The First Stella Cole Boxset

by Andy Maslen

  “And you thought of me?”

  “It was a spur of the moment thing. I’m sorry, I can go if you want?”

  She half rose from her chair but Freddie was quicker. He leaned forward and placed a meaty palm on her knee.

  “No. You can stay here. You look done in, for a start, and I’ve got plenty of spare rooms. Plus, like we discussed last time, I’ve got unfinished business with Collier myself.”

  “Yeah, I remember. Um, can I ask you a question?”

  “Fire away.”

  “How come you haven’t got a burglar alarm? I’d have thought all the houses in this road would’ve had them as standard.”

  Freddie smiled.

  “Never felt the need. I let it be known in a few select hostelries round here which house was mine. And what line of business I used to be in. I guess the thieving little shits who make a living burgling rich folk decided out of respect to leave me in peace.”

  Adam Collier woke at 5.30 a.m. while Stella and Freddie were still drinking their tea. He eased his still-sleeping wife off his right arm, from which all sensation had departed sometime in the night. Wincing, as blood and feeling came flooding back into the deadened limb, he climbed out of bed. He donned a dressing gown, grabbed his phone, and padded downstairs to make coffee. He checked his phone, looking for the missed call from Dan and the voicemail telling him Stella Cole had become unruly – violent, even – and had had to be sedated. And could he come in to St Mary’s and offer his distressed officer some much-needed support?

  He smiled with satisfaction as the phone woke up and displayed a little white “1” inside a red circle over the green-and-white phone icon. The message icon had its top right corner clipped by an identical alert symbol but carrying a “2.”

  Choosing to read first, then listen, he tapped the message icon. As his eyes skittered over the first, two-word text, he punched the air. Even better than expected. Dan must have overcooked the dosage. Or just decided to man up and do the job himself.

  She’s gone.

  He noticed that the second text was also from Dan and apparently sent a minute after the first.

  I think she’s escaped. I have to report it.

  A cold weight settled in the pit of his stomach. For the first time since the whole wretched business with Richard Drinkwater, Detective Chief Superintendent Adam Collier was frightened.

  21

  Ongoing Investigation

  Ever since Collier had pressured her into using the Taser on Stella, Detective Sergeant Frankie O’Meara had been struggling to stay focused on her current cases. It wasn’t as if they were run-of-the-mill. On the whiteboard listing cases by team member, Frankie was down for a double-murder, a suspected child abduction and a serious sexual assault. But what was eating at her conscience, and waking her at three in the morning, was the nagging suspicion that she’d been played.

  She hadn’t managed to speak to Stella since she’d disappeared up to Scotland on the trail of the man who’d murdered her family. Stella had been cagey about his identity. But Frankie was a detective, and a good one at that. So she’d decided to do some digging in her own time.

  Frankie had made a list of a few questions she needed to answer if she was going to discover what was going on with Stella. Not on a computer, nor an official police notebook. She wanted something deniable. So this list was on a sheet of paper in a kitchen drawer in her flat.

  WHO would need a fall guy for the murder of a human rights lawyer and his daughter (husband and daughter of DI S. Cole)?

  WHO did Stella go up to Scotland to arrest (kill)?

  WHY wouldn’t Stella follow official procedure?

  WHO did Stella trust (apart from me)?

  It had been so long since Frankie had worked with Stella – properly worked – that she’d lost her sense of intimacy with her boss. Who she was tight with, who she confided in, who she shared fag breaks with. But she knew a man who might be able to point her in the right direction. Which is why, at 11.00 a.m. on a sunny day when she would rather have been outside soaking up some rays, Frankie found herself in the subterranean, supermarket-sized space that was the Exhibits Room.

  Pushing through the swing doors, she sighed as the smell of stale air, stale blood and stale ambitions assailed her nostrils. The space before her was crowded with some of the tattiest, saddest and downright ugliest office furniture in the entire station. IT had once had worse. But the commonly believed rumour was that one of the managers there had wiped porn from a senior officer’s computer just hours before an ethics audit and been rewarded with a trolley dash round Staples.

