by Andy Maslen
She leaned down until the tip of her nose, which had stopped bleeding, was just touching his.
“Live by the razor, Ronnie,” she murmured.
No practice cut.
No hesitation.
No need for a second attempt.
In a single, powerful move, Other Stella drove the edge of the razor against the freshly shaved skin of Ronnie “The Razor” Wilks’s throat and opened him like a fish, right to left. What little breath remained in him escaped the rent in his throat with a bubbling hiss like an uncapped beer bottle.
She moved back fast, but not fast enough.
The first spurt caught her full in the face and she swiped her sleeve across her cheek as she climbed off the dying gangster.
From her vantage point – or prison – in the corner of the room, Stella watched in horror as Ronnie Wilks died, the jets of bright scarlet blood spurting six or seven feet into the air. Other Stella turned and beckoned her, and with a sucking sensation she felt herself streaming across the room.
Stella shook her head. She was standing between the blood-soaked corpses of Ronnie and Marilyn Wilks. She dropped the razor. Looked around. At the walls. The furniture. The antique, gold-framed mirror above the fireplace. The paintings on the wall. The curtains. The ceiling.
“Tarantino,” she said.
Then she went upstairs to shower and change. Rubbing the towel over her hair, she discovered that Ronnie’s initial blow had popped the stitches in her scalp wound, but the tissue beneath had more or less healed.
She sat on the edge of the bed in the guestroom and called Vicky.
“There’ve been some developments. I need to leave Freddie’s. Can I come and stay with you for a few days?
“Of course. But what developments?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you.”
Downstairs, she paused to collect the rucksack full of Freddie’s illicit cash. She’d decided while showering off the blood that she was going to keep the Glock, but leave the razor. The scene inside Five Beeches would baffle even the most ardent and experienced investigator. Christ alone knew what the media would make of it when the news eventually leaked out. The flick-knife she also kept. A thought occurred to her. Collier might have cancelled her ID card. She turned towards the sitting room door.
Hand on the knob, she took a deep breath and tried to prepare herself mentally. She’s gone, Stel. Nothing in there but DBs, now. You need it. So, in, get it, out, close the door. Mourn her later.
She pushed through and let out an involuntary sob as she saw Frankie. Avoiding the blood on the carpet, Stella picked her way over to where Frankie lay. Leaning over her and lifting her head gently, Stella eased the Metropolitan Police Service ID card and its blue lanyard clear of the dead detective sergeant’s long brown hair. She laid Frankie’s head back down on the carpet and retraced her steps. The white plastic ID card was spotted with blood and the lanyard had turned almost black with it in places. Stella took it to the kitchen, unclipped the badge and washed it under the cold tap before sliding it into her purse. The lanyard went into a zip-lock sandwich bag, which she sealed and pocketed. She ran upstairs and retrieved the cash-stuffed daysack.
In the hall, she pulled up the number of the taxi firm she’d used to take her to Westcliff-on-Sea. Then smacked herself on the forehead.
“Come on, Stel. Use some common sense! Why not just call a press conference in the sitting room while you’re about it?”
Instead, she lifted the keys to the Rolls from a hook beside the front door.
She frowned at the long swooping silver scar on the car’s golden flank. The interior smelled of leather and cologne. Everywhere she turned she saw richly figured wood, cream leather, chrome, or cream carpet with dark-green piping.
Stella placed her rucksack in the passenger footwell. She twisted the surprisingly delicate key in the ignition. She felt, rather than heard, the engine start.
“Huh,” she said. “I’ve been in hybrids that make more noise than you do.”
She moved the slender, column-mounted gear selector lever into Drive and, after a moment of confusion, located, and let off, the floor-mounted parking brake. Keeping her hands at the ten-to-two position on the slim-rimmed steering wheel, she gave the throttle pedal a gentle push.
