The First Stella Cole Boxset Read online

  Stella felt the steel clamp squeezing her chest loosen, then vanish. She inhaled deeply.

  “Look, Vicky. It’s me who should be apologising, not you. I was always a little jealous. Women naturally took to Richard and I used to feel insecure. No chance of that now, though, is there?”

  “Why don’t we sit down? I have a lot to tell you. I’ve got some wine on the go.” Riley pointed at the opened bottle. “Do you want a glass?”

  “No, thanks. But a coffee would be good. Milk, no sugar.”

  Riley made the coffee; ground, Stella noted, not instant, another tick in the credits side of the ledger she was keeping. She checked out the kitchen. It was a habit she couldn’t break, assessing every room she sat in as a potential crime scene. The place was a mess. Plates and mugs piled up by the sink, even though there was a dishwasher tucked under the kitchen counter. Papers strewn over the table. A pair of deck shoes by the back door, and a pair of wellington boots, tumbled over as if drunk.

  “Here you are,” Riley said, finally, pushing a mug of steaming coffee across to Stella.

  Stella took a sip, letting the smell of the really very good coffee drift into her nostrils. “Mmm. Good.”

  “Costa Rican. Fair trade, organic.”

  “And harvested by disabled lesbians, no doubt.”

  There was a pause, then both women laughed. The sound was loud in the little kitchen, and it broke whatever lingering tension lay between them. Riley spoke first, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

  “I’m sorry about Richard. And Lola. Really, I am. He gave me something and told me to give it to you if anything ever happened to him.

  20

  From Beyond

  Riley handed Stella the envelope.

  “He said to wait at least a year. To make sure you and Lola were OK. I don’t think he ever imagined they’d go after Lola as well.”

  Stella took the envelope. Her fingers were shaking as she ran her thumbnail under the glued flap. “Who are ‘they’? What are you talking about?”

  “Read it. Then I’ll answer your questions.”

  Stella’s pulse was throbbing in her throat as if something was trying to push its way out. Her stomach was tight and the anxiety was making her crave a drink, or a pill.

  Her thumb and forefinger were pinched round the edge of the sheet of paper inside the envelope so tightly the nails had turned white. She pulled it out, smoothed it flat on the table then held it up to read. The top edge fluttered.

  My Darling Stella,

  I am so sorry. You’re reading this, and that means I am dead. By now, I hope the dust has settled and you and Lola are doing OK.

  You’ve met Vicky. She is a friend, and someone I hope you will work with, as I have. She and I have been investigating a series of cases where people found not guilty, freed on appeal, or given non-custodial sentences, have turned up dead a few weeks later.

  There is something going on in the legal system. A conspiracy, a secret society, a star chamber – we’re not exactly sure what. They are acting as a parallel justice organisation, as judge, jury and executioner.

  I can see you now. You’re frowning and pulling your head back like you always do when you think something’s bullshit. Talk to Vicky. She’ll show you the evidence we’ve collected.

  But be careful, my darling. These are dangerous people. They got to me. You have to keep Lola safe. And yourself. But you’re the tough one. I know you can do it. Bring them down, Stella. Arrest them and get them in the dock. Expose them all.

  I love you. I always will.

  Richard

  Stella folded the letter and pushed it back into the envelope. Looked across at Riley, who was crying silently, tears running down her cheeks, leaving greyish trails where her mascara had run. She pushed her palms against her own eyes and screwed them around, wiping away the wetness.

  “He didn’t know about Lola. It would have killed him,” Stella said. Then she laughed, a cracked bark of a noise. “Poor Richard. They killed you before you could expose them, and they took our baby as well. I’m going to get them, darling. I’m going to get them all.”

  Then she sniffed and shook her head, blew her nose on a tissue and stared straight at Riley.

  “I want to know everything you and Richard found out, dug up, suspected or just wondered about. Starting with, who, or what, we’re looking for?”

  Riley took a sip of her wine. “Since Richard was killed – murdered – I mean, I’ve developed a contact in the police force. He won’t give me his name. I call him Deep Throat.”

  “What? After that old sex film?”

  Riley shook her head. “After the mole in Watergate. When Nixon was bugging his opponents?”

  Stella shook her head. “American politics isn’t my thing, I’m afraid.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Deep Throat told me he works in SCO19. That’s–”

  “Firearms, yes, I know. I’m a police officer.”

  Riley blushed. “Sorry, force of habit. He told me he overheard colleagues in the locker room talking about a job they’d done. It wasn’t official police business. One of them said, ‘We gave him PPM’s message,’ and the other one said, ‘Die for your country’. Then they both laughed, apparently.”

  “What does PPM mean?” Stella asked.

  “It’s very interesting. If you Google ‘die for your country’ you get a poem by Wilfred Owen. He was–”

  “First World War poet. We did him at school. I may not know my contemporary American history, but I’m not completely thick, you know.”

  Riley acknowledged her mistake with a nod. “My mistake. Again. The last line of the poem is ‘Pro patria mori’. It’s Latin. It means to die for your country.”

  “PPM,” Stella said. “It’s the name. Of this parallel justice outfit. Pro Patria Mori.”

  Riley nodded and sipped her wine. “That’s where we got to, as well.”

