Let The Bones Be Charred Read online

  Let the Bones be Charred

  A Stella Cole Thriller

  Andy Maslen

  For the cops:

  Andy, Jen, Ross, Sean, Simon and Trevor.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Radio interview with DCI Stella Cole. Partial Transcript.

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Also by Andy Maslen

  About the Author

  Afterword

  So heap on the wood and kindle the fire. Cook the meat well, mixing in the spices; and let the bones be charred.

  Ezekiel, 24:10 (New International Version)

  ‘All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.’

  Abraham Lincoln

  1

  THEN

  Malachi awoke and knew immediately that trouble lay ahead.

  The sheet beneath him was wet and he could smell the tang of urine. Before he could even think how to escape his punishment, Mother appeared by his bedside. She grabbed him by his skinny bicep and dragged him from the narrow bed.

  ‘You dirty little boy!’ she shouted. ‘Lying in your own filth. Not even trying to be good. As God is my witness, I will teach you to behave yourself like a decent human being. You are five years old. You should have stopped this disgusting behaviour years ago.’

  She dragged him down the hallway. He stumbled and cried out in pain as his arm twisted in its socket.

  ‘Don’t, Mother!’ he screamed.

  She clouted him on the side of the head.

  ‘How dare you shout at me! Remember the fifth commandment. What is it?’

  ‘Honour thy mother and thy father.’

  ‘Well do it, then.’

  She pushed open the door to the spare bedroom. The room was devoid of furniture. Not even a carpet softened the hard-edged cube, although thick, plum-red velvet curtains kept the outside world where it belonged. Outside.

  In the centre of the bare boards stood a six-foot-tall wooden post, eight inches in diameter. It had been mounted on a sturdy platform which was screwed down through the floorboards and into the joists. To stabilise the post, a braided steel wire ran through a neat hole drilled through it, three inches from the top. The wire was secured to eyebolts in opposite walls and strung to a humming tension with heavy-duty galvanised turnbuckles.

  The boy struggled half-heartedly. He knew it was pointless. Mother was so much stronger than him. For now. And the punishments weren’t usually painful. More uncomfortable, he supposed. Though he hated the feeling of powerlessness they imposed upon him.

  ‘Put your hands behind you,’ his mother said.

  He complied, interlacing his fingers around the pole. He felt her rough hands tying the knots that bound his wrists. Swore to himself, once again, that there would come a reckoning. A Judgement Day.

  When she’d finished, she came round to stand in front of him. Bent closer so he could smell the alcohol on her breath, see the fine hairs on her cheeks where the grains of powder had caught.

  ‘The Christian saints endured so much suffering for their faith. Yet you cannot even live like a civilised human being amongst all this luxury we provide for you.’

  She turned and left him there, although she didn’t close the door.

  When she returned, she was carrying a kitchen knife. And she had the strange twist to her lips that he’d christened ‘the danger smile’.

  There were other times after that. Mother was determined to instil in the boy the correct attitude to faith. Obedience. Self-discipline. Chastity.

  The first time she touched him while he was lashed to the post he recoiled, earning himself an extra three hours in the room on his own. He passed the time by going into his head, an increasingly troubled place but one where he could escape Mother’s endless sermons, strictures and alcohol-fuelled fits of weeping self-pity.

  Once, he walked into the bathroom to wash his hands before tea and stumbled on his mother, naked, one foot up on the edge of the bath. Her breasts were white and flabby. She was looking down at herself. Holding something in her right hand and sort of scraping it against the hair on her – fanny! He said the word in his head. The other boys said it out loud at school, down the field, far from the buildings, where the teachers wouldn’t hear. And worse words, too.

  She looked up at him and her eyes blazed so it looked as if they would burst from her face. She snatched a towel from the rail and covered herself up.

  Red in the face, she didn’t scream as he’d expected her to. She just pointed to the door across the hall.

  ‘Go and wait for me,’ she said, in a voice all the more terrifying for being so quiet.

