by Andy Maslen
She pressed hard. To make sure. She didn’t want anything to go wrong. Ending up a quadriplegic was not part of the plan.
Then, from far away, she heard a voice. A little girl’s voice.
“Mummy!”
She opened her eyes. The cold had gone, to be replaced with summer’s warmth. And so had the garden. She found herself in a park, bright with cherry blossom from an avenue of trees. The tree she was leaning on had been planted near a hedge. From the other side of the hedge she could hear the excited screams of children playing on the swings and clambering up the brightly coloured climbing frame to wave to their delighted parents.
Through a dazzling white mist that made her squint, she could see a man walking towards her, his right hand loosely clasping that of a little girl, of maybe three years old.
The man was waving. And she recognised him. Richard. She smiled with gratitude.
She tightened her right thumb on the trigger, sensing the internal mechanism blocking the firing pin start to disengage.
The little girl broke free of her father’s grasp and started running towards her mother.
Stella was weeping now, but it didn’t matter. It was good. Soon they’d be together again. The three of them.
Stella held her thumb quite still as the little girl came closer.
She launched herself towards Stella, arms outflung, mouth wide in a smile of pure joy. Stella watched as her progress through the air slowed, then stopped. She hung there, suspended. Waiting.
Inside the pistol, metal parts began sliding past each other again, clearing the passage that the firing pin would take on its short, purposeful journey towards the primer at the base of the cartridge.
Stella smiled back. Then she spoke. Just a single word.
“Lola.”
The thump against her side drove the breath from her lungs in an explosive gasp. The pistol fell from her hand and she toppled sideways.
69
Getting Better All the Time
Stella opened her eyes.
Polly Drinkwater had dived onto her aunt’s lap and thrown her arms around her. The impact of the little girl’s three stone nine pounds caused Stella to cry out. Pain flared in her old bruises from her encounter with the blacktop on the road outside Duluth.
“Auntie Stella! Do you have in-some-near as well? Oh, what’s that? Is that your police gun?”
She was reaching for the Glock, which had tumbled from Stella’s grasp and now lay beside her pointing into the woods at the back of the garden. Stella shoved it behind her and then wrapped her arms around Polly.
“Yes, it is, Polly Wolly Doodle. But what are you doing out here so early?”
“What I said, silly! I wake up early. Mummy says I have that thing I said. In-some-near. Do you have it too?”
Instead of answering, Stella clutched Polly to her breast. Felt the tears coming and let them flow – hot on her chilled cheeks. And she realised that nothing would ever bring Lola back. But something else as well.
Nothing would take her closer to Lola either. Certainly not putting a bullet through her heart. What had she been thinking? Leaving a bloody corpse in the back garden for poor little Polly to find.
You must be mad, Stel. Oh, wait. You’re not. Not anymore. They’re all dead. Including her. But here is another little girl who loves you. Who you love.
It was as if the world had righted on its axis, having been spinning off kilter for millennia. Stella saw, as clearly she’d once seen the inevitable need to put a 9mm bullet through her own heart, that she’d been wrong all along. The brittle emotional carapace she’d grown around herself to protect her from ever feeling anything, for anyone, ever again, burst apart.
“Auntie Stella! You’re hurting me.”
“Oh, Jesus! I’m sorry little one.”
Stella relaxed her grip on her niece, turning it into a cuddle. The little girl was warm and her brushed-cotton pyjamas were soft under Stella’s hands. She snuggled closer. Pulled Stella’s head down so her lips were touching Stella’s right ear. She whispered.
“You said, ‘Oh, Jesus.’ That’s naughty. Mrs Lemon said so.”
“Is Mrs Lemon your teacher?”
“Yes. Can we go in now? I’m cold.”
Stella wiped her face dry with her sleeve and accepted Polly’s help, clambering to her feet.
“Come on then. Let’s make some hot chocolate.”
Polly’s eyes darted downwards.
“Don’t forget your police gun.”
They kept Stella lightly sedated and under observation during the two-hour drive to the private psychiatric hospital for her evaluation, treatment and rehabilitation. A month of intense, inpatient psychotherapy followed, though not at St Mary’s in Paddington, from which the head of the psychiatric unit had recently taken an unexplained leave of absence.
Stella endured multiple electroencephalograms, MRI and CAT scans, Rorschach ink-blot tests, psychiatric assessments and sessions of one-to-one and group therapy. Her doctors even administered the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. Stella took the test twice, yielding two scores, one for her answering as herself, and one answering how she imagined Other Stella would have responded. Stella scored zero out of thirty. Other Stella scored a rather more worrying twenty, although this still placed her inside the bounds of “normal” behaviour. So, neither version of Stella was a psychopath. Which was good news. Especially for Callie, who’d asked to be kept informed of Stella’s progress on a daily basis.
