The First Stella Cole Boxset

by Andy Maslen

  “The wolf was sad,” she muttered. “All he wanted to do was play with the other animals. But they ran away whenever they saw him coming. It wasn’t his fault he had such long, sharp teeth. It was just how he was made. And then—”

  And then Debra Fieldsend emerged from the CPS, turned left and headed towards Southwark Bridge. Her outfit was a model of organisational sobriety, all blacks and greys. Except for a pair of red shoes of so startling a hue Stella thought she must have lost a bet.

  Stella stood, and then, under her breath, finished off the line from the story in a way its author would not have recognised.

  “—the wolf sank those long, sharp teeth into Debra Fieldsend’s neck and pulled and bit and twisted until blood spurted up to the fucking ceiling.”

  She was on her feet, head down, crossing the road between two double-decker buses. Fieldsend’s blonde hair was being whipped about by the wind, a fluttering ‘follow me’ signal that Stella could track without having to look directly at her quarry.

  Arriving in the ticket hall of Monument tube station, she realised Fieldsend would probably have an Oyster card. That meant she’d be able to swan in through the barrier with a quick tap of the card on the reader while Stella had to stop to buy a ticket. She pulled her warrant card from her bag and flashed it at the uniformed London Underground employee standing by the wide gate for people with luggage too big for the narrow barriers. No time for him to compare the unblemished countenance of the officer in the ID photo with the face in front of him.

  “Police,” she said. A harsh urgent whisper.

  He nodded, and pressed a button to open the gate. She was through without taking her eyes of Fieldsend. The escalator was rammed; people were standing two abreast all the way to the bottom. Fieldsend was five people ahead of Stella, her head bent forward, as so many of the others were, checking her phone. At the foot of the escalator, she headed for the westbound platform of the District Line. Shoulders slumped, hands jammed into her pockets, Stella followed the red shoes onto the platform. The digital display informed those bothered to look that the next train for Ealing Broadway would arrive in three minutes.

  Pulse racing, Stella moved in close behind Fieldsend. The woman who had conspired to have Stella’s family murdered was standing with the toes of her vibrant scarlet stilettos just kissing the edge of the yellow line painted on the platform as a safety guide. A plump young woman with a nose piercing and a paperback book clutched in both hands looked up in annoyance as Stella knocked her right elbow. She looked directly at the birthmark then hurriedly looked away again. Magic!

  Stella inhaled deeply. She could smell Fieldsend’s perfume, a musky scent. Something expensive. Must have freshened up in the loo before leaving work, she thought. Hope you haven’t got a date tonight. He’s going to be disappointed.

  A warm wind rolled along the tracks, bringing with it the familiar smell of ozone and diesel fuel. Stella peered round Fieldsend’s left shoulder and down at the tracks. A rat, as big as a domestic cat and the colour of burnt paper, scuttled along below the live rail. A few scraps of litter and an empty Starbucks cup rolled and fluttered in the breeze pushed along by the approaching train.

  All around her, she could sense people readying themselves for the scrum, subtly adjusting position and posture to ensure they got on at the very least, if only to stand with their head jacked sideways to avoid being stuffed under someone else’s armpit.

  Fieldsend looked up from her phone and turned to peer down the track. Stella noticed the dark-coloured mole on the left side of her top lip, like a beauty spot.

  Now the metallic roar of the train built. A crescendo that drowned out the conversations going on around her.

  Stella focused on a place just below the small of Fieldsend’s back where the seam of her jacket kicked out a little over the swell of her behind. She took her hands out of her jacket pockets. They were damp and she wiped them over the sides of her legs.

  The driver began braking, sending screeches of steel against brakes into the air and making the waiting crowd flinch.

  Stella could see his face in the lit cabin of the train. A middle-aged black man with an extravagant Afro.

  The front of the engine was thirty yards away. Speeding on towards the far end of the platform.

  Stella took a breath and moved in closer.

  Timing is everything.

  She closed the distance to a hand’s breadth and brought her palms up flat, just skimming the back of Fieldsend’s jacket.

