The First Stella Cole Boxset Read online

  A few squirts of superglue and a length of new duct tape and the evidence of Stella’s tampering with the carton vanished.

  “Who’s got a clever mummy, Lola?” she asked the empty air. Then she drove back to the station, stopping briefly at her house to leave the newly anonymous Glock in a kitchen drawer.

  Back at Paddington Green, having phoned ahead, Stella was met at the rear door of the armoury by Hutchings and Nick Probert.

  “Everything go okay?” Hutchings asked. “You were gone a lot longer than I expected.”

  Stella nodded. “Uh-huh. Your friend at Frame’s a bit of a talker. Had me learning to shake hands with the Hound of the Baskervilles. Then the plane was delayed. Spent an hour reading magazines about freight handling. I tell you, there are some sad, sad people out there doing jobs you would never, in a million years, want to do. So, what do we do with this lot now?”

  “First I book them in. Then we take them down to the range and test fire them. We photograph the slugs for the striations and log them on the database, then they just go on the racking until they’re needed.”

  “Or five years goes by and they get turned into garden tools.”

  Hutchings laughed. “They tell you that at Frame’s did they?”

  “I like to learn, what can I say? Listen, I haven’t been as good as I should have been at keeping up with my firearms training. Why don’t you let me help with the test firing?” She looked around. Nick was inside the van, scanning barcodes on the shipping labels with his phone. She held her breath.

  Hutchings grinned. “Why not? We can see how good your shooting is, can’t we?”

  As they were unloading the Glocks from the cartons, Stella positioned herself with her back to the two men. Then she picked up a screwdriver and nicked the corner of the case containing the rogue pistol.

  When all the weapons were unpacked and booked into the computer, and the cartons stamped flat and piled in a corner, Hutchings turned to Stella.

  “We’ll do them in batches. Grab two cases and follow me down to the range.”

  She walked over to the bench and casually selected the marked case, along with a second, then followed Hutchings out of the room.

  At the firing range, they laid the six plastic cases in front of them along the plain wooden bench that ran the width of the room. The range was five metres wide by twenty long, with a low ceiling striped with neon tubes. At the far end, a set of black-and-white, paper “aggressor” targets stood waiting in frames, pointing weapons back towards the shooters’ bench. Hutchings spoke.

  “We fire a handful of rounds from each pistol. Then I give the command, ‘stop firing’. We place our weapon down on the bench. Then we walk down to the end and retrieve the slugs from the ballistic foam behind the targets. You log the serial number of each weapon on the computer, photograph the round using the rig over there,” he pointed at a plinth-mounted, digital SLR pointing down towards a polished steel platen, “then log that with the same serial number to match it to the weapon. Hit ‘save’ and you’re onto the next weapon. Clear?”

  “As mud,” Stella said.

  Even with the black ear-defenders clamped over her head, the noise of the three Glocks firing unsuppressed in the concrete range was brutally loud. Stella enjoyed the way the weapon fitted into her hand, and the recoil that jolted her wrists as each 9mm round exploded out of the muzzle with a huge bang and tore a hole in the

  (hit and run driver)

  aggressor snarling at her from the target. The sharp tang of burnt propellant and the hot brass smell of the spent cartridges tinkling round her boots made her smile.

  “Stop firing!” Hutchings yelled. The guns fell silent.

  Stella pulled her ear defenders off and laid them on the bench in front of her.

  “Enjoy that, did you, DI Cole?”

  “Loved it!” she answered. She really had.

  They walked the length of the range and, using penknives, or in Nick’s case an impressive-looking hunting knife he produced from a sheath at his belt, dug the bullets out of the dense black foam that backed the targets.

  Stella dawdled on the way back so she was last to reach the computer. Once the other two had logged their weapons, photographed the spent slugs and returned to the shooters’ bench to begin loading their second set of weapons, Stella approached the computer terminal.

  She typed in the serial number stamped onto the right-hand side of the barrel.

