The First Stella Cole Boxset

by Andy Maslen

  DCS Collier’s name was one of those in Leonard Ramage’s phone. The phone she’d accessed by clipping off its owner’s right index finger with a pair of bolt cutters and using it to bypass the biometric security. Collier was a member of PPM, too. He’d been the senior investigating officer on the hit and run. He’d been the one who’d fixed things. Got a little toe rag called Edwin Deacon to take the fall to cover for Ramage. Deacon was dead now. Beaten to death by thugs inside HMP Long Lartin, a high-security prison where he’d been reclassified as a paedophile. Collier had misfiled the only piece of physical evidence, hoping to lose it in the supermarket-sized exhibits room at Paddington Green nick. Why he hadn’t just thrown it away she had no idea.

  “Well, we’ll have to ask him, won’t we?”

  It was Other Stella, standing beside her, looking unruffled and cool in the heat.

  “Yes, we will,” Stella answered.

  “Seems a shame to dump the guns after you paid so much for them.”

  “I was going to keep them, but after that business with the immigration cop in Santander, I changed my mind.”

  “That one’s still got three shells in the magazine, you know.”

  Stella nodded. She turned through ninety degrees and spotted a dead tree about a hundred yards away, its branches blasted by lightning back to white wood.

  She thumbed off the safety, worked the bolt to push a new round into the breech, sighted on the fat bole of its trunk and squeezed the trigger.

  The noise was loud, pleasingly so. Stella’s ears rang. The bullet smacked home off-centre on the tree trunk, producing a cloud of bark chips. The air smelled of gun smoke, an aroma she’d grown very familiar with in the previous few days.

  She worked the bolt again, ejecting the brass casing. Squeezed off another round, imagining it was Collier standing in front of the tree like a prisoner in front of the firing squad.

  He crumpled as the Federal soft-point round smashed into his chest, blood spurting from the entry and exit wounds.

  “One more for luck,” she muttered.

  The final round bored a tunnel into his brain, exploding his skull like a ripe piece of fruit.

  Stella walked over to the low fence bordering the turnaround and climbed over. One leg, then the other, stepping high to avoid snagging her jeans on the pointed wooden tips. She strode down to the water’s edge.

  Reversing her grip on the rifle, she swung it back then forwards in a fast half-circle before releasing it. It looped out over the water, turning muzzle over stock before splashing down and disappearing.

  She repeated the process with the shotgun. Its metallic red action glinted in the harsh sunlight like a ruby before it, too, sank beneath the surface. The remaining ammunition for the two long guns followed.

  That left the Glock. Stella had gone to a lot of trouble to get it, and the hollow-point rounds she’d used on Ramage. She’d befriended Danny Hutchings, the armourer at Paddington Green. Slept with him. Wheedled her way into helping him decommission twenty Glocks, then stolen one. New long guns were easy to acquire. But handguns? They were different. She stared down at it in the boot for a few minutes. Lifted it out. Hefted it in her hand. No. I’m going to keep it.

  She lifted the grey carpeted boot floor and leant it against the rear wing. Underneath was the spare wheel, nestled into the centre of which was a black nylon tool roll. She shook the tools out onto the ground at her feet, wrapped the Glock in the roll and replaced it in the wheel. The boxes of ammunition she wedged into the corners of the recess where they sat snugly between the tread of the tyre and the exposed bodywork. Back went the boot floor. She picked up the tools and threw them back in. They added to the grubby, uncared-for look of the boot. Stella nodded. Still tooled up.

  Before she climbed back into the shitheap, she collected the spent bullet casings, walked back to the water’s edge and flung them out in a glittering arc.

