by Andy Maslen
With the money she’d made from the sale, she’d bought a two-bedroom flat in a 1930s block on Lisson Grove. Her new place was just ten minutes’ walk from Paddington Green nick, or a three-minute burn if she took her bike. Not even enough time to warm up the Triumph’s engine.
From her balcony, she could actually see the top of the station, though she preferred to ignore that part of the view and let her eyes rove over the cityscape beyond.
Unlike the West Hampstead house, this, she felt, was home. Somewhere she was happy. She could be alone there. Not with her ghosts, but with her memories. She let herself into the flat, stripped off her running gear and wadded the whole lot into a ball before tossing it into the laundry basket in her bedroom. She switched on the shower and when the blue light had stopped flashing, stepped under the powerful jets and let the water ease her aching muscles.
She’d put on some weight since she’d been living in the flat. In a good way, she felt. Her boobs had returned to their post-pregnancy B-cups after almost disappearing during the months she became addicted to running to blot out her grief. And there was a bit more flesh on her hips and bum.
She’d turned thirty-nine the previous September and had reached a stage in her life where she liked the way she looked and didn’t care what other people thought. She looked down. Yes, the belly was curved outwards again after the Spartan era in her early thirties when she’d actually created a rippled six-pack like a member of Team GB at the Olympics. And that, too, was OK. Good, in fact. The mini cobblestones of her abs had receded into a smooth curve, though a few crunches were all it took for her to be able to feel them again.
She dried herself and swiped a hand over the mirror above the sink. Next, she applied mascara and a little dark-brown eyeliner, a new lippy she’d bought on her way home on Saturday evening – Chanel Téméraire, a deep plum red – then got dressed for her day off. Faded skinny Gap 1969 jeans, a white T-shirt from Swedish brand Arket and black ankle boots with silver buckles.
She slotted a latte pod into the coffee machine and while it huffed and puffed, made herself two slices of toast and peanut butter. She took her second breakfast out onto the balcony and sat at the small round table to enjoy it. Below her, through the leaves of the plane trees, she watched the pedestrians, cyclists and drivers jostle for their own little piece of territory. Up here, she felt free of the competition. She could just be.
And now, on this fine summer’s morning, she had nothing to do. A precious day off.
She looked at her watch. Nine-thirty. The high spot in her otherwise unplanned day was lunch with her best friend, Vicky Riley, a freelance journalist. Vicky had helped Stella nail the bastards who’d killed Richard and Lola, though she’d not emerged unscathed. She’d suffered the loss of her godparents in the murderous conflict between Stella and the Pro Patria Mori conspirators.
Stella finished her latte, a reasonable approximation of what she’d get from the independent coffee shop she favoured on the Edgware Road, and set the glass in its chrome cage back on the table with a little plink. She smiled.
Stella enjoyed being able to smile again. Even though the dreadful events of 2012 lay in the past, not a day went by when she didn’t find herself thinking about the trail of destruction she, and Other Stella, had left in their wake. The bodies. Of the guilty, yes, but also the innocent. Bystanders who’d got caught in the crossfire between her and the people who’d torn her family from her.
Innocent, Stel? she wondered. Innocent in the matter of Cole vs. PPM, she replied. Yes, Ronnie and Marilyn Wilks were gangsters. And so was Marilyn’s father, Freddie McTiernan. But they were the type of traditional criminals that the police, or the old-school coppers anyway, respected. The ‘never kill women or children’, ‘always look after your family’, ‘beat up a nonce’ type of villain.
And then there was Frankie. Dear, sweet Frankie O’Meara, Stella’s right hand and a friend who she could always rely on whether she’d run out of cigarettes or needed a shoulder to cry on. Until that fateful day when Frankie joined the mounting roll call of PPM victims. Not because she had escaped justice and therefore deserved to be punished, but because she’d discovered that her own detective chief superintendent, Adam Collier, was in charge of the vigilantes. He’d shot her dead to silence her.
