The First Stella Cole Boxset

by Andy Maslen

  He was on the odd-numbered side of the road. Stella Cole’s house was 38. He wandered along, head down, hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt, glancing at the numbers to his left. When he reached 35 he stopped, bending to fiddle with the lace of his trainer, and flicked his gaze across the road. Maintaining his crouch, he drew the Makarov from the holster and switched the safety lever off. He coughed, racking the slide at the same moment. Another quick look around and, seeing nobody, he transferred the pistol from holster to pocket, jamming it in hard so no portion of the gun protruded except the grip, and that was concealed inside his fist.

  He straightened, took one more look around and crossed the road. He walked up the path to the front door of 38. His heart was racing, but it was only partly anxiety. There was something else there, too. Something he’d not felt for years. Excitement.

  Every promotion he’d fought for, and won, had brought more prestige, more money and more perks. It had also brought more responsibility for abstract concepts like budgets, staffing ratios, political liaison and the targets that had become the monkey on the back of every senior police officer. A day he didn’t spend in meetings from 8.30 a.m. until 6.00 p.m. was the exception, not the rule. Even the business of PPM went on several layers below him, with willing foot soldiers like Lucy Van Houten getting the taste of blood in their mouths. Poor old Lucy. Recuperating in hospital after having half her foot shot off and looking at forced retirement from active duty. He’d gone to see her, but she was out of it on morphine, and after ten minutes listening to her woozy mumbles about letting him down, he’d left.

  He breathed deeply and pressed his thick finger down on the bell push. Inside the pocket he gripped the butt of the Makarov, index finger straight alongside the trigger guard. If she opens the door, I shove her backwards, close the door behind me and order her onto the ground. Two rounds to the head then leave. Gun in the canal, back home to change, return to work.

  Today wasn’t the day. He waited for two minutes, scanning the street behind him from time to time. Apart from the damn blackbird, the place was quiet as a churchyard. No answer. Shit!

  He retraced his steps and was almost back at the car when something stopped him. A faint ping in his brain. Some circuit or other had just fired. And it was giving him a message. It was saying, You missed something. Go back.

  Standing outside the front door again, he was hyper-alert. If anyone asked him what he was doing, he intended to say he was starting a window-cleaning business and was doing market research. It was thin, but it was the best he could do. He’d even practised what he thought of as a working-class accent to disguise his own more middle-class tones. Feeling some sort of dumb show was called for, he stepped out of the porch and looked up at the first-floor windows, regular sashes, painted white, peeling here and there. Then the bay window to his left. More peeling paint, and the white concertina of a security grille beyond the glass. He turned to go. Then turned back.

  19

  Set the Dogs Loose

  Where’s the motorbike? Collier had stood in this exact spot fifteen or more times in the past week, and he’d seen the black Triumph lurking in the shadows in front of the bay window every time. He knew she rode it to work and had checked the car park beneath Paddington Green nick. No bike. So what were the possibilities? She’d sold it. Unlikely given what else she’d been up to in the previous seven days. It had been stolen. Possible, given the sort of neighbourhood she lived in, but he remembered seeing a fat yellow lock on the front brake disc, and besides, it was hidden from the street. Or she had taken it herself. He’d cruised by at 7.15 a.m. this very morning, and it had definitely been there then. So she’d been here sometime between then and now. He checked his watch: 4.25 p.m. You could get a long way on a bike in nine hours. From one end of the country to the other, more or less. You’d probably need a new tank of petrol every couple of hundred miles, and a spine transplant, but the search area was Land’s End to John O’Groats.

  On the other hand, she was in the UK. So was he. And so was Tamit Ferenczy.

  He turned to go and had reached the pavement when someone called to him.

  “Hello? Are you looking for Stella?”

  He looked around for the source of the enquiry. Coming down the path from 36 was a white-haired woman, maybe seventy or seventy-five. He made the mental shift into the persona of Sean Smith, budding window-cleaning entrepreneur. He shrugged.