Freddie had explained how he’d had a mechanic fit a transponder inside the car that opened the gates. Nosing the big car forwards, she held her breath. Then released it as the wide wooden gates swung open. She let the big car ease itself out onto Mill Green Road, content to guide the seventeen-foot-long beast with the steering wheel and let the idling engine do the rest. Freddie hadn’t been lying about the car’s dimensions. She was sure it was longer than her house in West Hampstead was wide.
She watched over her shoulder as the gates closed behind her. And sighed.
“I’m sorry I brought all this down on you, Freddie. You were kind to me.”
Then she pulled away, leaving the slaughterhouse behind the tall wooden gates and refocusing on her need to track down Collier.
From beside her, Other Stella spoke.
“Now this is what I call a classy motor. You can see why he bought it, can’t you?”
“Yeah, well, sadly he’s not around to enjoy it anymore, is he?”
“Don’t look at me, Stel. I didn’t do him. That’s on Collier. Along with your sergeant.”
“No, but you did kill Ronnie and Marilyn.”
“Of course I did! They were going to torture us then kill us.”
“They just wanted information. I was handling it.”
“Oh, right, handling. You mean with a fucking great razor in your face and a poker shoved up under your chin. Yeah, I saw how well you were handling it.”
“I could have talked them down. They were just in shock.”
“Well, they’re not in shock anymore, are they? Now, let’s forget all about the dead gangsters and concentrate on our next move. How are we going to get to Collier? Something tells me a full-frontal attack is out of the question.”
“I don’t know. I need to think. Talk it over with Vicky.”
Other Stella swivelled round in the armchair-like passenger seat.
“How about this? Call it in. The murders back there. The media’ll have a field day. I can see the headlines now. ‘East End Crime Family, Detective, Slain: Police Seek Deranged Killer.’ That’ll flush him out.”
“Maybe. But he left the gun to tell a story. He’ll be expecting press coverage. He’s not to know you took it.”
“All right then. Call it in and say you know who did it. Hint at a vigilante cop. A senior vigilante cop. Say they should be looking at management at Paddington Green.”
Stella shook her head.
“No way. He’s too much of a smooth operator to get caught that way. He’d just smile that PR smile of his and say, ‘Oh yes, we know all about these allegations. It was this psycho-bitch DI who I sectioned and who just escaped from the loony bin by murdering another patient.’ Put out an APB on Stella Cole.”
Other Stella’s eyes flashed.
“Stop the car!” she shouted.
“Fuck off!”
“I said,” she growled, “stop the car.”
“And I said, fuck off.”
The slap was so hard Stella saw bright white stars dancing in front of her eyes.
Other Stella’s hand was around her throat.
“Last chance, Stel. Stop the car.”
Choking, Stella stamped on the brake, bringing the Rolls to a halt at the kerb outside a dress shop. She pushed the selector lever into Park and waited for Other Stella to release her.
37
The Dynamic Duo
Standing on the narrow pavement outside a boutique, fifty-year-old Julie Foster and her husband Mike, two years her senior, were discussing which of Ingatestone’s coffee shops they should stop at for a latte when a gold Rolls Royce pulled in sharply and stopped right beside Julie’s right hip. She jumped back.
“Jesus! Learn to drive,�
� she yelled in at the driver. Then she pulled back. “Here, Mike. What do you think she’s up to?”
Her husband bent down and peered in at the driver. He saw a youngish woman, early thirties, maybe, with a shocking blonde punk haircut he’d last seen in Ingatestone in about 1977. She was gripping herself around the throat and he could see her lips working as if she were talking. He couldn’t see a phone, and he was pretty sure Rolls Royces of this vintage didn’t come with hands-free or Bluetooth.
He knocked on the window with the back of his knuckles, intending to say something to this unlikely Rolls owner about road manners and watching out for pedestrians. When she turned to face him, the expression on her face, and what was clearly a stream of invective issuing from her taut lips, persuaded him that this would be a bad idea. The slap she delivered to her own right cheek convinced him of it.
“Come on, Julie,” he said, straightening, and turning to his wife. “Let’s go and get that coffee. Something not quite right in there.”