  Two civilian staff – both young women – were pecking away on keyboards blackened by years of use. One, a plump blonde with a nose ring. The other, slim, with dark purple lipstick and long black hair. She looked up as Frankie coughed a polite “Ahem.” Her face was white. Not with fear, Frankie quickly realised, correcting her initial impression. This was makeup. Jesus, Mary and sweet Joseph, she thought, the Goths have taken over the asylum.

  “Hi there. Can I help?” the young woman asked.

  “Is Reg the Veg – I mean, is Reg Willing around?”

  Reg Willing, plump, lazy, transferred from active duty years before, the master of the Exhibits Room. And Stella’s former colleague during the time she’d worked there on light duties.

  The young woman smirked.

  “He’s through there. Want me to get him for you?”

  She nodded towards a door beyond which lay the secured evidence room, packed to the rafters with bagged and tagged exhibits from thousands of current and historical cases. Bloody knives, semen-stained knickers, friction-ridge prints, hair samples, insect larvae, paint chips, plaster casts of footprints – they, and many hundreds of other evidence types, waited for their moment in court on miles of industrial racking.

  “No thanks, you’re all right,” Frankie said. “Is it OK if I go through to speak to him?”

  “Of course. You just need to sign in. Here.”

  She pushed a visitor book towards Frankie, who jotted down her name, rank and warrant card number, along with the time.

  The fluorescent lighting of the outer office was depressing. In here it was frustrating. Bluish-white, dim and hardly any use. A bit like you, Reg, Frankie thought, stifling a giggle. Peering through the gloom, she saw a rotund figure moving with surprising grace among the shelves.

  “Reg?” she called out.

  The figure straightened. Turned.

  “You called, Milady? Oh, it’s DS O’Meara. Top o’ the morning to ye. Oi’ll be with yez in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, so I will.”

  In terms of accents, Reg’s “Guinness-and-Leprechauns” Dublin Irish was out by about a hundred miles. But even a proud Belfast girl like Frankie didn’t have time or the energy to correct him. Weaving his way along the racks of wire shelves, Reg kept up what he presumably felt was an amusing murmur of fiddle-de-diddly “Oirish” until he arrived in front of her.

  “Hi Reg, how are you?” Frankie asked.

  “Couldn’t be better, dear lady, couldn’t be better. And how may Sir Reginald of Recordsia help you this fine morning?”

  Face to face, Reg had dropped the accent in favour of his own unique brand of English. He’d dropped his gaze, too.

  “I’m up here, Reg,” she answered, talking to his bald patch.

  He jerked his head up.

  “Sorry, DS O’Meara. Old habits and all that. You won’t report me to HR for inappropriate ogling, will you?”

  Frankie sighed. At school, her bust had been the envy of her friends, the focus of attention of the boys and a cross she had learned to bear. At the station, it was as if the intervening years hadn’t happened. Male officers were simply incapable of maintaining eye contact.

  “It depends.” She paused, relishing the expression of anxiety that flickered on Reg’s reddening face. “I need to ask you something. And I don’t want it going any further.”

  She gave him a hard stare and was gr
atified to see that this time his eyes were locked on to hers.

  “Anything, DS O’Meara. Ask away. You can trust Old Reg.”

  “When DI Cole was working with you, did anyone come to see her? Was there anyone she seemed friendly with?”

  “What, down here, you mean?”

  Frankie shrugged.

  “Down here, up there. I just need to find out who she was hanging around with.”

  Reg made a show of thinking, cupping his chin and looking up at the ceiling.

  “She introduced Daisy to Barney Riordan. It was all the poor girl could talk about for weeks afterwards. Don’t think I ever really saw Stel talking to anyone else. I had a bit of a tummy bug that kept me out of circulation for a while. Stel basically went AWOL shortly after I got back, so …”

  “That’s OK, Reg. Is Daisy the vampire in your front office?”

  Reg laughed.