  “Not ’specially,” he said, moving his voice down the social ladder a few rungs. “I’m thinkin’ of settin’ up a window cleanin’ round. Just, you know, doin’ my market research for the bank.”

  “Oh, we already have a very nice young man who comes round. Ben, his name is. Every six weeks, regular as clockwork, though with all that building work on the High Road, I always tell him he could make it every two weeks and our windows would still get dirty. All it takes is one shower and they’re covered. I said to Ben—”

  Collier interrupted before the old lady could get into her stride.

  “Is she around, then, the lady who lives here? Only I really want to get everyone in the street to do my questionnaire.” He spread his hands wide in a gesture of haplessness. “The bank, you know …”

  “Well, it’s funny you should ask. Her sergeant has been calling round and I saw her two days ago. I said Stella wasn’t here, because, well, you know, she wasn’t. Then this lunchtime, I was going out to the shops to get something for my tea, and there she was!”

  Collier crinkled his brow. The expression went with his act but it was genuine. His mind was working furiously.

  “What, the sergeant?”

  “No, silly! Stella. Right where you’re standing, as large as life.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Oh, let me see, I should think it was about half past one.” Her eyes narrowed. “Are you sure you’re a window cleaner? You ask a lot of questions.” As she spoke she reached out a bony hand and pulled the wrought iron gate closed.

  Collier put on his brightest smile. The one he used at awards ceremonies when presenting a commendation to one of his officers.

  “Just makin’ conversation. Who knows, I might be cleanin’ your windows one day.”

  She sniffed.

  “Yes, well, dear, like I said. We’ve got Ben and he’s very reliable.”

  She turned on her heel and went back indoors.

  Sitting behind the Audi’s wheel, Collier performed a quick calculation. Assuming she left at 1.30 p.m. and rode due north, it would take her twenty minutes to reach the M1. From there, keeping to seventy, she could cover about a hundred and eighty miles. Take off fifteen minutes for a fuel stop – he had no idea what sort of range a big bike like hers could manage – and that cut it to just over a hundred and sixty. Great. Somewhere between Chesterfield and Sheffield. If she was heading north.

  He made a call to his contact in occupational health. Linda Heath was a willing servant, if not one of the foot soldiers in PPM. She’d helped him place Stella on the light duties assignment in the Exhibits Room that was supposed to drive her out of the service for good. Instead, she’d used it as a personal incident room to track down and eventually murder Leonard Ramage.

  “Adam, what can I do for you?” Heath asked, in a bright tone of voice that said, Whatever it is, I will make it happen for you.

  “Hi, Linda. I don’t suppose you have the licence number for Stella Cole’s motorbike on record somewhere, do you?”

  “I think so. It’ll be on her file, which I can access. Just hold on.” He listened to her fingernails clicking on a keyboard. “Yes, here we are. AD59YKA. Is there anything else?”

  “No thanks, Linda.”

  He ended the call.

  He’d just have someone run an ANPR search on the plate and then have her picked up by a motorway patrol car, if Stella were a regular criminal. If. That damned word again. But there was nothing regular about her, was there? Yes, she was a murderer. But so was the man she’d murdered. As was Collier. Pulling
her in through regular channels would unleash the kind of shitstorm that would end his career and that of everyone else in PPM, not to mention the kinds of prosecutions that would make the history books. No, the plate was useful intelligence, but the team he intended to give it to would have to rely on their wits, instead of automatic number-plate recognition cameras.

  He dialled another number.

  “Tamit, it’s Adam.”

  “What is it? Have you found her?”

  “Yes and no. She’s in the UK. On a bike. She could be anywhere within a one-eighty-mile radius of northeast London.”

  “Fuck, man, that’s the whole fucking country. You ain’t got nothing else?”

  “Look, it’s better than we had last time we spoke. She’s on a black Triumph, registration AD59YKA. You know what she looks like.”