  Ten yards. Five.

  33

  The Field’s End

  A woman screamed.

  Stella was barged sideways. She stumbled into the side of a man wearing a pinstriped suit.

  “Fuck off, Jacksy!” A young man’s voice.

  “You fuck off!”

  Stella turned. Two guys in their midtwenties, wearing replica football shirts and clutching bottles of lager by their necks, jostled and pushed their way onto the train to a chorus of tuts and much eye-rolling. Stella boarded the train along with a few hundred other people, one of whom, at least, was lucky to be alive. She kept her head down and watched Fieldsend’s scarlet heels through a press of legs.

  “OK, change of plan,” a voice whispered in her ear.

  Standing next to her was Other Stella. She was wearing red shoes, too. Only these were pale-blue Converse baseball boots, their original colour obliterated by glistening bloodstains that spread from the white rubber toecaps up to the laces. The voice continued.

  “Follow her home. Then we’ll figure out what to do with her there. It won’t be as easy to disguise as ‘Top Government Lawyer Dies in Tragic Accident’ but we’ll manage. We always do.”

  Fieldsend left the tube at Ealing Broadway and started striding away from the station, north on Mount Park Road. Stella followed her, on the other side of the road, about twenty yards back. Pedestrian traffic was light, and it was child’s play to keep her target in view. A right turn, then a couple of lefts, then they were walking along Corfton Road, a wide residential street lined with London Plane trees, flowering cherries and even the odd ornamental pear with tiny white blossoms.

  In contrast to the clicking of the lawyer’s high heels on the pavement, Stella’s rubber-soled boots were silent. She closed the distance between them to ten yards. She swung the messenger bag to her front and silently unsnapped the magnetic catch holding it closed. In went the right hand, fingers closing around the grip of the Glock.

  Fieldsend was slowing, and looking down at her handbag, finding her door keys. Stella hung back but Fieldsend must have caught movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned. Stella matched her and pushed through a wrought iron gate and onto the slate-tiled front path of one of the large, detached houses she estimated must be worth well over a million apiece.

  Through the sparse greenery separating this house from its twin, Stella watched as Fieldsend scanned the road behind her then returned to her search for her keys.

  “Get your timing right, Stel, or we’ll have to bang on the door,” Other Stella said.

  She slipped out onto the pavement, in time to see Fieldsend disappearing up the garden path of a house two doors along from her temporary cover. Picking up her pace, she long-stepped the yards she’d lost and turned to see Fieldsend’s back as she pushed open the glossy red front door.

  Stella traversed the path in four wide strides.

  Followed Fieldsend across the threshold.

  Pushed her hard in the back. The exact same spot she’d been aiming for on the underground platform.

  Slammed the door behind her.

  Stood, spread-legged, over Fieldsend’s prostrate form.

  Then blinked and shook her head.

  Other Stella bent.

  Whacked the Glock against the back of the lawyer’s skull, jamming her nose against the oxblood, sky-blue and cream floor tiles and starting a bleed.

  Dragged her groggy and unresisting form into the kitchen.

  Proppe
d her against one of the kitchen units in a kneeling position.

  Bound her ankles and wrists with butcher’s string from a ball in a drawer.

  Gagged her with a tea towel.

  Retrieved her mobile from her handbag.

  Sat and waited.

  Stella observed the scene from a vantage point just beneath the ceiling, where she floated, unwilling or unable to leave. This is odd. I’m up here and – she – is down there. She began assessing this kitchen as the crime scene she knew it was about to become. A high-end range cooker with a bright orange Le Creuset cast-iron skillet sitting over one of the burners. Tasteful wooden cabinets painted a subtle shade of moss-green. Wine bottles in a rack on the creamy travertine floor tiles, hand-tied bunches of dried herbs dangling from a hook beside the window.

  And knives. Lots of knives, slotted home in a pale wooden block.