Other Stella’s eyes were blazing and all the colour had left her cheeks, giving her skin a pale, waxen sheen like a mannequin’s.
“I am trying to help you. Making suggestions. And all you do is throw them back in my face. Now I’m going to tell you what to do. Get Collier’s address. We’ll go there together. And then we’ll show him the true meaning of justice.”
Stella thought of Collier’s wife, Lynne. She hadn’t done anything wrong. She was an innocent party. And she thought of Other Stella’s repeated mantra that she would kill them all and then move onto their families. She couldn’t risk it.
“Let me talk to Vicky. Then we’ll decide. OK?”
“Fine. I’m tired.”
With an odd snap inside her head, Stella felt her Other disappear. She groaned. Other Stella was getting stronger, and more malevolent. What would happen if she decided to take over completely and never leave? Would it be Stella who vanished? She shook her head. Not. Going. To. Happen. She pointed the big car towards the A12 and London.
“Bloody hell, where did you get that monster from?” Vicky asked with a smile. She’d just opened her front door to Stella and was looking beyond her to the Rolls, parked among the sleek grey and silver hatchbacks on Vicky’s narrow Victorian street like a whale amongst dolphins.
“I’ll tell you inside.”
Stella dumped her rucksack on the kitchen floor. It now contained several changes of underwear and a few white T-shirts that she’d bought in the Ilford branch of M&S.
“So?” Vicky asked, pouring boiling water into two mugs.
“It belonged to Freddie McTiernan.”
Vicky turned from her place at the kitchen counter.
“And when you say ‘belonged’?”
“He’s dead. Collier shot him. And my sergeant, Frankie O’Meara. He left them together at Freddie’s so it looked like they’d killed each other. But I found them. Then Ronnie and Marilyn Wilks turned up. They were about to torture me to find out what Collier was up to and—”
“And what?” Vicky placed a mug of coffee in front of Stella then joined her at the scrubbed pine table.
And my psychopathic alter ego took over and killed them while I had an out-of-body experience and watched from a corner.
“And now they’re dead, too.”
Vicky took a cautious sip of her coffee.
“You killed them.”
“It was self-defence. Reasonable force. Look.”
She placed the tip of her finger to the scabbed-over cut on her nose. Then lifted her chin to show Vicky the dark purplish-black bruise the size of a penny, dead-centre between the wings of her jawbone.
“It’s fine, Stella, really. I’m way past caring what happened to a couple of gang—”
“Three—”
“—three gangsters. I daresay they had it coming one way or another. What I really want to do is get Collier.”
“OK, look. Here’s what I think.” She started counting off points on her fingers. “One, he’s isolated. All his scumbag PPM friends are dead. He can’t rely on the foot soldiers. They’ve probably already got wind of the deaths so they’ll be praying it all goes away. Either that or checking out how many points they could rack up in the Australian immigration system. Two, he’s a senior cop. He can’t just disappear. He goes to work. He goes home. So we should be able to track him down without too much trouble. Three, he knows I’m coming for him, but he doesn’t know you are. So we have the element of surprise plus superior forces. Plus, I took the gun to spoil his little scenario.”
“What can I do? I thought about what you said and it’s true I’m not much good at the physical stuff. But I have contacts, investigative skills.”
“I’ve been thinking, too. The first thing we need to do is, as my colleagues and I like to say, ascertain his whereabouts.” Stella put on a comically precise police-officer-in-court voice for this last phrase and Vicky snorted with laughter.
“I can do that. I’ll call the media officer at Paddington Green. Say I want to interview him for a piece.”
“OK,” Stella said.
Then she leaned back and folded her arms.
“What, now?”
“Why not? Are you working on something more important?”
Vicky rolled her eyes.
“Sorry. I’m just not used to this whole vigilante thing yet.
“Believe me, it gets easier.”
Metropolitan Police press officer Tim Llewellyn was putting the finishing touches to a press release about improved community relations in Paddington when his phone rang.