  “Where’s she headed, do you think? What’s your best guess?”

  Collier paused before answering. Where would I go? Who can help me track down the people I want to kill?

  He wiped his fingers across his top lip and down over his chin. Then it came to him. The journalist. The one they’d tried to warn off with a brick through her window. He spoke.

  “There’s a journalist. Her name’s Vicky Riley. She’s been on our trail for a while now. She was working with Cole’s husband. That’s how this whole bloody mess started. I bet she knows her location, and I’m sure you can get it out of her, one way or another.”

  “Address?”

  “I’ll text you. It’s in her dossier, but that’s back at my station. Give me half an hour.”

  Behind his desk at Paddington Green, Collier unlocked the file drawer in his desk and removed a cardboard folder, pale blue like all the others. Anyone who managed to sneak into his office and jimmy the lock and find the folder and open it before being discovered would come across a sheaf of papers of calculatedly mind-numbing content. Budget spreadsheets, mostly, but also documents with titles like, “Human Resources Operational Protocol Embedding Team Meeting Update 19” and “Resource Management Best Practice Overview, Recommendations for Next Steps.” He put all these to one side. Roughly halfway down the stack of bumf was a stapled set of three sheets of A4 paper. Vicky Riley’s dossier. The heading at the top of the front page read, “Third Quarter Operating Budget Initial Projections.” Three dense paragraphs of text filled the page. Only in films did people label secret dossiers on prying journalists with words like “Operation Stingray.”

  He turned the top page over.

  Here was the meat. Vicky Riley’s picture, taken with a long lens but as clear as a passport photo. Then the facts. Her date of birth. Her address. Her email address. Mobile phone number. Facebook and Twitter profiles. Her National Union of Journalists membership number. Her parents’ names and addresses. The fact they’d divorced when she was 15, and her mother had committed suicide the following year. An update when her father died of a heart attack in December 2009. Then, as he turned the page, a written report on her political leanings – leftish, but not radically so; her career, local paper in Yorkshire then a spot on a national broadsheet, then freelancing; and her major stories, mainly political, the occasional low-level exposé of a minor official with his hand in the till. Finally, the opinion of an intelligence officer from Special Branch. That she was actively working on a story about PPM and had made contact with DI Stella Cole and was deemed a very real threat to the security of PPM, its members and its activities. At the foot of the third page was a two-word line.

  Termination recommended.

  He hadn’t acted on that recommendation. Yet. Now he texted her home address and that of her godmother to Ferenczy. First she’d give up Cole. Then her life.

  20

  Lockup

  Fifty-five minutes after leaving the house, Stella was cruising along a country road at a comfortable fifty miles per hour. The sun was out, and she was riding beneath overhanging trees in the first flush of bright-green spring growth. It could have been pretty. It should have been pretty. But not to her. It was just scenery. It could have been blackened mill chimneys or a stinking canal full of supermarket trolleys for all she cared.

  Leaning her bike into a bend she felt, for a couple of seconds, a kind of peace, as she adjusted her weight over the bike to hold her line around the curve. Then she swore, loudly.

  “Fucking HELL!”

  Just beyond the corner’s apex were two brick pillars bracketing the entrance to a golf club. Emerging from between them was a coach.

  Time slowed down.

  Stella saw the driver looking down at her as she approached the slab of steel behind and below him.

  She glanced round the front end of the coach at the opposite side of the road.

  There was a hedge.

  There was a gap in the hedge.

  A field beyond, sown with grass, no more than six inches high.

  She calculated the angles.

  She’d never haul the bike to a stop in time.

  On a bike you’re best off braking in a straight line.

  On a straight line the bike is vertical and the front forks are facing forward. So the physics work. Yank the brake lever on the right grip to shove seventy percent of your effort into the front brake. Push down with your right toe to send the remaining thirty percent to the rear. The front dives. The bike’s weight, plus yours, digs the front tyre down and friction does the rest.