  9

  The George and Dragon

  At around noon the following day, having spent the night in a cheap hotel outside Toledo, then checked into another in Puerto Banús, Stella walked into the centre of town, past broad-leaved palms, cacti, and scarlet flowering shrubs. The road seemed unnaturally clean – she couldn’t see so much as a discarded ice cream wrapper. The buildings were universally either white or cream. Many of the windows were shuttered or faced with mirror-film to cut down the sun’s glare. She found herself remembering a holiday she’d taken with Richard in this part of Spain, and how they’d marvelled at the almost desert-like vegetation. The sun was bouncing off the hard-edged surfaces of the buildings and making Stella squint, despite her sunglasses. There appeared to be more Brits than Spaniards in this suburb of Marbella, to judge from the accents drifting in through her open window. But then, that was why Stella was here. She moved aside as three mahogany-skinned women walked straight at her, arms linked, lost in their conversation, which seemed to revolve about somebody’s super yacht. The women wore matching outfits: stiletto-heeled white sandals and floaty white sarongs over spotted bikinis. Ears, throats, wrists, and in one case the belly button, dripped with gold. Stella was briefly enveloped in a cloud of Opium as they passed her.

  “Seems the women round here believe leopard-skin print is a neutral,” Other Stella said dryly.

  “Yeah, and that it’s best to carry your wealth around as bling.”

  She turned away from the marina and found her way to Calle Ramón Areces. Four hundred yards down on the left, it opened out into a small square. And there, dead centre on its northern side, was her destination. Her shirt was sticking to her back and her jeans felt hot and itchy.

  She took her ponytail out of the scrunchie, ran her fingers through her hair, shook it out, then refixed it, tugging the ponytail tight. Glad of the shower she’d taken before coming out, she threaded her way between the knots of drinkers standing outside the George and Dragon towards its open door. To the left was a free-standing blackboard bearing the pub’s name, a competently executed cartoon bulldog spearing a dragon with a lance, and the legend, “Traditional British Pub. Fuller’s London Pride on tap. Roast every day. No shirt, no service.”

  Inside, the pub was dark. Red-shaded lamps on the bar and tables, plus a handful of weak downlighters let into the low ceiling, provided minimal illumination. A fruit machine was flashing multicoloured lights in an apparently random sequence of flickering patterns that Stella imagined would guarantee the onset of a seizure for anyone unfortunate enough to suffer from epilepsy. The walls were white-painted plaster, criss-crossed with black beams that looked as though they might have been reclaimed timber from a Tudor manor house, gnarled, knotty and coated in a thick, tarry black paint. Horse brasses twinkled on polished black leather harnesses nailed to the thick wooden posts and beams around the pub. Eighteenth-century prints of fox hunts and cricket matches competed for wall space with modern pictures: dogs playing pool, or poker; paintings of Marbella itself, presumably done by local artists; and sticking out like a mugger in a lineup of vicars, a framed blow-up of a front page of The Sun.

  The date, set inside the familiar red-and-white masthead, was Friday, 16 August, 2002.

  The headline, screaming in huge black capitals, read:

  CLOSE SHAVE

  FOR ‘RAZOR’

  To its right was a colour photo of a man in his early fifties, short, muscular, with a shaved head, walking from the Old Bailey smiling broadly and surrounded by sharp-suited, grinning men who were clearly lawyers. Stella positioned herself in front of the enlargement and read the few paragraphs of text squeezed in beneath the gigantic, blocky headline.

  East end crime boss, Ronnie ‘The Razor’ Wilks, 52, walked free from his trial at the Old Bailey yesterday.

  The Crown’s key witness, Samir Ahmed Mahomet, failed to appear, and the prosecution case collapsed.

  Pals of the alleged gangster claimed he had been set up.

  His wife, Marilyn, 47, said, “Ronnie wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone carve someone up wit
h a cutthroat razor. He’s a vegetarian”.

  “Yeah, and I’m Wonder Woman,” Stella said bitterly.

  A voice from her left startled her.

  “You better show us your lasso of truth then, DI Cole.”

  She turned to face the speaker. She knew his height exactly: five feet six and a half. It was in his file. Compact, muscular build, flat stomach, well developed biceps and shoulders that stretched the thin, white cotton of his open-necked shirt. Shaved head browned evenly by the sun, startlingly bright blue eyes sitting in an appraising face full of what appeared to be genuine good humour.

  “Hello, Mr Wilks. Or can I call you Ronnie?”

  He spread his hands wide and smiled, deepening the web of crow’s feet round his eyes.

