The First Stella Cole Boxset Read online

  The First Stella Cole Boxset

  The Revenge Trilogy: Hit and Done, Hit Back Harder, Hit and Done

  Andy Maslen

  For honest coppers everywhere.

  “I'll never pause again, never stand still,

  Till either death hath closed these eyes of mine

  Or fortune given me measure of revenge.”

  William Shakespeare, Henry VI part 3

  “And though the villain ’scape a while, he feels

  Slow vengeance, like a bloodhound, at his heels.”

  Jonathan Swift

  “They are not dead who live in the hearts they leave behind.”

  Native American proverb

  Contents

  Volume 1

  Hit and Run

  1. Hit and Run

  2. The Whole Truth

  3. Sweet and Proper

  4. Back in Harness

  5. Light Duties

  6. Descent into Purgatory

  7. Spring Cleaning

  8. Fight or Flight

  9. Death in Custody

  10. Absence of Evidence

  11. Kill #9

  12. Forensic Assistance

  13. Viola del Diavolo

  14. A Bad Day

  15. Suffer the Little Children

  16. Armoury Tour

  17. How to Vanish a Pistol

  18. Concealed Carry

  19. A Friend

  20. From Beyond

  21. Paint

  22. Shopping Trip

  23. Square Eyes

  24. Ammunition. Lots

  25. Is it Ever OK to Date a Suspect?

  26. Charity

  27. Sending a Message

  28. Help Wanted

  29. Moxey's Mojo

  30. One Down

  31. A Dead Child Buys Guns

  32. Ready, Aim …

  33. Fire!

  34. Hunter/Hunted

  35. Ramage

  36. A Mother's Love

  37. Stella's Final Shot

  Epilogue

  Volume 2

  Hit Back Harder

  1. Sail Away

  2. Standing Ovation

  3. Mistaken Identity

  4. Murderers’ Row

  5. Any Friend of Gordon’s

  6. Outlaws

  7. Sweating

  8. The Lady of the Lake

  9. The George and Dragon

  10. A Modest Proposal

  11. Trouble and Strife

  12. Frenzy by Nature

  13. Business

  14. Amazonian Predators

  15. Alley Cat

  16. Trading Favours

  17. Hidden in Plain Sight

  18. Detective Work

  19. Set the Dogs Loose

  20. Lockup

  21. Honour Amongst Thieves

  22. Crime Scene

  23. Change of Plan

  24. Courtesy Call

  25. Deep Throat

  26. Goodbye, Lola

  27. Mystery Blonde

  28. Family Life

  29. Story of the Century

  30. A Death in the Family

  31. Pitching

  32. Stalker

  33. The Field’s End

  34. Cold Justice

  35. Regrouping

  36. The Stalker, Stalked

  37. Vigilante

  38. Driving Without Due Care and Attention

  39. What to Bring to a Gunfight

  40. Threat/Counter-threat

  41. Oh, I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside

  42. Ships That Pass

  43. Ferenczy Calls Collier

  44. Your Money, Mr Wilks

  45. Tit for Tat

  46. Yiannis Terzi, MD

  47. Mental Health

  48. Doctor’s Appointment

  49. Crime Victim

  50. Lex Talionis

  51. Disappearing Act

  52. Plan C

  53. Pain

  54. Another Invitation

  55. A Call From a Cousin

  56. The Vanishing Police Officer

  57. Pro Patria Mortem

  58. Joining Forces

  59. Getting Ready to Go Out

  60. Party Girl

  61. What Does QC Stand For?

  62. Freddie’s Gaff

  63. A Bit of Mutual Backscratching

  64. Metal/Wood Work

  65. Time to Run

  66. Clubbing

  67. Gang Violence

  68. Five Down, One to Go

  69. Me and My Shadow

  70. Takeover Bid

  71. The Prodigal Daughter

  72. Officer Down

  Volume 3

  Hit and Done

  1. Deep Clean

  2. You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here …

  3. But It Helps

  4. Sectioned

  5. Single Room, Double Occupancy

  6. A Little Chat

  7. The Heavy Squad

  8. Naming Names

  9. Down Payment

  10. New Admission

  11. Gloria. From Malta

  12. A Friend of Vicky’s

  13. All That Glistens

  14. Stopping Elsie

  15. Accident & Emergency

  16. Victim Impact Statement

  17. Midnight Till Dawn

  18. Under Sedation

  19. Ingatestone

  20. House Guest

  21. Ongoing Investigation

  22. Amazing What You Can Find on the Internet

  23. Following in Stella’s Footsteps

  24. A Day Off

  25. A Nice Trip to the Coast

  26. L is for Lola

  27. Retired

  28. Family Scrapbook

  29. A Promising Career

  30. Confession

  31. Honesty is the Best Policy

  32. Journalistic Ethics

  33. Crime Scene

  34. Beauty Spot

  35. A Reputation to Maintain

