” other-Stella observed.
His associate was scrambling to help him whilst looking frantically all around for the shooter attacking them. He drew a piece of fabric from his pocket – it looked like a handkerchief – and pressed it against the entry wound, bringing another scream from the wounded man.
Ramage appeared at the front door. Seeing the pair of guards, he ran over, which was, in the circumstances, an unwise move, and stood over them. The second man and he exchanged a few words. Then Ramage pointed at him, shouting. The man replied, waving his hand wildly in Stella’s direction, then pointing down at his friend and then at the Land Rover. Stella couldn’t hear the words themselves, but their meaning was clear enough.
I paid you. You’re staying.
Not enough. We’re going.
Lucy watched with mild interest as the three men argued. It had been a good shot, and she was impressed by the other woman’s marksmanship. She recognised the silver-haired man now, and wondered whether the detective would kill him now or go in close to do it personally.
Ramage laid a restraining hand on the unwounded man’s right arm as he was bending to help his friend. He shook it free and pushed Ramage hard in the chest, sending him staggering back. Ramage turned and ran back into the house. Moments later, the men were inside the Land Rover and it was slewing around on the gravel, its rough-treaded tyres gouging four dark-brown curves through to the earth beneath, before roaring off back the way it had come and, Stella assumed, to hospital. The cover story would be easy enough to imagine. A stray bullet from a hunter while they were hiking.
Stella pulled the bolt back to eject the brass casing. It leapt from the action with a metallic ping. She’d worked enough crime scenes, read enough ballistics reports, hell, she’d read enough thrillers, to know that professionals never left their brass behind. She followed the twinkling, golden, metal cylinder as it flipped into the bracken, but as she moved to start searching for it, other-Stella offered her a piece of advice.
“Leave it. It doesn’t matter. The gun’s registered to a dead kid from the seventies. The brass won’t tell them anything.”
“Fair enough. Let's get down there."
Ramage had probably locked and bolted the heavy front door from the inside. Stella knew she would have done exactly same, faced with the imminent arrival of an armed intruder. Wanting to be as unencumbered as possible, she laid the Blaser in the bracken, bent some dry stalks over it, then walked down to the house with the shotgun in her hand.
The front door had two locks about a foot apart. One, a standard five-lever mortice, the other a more expensive Ingersoll. Tough for an opportunist thief to deal with, not so much for a determined police officer armed with a door-breaching shotgun.
She aimed at the Ingersoll first, keeping the Winchester’s muzzle a couple of inches back from the steel, and pulled the trigger. Bang. The recoil wasn’t too bad. Just a hard shove into her right shoulder. Then the mortice. Bang. Then she loosed off four more of the Hatton rounds to take out the hinges a
nd any frame bolts locking the door into the frame.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
The semi-automatic action worked sweetly, propelling a new round into the chamber with each shot fired. Maybe five seconds had elapsed. Not exactly world record-breaking, but it did the job. Each of the Hatton rounds blew a six-inch diameter hole in the timber, showering Stella with chips of burnt wood that smelled of bonfires.
She leaned back and kicked the door at waist height. The massive slab of oak fell away from her, slamming onto a stone-tiled hallway with a crash, softened only marginally by the fast-escaping cushion of air pushed down and away by the two square metres of oak planking.
“Ramage!” she yelled, stepping over the fallen door and onto the hall’s polished herringbone parquet floor.
No reply, but then she hadn’t really been expecting one.
“Sir Leonard?” she called again, this time in a singsong voice as if they were engaged in an adults-only game of hide-and-seek. One where the loser was likely to end up with his brains splattered over the ceiling. “Remember me? It’s Stephanie Black here. Only I’m back to Stella Cole now. Well, technically I’m Jennifer Stadden, but it’s me anyway. You murdered my family. With your car. Now I’ve come for you.”
Striding around the ground floor, she pushed the doors of each room she came to with the muzzle of the Winchester. They were opulently furnished with huge, deep-red Turkish carpets on which stood sideboards, bookcases and chairs carved from richly figured woods in shades of dark chocolate-brown, a dark red that could only be mahogany, and golden honey. Buttoned leather sofas in cherry-red and bottle-green faced each other in front of huge stone fireplaces filled with dry logs, or, in one room, a vast arrangement of dried flowers including great swags of the local purple heather. Standing like a forgotten sentry at the foot of the stairs was a suit of armour complete with seven-foot-long pikestaff.
The house smelled of furniture polish, a strong, sickly perfume; she wondered how Ramage could bear it. After completing a search of the ground floor, she concluded he must have run for the top floor. Hell, there might even be an attic. The stairway beckoned. It rose from the centre of the hall, directly opposite the now-ruined front door. The architect had designed it so that it appeared to rise, unsupported, to the first floor. There were no cupboards behind it, just a couple of narrow wooden columns.
First, she adjusted the Glock; it was digging into the flesh at the small of her back. Gripping the Winchester in one hand, she began to climb, pausing on each step as she scanned the upper hallway, which ran in a square above the hall below. The stairs were well made – silent – so it was easy to listen for movement on the next floor. Then, on her seventh step, the tread beneath her foot emitted a loud squeak. She flinched and swore. She waited longer this time but heard nothing, and continued.
At the top of the stairs, she pulled out the Glock. Leaning the Winchester against a bureau for a second or two, she racked the pistol’s slide then continued, one weapon in each hand in the gloom at the end of the hall. Her breathing was fast and shallow and she was tensed, ready to shoot if Ramage should show so much as a whisker in the crack of a bedroom door. She wasn’t scared. The feeling was more of a heightened sense of readiness, a lioness closing in on a kill.