Finally, in early March, Stella was released from the kind and compassionate care of the staff at The Sanamente Centre in rural Hertfordshire. Among her possessions, she could now claim a piece of paper proclaiming her to be “of capacity.” At no point during her stay had she experienced so much as a whisper from any other version of herself, malevolent or otherwise.
No intrusive thoughts. No hallucinations. No out-of-body experiences. No sarcastic or biting remarks. No self-harming.
Stella Cole was whole again.
70
New Leaf
Callie McDonald wasn’t used to meeting civil servants. Not those serving the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood and certainly not those doing a similar job in Whitehall. The Home Office conference room in which she now found herself reinforced her opinion that too much money was sloshing around in Westminster, and the sooner the Scots managed to vote themselves into independence the better. The ceiling alone gave her indigestion. Some fourteen feet above her head, it sported ornate plaster mouldings around the edge – ivy leaves, bunches of grapes, cherubs – and an intricate ceiling rose from which an actual, crystal chandelier hung as if waiting for Regency toffs to dance and play cards beneath it.
Sitting on her left, Gordon Wade looked relaxed. As well he might, she reflected, having brought the hideous, bloody perversion of justice called Pro Patria Mori to an end without a single whisper reaching the media. To her right, Stella seemed equally at home in the grand surroundings of the conference room. She was popping the catch on a sweat-stained leather tube and refastening it. She looked up, following Callie’s gaze.
“My wedding cake wasn’t as pretty as that ceiling rose,” she said.
“Tax payers’ money paid for that, you know,” Callie retorted, feeling cross with herself for not being able to rein in what she realised was chippiness.
“Compared to what they were paying for until a few weeks ago, I’d say a poncy chandelier is a pretty good deal.”
“Stella has a point, Callie,” Gordon said. “Given a choice, I think most of us would opt for a few baubles over bloody death squads, eh?”
Unable to lay her hands on a suitable riposte, Callie fell silent. All that remained was to meet the mysterious man working for some unspecified organ of state security who, they had been assured by the minister for justice, would make the remnants of PPM “disappear like morning mist over the Serpentine.”
“Keeping us waiting. That’s a bit old, isn’t it?” she said. She wanted to sound bored but realised
she sounded nervous. Which was, annoyingly, true.
“Relax, Callie,” Gordon said. “We just say our hellos, hand over Collier’s notebook and bugger off for a decent lunch and a couple of decent single malts in a pub somewhere.”
The door opened, startling Callie. Inwardly cursing her jumpiness, she stood, then sat as she realised neither Gordon nor Stella had budged from their chairs.
Two men entered. One older, late sixties, perhaps. Iron-grey hair, twinkling eyes set in a lined face. Grey suit, highly polished shoes. One younger, midthirties. Short dark hair. Scar on his left cheek. Not bad looking at all in his jeans, white shirt and navy linen jacket.
They all shook hands and introduced themselves.
The older man spoke.
“I understand you have a notebook for us.”
Callie pulled the notebook from her bag and slid it across the polished rosewood table. The older man didn’t open it. Instead he passed it to his number two.
“There you are, Old Sport. That should keep you and your team busy for a few weeks, don’t you think?”
The younger man opened the notebook and flipped through the pages. Then he closed it again and nodded. He looked at Callie. Nice eyes, she thought. But you’ve seen sadness, haven’t you? You have what my Granny would’ve called “a dowie look” about you.
“There are a few firearms officers on this list,” he said. “Will they have weapons?”
She shook her head.
“They’ve all been placed on administrative leave. Told the jig’s up. They’ve been led to believe that now they’ve signed the Official Secrets Act and promised to keep quiet, they’ll be allowed to retire quietly and draw their pensions.”
“Just not for very long.”
“No.”
The older man cleared his throat. Callie looked at him. He was frowning.
“Forgive me, but I’d like to ask Stella a couple of questions. If that’s all right with you, Stella?”
“Shoot. No pun intended.”
“Just wondering what your plans are? I gather you’re on leave just now.”
“That’s right. I’ve had what you might call a traumatic couple of years.”
“Oh, of course, of course. Hmm, mm-hmm,” he said, humming quietly through his nose. “Any thoughts about what you might do when you rejoin the workforce?”
Stella shrugged.
“I’ve been talking to Callie about a new team she’s setting up. What did you call it?”
Callie answered.
“Special investigations unit.”
“Interesting word, ‘special.’ You know, special birthday, special child, special event.” He paused for a beat. “Special Forces. We used to work in that general arena, didn’t we, Old Sport?”
The younger man smiled. Exchanged a glance with his neighbour that Callie couldn’t read before answering.
“Yes, Boss. Yes we did.”
“Going after the really bad guys, Callie?” the older man asked.
“Something like that.”
He smiled.
“An admirable ambition. Which we share.” He pulled out his wallet and extracted a white business card, held it out across the table to Stella. “Here’s my card. Why don’t you give me a call when you’re back in harness?”