  “No. That’s Thea. Jackson. She’s actually very nice. You know, when she’s not drinking wirrgins’ blaad.” He rolled his eyes and bared his yellow incisors, pushing his hair back into a widow’s peak.

  Feeling that she really needed to be somewhere else before she rammed a stake through his heart, Frankie thanked Reg, turned on her heel and left him to his comedy accents.

  Back in the main office she looked around. The blonde had disappeared. She approached Thea.

  “Excuse me. Is Daisy going to be long?”

  “Shouldn’t be. I think she just went to the loo.”

  “Thanks.”

  Frankie asked for directions to the Ladies then left, breathing a sigh of relief as the swing doors closed behind her. She found the plump young woman at the sinks in the Ladies.

  “Hi. Are you Daisy?”

  “Yes. You’re DS O’Meara, aren’t you?”

  “Well remembered.”

  “I saw you come in with Stella once, before she was working in Exhibits, I mean. You introduced yourself then.”

  Frankie felt a momentary flicker of awkwardness that Daisy had remembered their previous meeting when she had not.

  “Yeah, I remember now. Stella introduced you to that footballer, didn’t she? What was his name?”

  Daisy’s face broke into a wide and innocent-looking smile. Eyes round, she answered in a rush.

  “Oh. My. God. Barney Riordan. Rear of the Year Barney Riordan. He came over at the Café Royal and said hello to me personally. And gave me a kiss. In front of the paparazzi and everything! I was actually in heat, can you believe it?”

  Frankie blinked in surprise. For a second she thought Daisy was describing her state of sexual arousal. Then reality kicked in. Not heat. Heat! The celebrity gossip magazine.

  “Kudos,” she said, drily. “So, listen, you spent a bit of time with Stella, right? Did she ever say who she was close to since she came back on light duties?”

  Daisy offered up an almost exact copy of Reg’s body language. Apparently drawn from a book called How to Show You’re Thinking. Then she returned her blue eyes to Frankie’s.

  “I don’t exactly know if they were close, but she did go to dinner with this really good looking black guy. He came down looking for her once, but she’d gone by then.”

  Dinner? That sounded like someone Stella might share a confidence with. But the description was a bit rubbish.

  “And when you say, ‘good looking black guy’?”

  “Oh, right.” Daisy frowned. “Tall. About six-one. Midthirties. Slim, athletic build. Not muscly, but you know, fit-looking. Golden-brown eyes. Very short hair, cropped, really. High forehead, no wrinkles. Great smile. Super-good dresser. Not suited and booted like the detectives. More casual. But, like, with amazing taste. Oh, and he talked really posh. Like he went to Cambridge or something.”

  Frankie mimed applause.

  “Wow! OK, that was truly impressive.”

  Daisy blushed.

  “I’ve trained myself. To be observant, I mean.”

  “Well it worked. Because I know exactly who you’re talking about.”

  “Really?”

  “There are dozens of good-looking black guys at Paddington Green, but only one who’s also posh and a clothes horse.”

  22

  Amazing What You Can Find on the Internet

  Frankie walked into the forensics office already scanning for Lucian Young. Daisy couldn’t have described him more accurately if she’d produced a high-resolution photograph. As the door squeaked to a close over its final couple of inches, three or four heads popped up from behind screens. Like meerkats, Frankie thought. She spotted Lucian at the rear of the office, hunched over a microscope.

  “Hi,” she said, when she reached his desk.

  He raised his head from the scope and turned to her.

  “Oh, hi. Frankie, isn’t it? You work with Stella.”

  “That’s right. Nice of you to say work, not worked, too. At least you think she’s still a copper.”

  He smiled, and Frankie reflected that he was, actually, very good looking. And the fact he wasn’t staring at her tits was a bonus.

  “Well, she is, isn’t she? Last I heard. Despite everything.”

  Something in his look, made Frankie feel instinctively she could trust him. She leaned closer and spoke in a low voice.

  “Is there somewhere we could go for a chat? About Stella?”

  He stood.