  Fieldsend came to with a shudder. Her eyes popped wide when she saw the woman squatting opposite her. She tried to speak and immediately became aware of the cotton gag jammed tightly between her jaws, pulling back on her cheeks. She tried to figure out what had just happened. And why. And the identity of the facially disfigured woman with the bottle-blonde, punky hair sitting opposite her. The woman holding Fieldsend’s phone in one hand and a large, black pistol in the other, swinging it back and forth by an index finger crooked through the trigger guard.

  The woman smiled.

  “Ealing. Nice place to live. Must have cost you a fortune. Is it a nice place to die?”

  Fieldsend could only grunt. The gag was pressing her tongue back against her soft palate and she felt she might vomit. Her nose was only letting a whisper of air through the clotting blood. She began to panic, her breathing coming in little short gasps that made white sparks dance in the periphery of her vision.

  The woman spoke again.

  “Code for the phone, please?”

  Fieldsend moaned against her gag.

  “Oh, silly me. How can we talk when you’re gagged? I tell you what. I’ll take it off you then we can have a proper convo. Only here’s the thing. You might be thinking of screaming. I’ll be honest, you could probably get one out. And somebody might hear you. And they might think ‘Ooh, somebody’s in trouble, I’d better go and help,’ instead of, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, it’s that screechy bitch at number seventeen enjoying the delights of her latest vibrator.’ But it won’t matter. Because I’ll shoot you in the face. So you’ll be dead when they arrive. And I’ll be away out the back and over that rather pathetic little fence you’ve got. So my advice is: no screaming. OK?”

  Something about the woman’s features was ringing a faint bell in Fieldsend’s memory. But the port-wine stain was as loud as a pneumatic drill and it drowned out any connection she might have made. She nodded frantically, desperate to gape her mouth wide and suck in more air than her blood-clogged nostrils could manage.

  The woman leapt to her feet in an athletic move that had Fieldsend rearing back, straining the soft flesh of her wrists against the multiple coils of thin, strong twine. She winced with the pain. Then felt a surge of cold terror as the woman walked to her Porsche-branded knife block and select the largest blade from a slot. She turned, grinning oddly at Fieldsend, and approached her, the point of the seven-inch cook’s knife closing on her right cheek.

  Fieldsend shook her head from side to side, trying to widen the distance between her face and the razor-sharp edge of the knife.

  “Now, how can I cut you free if you keep dodging your pretty face about like that? Hold still!” The woman barked out the last two words and Fieldsend was still, though her pulse was roaring in her ears.

  She felt the cold steel sliding between her jawbone and the twisted tea towel, moving up until the point was level with her right eye. With a swift slash, the knife cut the tea towel cleanly and it flopped onto her left shoulder.

  Fieldsend gaped like a landed fish as she drew in a huge breath that made her cough so hard she retched.

  “Who are you?” she asked, once the paroxysm had passed.

  “Code first.”

  “It’s nine-eight-zero-zero-three-seven.”

  She watched as the woman tapped the screen to unlock it. Then nodded.

  “Thank you. That’ll come in very handy later.”

  “Please! Who are you?”

  “Well, that’s a very good question,” the woman said, tying on a red-and-white striped apron she’d pulled off a hook on the back of the kitchen door. “You don’t recognise me, then?”

  There was that tinkling little bell again. She did know the woman. But couldn’t place her. She knew from the crime novels she feasted on before turning out her bedside light and trying to grab a few hours’ sleep that you were supposed to keep your tormentor talking.

  “Were you ever tried in court? Have we met through my work?”

  “No and yes. Next question?”

  Her welling panic spilled over.

  “Please don’t hurt me, please. I beg you. Whatever you think I did to you, I can promise you it was only in the course of my profession.”

  “Really. That’s what you think, is it? That I’m some ex-con with a grudge against the CPS?”

  “Then, what is it? Why are you here? I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  The woman pressed her lips together, and Fieldsend noticed her hand grip the pistol a little tighter. No, that was a mistake, she thought.

  “I’m here to punish you, Debra. Just like I punished Ramage. Just like I’m going to punish Ragib, Howarth and Collier. And just like I would have punished De Bree, if, and I’m only speculating here, one of you lot hadn’t got to him before me.”

