The First Stella Cole Boxset

by Andy Maslen

  Standing under the water, she reviewed the events of the previous night.

  Other Stella was keeping her company, sitting naked on a cork-topped wicker laundry chest in a corner of the steamy room.

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “So why were you going to leave them alive? Why didn’t you put a couple of bullets into their thick skulls straight away, instead of their kneecaps?”

  “I don’t know. An attack of conscience? Maybe because I was going to kill them for a disgraced, struck-off surgeon who’s a heroin addict and does fingerprint removal for the scum who move down here to escape justice.”

  “What, scum like your friends Ronnie and Marilyn, you mean? Or do you mean—no, surely, not—scum like you? You heard what they did to Terzi’s daughter.”

  “I heard what he said they did. Now please, shut up! Why can’t you leave me alone? I’m doing what I have to do to pay them back for Richard and Lola. I’m not a career criminal or a gangster, murdering my way round Europe, then retiring to drinking fucking Amazonias for the rest of my life, am I?”

  Other Stella merely smiled and raised her hands in mock surrender.

  “Just checking. Now, how about some breakfast? I’m starving.”

  Terzi was standing at the stove, frying eggs. Stella’s bare feet slapped lightly on the cool floor tiles and Terzi turned at the sound.

  “Good morning. Thank you for the note you left me. I am glad you succeeded. Now, tell me, did you sleep well?”

  “Like a log.”

  Terzi’s brow crinkled for a second.

  “Ah. In Greece, we say koimíthika san moró. It means ‘I slept like a baby.’ You say this in England also? Like a baby?”

  Stella didn’t answer immediately. The word baby brought a lump to her throat, and she felt tears pricking her eyes. Terzi looked at her closely, for what felt like an age, and spoke again.

  “You don’t like that word. It causes you pain. Why is that, Stella?”

  She shrugged and said the first thing that came into her head.

  “I always wanted a baby, but I couldn’t have one.”

  Terzi smiled sadly at her, almost causing her to sob, so plain was the feeling the look conveyed, then he turned back to the pan of eggs, spooning olive oil over them.

  Without turning around, he said,

  “Oh, my dear Stella, but that is not quite the truth, is it?”

  She sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand, not having a tissue.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I am a parent, as you know. And I nearly lost my daughter to those two thugs. I thought she was dead when the hospital called me. Only that fear brings the expression you are wearing on your face right now.”

  She cleared her throat, accepting a mug of coffee he handed her and taking a sip.

  “I told you I was widowed. Well, I lost my baby daughter, too. They were murdered. By some very evil people back in the UK. They’re part of a conspiracy that stretches high into the law and probably the government for all I know. I’m taking revenge.”

  Terzi nodded, slipping a fish slice under two of the eggs and sliding them onto a warmed plate. He added a slice of toast and turned, handing the plate to Stella. He followed with his own plate as she went to sit at the table.

  “In Greece, we know all about revenge. Often it was the goddesses who meted out the worst punishments against mortals who had offended them. Nemesis, of course, but also Adrestia, Aphrodite and Artemis. If you have time for a short retelling of one of the most famous myths?”

  Stella shrugged and pushed another piece of egg and toast into her mouth.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Once, a young man, Actaeon, was out hunting with dogs. He came across the goddess Artemis while she was bathing in a stream. Artemis was enraged that a mortal should have seen her naked so she changed the young hunter into a stag. He was then chased down and torn to pieces by his own hounds.”

  “Sounds like my sort of woman,” Stella said grimly, finishing her egg.

  “Just so. And although I believe you do not have a very high opinion of me as a person, I must tell you that to kill a child is the very worst crime. The people you are bringing to justice, well, I hope I can help you in my own small way.”

  “On which subject, maybe you can tell me how this works.”

  “No need for mere telling. If you would like, we can go now straight to my consulting room and begin.”