Out of all the deaths, and there had been plenty, including that of Collier’s wife, Lynne, Frankie’s was the only one to really trouble Stella. She had been acting out of a sense of duty, a sense Stella shared with her and had discussed in their frequent chats over drinks, coffees or on car journeys.
It was unfashionable to talk about such things publicly nowadays: that was Stella’s impression. A belief in the rule of law, in doing the right thing even at personal cost; a belief in one’s country and its institutions and the need to defend them: these were mocked as being out of touch. It wasn’t what you believed in that mattered so much as what you identified as.
The previous week, Stella, like all the coppers at Paddington Green, had received an email from the HR department. Never popular at the best of times, it was apparently soon to be renamed Organisational Competencies and Culture (OCC). Much to the delight of the older coppers, who had immediately coined a new version of the acronym to explain their reluctance to attend the many and varied workshops and ‘lunch and learn’ sessions: Out Catching Criminals. The email announced a new workshop, not, as yet, compulsory, on ‘Trans Sensitivity and Awareness’.
‘I used to know a tranny, worked as a tom down in Greenwich five years back,’ DI Arran ‘Jumper’ Cox said, as a few of the SIU detectives were relaxing over drinks in The Green Man. They’d discovered a few years earlier during a particularly violent protest march that the pub was, literally, a stone’s throw from the station. Arran was a seasoned detective with, by common consent, the best contacts book in the team.
‘Oh, God, here we go,’ DS Garry Haynes said, setting his pint of lager on the crisp-strewn table, a smile spreading over his dark-brown face. ‘Another tale of the unexpected from Paddington Green’s very own Roald Dahl.’
Over much good-natured jeering, Arran carried on, patting the air for silence.
‘Toni, she used to call herself. Real name Anthony Stevens, a former Barclays Bank assistant manager until he was nicked for fraud. Made a nice little living satisfying the difficult-to-meet needs of her former colleagues. They’re all pervs, you know. Bankers, accountants, solicitors—’
‘Don’t forget the judges!’
This from DS Stephanie Fish, known from day one in CID as ‘Definitely Fit’ by her male colleagues, and, as time went on, ‘Def’, at which point her female colleagues had adopted the moniker too. It was hard not agree. Def was twenty-five and on a fast-track programme, just as Stella had been in her own twenties. Five foot six tall, slender as a willow wand and with bright-blue eyes that dominated a heart-shaped face framed by streaky-blonde hair, she had a grace to her that belied her ferocious attitude to catching villains. More than one suspect had been lulled by her innocent-sounding enquiries into revealing more than they should have done about this blag or that kidnap plot.
‘Yeah, they’re the worst,’ Garry said to laughter. ‘They get so used to being around briefs wearing wigs and gowns, they can’t get it up unless they’re with a bloke in a dress!’
‘You do know trans people aren’t transvestites, don’t you, Jumper?’ Stella asked him, before finishing her glass of pinot grigio.
His eyes widened. He put his finger to the point of his stubbled chin, and grinned.
‘Aren’t they? You better enlighten us, then, Guv.’
‘Don’t be a dick, Jumper,’ Def said with a smile. ‘You know perfectly well what they are.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s not the point, is it?’ Arran said, suddenly serious. ‘The point is, why are we being forced to sit in some bloody conference room learning about preferred pronouns when there are rapists and terrorists driving vans into crowded pavements and psychos and bloody child killers roam
ing about London doing God knows what? You don’t think they bother finding out what pronouns their victims prefer before gutting them and stringing them up in their basements, do you?’
Everyone knew what Arran was talking about. The previous year, the team had caught a man who had abducted, tortured and killed three teenage boys in Brixton. The victims had all been black and one had been a transsexual, which had drawn the sort of media attention commonly known within SIU as a Force-Ten Shitstorm.
‘Well, that killed the mood,’ Stella said, drily. ‘What you need, Jumper, is another pint. Anyone else?’
