The First Stella Cole Boxset

by Andy Maslen

  Radstock turned away and peered over the edge again.

  Collier stepped forward, palms outstretched and shoved him, hard, between his shoulder blades.

  Screaming, Radstock fell outwards and down, arms flailing.

  Collier watched his progress as he hit an outcropping fifty feet down, then a second, before sailing out from the cliff face. He counted. Five seconds. That was how long it took for his son’s killer to reach Mother Earth. The smack of skull on rock reached him a split second after he saw the bloom of red. He turned away and walked back to the car.

  Back in Roundhay Park Lane, he blipped the gate opener on the key fob and parked the Ferrari exactly where it had been before, lining it up on the scuff marks in the gravel. He locked it, opened the door with Radstock’s key and replaced the car keys on the hook he’d watched Radstock lift them from.

  Locking the front door behind him, he pushed the button on the gatepost to manually open the gate, walked out onto the street and waited for the gate to close behind him. He started walking, back to his own car.

  In his office at Lothian and Borders Police HQ in Edinburgh, two hundred miles to the north, Gordon Wade was talking to Callie McDonald.

  “You were due for a promotion anyway, but if we’re going to send you down south to clean up this unholy mess, I think we’ll just bring it forwards a wee bit. So congratulations, Detective Superintendent McDonald.”

  Callie smiled. Though Wade discerned grim determination as well as her natural pleasure at the promotion.”

  “Thank you, sir. I won’t let you down.”

  “Aye, well, for all our sakes, Callie, I hope ye don’t.”

  35

  A Reputation to Maintain

  Marilyn’s face was a mask of surprise. Blue eyes dazzling against the mahogany tan, and enhanced further by the fans of white crows-feet at the outer corners. Frosted-pink lipsticked mouth open wide.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” she said, hands on hips. Then she turned and shouted over her shoulder. “Ronnie! Get over here. Now! Your friend Stella is in Dad’s house.”

  Without waiting for her husband, Marilyn turned back to Stella and advanced.

  “Marilyn, wait, please.”

  It was a pointless plea. Stella knew it. Marilyn Wilks was not a woman to take orders from anyone. Least of all a copper she considered as bent, whether or not said copper had retrieved a couple of million in illicit cash from a lockup for her and Ronnie.

  She took a shove in the chest from Marilyn’s expensively manicured right hand and gave way as she marched through the front door. Stella followed her.

  “Marilyn. Stop!” she barked.

  The shout worked. Or something in its urgent tone. Marilyn stopped dead and spun round.

  “What’s going on?” Then she walked to the foot of the stairs and called out. “Dad? Dad? It’s Min, Dad. We’re early.”

  “He can’t hear you,” Stella said, dreading the next few minutes.

  “What d’you mean, he can’t hear me? He’s not deaf. He knows we’re coming. He said he’d be in.”

  She turned and marched towards the sitting room door. Stella tried to catch up, to get a hand on the door knob before Marilyn, desperately trying to figure out a line that would save the situation from descending into chaos.

  The she heard Ronnie’s voice behind her.

  “Min, stop, she’s got a shooter!”

  Too late, Stella remembered the Glock she’d pried from Freddie’s hand and stuck in her waistband.

  Marilyn stopped. Turned. Took two paces towards Stella. Eyes blazing.

  And Stella’s head exploded in pain.

  Stella came to, leaned over to her left and vomited. Straightening, and wincing at the flare of agony at the side of her skull, she looked up through teary eyes. Her arms ached. They were sandwiched behind her, between her back and the sofa cushions. She leant forward and tried to pull them free, only to realise her wrists were tied. She groaned.

  Facing her, in the smaller sitting room that Freddie called the snug, Ronnie sat in an armchair, leaning forwards. The Glock in his meaty right hand looked like a toy. No beige velour leisure suit today for Ronnie. In Marbella, his preferred choice of outfit had robbed him of his dignity let alone his menace. The Ronnie whose hard eyes were boring into hers now looked every inch the kind of man with whom law-abiding citizens would avoid eye-contact. A black, roll-neck sweater beneath a caramel leather jacket, neither of which did much to disguise his still-impressive musculature. And the mouth set into a grim line across a freshly shaved face as if slit by a knife.