  An old feeling, part nervousness, part dread, uncoiled like a sleeping monster from a long-buried lair in Stella’s psyche and squirmed upwards for light and air. As a child, she had once had to have a molar extracted. The dentist was a well-meaning man, but also an alcoholic, she now realised. He was half-drunk when her mother left the room, and her daughter to his ministrations with an encouraging murmur to, “Be good for Mister Hayes, darling.” The painkilling injections he had clumsily administered hadn’t taken effect before he was pushing his long, bony fingers between her lips and sticking wads of cotton between her gum and cheek. The extraction had taken an hour, and virtually all of Stella’s energy. She remembered staggering out of the consulting room, a bloody wad of gauze clamped between her aching jaws, tears streaming down her cheeks. Ever since then, dental appointments, even routine inspections, had produced the same, cold feeling of fear she was experiencing now as Terzi led her from the kitchen, down a narrow hallway and into a brightly lit, white room.

  Dominating the room was a surgical bed: royal-blue cushions for legs, back and head supported on a chromed frame, the whole contraption mounted on a heavy, wheeled base. A height-adjustable chair upholstered in matching vinyl sat next to it. Next to this was a stainless-steel trolley with a flat top, on which rested an array of glittering instruments Stella tried to avoid looking at. Everything was bathed in hard, blue-white light. Beneath the bed was a bright-yellow plastic container with a biohazard symbol printed on the sides in black. In one corner, Terzi had installed a desk and the usual collection of office equipment, including a tower PC, a printer and a small two-drawer filing cabinet in grey steel. Compared to the taste with which he had finished and decorated the rest of his house, this room blared a single message: utility. It was a place where skin was sliced, fat sucked, breasts plumped, bones broken and re-set and who knew what else? Bullets removed? She wouldn’t have put it past the urbane Greek, who even now was donning a royal-blue surgical gown and scrubbing his hands under a tap with foaming anti-bacterial soap. He was humming along to the classical music coming from a ceiling-mounted speaker. Something soothing. Lots of violins and flutes. Stella’s nerves were thrumming like harp strings.

  “On the couch, then?” she managed to ask, in a strained voice.

  “Yes, please.”

  He turned to face her, snapping thin, blue nitrile gloves over his hands.

  “Just like a CSI,” Other Stella said, from the corner.

  Stella tried to ignore her and focused resolutely on Terzi’s brown eyes.

  “What happens now? You haven’t told me anything.”

  “Well, there is the anaesthetic, of course. Local. I’m afraid it isn’t completely pain-free, but it will make the procedure itself painless. Then I will make a series of micro-abrasions—you know this word?” Stella nodded as she settled herself back on the bed, straining to keep the butterflies in her stomach from bursting through her skin like baby aliens. “Good. So, a series of very tiny cuts in the skin of your fingertips. Then I inject a minute quantity of a drug called capecitabine. It is commonly used to treat cancers, but it produces cell mutations in the epidermis, and the fingerprints disappear. It is a technique I call peppering. Many tiny shots into the fingertip. Finally, we dress your fingers.”

  “How long does it take to heal?”

  “I know you are in a hurry to leave for England again and continue your mission. Don’t worry. The damage is superficial, and the bleeding will stop within an hour or two. I would suggest waiting twenty-four
hours, so I can remove the dressings. You might find it hard to do yourself.”

  Stella breathed out slowly. She could wait another day.

  “And it works? Permanently?”

  He nodded.

  “I performed my first such operation five years ago. The gentleman has not returned asking for a refund.”

  “He could be dead and chopped into pieces though, couldn’t he?” Other Stella called from the other side of the room.

  Stella blocked her out, angling her head to avoid that amused gaze.

  “Right, then,” she said. “Let’s get it over with.”

  52

  Plan C

  “Everyone has a Plan A,” Detective Constable Adam Collier’s first partner had intoned one grey September morning back in the mid-1980s. “And a fair few manage to think up a Plan B,” DS Jimmy Preston had continued, drawing the smoke from his Marlboro Light deep into his lungs. “But, if you want to stay one step ahead of the bastards, young Adam, what you really need is a Plan C.” Poor old JP hadn’t followed his own advice, dead of lung cancer ten years later.