  She tied his hands behind the post, then fetched the kitchen shears she used to cut up chickens. She dragged his trousers and underpants all the way down round his ankles, then pulled his penis out with her thumb and forefinger, so hard he thought it might actually come away. He didn’t cry out. He knew better. Mother opened the jaw
s of the shears and placed them around the pathetically stretched length of tissue.

  She looked him in the eye.

  ‘You are filth. Don’t you know it is a sin to do what you just did? Would you lie with your own mother? Fornicate with her?’

  He tried to answer in a way that would placate her, but it was so hard to know which words and phrases would achieve the desired effect and which would only enrage her. Her eyes were glistening and her cheeks flushed.

  ‘No, Mother,’ he said, finally, in a whisper, feeling sick with the anxiety of losing his ‘thing’.

  ‘No, Mother,’ she repeated.

  She drew the tip of her tongue over her top lip, then straightened suddenly and withdrew the shears.

  ‘What you saw, you must unsee. What you thought, you must unthink. Lust is a deadly sin, as well you know.’

  Then she left, towel clumsily wrapped around her.

  A little while later, just as he was wondering whether he’d be able to control his bladder any longer, and fearing what would happen if he couldn’t, the door opened. She was standing there. Slowly, she came towards him, her eyes full of pity. She moved behind him and began untying the knots.

  2

  NOW

  MONDAY 13TH AUGUST 12.05 P.M.

  Detective Chief Inspector Stella Cole watched, frowning, as bloody foetuses were shoved into the women’s clenched faces. The TV news showed them pushing the horribly realistic dolls aside and hurrying into the clinic.

  A female reporter’s voice spoke over the footage.

  ‘LoveLife’s pickets have been on duty at The Sackville Centre for the past week. The centre claims on its website that it offers advice on sexual health and contraception, but the protesters I spoke to earlier have a different take on it.’

  The picture cut to a woman wearing a cream blouse and an angry expression on an unmade-up face, helmeted by coarse-looking iron-grey hair.

  ‘We are sure in our hearts of one thing. That place,’ she jerked a thumb over her shoulder, ‘is an abortion clinic. Pure and simple. A murder factory!’

  The director cut back to the unfolding events.

  ‘Look at it closely,’ Niamh Connolly, the charity’s glamorous chief executive said, speaking through a megaphone. ‘Beyond those walls, unborn babies are being slaughtered. It is nothing more than a whited sepulchre. But no amount of modern design or pristine paint can mask the stench of death within.’

  Stella had seen Niamh Connolly on TV before. It seemed to her that the CEO knew her swept-back blonde hair and well-maintained good looks made her a magnet for the TV cameras.

  ‘Mrs Connolly, aren’t you actually restricting these women’s rights to have what is, after all, a perfectly legal procedure?’ the TV reporter asked.

  Niamh smiled as if to say, it’s OK that you’re stupid. She waved her left hand at the protesters who at the time were offering leaflets to a hunched young woman walking up the path to the clinic’s solid-looking front door.

  ‘Nobody’s restricting anyone’s rights, Janine, except the doctors and nurses inside that building, who are denying unborn children their right to life. Because let’s remind ourselves of something. The overarching document that enshrines people’s rights is called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

  “Now the two words that really matter in that title are ‘Universal’ and ‘Human’. Its drafters didn’t call it the Partial Declaration of Human Rights. Nor did they call it the Universal Declaration of Women’s Rights.

  “So unless you are going to deny that a foetus is human, in which case I would invite you to tell your viewers which species you believe a foetus belongs to. Or you’re going to say that although a human foetus is indeed human, it is not part of the universality of the human race. Then I think you have to agree with me that a child, even an unborn child, has the same rights as every other human being. And first of all of these is the right to life.’

  The young reporter sounded flustered. Stella felt a degree of sympathy. She was just doing her job, after all.

  ‘But your people are—’

  ‘I’m sorry, I must interrupt you there, Janine. Those people are not “my people”,’ – she made air quotes – ‘they have volunteered their time and their prayers to speak up for those who have no voice of their own. I do not employ them.’