“Speaking of harnesses,” Callie said, “hold your horses. No poaching, OK?”
“My dear Callie, on my honour as a soldier – well, an ex-soldier – no poaching. But I assume you wouldn’t be averse to the occasional chat about intelligence sharing, or joint operations? After all, we’re all on the same side. Now, if we’re finished with the business part of our meeting, I wonder whether you’d let me take you all to lunch?”
In the pub, after an excellent lunch of steak and kidney pie and chips, washed down with pints of London Pride bitter and topped off with a round of single malts, Stella leaned closer to the younger guy.
“He all right, your boss?”
He nodded.
“The best.”
Stella nodded.
“So’s mine.”
Later, after she’d written in her journal, a suggestion of the counsellor she was seeing twice a week, Stella curled up on the sofa. She poured herself a glass of wine and pulled a photo album towards her from the other end of the sofa. She opened the album, whose first page bore a single Polaroid photo of a very sweaty but happy Stella Cole holding a newborn baby.
On the wide, white margin below the image, Richard had written, in blue biro, “Mummy and Lola, 6.14 a.m. Monday 7 December, 2008.”
She touched the photo with her fingertip, smiled, then turned the page.
The End
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my many readers, some of whom are fans and a few, friends. I love getting emails from you, and I promise to answer them all personally for as long as I can.
I am lucky enough to count among my friends people willing and able to take a book in its infancy and help me nurture it through adolescence to adulthood. My first readers were Jo Maslen, Merryn Walters, Sandy Wallace, Charles Kingsmill, Jane Kingsmill, and Katherine Wildman. Thank you all.
Thank you, Ann Finn, Simon Alphonso, OJ “Yard Boy” Audet, Yvonne Henderson, Vanessa Knowles, Nina Rip and Bill Wilson for being my “sniper spotters.”
And Martin Cook, Melissa Davies and Arvind Nagra, for your medical expertise; Claire Snook for helping me navigate the provisions of Section Two of the Mental Health Act 1983; Lynnea Linquist, for your photographs, and help with the dialect of, Minnesota
For your help and guidance on police matters, I want to thank Sean Memory and Ross Coombs. Any errors on procedure, equipment, or the law are entirely mine. I am also grateful for Gabriella Gowman at Greenfields Gunmakers in Salisbury, who walked me through the technical points of long gun design, use, and purchase.
My editorial and production team are a superb group of talented and forgiving people. This book is better because of their help. Michelle Lowery, my editor; John Lowery, my proofreader; Darren Bennett, my cover designer.
As always, I reserve my biggest thanks for my wife, Jo, and my sons, Rory and Jacob, without whom I would be a much lesser man.
Andy Maslen
Salisbury, 2018
Copyright
© 2018 Andy Maslen
Published by
Tyton Press, an imprint of
Sunfish Ltd
PO Box 2107
Salisbury SP2 2BW
T: 0844 502 2061
www.andymaslen.com
The right of Andy Maslen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Requests for permission should be addressed to the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover illustration copyright © Darren Bennett
Cover design by DKB Creative
Author photograph for the print edition © Kin Ho
Edited by Michelle Lowery
Glossary
A* – top grade at A-level, equivalent to US A+
A-level – exam taken in a single subject e.g. biology at the end of British secondary school education at age 18
arsey – pugnacious, argumentative, especially with authority e.g. police
banging up – sending to prison
bobbies – British uniformed police officers
boffins – scientists, technical specialists
bollocks – literally, testicles; slang expression of disgust meaning, “Oh, shit!”, “ru
bbish”
brief – British lawyer equivalent to a US attorney, especially a trial lawyer (barrister in British legal system)
cut-and-shut – illegal practice of making one car by welding together two undamaged halves of other cars
diddling – cheating (someone out of something)
dip – pickpocket
DC – detective constable (lowest rank of detective in British police forces)
DCI – detective chief inspector
DCS – detective chief superintendent
DI – detective inspector
DIY – do-it-yourself (in the UK reserved mainly for household jobs like putting up shelves, minor electrical or plumbing jobs)
dodgy – unreliable (of people or things), not completely legal
DS – detective sergeant
DVLA – Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency
fag – cigarette
FATACC – FAtal Traffic ACCcident
fence – someone who buys and sells stolen goods, to perform that activity
filched – stole (sneakily rather than brazenly)
FLO – family liaison officer, police officer whose job it is to comfort families of victims of crime and keep them informed of developments in the case
FMO – force medical officer
GCSE – general certificate of education, single-subject exam taken at age 16 in British secondary schools
ghosted – moved from one prison to another with no notice
ghillie – (Scottish) man or boy who helps people on a hunting, fishing or deer stalking expedition
git – horrible person
Hendon – short for Hendon Police College, Metropolitan Police Service’s main training centre
hob – cooktop or stovetop
holdall – carryall