  Collier had been more careful. Ever attentive to the wisdom of his superiors, he’d striven throughout his career always to have a backup plan of his backup plan. So it was now. Plan A was the murderous, vengeful Albanian. Plan B was to somehow get Stella sectioned and then incarcerated where nobody would ever believe her paranoid fantasies about a parallel justice organisation headed by her own DCS. And Plan C?

  He knocked on the door of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Rachel Fairhill, waited for the “Come!” from the other side, and went in.

  The DAC was in her midfifties, immaculate in her black uniform, with a short, artfully styled mop of red hair. Minimal makeup softened the sharp angles of her face, but the smile as she came round the wide desk to greet Collier was warm and full of good humour.

  They shook hands, and she showed him to a black leather sofa beneath a wide, curtained sash window. She took a seat at the end of a second sofa placed at a right angle to the first and swivelled to face him.

  “It’s been a while, Adam,” she said, her flat Yorkshire tones at odds with the grandeur of her office. “What brings you all the way over here?”

  “Do you remember, last time we met, you asked me about my long-term ambitions?”

  Fairhill frowned. Then her brow cleared.

  “Bill Roddick’s retirement do, wasn’t it? I think so, though I seem to remember we drank the bar dry that night.”

  Collier smiled.

  “More or less. There were a fair few bottles of paracetamol being rattled about the next morning.”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding. “I do remember. Why? You thinking how to take the step up to an executive-level job?”

  “Not exactly. No. It’s more of what you might call a sideways move. I have a friend in Chicago. He’s deputy head of the FBI’s field office there. Last time I was out there, he said if I ever wanted to gain some experience of what he called ‘real law enforcement,’ I should give him a call. Apparently they have a scheme for overseas cops taking sabbaticals with the Bureau.”

  Fairhill laughed.

  “The ‘Bureau,’ eh? Well, you’ve certainly got the patter down, Adam, I’ll give you that. It sounds like it might be fun if that’s the way your thinking’s going. We’d be sorry to lose you, obviously. What does Lynne think about it?”

  Lynne doesn’t think anything about it because I haven’t told her. And if Ferenczy and Akuminde fail me, she’s going to have to fend for herself.

  “Well, it’s only an idea at this point. But she’s pretty keen, to be honest. She’s always said she’d like to move to the States. And it wouldn’t be permanent. We’d come back to the UK eventually.”

  Fairhill’s grey-green eyes narrowed.

  “Unless you decided you liked carrying a gun and lording it over the local plod, eh?”

  That was a bit too close to comfort. Collier pasted a smile onto his face and shrugged.

  “I’m not sure a career approving budgets, reviewing draft diversity policies and brainstorming social media strategies is what the younger me had in mind when he joined the police. But if I do go, Rachel, I’d want to go with your blessing.”

  She inhaled deeply and let the breath out in a sigh.

  “Why would I try to stop you? You’re a good man and a damn fine officer. The Bureau would be lucky to have you for a month, let alone the rest of your career. Of course you have my blessing. Do what you have to do, set the wheels in motion when you’re ready, and if you need me to sign anything, just let me know.”

  Back in his own office, Collier leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head and tried to think how the holy fuck he was going to deal with this, this Terminator he seemed to have unleashed. He had no real faith in Tamit Ferenczy and his gang of thugs, and while fleeing to Chicago would at least have the virtue of putting an ocean between him and DI Cole, he had no illusions that a mere body of water would be enough to stop her.

  53

  Pain

  Stella lay back against the padded back of the bed. She watched as Terzi filled a hypodermic from a small, foil-sealed bottle.

  “This is the anaesthetic,” he said. “Ready?”

  “Let’s go,” she answered, steeling herself for the scratch and the sharp, pricking pain of the needle.

  He picked up her left thumb and turned her hand slightly so that the fleshy part was uppermost. She observed with relief that his hand was absolutely still. The point of the needle touched her skin. She breathed in and held it. As Terzi pushed the hollow tip into her thumb, she flinched, then let out a grunt.