  MP151977UK

  The form field turned red and an error message popped up on the screen.

  WEAPON ALREADY REGISTERED

  Her cheeks burned and her stomach flipped. How could you be so stupid? She looked over her shoulder, but Hutchings and his assistant were chatting as they thumbed rounds into the Glocks’ magazines.

  She cleared the field and tried again.

  1MP151977UK

  The computer accepted this bogus serial number without a qualm. Thank Christ for free-text form fields.

  She took the spent round to the camera, photographed it, then returned to the terminal. Under magnification, the striations where the six grooves cut into the inside of the barrel had marked the copper jacket of the bullet were as clear and defined as the furrows on a ploughed field.

  Stella logged them against the same serial number, hit ‘save’ and moved back to continue the test firing.

  After a day out to Hounslow and Heathrow, the rogue pistol was safely back among hundreds of its fellows, bearing a brand-new-but-fake serial number that should ensure it was never tracked back to its original consignment. She inhaled deeply and let the breath out in a sigh.

  Her watch said twenty past five.

  She tapped Hutchings on the shoulder.

  “I have to go,” she said. “Appointment with Collier. I think he wants to check I’ve been getting on with my filing like a good girl. Can we keep today quiet? I don’t want it to get out I’ve been off having fun. He might banish me to the admin task force for ever.”

  Hutchings winked. “My lips, as they say, are sealed.”

  Then she left, to the sound of Hutchings and his assistant unloading a second pair of Glocks into the targets.

  19

  A Friend

  Stella sat facing Collier at 5.30 p.m. For once, he looked less than perfectly groomed. He had a black bead of congealed blood on his chin where it appeared he had shaved too hurriedly. She noticed a second nick on his neck, close enough to his collar to have left a red smear on the folded white edge of the otherwise pristine, herringbone-patterned cotton.

  He looked up from a sheet of paper he was apparently reading with great interest, frowning as he scanned its contents. He turned it over and moved it to one side. To Stella, the whole act looked contrived, as if he might have grabbed a random folder from his in-tray and started reading at the same moment as he barked, “Come!” before she entered.

  “Ah, Stella,” he said. “Thanks for coming in to see me.” Like I had a choice, she didn’t say. “I wanted to see how you’ve been doing.”

  What, since you dumped me where you thought I’d go crazy inside of two weeks, you mean? “Thank you, sir. For your concern, I mean.”

  “Come on, Stella, you can drop the “sir” business. Why so formal?”

  Because yesterday I discovered you were the SIO when Richard and Lola were killed, and I’m starting to wonder whether that fuckup with the evidence was more than just Reg the Veg and his sausagey fingers and actually something to do with you. “Sorry. Adam. I’m doing okay, I guess. I mean, it’s not detective work. But you were right. I was away for a long time, and I went through,” she hesitated, calculating the precise number of seconds she should wait before continuing, “some fairly major avoidance activities, didn’t I?”

  “How’s that side of things? Are you still on an even keel? Still attending AA meetings?”

  She nodded, and parcelled out a little smile for him. An ‘I’m doing my best for you, Adam’ kind of smile. “Every other day. The only surpri
se is I haven’t met any other coppers, you know?”

  He nodded and gave his ‘I understand’ smile: downturned lips that still appeared to look as if he found something humorous, and his trademark crinkle-eyed stare. “Just so long as you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine, really.” Although I’m a little closer to finding the person who murdered my family. And I have at least one new way of dealing with them. “Was there anything else, sir – sorry, Adam?”

  He shook his head and Stella pushed her chair back, getting ready to leave. He drew in a quick breath, loudly enough for Stella to stop, mid-movement. “Actually, there was one more thing,” he said. “You’ve been spending time with Danny Hutchings, I understand.” He stared at her, eyes bland, no more crinkles.

  She felt a wriggle of doubt twirling in her stomach, and shrugged to cover her discomfort.