  “No need for formality, is there? Plus, you know they used to call me and Biggs the Two Ronnies? Always loved that. How about a drink? On the house. Then you can tell me what brought you all the way from Paddington Green to the Costa del Crime.”

  Stella smiled back and followed him to the wooden bar. Its surface was entirely covered with polished pennies. The old, pre-decimal ones the size of manhole covers. They were set beneath a thick layer of clear lacquer and shone dully in the light from the red-shaded lamps.

  “What’s your poison, DI Cole?” he asked, hands flat on the bar behind a row of beer pumps.

  “Mineral water, please, Ronnie. Sparkling.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Not a nice, big glass of Pinot Grigio? I seem to remember hearing that was your preferred tipple.”

  “On the wagon. Just the water. Please.”

  He pursed his lips and tilted his head to one side.

  “You’re the customer. Ice and a slice?”

  After he’d poured her drink and added the rocks and a slice of lemon, he jammed a heavy-bottomed tumbler under the optic plugged into a bottle of Famous Grouse. He let the bubbles gurgle their way through the fitting and up into the remaining whisky, then hit it again.

  He passed her the tumbler of fizzing water and raised his own glass to her in a mocking salute.

  “What are we drinking to?” he asked.

  “How about friendship?”

  “Not sure that’s quite the way I remember our relationship. But that was then, eh? Friendship.”

  They clinked glasses.

  Wilks called over to a tanned guy, early thirties, bleached blonde hair, navy polo shirt and white jeans.

  “Sonny! Watch the bar.” Then he turned back to Stella. “Let’s get a table.”

  10

  A Modest Proposal

  Sitting opposite former armed robber Ronnie “The Razor” Wilks, Stella reflected on how things had changed. The last time she’d seen Wilks, he’d been wearing a sharp grey suit and tie, while she’d been in a black skirt and jacket, waiting to give evidence in Crown versus Wilks. When the case collapsed, he and his lawyers had swaggered past her in the Old Bailey and out to face the clamour of the media.

  “Better luck next time,” he’d said with a grin.

  He was talking again now.

  “So, Stella. As I said, what brings you down to this sunny little corner of Stepney-on-Sea?”

  She didn’t even pause.

  “I need your help killing Adam Collier.”

  His eyebrows shot up so fast and so far, she wondered if they’d actually come loose and would keep going till they hit the low, beamed ceiling.

  “Say again,” he croaked out.

  “I think you heard me.”

  “DCI Adam Collier?”

  “Detective Chief Superintendent Adam Collier now. But yes. Him.”

  Wilks took a swig of his whisky. Then he laughed, a loud sound in the afternoon quiet of the pub that brought quick glances, just as quickly reversed, from a couple of drinkers across the bar.

  “You had me going there. Never had you pegged for a cop with a sense of humour. So, OK, one point to you for showing me up. Now, what is it really? You investigating a cold case or something?”

  Stella took a sip of her fizzy mineral water, stifled a belch, blinked as the gas rerouted itself through her nostrils, and spoke again.

  “He conspired to murder my husband. And our daughter. He’s part of a vigilante group calling themselves Pro Patria Mori. Their members are lawyers at the CPS. Prosecution barristers. Firearms officers. They’ve been killing people. There was a High Court judge involved—”

  “Was?” Wilks had finished his drink and kept glancing over his shoulder at the bar.

  “I killed him. Last week.”

  “Hold on.” Wilks called out to the blond guy behind the bar. “Sonny. Refill.”

  Wilks stared at Stella while they waited for the barman to bring Wilks another tumbler of Famous Grouse. Once he’d left them, Wilks took a good swig.

  “Straight up? You’re sitting here confessing to murdering a judge?”

  Stella shrugged. “Bang to rights. What are you going to do? Call the police?”

  Wilks shook his head.

  “You remember when Collier arrested me? He brought me in personally? And I told everyone who’d listen he’d fitted me up?” Stella nodded. “Well?” he asked.

  “Well what?”

  “Well, now do you believe me?

  “Maybe. He could have been active in PPM back then or he could just have been an old-fashioned bent copper. I don’t care.”

  Wilks jabbed a thick index finger at her.