  “Fancy a coffee?”

  Avoiding a cluster of coffee outlets owned by one global chain or another, they settled on a little cafe in a row of tatty shops including a dry cleaner, a betting shop and a convenience store. Frankie ordered the coffees, and a currant bun for herself, and brought everything over to the table Lucian had chosen in a corner by the big plate glass window overlooking Edgware Road.

  She took a careful sip of the coffee. Scalding hot, but a genuinely pleasurable hit of caffeine beneath it, not just the usual milky overload. Lucian mirrored her action, eyeing her over the rim of the thick, white, china mug, but clearly waiting for her to make the first move. A young guy in jeans and a scruffy denim jacket came in and called out a cheery hello to the girl behind the counter. Using the distraction, Frankie spoke.

  “You heard what happened.”

  He put his mug down.

  “About Stella’s being sectioned? Yes. I doubt there’s a single person in the nick who isn’t aware one of our finest went postal in CID.”

  “She had dinner with you, didn’t she?”

  “A couple of times, yes. Why?”

  Why are you being so cagey? Frankie wondered. Press on.

  “I’m worried about her, that’s why. I’m trying to find someone, anyone, who she was close to after she came back to work. She told me she’d found out who murdered Richard and Lola. She was going to gather intelligence, she told me. But I think she went to kill him. Look, Lucian, if you know anything, you have to tell me. Please.”

  Maybe it was the beseeching note in her voice, she didn’t know, but something in Lucian seemed to change. His eyes lost the wary look they’d had since they sat down. He leaned closer, across the tabletop.

  “Stella told me she’d uncovered evidence that pointed to a high-level conspiracy inside the legal system. She thought they’d murdered Richard because he was getting close to exposing them. Lola got caught up in it, but it was Richard they were after.”

  Frankie rocked back in her chair. Whatever she’d been expecting – or hoping – to hear, it wasn’t this. She took a distracted bite of the currant bun and yelped as her teeth closed on her tongue. A couple of the other customers jerked their heads round at the noise, then turned away again, presumably having reassured themselves it wasn’t some nutter about to pull out a carving knife.

  “A conspiracy?” she hissed. “Are you serious?”

  “I’m serious that’s what she told me. She had a letter Richard wrote to her before he died. Whether it’s true or not,” he shrugged, “you’ll have to ask Stella.”

  “But do you think it’s true?”

&nbs
p; “I’m really not sure. On the one hand, we work for an organisation that feels constantly undermined by the courts, by defence lawyers, by special interest groups. What could be more natural than for a few rogue elements to decide to set things straight by other means? On the other hand, this is still Britain. We don’t really go in for death squads, black sites and secret police, do we?”

  “Oh, come on Lucian. Stop being such a bloody rational scientist for a second and just give me your gut feel. I need to know. This is Stella we’re talking about, not some case study.”

  He held his hands up in surrender. Or maybe just to ward off Frankie’s pointing finger.

  “OK, OK, I’ll tell you what I feel. Although being a bloody rational scientist is rather what I do, you know. I think she was – is – onto something. There were three pieces of evidence she turned up. She found a paint chip from the hit and run. It had been misfiled. Deliberately, she thought. And Linda Heath from HR. The way she said something about justice being done made Stella think she was quoting a mantra instead of just indulging in wishful thinking. And finally, that guy who was convicted, what was his name?”

  “Edwin Deacon.”

  “She told me he’d been – what do you call it, when you move someone between prisons without notice?”

  “Ghosted?”

  “That’s it. She said he’d been ghosted from HMP Bure to Long Lartin. Where he was beaten to death after being misclassified as a sex offender.”

  Frankie inhaled deeply and blew out across the surface of her coffee. If she’d gone to Stella with that quality of evidence about a case in the old days, Stella would have kicked her arse and told her to go away and do some proper police work. Now, she wasn’t so sure. Are you really onto something, boss? Or is it all in your head? After all, you were acting like Lola was alive when she’d died in the FATACC. She made a decision.