“Press Office,” he said crisply.
“Hi, Violet Rourke here, Daily Telegraph.”
Tim liked the broadsheets. They generally wanted to run features or general news on ongoing investigations. Not hit him with allegations of racism, police brutality or minor-league corruption like the local rag and the proliferating crowd of bloggers. He stood up. He’d been on a presentation skills course where the trainer had explained how taking or making important calls standing up made your voice sound stronger, more authoritative.
“Hi, Violet, I’m Tim Llewellyn. What can I do for you?”
“I’m writing a piece called ‘Fifty Under Fifty: People to Watch in Britain Today.’ It’s about a generation of people making things happen in British society. Lawyers, engineers, doctors, politicians, entrepreneurs, academics, teachers. I’d like to interview one of your senior officers. Detective Superintendent Adam Collier. Would he be able to make himself available? I’m sure he’s very busy but this really would be excellent personal PR. For the service too, I should think.”
Tim smiled. Wouldn’t it just? Like everyone else in the station, he called Collier The Model behind his back. Actually he suspected that Collier both knew about and enjoyed the nickname.
“Can you hold, Violet? I’ll call his office.”
He pushed a button on the handset then dialled the internal number for the boss of the Murder Investigation Command. It went straight to voicemail. Tim left a message then retrieved his other call.
“Violet?”
“Yes?”
“I’m really sorry. It went to voicemail. Listen give me your number. I’ll make a couple of enquiries. See if I can track him down. I’ll call you back, OK?”
“Thanks, Tim.”
Tim left his office and made the five-minute journey to the CID office for the MIC. He pushed through into the busy, open-plan space, marvelling once again at the way all police station CID offices had the exact same smell. Dry-wipe markers, stale coffee, BO and the underlying sweet tang of last night’s alcohol. Nobody looked up.
He approached the first occupied desk. A male detective with cropped silver hair and an ill-fitting suit looked up from his screen.
“Can I help you, mate?”
“I’m looking for Adam Collier? Is he in today?”
The detective frowned.
“I think he’s on leave. Hey Jake!” he shouted across the room.
&nb
sp; A second detective wandered over, a sheaf of computer printouts dangling from his right hand. He was younger than the first, but already sporting a paunch and a receding hairline.
“All right, Tim?” he said, when he arrived at the desk. “Is this about GQ wanting me for a photoshoot. You know, best-dressed DS in London?”
The older officer snorted. “Cockiest, more like.”
“Sadly no,” Tim said with a smile. “I’m looking for your boss. Adam Collier. Is he on leave?”
“Don’t think so. I mean, I haven’t seen him for a couple of days but I was filling in my dates on the holiday roster and I didn’t see his name on there.”
Tim shrugged. “Not to worry. I’ll ask HR.”
Unlike the CID office, the HR department smelled like a country garden. Hardly surprising, given the vases of flowers placed strategically around the room, on filing cabinets, desks and coffee tables. Whiteboards were much in evidence, but where those in CID were covered in words like “forensics,” “murder weapon,” “multiple victims” and “sexual assault” these bore business jargon Tim only partially understood: “360-degree evaluation,” “balanced scorecard,” “onboarding strategy” and, most baffling of all, “coterminous stakeholder engagement.”
Shaking his head, Tim repeated his routine, approaching a young woman in a funky black-and-white jacket, jeans and Converse.
Five minutes later, he returned to his own office, puzzled, and disappointed that he wouldn’t be able to help the woman he saw as his colleague at the Daily Telegraph.
“Hello?” she said when she picked up.
“Violet?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Tim Llewellyn. Paddington Green.”
“Please tell me you have good news for me, Tim. I could really do with it, the day I’m having.”
He winced. If there was one thing Tim Llewellyn hated, it was letting down journalists.
“I’m afraid not. I checked with the MIC – sorry, the Murder Investigation Command, and with HR. Adam didn’t turn up for work yesterday or this morning. He’s not on leave and nobody seems to know where he is.”