It was a feature of Chief Superintendent Callie McDonald’s Special Investigations Unit: the banter. All cops indulged in it. They were, in this respect, no different from doctors, nurses, firefighters and, for all they knew, quality-control managers and school crossing assistants. What did they used to call them in the pre-PC days? Lollypop ladies? But the SIU banter sometimes ran off the rails. One minute you could be telling off-colour jokes about death and destruction, the next picking the scabs off old cases where there really was nothing, not even a glimmer, of anything to laugh about.
Reflecting that at least the serial killer Robert Mabondebe was no longer a danger to young boys, having been sent down for life without possibility of parole, Stella idly flicked through her Facebook feed. The photos of her friends’ children no longer caused a physical pain in her chest. She could read about cello exams passed or cricket cups won without wanting to scream and fling her phone against the wall. But still she wondered, as her eyes skittered across the series of posts, why people felt this compulsion to share everything that was happening in their lives. Come on, Stel, you’re getting old. You sound like Mum used to.
The thought made her smile. Then the cheery sound of a vintage dial-phone rang out from the iPhone’s little speaker.
It was the end of her day off calling.
7
TUESDAY 14TH AUGUST 10.15 A.M.
Garry. That’s what the caller ID on Stella’s phone displayed. Her bagman, Detective Sergeant Garry Haynes.
‘Shit!’ Stella said as she put the phone to her ear.
‘Morning to you, too, boss. Sorry about this but we’ve got a case. The guvnor wants you in, pronto.’
And although part of Stella’s brain regretted this intrusion into her lazy morning, another, sharper part rejoiced. Work! A new case.
‘It’s fine. I didn’t have anything planned that I can’t change. What’s up?’
‘Murder. Very weird murder. Happened in Wimbledon yesterday. One of the South Division MITs handed it to SIU first thing this morning.’
Stella’s brain immediately started computing the factors that had brought her to work from her day off. If a Murder Investigation Team passed up the chance to investigate a homicide, that meant a number of things.
For a start, it wasn’t a domestic, or a pub brawl that got out of hand. Probably not a drug-related killing, either. The Met’s Homicide and Serious Crime Command would usually assign those sorts of killings to an MIT to investigate. Witnesses were usually abundant, and if they weren’t, the doer had usually been sufficiently angry, pissed, high or all three to leave his, or more rarely her, DNA and fingerprints all over the place.
It also meant that the MIT had concluded it wasn’t some sort of gang hit. Drug-related murders were usually fairly straightforward. Certainly no need to call in the ‘Freak Squad’ as the SIU was widely known.
Garry was still speaking.
‘I reckon the Wandsworth MIT guys worked the angles and realised it was out of their league, so now it’s come to SIU before it screws up their metrics.’
Stella liked Garry for lots of things. His attitude to the job, which was serious and dedicated, but leavened with a mischievous streak of humour. His lack of rancour towards his ex-wife, Sandy, with whom he had an eight-year-old son, Zane. His physical courage. But one thing she couldn’t abide was his management-speak.
‘Please don’t say metrics, Garry,’ she said now, giving half a grin. ‘It makes you sound like a management consultant. And tell me what makes a DCI running a South London MIT kick a juicy murder up to the SIU.’
‘The victim had her breasts removed and put on a plate in front of her on her own kitchen table.’
A tremor rippled through Stella’s insides. We’ve got a bad one.
‘Do we have a name for the victim?’
‘Yep. Hold on. Yes, Niamh Connolly. Mrs. She was the—’
‘Chief Executive of LoveLife. Oh my God! I was literally watching her on the lunchtime news yesterday. She must have been killed almost straight afterwards. Right, where are you? In the office?’
‘Yeah. The guvnor just called me in. Told me to call you, too. You need to get a team together.’
‘All right.’ She checked her watch. ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
She stuffed the remaining morsel of toast into her mouth and washed it down with the coffee, scalding her tongue and leaving it feeling dry and furry.