  “Fuck! That really hurts.”

  And it did. She fought her impulse to pull her hand away from the invading needle as Terzi continued to press the plunger down, all the while easing the needle further into her protesting flesh. Instead, she inhaled sharply then let the breath out between her teeth.

  “I am sorry. To numb the nerve, we must get very close.”

  At last it was done, the dose was delivered. She shuddered and began to breathe normally.

  “That’s the anaesthetic? It really hurts!” she complained.

  Terzi smiled ruefully.

  “Only nineteen more to go; we need one each side of each finger.”

  Without pausing, he turned her thumb over and repeated the procedure on the other side of the base joint, just below the web of skin connecting it to the index finger. Terzi paused after finishing her left hand to refill the syringe. Then, without speaking, he resumed his work. By the time he had finished, Stella was fighting back tears. But just as the pain from her screaming nerves threatened to overwhelm her, the local finally began taking effect. The left thumb started to calm down. Then disappear as a sensing digit altogether. One by one, her other fingers also lost sensation.

  While she waited, Terzi rose from his chair and walked over to a stainless-steel medicine cabinet screwed to the wall above his desk. He pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked it. She watched him select another small, clear bottle with a foil top.

  “What’s that? Not more injections.”

  “Not for you, my dear. This is for me.”

  Then he sat at his desk and opened the drawer to his right. When he pulled out a length of brown rubber tubing, Stella realised what he was doing.

  “For fuck’s sake. Please don’t tell me you’re going to shoot up right before you start work on my fingers.”

  By way of an answer, Terzi rolled up his shirtsleeve and wrapped the squirming rubber tube around his right bicep, then slapped the skin in the crook of his elbow to raise a vein.

  He twisted slightly in his chair to speak to her over his shoulder.

  “Relax, Stella. It’s how I prefer to work. Just a tiny dose. Keeps me level-headed.”

  She frowned as he said the word “relax” because all of a sudden she did indeed feel very relaxed. She lay her head back against the pillow and closed her eyes. Her feet felt
a long way from her head and as for her hands, so recently screaming with the pain of the injections, they had apparently become disconnected from her body and were floating free on each side of her torso.

  “What’ve you done, Terzi?” she mumbled through rubbery lips, at once angry that he’d drugged her and euphoric at the sensation of being blissfully in love.

  Terzi finished injecting himself and then came to sit next to her.

  “This is a delicate and time-consuming procedure. I just gave you a little sedation to help you relax, mixed in with the lidocaine.”

  “Wha-what fuck you gave me?” Stella asked, her tongue feeling huge in her mouth.

  “Don’t worry. I didn’t dose you with my drug of choice. Just a solution of midazolam. A tranquiliser a bit like Valium, yes?”

  But Stella had no more strength to continue the conversation. No inclination to, either. Instead, she let the warm waves carry her away from the beach on which she discovered she was lying, out beyond sight of land to where the only sound was the crying of seagulls and …

  … she was floating, without having to paddle, or tread water or even really think. The sea rocked her in its arms like a baby, and she let the little fish nibbling at her fingertips enjoy their meal without interference. Even when they scattered as the long, dark shadow appeared many fathoms down, Stella smiled and hummed Lola’s favourite lullaby. The shadow rose through the jade-green water, solidifying and taking on colour and form. A sinuous, waving tail, a pale-grey back, two dead, black circles for eyes – like buttons, Stella mused – fins extending left and right like a jet fighter’s wings. The fish, bigger than she was, surfaced right beside her and turned one of those jet-black buttons on her. Its mouth made her wonder: what sort of creature could possibly need a set of such ferocious teeth? And why so many? Why, there must be hundreds … thousands … she reached out to touch one of the saw-toothed blades then drew her hand back as the creature spoke, its maw a red, sloshing cauldron decorated here and there with strips of red, sinewy—stuff—dangling from its top teeth. The voice was deep, male, amused.