She stopped at the first door on the right. Stuck the Glock into her waistband, at the front this time. Twisted the brass knob while standing to one side so her body was protected from any outbound fire by the wall. No shot came, so she plucked the Glock out and, holding it level with her eyeline, pushed the door open with her foot.
Still nothing, so she went in at a crouch, pistol aimed upwards, shotgun at a matching angle. The room was a bedroom. Not the master bedroom, to judge by the plainly dressed double bed and serviceable but unmemorable wooden furniture standing around the edge of the room. Stella scanned the four walls. No more doors, no en suite bathroom where a cornered householder might be waiting with a weapon of his own.
She retreated and walked on another eight feet to a second door. She repeated the process with the knob and the tactical entry. Another guest bedroom. Another empty guest bedroom.
At the third door, she sighed and reached for the knob. Another brass sphere, this one engraved with three concentric circles around its waist.
Already imagining the empty room beyond, Stella twisted and pushed the ball of cold metal, shifting her weight forward as she did so to make a fast entry into the room beyond the door.
Her forehead banged into the unmoving door with a soft clonk.
The door was locked.
She backed up, stuck the Glock away and raised the Winchester to her hip, pointing it at the lock.
“Are you in there, Ramage?” she shouted. “Is this your hidey-hole?”
The Winchester roared.
The Hatton round punched a fist-sized hole in the door’s midline that took out the lock.
Silver-grey smoke curled out of the shotgun’s muzzle. The air was full of the sharp smell of gunpowder, mixed with the sweet, sawdust smell of freshly exposed wood. But of Ramage there was no sign. No fusillade of shots peppering the inside of the door. No screams for mercy. No breaking glass as he jumped through the first-floor window.
Faster than the previous time, Stella blasted away at the hinges and corresponding sites high and low on the lock side of the door. Her ears rang with the explosions, and her nose itched as the tang of the burnt propellant irritated its soft lining.
This door fell inwards on its own with a deep whuff onto a thick jade-green and rose-pink Chinese carpet.
And there
(you)
he
(murdered)
stood
(my family.)
In the centre of the carpet, clutching a shotgun and fumbling two shells into the barrels, was the man who had destroyed Stella Cole’s family, and with them, her sanity.
A faint whisper made her pause for a second. Are we the same as them now, Stella? She shook her head. “They made me like this,” she whispered.
She brought the Glock up and shot him in the right bicep.
Blood spurted out of the wound as the hollow point slammed home.
Ramage screamed and dropped the shotgun, clamping his left hand over his injured arm.
“That worked well. Let’s do the other arm as well,” other-Stella said with a smile. “And forget about the cases. You loaded it with gloves on, didn't you?"
The flat crack of the Glock smacked out again and Ramage’s other arm sprayed blood back against the wall. He was retreating now, eyes wide with pain and shock. His white shirt sleeves were soaking with blood, but there didn’t seem to be any actual fountains of blood, so the brachial arteries were obviously intact. That was good, because Stella didn’t feel like giving this … this creature first aid.
Lucy had been waiting patiently for some time now. She’d listened to the shotgun blasting away at the front door and then an internal door. Felt herself becoming aroused at the thought of what was about to happen.
She watched through the scope as the detective aimed the Glock at the silver-haired man. Slowed her breathing. And centred the cross-hairs on the woman’s left temple, just as she had with the tart.
The woman fired twice. Not a double-tap. Too slow. Probably one to the body and a coup de grâce to the head.
Lucy readied herself for her own shot.
Ramage’s back made contact with the dark wooden panelling behind him and he stood, legs trembling, his arms limp at his sides, blood dripping from his fingertips and pooling on the carpet.
“You can’t just kill me,” he said, panting as the adrenaline constricted his chest muscles. “You’re a police officer. You’ll go to jail. Kiss your job goodbye, and your police pension too.”
“You’re a High Court judge. It didn’t stop you, did it?” Stella retorted, pointing the Glock’s smoking muzzle at his face.
“That was an accident!” he squealed.
“Then why didn’t you report it? Why did you set up that half-wit Edwin Deacon to take the fall for you?”
“I was frightened,” he blurted through bloodless lips. “The media would have had a field day. You know what those jackals are like.”
“Yes. I do. In fact, I’m friends with one of them. Someone sent her a nasty message, wrapped round a brick. That wouldn’t have been one of your little chums, would it? One of your,” here it comes, Stel, get your comic timing right, “Pro Patria Mori friends, warning her off?”
Ramage’s face had already taken on a deathly pallor, but she could have sworn it paled still further. He blinked rapidly.
“Wh-what do you mean, Pro Pat–”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Sir Leonard. Don’t insult my intelligence. I know about your little crew of vigilantes. How do you think the media’ll like that story?”
Lucy took up first pressure on the trigger.
“Fine,” he said and she saw him try to raise his arms in a placatory gesture. His palms opened up, but the arms swung uselessly at his sides and he yelped with pain. Blood dripped more freely off his fingertips onto the carpet. “But then, if you know what we do, what we stand for, surely you can understand that we’re doing good. We’re actually helping you.”
Stella heard a snap inside her head, an electric shock in her brain. She shot him again, this time in the right knee. The brass cartridge case bounced off a Tiffany shade on a table lamp – plink – and skittered away underneath a nearby roll-top desk.