  36. Close Shave

  37. The Dynamic Duo

  38. Flight

  39. All PR is Good PR

  40. Entering, But Not Breaking

  41. An Old Friend

  42. Death Notice

  43. At Last, Some Good News

  44. A Burial

  45. A Sad Story

  46. Money Launderer

  47. Illegal Immigrant

  48. Target Practice

  49. Hunting Trip

  50. Airweight

  51. Goodbye, Stella

  52. No Witnesses

  53. Shaman

  54. Oxford Road, Putney, 6th March 2009

  55. Alone Again

  56. Welcoming Party

  57. Hitcher, Beware

  58. What Happens When You Fuck With Stella Cole

  59. Bar Job

  60. Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

  61. Get to the Wife First

  62. Party People

  63. Star of the North

  64. In the Dark of the Night

  65. Wrap Up Warm

  66. Till Death Do Us Part

  67. Home Again, Home Again

  68. Cop Killer

  69. Getting Better All the Time

  70. New Leaf

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Glossary

  Also By Andy Maslen

  About the Author

  Afterword

  Volume One

  Hit and Run

  1

  Hit and Run

  6 MARCH 2009

  The baby’s crying grew louder. It had taken on a frantic edge. Richard Drinkwater knew the translation off by heart.

  Feed me! Feeed meee!

  B
ut he couldn’t.

  Not till he got her home, anyway.

  He didn’t have the equipment, as he liked to joke to his wife. But she’d gone back to work with the Metropolitan Police, leaving precisely measured-out bottles of her milk in the fridge each morning.

  Now Lola was hungry and she wouldn’t stop screaming.

  The traffic was murder. It was rush hour. And there’d been an accident somewhere to the north of them. It would have been quicker to unbuckle Lola from the car seat and walk her home. The lights up ahead seemed stuck on red. Even when they did turn green, one car, at most, managed to squeeze through.

  “Come on, Lola,” he crooned. “Soon be home. Then you can fill up on Mummy Ultimate. Kristina will be there too, so you can snuggle up with her.” Sometimes he thought his daughter loved her nanny more than either of her hard-working parents. Either her or the giant teddy bear they’d christened, for no reason they could fathom, Mister Jenkins. When squeezed, the bear emitted a random sequence of squeaks, bleats and catlike mewing sounds that seemed to amuse Lola.

  The baby paused in her efforts to burst either her lungs or her father’s eardrums. Drinkwater’s shoulders dropped a little, and his stomach began to unclench. He checked the rear-view mirror, sitting up straight in his seat so he could catch sight of his three-month-old daughter. Her face was red and streaked with tears and snot. As he watched, she drew in a mighty breath and then let it out again in a scream so high-pitched it made him flinch. He caught a whisper of milky breath in his nostrils that made him smile despite the industrial noise issuing from his daughter’s tiny mouth.

  A car behind him sounded its horn. Twice. One of those twin-tone numbers precisely calibrated to emit the most horrible discord possible. He angled the mirror so he could see the make. Bastard! It was a Porsche. Some rich git working in a bank and earning more in a week than he did in a year. Well, darling, his mother’s voice sounded deep inside his head, perhaps you should have become a criminal barrister instead of all that human rights nonsense. Then you’d be earning a proper living instead of scraping along the bottom looking after your so-called clients.

  His own car was a silver 1974 Fiat Mirafiori he liked to claim to friends was a classic. He slammed it into first and lurched forward, closing the gap between him and the car in front, a big, shiny, royal-blue BMW.

  Lola’s screaming had settled into a steady, metallic screech now. In for five, hold for a beat, let it out in a shriek until her throat caught and she coughed, choking and wailing to silence. Repeat till Daddy had an aneurysm.

  Then, a miracle. The traffic lights ahead turned green again, and instead of merely sitting there as they cycled through amber, red, red-and-amber, green, as had been happening for the last five minutes, the traffic moved off smoothly.