  Stella leaned her head back, then jerked it forward again as she made contact with the top of the sofa.

  “Shit, Ronnie, what did you hit me with? A length of two-by-four?”

  “Shut the fuck up. Why did you shoot Freddie?”

  “I didn’t do it. It was Collier. You know he’s bent. We talked about it.”

  “How come you had the gun?”

  “He left it. He put it in Freddie’s hand. He killed them both, him and Frankie. She was my sergeant. To look like they killed each other, you know?”

  Ronnie’s eyes flashed.

  “No. I don’t fucking know. What I do know, is we just walked in on a fucking bloodbath and there’s a cop, a mad cop, wandering about in Freddie’s house with a shooter. A recently fired shooter.”

  “Please, you have to believe me. It went down the way I said it did.”

  Ronnie leaned back, though she noticed the grip on the pistol had tightened and it now lay across his right thigh.

  “You think I’m a joke, don’t you?”

  “What? No! Of course I don’t. You’re—”

  “Fannying around on the Costa, running my little pub, getting my marching orders from Marilyn, opening bottles of Bolly for houseguests. You know what my nickname is, don’t you?”

  “The Razor.”

  “That’s right,” he said, his voice dropping into a low-toned murmur. “Ronnie ‘The Razor’ Wilks. Do you know how I got it?”

  “Did you start off your career as a barber?”

  Ronnie smiled. Lifted the Glock off his thigh and turned it this way and that in the light so Stella saw the barrel’s dull gleam.

  “Very funny. I saw this documentary once on the telly. About these tribesmen in Africa. Masai, I think they were. Maybe Zulus. Tough little fuckers, anyway. So, if you wanted to become a man, you had to go out on your own, into the savannah, and guess what?”

  “What?”

  “Kill a lion. A fucking lion! With a spear. Like I said, tough little fuckers. So, anyway, when I was growing up, I got myself into a little firm over in Lewisham. Commercial burglaries mostly, but we weren’t averse to a little protection, armed robbery, whatever looked profitable. The boss said anyone who wanted to be counted as a full member had to do him a favour. My favour was to deliver a beating to one of the boss’s business rivals who’d got too big for his boots. He told me to make it count but to leave him alive. But it went sideways. The bloke pulled a razor on me. Got in a decent cut to my cheek,” Ronnie drew a line down his right cheek with his left index finger, “and I saw the red mist, didn’t I? I had brass knuckles on and I knocked his fucking head off. When he went down he smacked his head on the pavement and that was that. KO’ed him. So I took the razor off him and sliced him open. Both cheeks, forehead and chin. Kept it, too. After that, the boss made me his number three. He was the one who called me Razor.”

  “Why are you telling me this? What do you want from me?”

  “I want you,” he pointed the Glock at Stella’s face, “to tell me,” he waggled it from side to side a little, “the truth.”

  Stella opened her mouth to answer. To protest that she was telling the truth. But before she could speak, the door to the snug burst open. Marilyn stood there, her eye makeup blotchy, giving her the panda-eyed look of a homeward-bound clubber after one too many margaritas. Her white trouser suit, the jacket buttoned over her luxurious boso
m, was smeared and stained with red.

  “What the fuck have you done?” she said. Her voice was toneless. And that made it all the more frightening.

  “Marilyn, please. It wasn’t me. It was Collier. I’m trying to tell you both. He tried to have me killed. He put me in the loony bin. I escaped and came straight to Freddie.”

  “Don’t you —” Marilyn, heaved in a breath and let it out again in a juddering sigh, dashing tears away with the back of her hand and further blotching her makeup. “Don’t you ever call him Freddie again. He was my Daddy. I never called him that.”

  Before Stella could frame an answer, Marilyn closed the gap between them and slapped Stella hard across the cheek. Then again. And again.