  ‘But you organise them. You encourage them.’

  ‘No. I offer them my help, my support, my prayers, and the resources of LoveLife. They have chosen to exercise their right to free speech. As have those misguided souls.’ Niamh pointed at a crowd of about thirty counter-protesters who were waving placards asserting a woman’s right to choose. ‘I take it, as a journalist, you’re not in favour of restricting freedom of expression?’

  ‘Of course not. But they are harassing women who may not even be thinking of having an abortion.’

  ‘And good for those women if that’s true. Good for them! But as everybody who lives in Mitcham knows, The Sackville Centre is one of the biggest abortion clinics in South London. Legally, since you are fond of quoting the law, a baby has been defined in case law as a gift from God. As a devout Christian who draws her inspiration from God, I believe it is not just wrong but evil to take that gift and treat it as a tumour. Something to be cut out of a woman’s body and dropped into a bloody bucket to die.’

  At that point, and presumably fearing a tongue-lashing from her producer, as she was reporting for a lunchtime show, Janine Everly ended the interview with a hurried thank-you.

  Stella switched the TV off and changed into her running gear. She’d worked the last ten days straight and was enjoying the prospect of two days off.

  As she entered that blissful, flowing state of mind that arrived when her heart and lungs had adjusted to the new demands she placed on them, she thought back to the news item. She wasn’t opposed to abortion. Not exactly. She knew plenty of women who’d had them. But she also carried around with her the grief of losing her own baby daughter. For her, ‘getting rid’ of unwanted babies carried a devastating emotional charge.

  Even though Stella had killed the people responsible for Lola’s murder, and that of her daddy, the pain still lodged in her heart like a thorn. She’d grown a strong, protective sheath around it, but it was still there. Once she had thought it would kill her. Her colleagues thought it had.

  Stella would never forget the day she came back from the dead. On March 5th 2012, her boss, Callie McDonald, had convened the Murder Investigation Command on the fifth floor of Paddington Green Police Station at 8.00 a.m. with a promise of ‘some very good news indeed’.

  The whole team, upwards of fifty detectives, crime analysts, forensics officers and civilian employees, were gathered in the CID office. Most were sitting on tables or standing. A few of the older detectives leaned back in their chairs as if to say, ‘go on, then, show me something I haven’t seen before’.

  Callie had told Stella to come in at 8.05 precisely: they’d synchronised their watches. She’d followed orders, walking quickly but not fast, through the civilian-staffed reception area, before swiping her Metropolitan Police ID at the access-controlled doors leading to the rest of the station. The goggle-eyed stares and dropped jaws her passage through the ground floor occasioned made her stomach flip.

  But it was the reaction from her former colleagues that was the real concern. Would they go into shock? Cry? Shout at her? Laugh? Scream? She had to admit to herself, she had absolutely no idea. After all, it wasn’t every day you got to meet a colleague the new boss had told you had been run over and killed while escaping from a secure psychiatric unit.

  She elected to take the stairs rather than the lift, reasoning that she’d be less likely to meet someone on her way up to the fifth floor and, even if she did, it would be orders of magnitude less uncomfortable – Uncomfortable, Stel? How about unbelievable? – than being trapped in a toilet-cubicle-sized stainless-steel box.

  She arrived on the fifth-floor landing breathing easily: in the pr
evious few months she’d walked almost six hundred miles from the US-Canadian border to Duluth, Minnesota.

  Wishing she’d not had anything to eat for breakfast, she walked along the corridor towards the double doors at the far end. Stella peered in through the left-hand square of wire-reinforced glass positioned at head-height in the plain wooden door. Everyone bar Callie had their backs to her. Callie was speaking, making expressive gestures with her hands. Stella felt a sharp pang of grief as she saw that a new detective was sitting at her old DS’s desk. Frankie O’Meara and Stella had been a team. Then their boss, the now-dead Detective Chief Superintendent Adam Collier, had murdered her. He’d shot her with a police-issue Glock 17 at the house of a former gangster, then staged the scene to look like an arrest gone wrong.