  “Yes!” he shouted, slamming both open palms onto the steering wheel and bringing forth an even more desperate scream from the baby. “Oh, sorry, darling. But look, Daddy’s on the move again. We’ll soon be home, and everything will be all right.”

  As he approached the front of the queue, Lola screamed again. Will we have to wait through another red? he thought. No. We’re going. He put his foot down and surged towards the traffic light, smiling as he began to catch the car in front. He craned his head to snatch another look at his baby daughter in the mirror.

  The baby burbled out a couple of random sounds, “da ba”. Then she smiled, a wide, gummy expression of pure joy.

  His eyes popped wide open. “What, Lola? Did you say ‘Dada’? Oh, my God, your first word. In a traffic jam too. Mummy’s going to have a fit.”

  He accelerated across the box junction, heart full at the sound of his name on his daughter’s lips.

  The light was on amber now, but that was just a ‘hurry up’ signal in this part of London.

  The lights changed to red just as Richard Drinkwater reached the white line indicating where stopped traffic should wait. Oblivious to anything but his daughter’s renewed screams, he flew across the junction to a chorus of angry blasts of motorcycle and truck horns. He drove on for another mile or two, through gradually thinning traffic, until he reached Putney. Turning off the High Street, he heaved a sigh. The road was empty ahead and behind, as if somebody had barred anyone else from entering this little part of residential London.

  Sticking the indicator on and singing to Lola, whose screams had subsided to a steady, muted keening, he turned into the street that led towards Oxford Road, and their house, and sped away from the junction.

  Then it was his turn to scream.

  Approaching on his side of the road was a car. It was being driven at speed. He swerved to avoid it.

  But it was too little, too late.

  The bang as the oncoming car smashed his offside rear wing with its own front end was loud enough to rattle windows in the houses on each side of the street. He, himself, heard nothing. His slewing, bouncing progress across the street was terminated by a cast-iron pillar box, manufactured during the reign of King George VI, and as solid now as it was then.

  The Fiat hit the kerb and left the ground. Richard Drinkwater’s last coherent thought was that Lola had stopped screaming. Then the top of the pillar box punched in the side window and met his head coming in the opposite direction at thirty miles per hour.

  As people began to emerge from their houses and run towards the car, intent on rescue, Drinkwater’s corpse was catapulted back against his seat, his skull smashed like an egg.

  Detective Inspector Stella Cole was sitting at her desk on the Specialist Crime and Operations Division’s Homicide and Major Crime Command floor at Paddington Green Police Station. She was joking with a colleague about a recent case they’d closed.

  “No way, Jake,” she said, laughing. “He’s as sane as I am. If that brief tries to plead insanity, she’s going to get My Lady Justice Miranda Jeffery’s patent leather stiletto right up her Cambridge-educated arse.”

  The paunchy, balding detective sergeant perching on a desk beside her spread his hands wide, revealing an expansive belly that stretched his grey shirt tight.

  “You say that, Stel, but you weren’t there when we nicked him. I’m not saying he had his old mum’s corpse in a rocking chair, but it wasn’t far off.” He raised his head and called across to another DS. “Oi, Frankie. Tell her. Wayne Stebbings’s flat. It was in a right state, wasn’t it?”

  The female DS ambled over, hitching up her black polyester trousers, which had slipped down over her hips.

  “He’s right, boss,” she said. “Stebbings had all these dildos and whatnot lined up on shelves.”

  The male DS, Jacob “Jake” Tanner, grinned. “Go on, Frankie. Tell her the best bit.”

  Frances “Frankie” O'Meara blushed. “There was one of those sex dolls, boss.”

  “What, a blow-up one, you mean?”

  “No. Like a real woman. Jointed and everything, looked like a sort of shop-window dummy.” The blush spread, deepening from a pale pink to a furious coral. “She … it, well it was all done up in underwear, boss. Like a tart’s, I mean. You know, stockings and suspenders, corset, the works.”

  “Unbelievable,” Jake said. “And as for his porn stash, well, let’s not even go there, because…”

  Frankie shushed him, her eyes signalling a warning. “Shut up, Jake.”

  From the door leading to the rest of the station, Detective Chief Superintendent Adam Collier was signalling to Stella. His handsome face was stern, lips set in a straight line.

  “Stella, could I have a word in private, please? My office?”