  Tears rolled out from Fieldsend’s pale-blue eyes. Because now she knew the identity of the woman facing her, holding a pistol. It was the names that had done it. Forged the connection in her brain.

  “You’re her, aren’t you?” she whispered. “The detective.”

  The woman let go of the pistol long enough to bring her palms together in three, slow handclaps.

  “Well done. Were you the smartest lawyer in your year? I bet you were. So, yes, since you ask, I am she. The woman whose husband and whose five-month-old baby,” she whispered these four words, “you murdered. You know, there were always rumours, on the job, I mean, about who was a hanging judge. Who would have loved putting the black silk square on and sending some scumbag to the gallows. Ramage was on the list. I guess you lot decided if Parliament wouldn’t pass the right law, you’d take it into your own hands. Well, guess what. Ramage got his own brand of justice meted out to him. An eye for an eye. And now it’s your turn.”

  “No! Wait, please. You think we were vigilantes. Maybe you’re right. I regret ever joining PPM. I only did it because I thought I could make connections. They were powerful people. I want to be an MP, you see. I never really sympathised with what they were doing. You have to believe me. Kill me and aren’t you just as bad as them?”

  The woman scratched the tip of her nose with the muzzle of the gun.

  “You have a point. It’s just that the law and I parted company some time back, and I was never much of a one for philosophy. I agree with you. I have put myself in a tricky situation. Ethically, I mean. But here’s the thing. Debra.”

  She paused, holding the pistol at her side in her left hand.

  “You burnt my baby to death while she was strapped into her car seat. You smashed my husband’s head in with the top of a pillar box—”

  From her vantage point directly above Fieldsend, Stella wanted to scream. The noise of the shots would surely bring neighbours running, or calling the police. But Other Stella didn’t fire. Instead, she reached behind her and picked up the cast-iron skillet from the stove top.

  She brought the heavy pan round in a fast, swinging trajectory. Its angled edge met Fieldsend’s temple with a crunch and stove in the side of her head.

  Her body crashed sideways, blood spraying onto the units behind her, muscles spasming as her damaged brain f
ired random electrical signals down her spinal cord.

  In horror, Stella watched as her alter ego knelt astride the groaning lawyer, raised the skillet above her head and then, two-handed, smashed it back down onto a spot between the eyes. The skull split open around the edge of the skillet with a loud crack and blood flooded out, creating a rapidly spreading scarlet pool as if someone had opened a stopcock. Levering herself off the corpse, Other Stella spoke once more.

  “—so I don’t, actually, care.”

  34

  Cold Justice

  Stella stared down as, below her, Other Stella pulled the kitchen table and the chairs over to one side of the room. She worked methodically, stacking the chairs seat -to seat in pairs, creating what Stella realised was a workspace in the middle of the floor. Pulling each brushed-steel-handled drawer open, Other Stella smiled with satisfaction as, at the bottom of a set of five, she found a fat black roll of heavy-duty dustbin liners, among cardboard containers for food wrap, tinfoil and baking parchment. She pulled the black cylinder out, kicked the drawer closed and snapped half a dozen of the slippery black sacks from the roll.

  She craned her head up and looked directly at Stella.

  “All right up there, are you? Got a good view?”

  Then she returned her gaze to the bags, laying them out in an overlapping sheet of plastic on the kitchen floor. More rummaging in the drawers produced a roll of brown parcel tape, which she used to stick the bags together along their edges.

  Stella felt, not nauseous, exactly. She suspected she’d need her own stomach for that. No, what she felt was a fluttering sensation in the midriff. Because she knew what was coming. She tried closing her eyes but it seemed to make no difference. The scene below her continued to play out in her vision.

  Other Stella was rolling Fieldsend’s corpse from its position by the blood-spattered units to the centre of the improvised groundsheet. The pool of blood beneath her head was darkening as it congealed, but her matted blonde hair painted a wide smear of reddish-grey stuff as she was dragged into position.