  “You know, just trying to be helpful. Filing’s not all it’s cut out to be, and I will admit I get bored. He said he needed some help, and I volunteered.”

  Collier maintained his stare. Then offered the briefest of smiles.

  “I think, all things considered, it would be better for you to keep to the exhibits room. Can’t have you distracting our armourer, can we? Not while his marriage is, what shall we say, precarious? No, you keep on with your task force duties. If Danny needs help counting bullets or signing out weapons, he can come to me, yes?”

  Stella nodded, striving to maintain a neutral face, even while her guts were jumping around like Paddington tarts on low-grade crack. “Absolutely. Sorry if, you know, I acted outside my remit. It won’t happen again, Adam. I promise. Just looking forward to the day I can start working cases again.”

  He leaned back and favoured her with a warmer smile this time.

  “I understand, Stella. Nobody wants to see you back hunting down bad guys more than me, you know that.”

  At eight o’clock that same evening, a mobile phone vibrated in its owner’s pocket. The club had strict rules on phone conversations being conducted in its restaurant, so the Crown Prosecution Service official to whom it belonged excused herself from the table and walked through the crowded dining room to the marble-floored hallway between the restaurant and the members’ lounge.

  “Hello,” she said, having gained the safety of the hall. “What is it?”

  The voice at the other end of the line was male. Elderly. Its tone was papery, as if the lungs and larynx producing it had a struggle to force enough air between the lips. Yet she heard the authority there.

  “I hear there’s a member of the fourth estate sniffing around.”

  “Yes. A Guardian journalist, apparently. We’re tracking her down, sir.”

  “You’d better. And when you do, you should find a way to steer her into safer investigative territory.”

  “Absolutely, sir.” Despite herself, she began chewing and biting at her lower lip, tearing little slivers of skin away until she felt one pull at the soft flesh beneath and draw blood. She sucked her lower lip into her mouth, tasting the salty, copper tang of her own blood in her mouth. “We’ve managed before; we will this time too.”

  “Just see to it that you do.”

  The line went dead.

  Eight miles away, in a terraced house in West London originally built to house brewery workers, and now worth more than ten thousand of them would have earned in a year, a freelance journalist named Vicky Riley was sipping from a glass of South African Chenin Blanc. In front of her on her desk was a battered black laptop. On its screen were notes relating to a story she’d been researching, on and off, for three years.

  The document title visible at the top of the screen was Star_Chamber_2010_VR_1. In the main working area of the screen was a bulleted list of short phrases, sentences and questions:

  Extra-judicial killings in Britain exposed by Vicky Riley.

  Is there a conspiracy inside the UK legal establishment?

  Ultra-conservative agenda – pledged to combat human rights law.

  State-sanctioned death squads?

  Collusion between CPS and police?

  Richard Drinkwater/Edwin Deacon. What links their deaths?

  Her mobile lay beside her laptop, and behind the glass of white wine, which was beaded with condensation. Beneath the phone was a slim, white envelope with a single word written across the front: “Stella”.

  She took a large gulp of the wine and picked up the phone, dialled a number and then waited. The phone at the other end rang eleven times. Just as she was getting ready to hang up, it was answered.

  “Who is this?”

  “Is that DI Stella Cole?”

  “I repeat, who is this? You’ve got three seconds, then I’m hanging up.”

  Riley inhaled and spoke on the outbreath. “My name is Vicky Riley. I was a friend of your husband’s.”

  She waited. The silence was filled with sounds. Her heartbeat, loud in her ears, like the surf rushing in and out through the coiled corridors inside a seashell. Clicks and whistles on the line as cell towers between Hammersmith and Stella Cole’s house in Kilburn swapped the packets of ones and zeroes that constituted the call. And the steady breathing at the other end of the line, as she listened to her friend’s widow deciding what to do next.

  “What kind of friend?”

  “The good kind. The kind he trusted with important information. The kind that was devastated when he was murdered.”