  On a curve, the bike’s leaning over. Hit the back brake, and you risk the rear wheel losing traction and sliding. Do that and you’re off. Sliding along the tarmac on your arse or tumbling over and over like you used to when you were a kid and rolling down a grass hill, screaming with laughter. Hit the front, and the same thing happens. Or worse, it digs in and then you’re flipped off the bike like a rodeo rider bucked off by a frenzied, unbroken mustang.

  The coach was no more than forty feet away. A middle-aged man with a terrible comb-over was staring at her, openmouthed.

  She let the handlebars straighten up and shifted her weight.

  There was no oncoming traffic, or none that she could see.

  She aimed at the gap in the hedge, opened the throttle and prayed.

  The front end of the coach was beginning to make its turn, and in the process it was slowly but surely swallowing up Stella’s escape route as it ate the tarmac across the full width of the road.

  The driver must have hit his own brakes finally. The coach slowed fractionally.

  But that was enough.

  With the Triumph’s engine roaring, Stella piloted the bike past the grille of the coach, close enough to feel the heat from the engine, and through the gap in the hedge.

  Travelling in a straight line now, she hit the brakes. Not hard: she didn’t want to drop the bike or dig it down to its axles in soft earth. Slow but sure wins the day, Stel.

  Bumbling and juddering over the rough grass, it took her a hundred or more feet to bring the big black bike to a stop.

  Behind her the coach was already disappearing down the road. She hoped the driver’s heart was beating as fast as hers. Once her pulse rate had returned to something like normal, she toed the gear lever into neutral, restarted the engine, which had stalled at some point, and then kicked it into first. Executing a wide circle through the grass, she rode back through the gap and onto the road into Watlington.

  Something about the absurdity of her situation made her laugh, and she arrived in the town in virtual hysterics, laughing so hard she had to pull over once she reached the first safe place – a bus stop – and wipe her eyes.

  According to her phone, the lockup was on a light industrial estate on the north side of the town. She rode slowly down a narrow street lined with the kinds of shops she imagined were patronised by country types in green wellies and tweed caps: a traditional butcher’s, a deli, an upmarket kitchen shop, a gift shop, an art gallery and an artisanal bakery. The street curved away to the left at a war memorial still surrounded by paper poppies at its base. Stella followed the road r
ound then pulled up at a T-junction, signalling right. After her encounter with the coach, Stella was feeling nervous and checked and double-checked the road in both directions before opening the throttle and leaning the bike over in a fast exit onto the westbound side. Four minutes later, she indicated and slowed to a crawl to negotiate a sharp-left turn into the industrial estate.

  Most of the units appeared to be up for rent or sale, their wide security doors clamped shut with heavy-duty padlocks. She rode on past them all, before turning right at the far end of the concrete road. Facing her was a row of lockups, each with a white-painted steel shutter into which was let a narrow wicket door. Numbers from one to seven were stencilled on in black paint. She turned the bike in a circle, dropped it into neutral and waddled it backwards up to the door marked with a fat black “7.” She killed the engine, pushed down the kickstand and leaned the bike over before dismounting.

  She took her helmet and gloves off, tucking them under the cargo net stretched tight over the rear part of the Speedmaster’s seat. The key for the lockup was a silver Yale. It slid smoothly into the lock in the wicket door. Odd, she thought, expecting it to be stickier if it had been unused since Ronnie’s mate had died. She took a breath and twisted the key. The lock clicked and she was in.

  Closing the door behind her, Stella felt around for a light switch. Her fingers brushed across a smooth plastic box, and she snapped the switch down. A single neon tube flickered into dismal life, rendering the interior of the lockup in a cold, bluish light. The walls were breeze blocks, painted white and flecked here and there with black spots of mildew. Despite the warmth outside, it was cold and damp in here, as if moisture were seeping up from the ground beneath. The corners of the ceiling were thick with cobwebs in which Stella could see the silk-shrouded corpses of hundreds of insects.