  “Well, you should care. We were on opposite sides of the law, but it was always understood: everyone was supposed to play by the rules. I did time before, when I was caught fair and square. But he never had the evidence in that last case. That was planted later.”

  “Like I said, he’s evil. I know you want payback. I’m here to help you get it.”

  “Look, that’s all ancient history. I’m a respectable publican now. A businessman. Marilyn opened a beauty salon down here, too. We’re legit. Now you turn up in my pub, telling me some cock and bull story about topping judges and your boss in the Met.”

  Stella banged the side of her fist down hard on the table.

  “It’s true!” she shouted, causing the curious drinkers across the bar to turn around for a second time. “It’s true,” she continued, in a quieter voice. “You must get the British papers here. It was in the Times. I bought it in Santander.”

  She got her purse out of her bag and extracted a folded square of newsprint. She passed it to Wilks, who unfolded it and read aloud:

  “A High Court judge, The Right Honourable Mr Justice Sir Leonard Ramage, 63, was found dead at his Scottish home yesterday after a house fire. The police report no suspicious circumstances. Sir Leonard is survived by his wife, Samantha. The couple had no children.” He refolded the cutting and handed it back to Stella. “Doesn’t prove anything. All I can see is a DI from the Met turning up and trying – not very subtly, by the way – to entrap me into some monkey business back in England.”

  Stella paused. She hadn’t been expecting resistance from Wilks. Naïvely, she realised, she’d assumed he’d jump at the chance to get back at the Metropolitan Police in general, and Collier in particular. Now he was challenging her to explain why, and worse still, prove to him that she was telling the truth. It was worse than dealing with the CPS.

  “Show him the Glock, Stel.” Other Stella was back, sitting beside Wilks, eyes boring into Stella’s. “That ought to convince him at the very least that you’ve strayed off the true path of righteousness. No way a DI ought to be carrying one, especially all the way down here.”

  Stella shrugged. It was worth a try.

  “Can you come to my hotel? There’s something I want to show you.”

  Wilks frowned. She could see he was intrigued and cautious in equal proportions, weighing up the risks and rewards in his head.

  “What is it?” he asked, showing her the scales were tipping in her favour.

  She leaned closer and beckoned him to meet her almost nose to nose across the small
round table.

  “I stole a shooter,” she chose the word carefully, “from the armoury at Paddington Green. A Glock 17. Plus hollow-points. I used it on Ramage. It’s in my room. No way I should have it. Not in London and certainly not down here. Come and see it. Then we can talk business.”

  Wilks leaned back in his chair, slowly raised his glass to his lips and knocked back the remainder of his second whisky.

  “Which hotel?” he asked.

  “It’s on Calle Rodrigo de Triana. The Mar de Sueños. You know it?”

  “Sea of Dreams. Good choice. Yeah, I know it. You leave now. Give me half an hour.”

  Stella didn’t know whether Wilks’s verdict on the hotel was a reference to the quality of its accommodations or his feelings about her story. Didn’t matter. She needed to convince him. She stood, thanked Wilks for the drink and bent to pick up her bag. As she straightened, a woman’s voice, sharp, cockney, cut through the ping and clatter of the fruit machine.

  “Oi! I recognise you! Ronnie, what the fuck are you doing talking to that cop bitch?”

  Stella tensed, hand instinctively going to her little helper in her pocket. She looked round for the source of the insults, though she recognised the shouter’s voice well enough. It was Marilyn Wilks, Ronnie’s loyal wife – some said lieutenant – who’d stood by her man in court and rejoiced vociferously when the judge had thrown the case out. She’d gone as far as to punch a female reporter who’d been too aggressive in her questioning.

  Wilks had his hands out in a placating gesture as his wife stormed across the bar towards their table. She cut an impressive figure. Five-eight in her towering heels and dressed in a low-cut, tiger-print dress that clung to her curves as if glued there. Her hair a shade of blonde Stella’s mother would have called “brassy,” worn piled up on top of her head in a complicated arrangement held in place by a couple of tortoiseshell slides and a number of skilfully placed hair grips. Skin the colour of burnt sugar, from which ice-blue eyes glittered as she locked onto Stella.