  “Richard wasn’t murdered. It was a death-by-careless. Equivalent to manslaughter.”

  “I believe he was murdered. I’m a journalist. He confided in me. He said he suspected people were out to get him. Can we meet, please?”

  “Who do you write for? What people? Why?”

  “I’m freelance. I’ve pitched a story to The Guardian. About a conspiracy. High up in the law. I need to meet you. I really do. I’ll come to you, or you can come here, to my house, I mean. Or a café, or the middle of Trafalgar Square, anywhere. You tell me when and where, and I promise I’ll be there. There’s stuff you need to hear. Stuff from Richard.”

  Another long pause: Riley waited it out. Slid the tip of her right index finger around on her laptop’s trackpad.

  “I’ll come to you. Address?”

  “It’s thirty-one Overstone Road in Hammersmith. The postcode’s–”

  “Don’t need it. What time?”

  “Can you come now?”

  “Give me half an hour.”

  Stella hung up. Put her phone down on the desk in her office. Closed her eyes. “Friend”. It was such a simple word. Lola would have gone on to have friends. She would have had best friends. Then fallen out of love with them and hated them. Come home weeping onto Stella’s shoulder about the betrayal. Then they would have made up. But this lady says she was a friend of Daddy’s, Lola. Sometimes grownups say “friend” and it’s not a good thing. Let’s go and find out.

  It had started to drizzle. Stella thumbed the bike’s self-starter and gave the right grip a slight twist. Recently, it hadn’t been catching on a closed throttle. As the Triumph’s engine fired and settled into its comforting off-kilter idle, Stella looked up. Dark grey clouds were pressing down on the city, pregnant with rain. She kicked the bike into first and pulled away.

  The two women faced each other on Riley’s doorstep, Riley standing back from the threshold in tight, faded jeans and a white shirt, Stella in bike gear, holding her helmet in her left hand, shaking out her ponytail.

  Stella took the journalist in at a glance. She was Richard’s type. He’d always sworn he didn’t have a ‘type’. “You’re my type!” was his stock answer whenever she teased him about ogling other women. But here was another representative. Dirty blonde hair. Streaks of brown amongst the sand rather than an even expanse of pale yellow tresses. Tall. Long legs. Why were men so predictable?

  “Stella, I mean, can I call you that?” Riley looked down then back at Stella, scratching her scalp through the long hair Stella had already clocked. “Come in, please, it looks horr
ible out there.”

  She moved aside to let Stella come in, realised they’d end up squashed together in the narrow hall and turned to lead Stella down to the kitchen.

  Pert little arse too. You’re definitely his type. “You said you were a friend of my husband?” Stella asked. Emphasise the possessive pronoun. Just to remind you who’s who in this situation. I’m the one who gets to call him Richard, for now.

  Riley looked back over her shoulder as she reached the kitchen.

  “Yes. I interviewed him a few times for stories I was working on. I specialise in miscarriages of justice. Police brutality, corruption, things like that.”

  “Which is supposed to endear you to me, is it?”

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry! I didn’t–, I mean I know most police officers are honest, and do their best, but you know, the bad apples…”

  “How good a friend were you? To Richard?”

  “We used to keep in touch about his cases and my stories. We’d buy each other lunch once a month. Didn’t he mention me?”

  “No. Funnily enough, he didn’t. He never mentioned you once.”

  Riley’s eyes widened and her hand went to her mouth for a second.

  “You don’t think we were–?”

  “You were what?”

  “Oh, God! You think we were having an affair, don’t you? Look, we were friends, that’s all. There was never anything between us. I wouldn’t have minded, if he’d been single. I mean, he was a good-looking man. But he wasn’t. Single, I mean.” Her fingers were raking through her hair now. “I’m not a slut who sleeps with people to get stories, and I don’t go after other women’s husbands, either. Plus, he spent half the time talking about you, anyway. I’m sorry if you thought–”