In the hall, she grabbed her favourite item of clothing bar none. Her bike jacket. She’d owned it from new, buying it with money she’d saved over from her summer job the year she left school. Made by Harley Davidson, it was black with a wide horizontal orange stripe and thinner cream stripes above and below. A zip at the front and a round collar that fastened with a press stud. The intervening two decades had been good to the jacket, which had acquired a patina of creases, crinkles and the odd scuff mark.
On the way out she called Vicky.
‘Hey, Stella, everything OK?’
‘Not really. I have to blow you off for lunch. Something’s come up.’
She knew Vicky wouldn’t ask. As journalist and cop they were easy-going about sudden changes to their social arrangements.
‘OK. I’ll miss you but tell me all about it next time, OK?’
‘OK. Gotta go.’
Jogging down Lisson Grove, Stella turned right onto Bell Street and followed it west until it joined the Edgware Road. Fried chicken aromas mingled with exhaust fumes while she waited for a gap in the traffic, which clearly would be a long time coming.
Swearing, she took her life in her hands and sprinted in front of an onrushing white transit van, earning herself an extended blast on the horn from the driver. She reached the narrow central reservation, then repeated her Olympic performance, before taking the steps two at a time up to the front doors of Paddington Green Police Station.
This had been her workplace for more years than she cared to remember. She’d been posted there the year before Richard and Lola were killed. What did that make it? Eight years? Nine? As well as the usual CID and traffic, uniforms and firearms commands, Paddington Green also held Britain’s most dangerous terrorism suspects.
It wasn’t unusual to be walking into the office and find yourself face to face with some bearded Muslim youth being frogmarched to the holding cells between two uniforms, yelling about Allah and infidels and the usual crap.
Either that, or one of the remaining hardcore Irish republicans with flint chips for eyes. Or, more and more these days, a shaven-headed, extreme-right nutjob ranting about immigrants and English independence, having just thrown acid into the face of a hijab-wearing mum walking her kids to school. Fuckwits, the lot of them.
She nodded to the civilian receptionists and touched her ID card to the reader pad on the side of the glass security gate.
SIU had the whole of the eighth floor of ‘The Tower’ – the multi-storey office block at the centre of the half-acre plot of land sandwiched between the Edgware Road and the Westway. The lift lady announced in her unruffled, Home Counties voice that they had reached the eighth floor.
Stella stepped into the midst of the hum and chatter of a major crimes unit in full swing. Not just the new case: Callie’s unit was working on a handful of cases. Detectives, civilian database collators working on HOLMES, the second version of the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, forensics officers and Crown
Prosecution Service lawyers were buzzing around the hive.
As in every other station she’d worked in as a copper, the SIU office was a functional place, and that was being diplomatic. Basically, a rectangular, open-plan space crammed with utilitarian desks and swivel chairs, filing cabinets, walled-off conference rooms, a couple of private offices, a tea and coffee station and a few storage cupboards.
Stella had her name on the door of one of the offices, but she preferred to work in the open area and had a second desk out there.
She’d often wished that the powers-that-be had watched a few more cop shows on the telly. Then they might have housed SIU in a converted print factory or tobacco warehouse. All stripped wooden floors, Victorian ironwork and brick-arched windows giving out onto the Regent’s Canal, or an atmospheric landscape of post-industrial developments.
They’d all tap their reports into gleaming, brushed-silver Macs and gather for meetings in frosted-glass meeting rooms painted in inspiring-yet-serious shades of sage-green and petrol blue.
Instead, SIU had to make do, like every other command in Paddington Green with a broad swathe of grey nylon carpet that generated enough static electricity to power the lights after dark. Ageing desktop PCs that took longer to boot up than the average bail hearing.
No original sash windows. Instead, smeary, steel-framed windows that you had to keep shut unless you enjoyed working to the roar and stink of the traffic heading into, or escaping from, the Smoke.
And for the walls, a delightfully inspiring shade of grey that, everyone agreed, Facilities had picked up cheap at an army surplus depot.