  The pain of the impacts wasn’t bad. Stella had had worse. It didn’t worry her that she was tied up in the presence of the Wilkses, with their suspicions that she’d murdered Freddie. What worried her, what frightened her, was the sound she could hear deep inside her head. A deep-throated roar. A big motorbike, all black, throttle wide open gripped by a red-nailed hand, its rider laughing maniacally as she headed for the gates of Stella’s conscious mind, ready to burst through and assume control.

  “Leave them to me, Stel,” the rider shouted over the thrashing engine and screaming exhaust. “Leave them all to me!”

  Stella shook her head as Marilyn’s latest back-handed blow raised sparks in her peripheral vision.

  “You have to let me go. Please. Right now!” Stella said.

  “What’s Collier planning?” Ronnie said from his spot on the sofa, from which he hadn’t moved during Marilyn’s assault.

  “I don’t know. I told you. I’m after him, too.”

  Stella concentrated on trying to erect mental road blocks in front of the onrushing bike and its grinning rider. She thought of Lola, willed herself to picture her baby girl, despite the pain it caused her. The white cot with the mobile clamped to the headboard. Little furry zoo animals that turned slowly as it played “We’re all going to the zoo tomorrow.”

  Marilyn stepped out of Stella’s eyeline, behind the sofa to the fireplace. Stella heard a metallic clank. When Marilyn came back into view, she was holding a wrought-iron poker, the business end tipped with a hooked point.

  “You heard him,” Marilyn said. “Tell us what that scumbag is going to do next.”

  Other Stella was hunkered down over the Triumph’s handlebars and riding straight at the cot and its slowly revolving mobile of gaily coloured fluffy toy animals. The cot splintered under the front wheel. Other Stella threw her head back and opened her mouth wide.

  “WE’RE GOING TO STAY ALL DAY!” she shouted.

  The point of the poker was icy cold against Stella’s chin. Marilyn pushed it up so that Stella felt it underneath her tongue. She felt it as the skin in the soft place between her jaw bones split.

  “I’m sorry,” she choked out, her tongue working overtime to form the words around the bulge the poker was pushing into her mouth.

  “You should be, you cold-hearted bitch,” Marilyn said. “He didn’t deserve to be killed in his own lounge.”

  “Not for Freddie. For what’s coming next.”

  Other Stella had arrived. She killed the engine and climbed off the bike.

  “Stick around Stel,” she said, grinning. “No need to go floating off to the ceiling for a birds-eye view of the action. Let’s do these two together.”

  Stella leaned back into the soft sofa cushions. She looked up at Marilyn and spoke in a low, sardonic growl.

  “You’re dead.”

  Behind her back, she pushed her hand down into her jeans pocket and clamped the index and middle fingers round the handle of Freddie’s flick-knife.

  “Why? What’s Collier going to do next?”

  “It’s too late.”

  Extracting it was easy, despite losing her grip a couple of times. The polished handle slid free without snagging.

  “Hang on, Min,” Ronnie said.

  He rose from his seat on the sofa opposite Stella. He crossed the rug between them and gently eased Marilyn to one side, mercifully lowering the point of the poker out from under the soft flesh of Stella’s jaw. Then he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket. The hand that reappeared held a cutthroat razor. A gleaming, stainless steel implement that, closed, looked exactly like the long, thin clamshells it gave its name to.

  “I never go anywhere without one of these,” he said with a smile. “I’ve got a set of seven in a lovely black, leather case. That’s what gentlemen used to do in the old days, buy seven. One for each day of the week. Kept them sharper that way. Gave the edges a chance to recover.”

  Stella shuffled her bottom forward on the sofa cushion to give herself space to work.

  “Uncomfortable, are we? Rope a bit tight is it? It’s gonna get worse before it gets better, Stella, I can promise you that.”

  He opened the razor. The fearsome weapon was almost a foot long from the tip of the blade to the end of the handle. The blade shone like silver. He leaned forward and placed the edge on the tip of Stella’s nose.

  “I took a bloke’s face off with one of these. One feature at a time. He told me what I wanted to know. In the end.”

  36

  Close Shave

  Ronnie flicked his wrist and Stella gasped at the sharp flare of pain. She felt the blood dribbling down across her top lip. Instinctively, she put her tongue out to catch the flow. Salt. Iron. Copper.

  And behind her back, the sound masked by her cough, she pressed the button to open her own blade.

  “You better tell us what we want to know,” Ronnie said. “Compared to Marilyn, I’m the good cop.”

  Other Stella issued an instruction that only Stella could hear.

  Keep him happy, babe. Make something up. Just for a minute or two.

  Stella inhaled. Fixed Ronnie, then Marilyn, with a stare that she hoped would look penitent.

  “Collier sent me to Marbella. The whole thing was a setup. To get you two back in England. He’s assembled a snatch team. He’s going to track you down and take you off the street.”

  “I knew it!” Marilyn cried.

  Ronnie’s questions came like bullets.

  “And the Glock? Your story about your kid? The death squads?”

  “Oh, the death squads are real enough. But we cooked up the other business between us. He thought an old school villain like you would go for it. I’m single, Ronnie. There never was a kid.”

  Freddie had been as meticulous about keeping his blades sharp as he had about everything else in his house, from the neatly made bed to the squared-up paperbacks on the nightstand. The flick-knife cut through Stella’s bindings as if they were ribbons round a child’s Christmas present. With a small jerk, the last of the thin ropes parted.

  Stella readied herself.

  So did Other Stella.

  “Changed my mind, Stel. I’ll take it from here.”

  Stella felt the familiar nauseating lurch in the pit of her stomach. It had happened when she’d butchered the CPS lawyer Debra Fieldsend. When she’d thrown Charlie Howarth QC to his death several storeys down onto York stone flagstones. And again when she’d shot Tamit Ferenczy on the roof of his own club. The violence of Other Stella’s takeover sent Stella shooting backwards out of her own body into a corner of the snug, where she remained trapped, a passive witness to what came next.

  Other Stella lunged forward, her right hand swinging out wide in a semicircle. The flick-knife’s wickedly sharp blade punched deep into Ronnie Wilks’s abdomen on the left-hand side. By the time he’d thought of lifting the pistol it was too late. As his eyes widened in shock, Other Stella pushed herself off the sofa and dealt him two slashing blows across the face. Left, then right. The knife opened two deep cuts across both cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, and on the return trip sliced clean through his left eye. Over his screams, she yelled defiantly.

  “Dead man walking!”

  He staggered back, dropping the pis
tol and the straight razor to clutch abdomen and ruined eye. Other Stella leaned back and kicked him in the stomach with the sole of her right boot. Then she turned her attention to Marilyn, who was standing paralysed, as she tried to assimilate the information her own eyes were sending her brain.

  Too much thinking. Not enough acting.

  Other Stella slashed down at her right hand, half-severing it as the ultra-sharp blade sliced through the tendons and ligaments of her wrist. Marilyn screamed. As her fingers opened and the poker she’d been holding rolled free of her grasp, Other Stella darted forward and caught it.

  “You crazy bitch!”

  This was Ronnie, who’d fallen back against the sofa he’d so recently vacated. One hand was clamped over his eye, viscous pink liquid leaking from between his fingers, the other over the spreading patch of blood on his shirt.

  “Oh, do shut up, Ronnie,” Other Stella replied. “I’ve had enough of you. I should’ve cut your cock off when you made a pass at me at your house.”

  She ducked as Marilyn launched an attack with her remaining good hand, which was holding a Chinese vase. She straightened after the crockery had passed harmlessly over her head and swung up and across with the poker. With a crack, the hook buried itself in Marilyn’s temple. A low moan issuing from her frosted lips, Marilyn’s eyes rolled upwards in their sockets until only the whites remained visible. Other Stella stepped back as the dead woman toppled backwards, blood jetting from the head wound, and came to rest with a thump on the rug.

  She bent to collect the razor then straightened and climbed onto Ronnie’s supine form so that her knees came to rest one each side of his chest. Her weight drove his wind out of him in a gasp that sprayed a fine mist of blood into her face.