  “And they’re educated, or some of them are, anyway. I wouldn’t expect a bunch of vigilante coppers to go around naming themselves in Latin.” Although I know a man at Paddington Green who’s hinted twice that they exist.

  “Exactly! Richard thought it had to involve people right through the legal system. Police, lawyers, judges, even. Politicians too. In the Home Office, maybe. It’s massive, Stella. And if we can break the story, it could be the biggest thing in British legal history since the Birmingham Six. Bigger.”

  Stella slurped the last of her coffee. “Okay, first, calm down. Second, this isn’t just a story. If you’re right, this is institutional corruption that includes fucking death squads on British soil. That’s a bit bigger than fitting up suspected IRA terrorists. These people are murderers, Vicky. Dangerous people. With guns. You need to be careful. A Pulitzer Prize won’t do you much good if you’re tucked up all cosy in the footings for a new office block.”

  “I resent that. I’m not in this for glory. You’re not the only one who cares about justice, you know.”

  Stella shrugged. “Sorry. I’ve never been the best of friends with your lot.”

  “Anyway. I know I need to be careful. That’s why I contacted you. You’re on the inside. You might even be able to find out who Deep Throat is. We have to keep going with this.”

  “Oh, I agree.” Because I need to find the people who killed my husband and my baby girl. I have plans for them. “Just, you know, don’t expose yourself to unnecessary risk, that’s all.”

  They spent another three hours going over every angle, and every lead, thin as they were, that Riley had on her laptop and in her files. At the end of the evening, Stella turned to the journalist.

  “I have to go. I’m too tired to do any more on this now. Keep in touch, OK? We can meet again, whenever you like. And if you get anything new, you call me. Immediately.”

  She left, then, and was back at her own desk in her spare room forty minutes later, with a fresh pot of coffee by her elbow. On an index card she printed the words, PRO PATRIA MORI. Beneath them, she wrote, ‘hi
gh-level legal conspiracy’. Then she pinned it onto the wall in the centre of her display of documents and leaned back in her chair.

  “I’m coming for you,” she whispered.

  Stella sat, thinking hard. The exhibits room had been busy all morning, with exhibits officers on various cases and operations coming and going, dropping sealed evidence bags off, collecting others, asking for help tracking down this bloody shirt or that bag of skunk. But now, mid-afternoon on the day after her conversation with Vicky Riley, it was quiet enough. She was doodling on her pad and scanning down the list of points and questions she’d written earlier.

  She added three more questions.

  Who murdered Richard and Lola?

  Why?

  PPM connection?

  “Fuck this!” she shouted into the empty room. “Come back Reg, I need you here. I’ve got stuff I need to do.”

  Reg had called that morning, telling her he was still in pain and on medication, but would hopefully be back at work the following Monday. She decided to get back to the desk research into Edwin Deacon’s case. That at least she could do from the exhibits room. Jiggling the mouse on the ancient computer, she murmured to it.

  “Come on you antiquated piece of crap. Boot up for Mummy.”

  She waited for what seemed an eternity until finally the clockwork guts of the machine cranked it into flickering life. A few clicks later, she was staring at the main search screen for HOLMES. The case number was etched into her brain, and in a half-second of blurred fingertips she entered it. Up came the main screen for the case. She clicked on the one labelled ‘court case’ and then ‘personnel’.

  Defence barrister: Maurice Anstey

  Prosecution barrister: Louise Stannah QC

  Judge: Hon. Mr Justice Sir Leonard Ramage REPLACED Hon. Mr Justice Julian Frizzell-Gorman

  Stella noted the three names, wondering why the original trial judge had been replaced, then cross-referenced them to a Metropolitan Police database of law firms and their members, plus all County Court and Crown Court judges. More notes followed the names into her phone: phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses of their chambers.

  Her finger was poised over the screen of her phone, ready to dial the number given for Anstey, when she realised she had no plausible reason to be ringing him. Or either of the others. Maybe Riley would be a better option. Journalists could always invent a cover story. She decided to hold off calling them till she’d discussed it with Riley.

  Next stop, the purple Bentley. A list of owners was the prize, but now she had an identifiable vehicle she could at least get going on the CCTV. Her old street was free of cameras; it was far too quiet for any of that. But Putney High Street ought to be solid for coverage from Putney Bridge all the way through the shops and up to Tibbet’s Corner, where drivers could choose from Wimbledon, Roehampton or the A3 towards Richmond and the southwestern suburbs of London beyond that.

  She consulted another database on the PC, then picked up the desk phone and punched in a number. A woman answered.

  “Wandsworth Police Station. Traffic.”

  “Hi. DI Cole here, Paddington Green nick. I need to review CCTV footage from Putney High Street for April ninth, 2009.”

  “Sorry, DI Cole. Not our cameras. It’s the council you need to speak to.”

  “Which department, Highways?”

  “Should be, yes, unless they’ve rebranded themselves.”

  Another search, another number. Stella dialled again. This time, having escaped the litany of automated options – everything from complaining about noisy neighbours to reporting fly tipping – she was through to a real human being. She repeated her credentials, and her request, breathing slowly to keep herself calm, despite her urge to yell and scream.

  “Yeah,” the man drawled after a wait of what was only three seconds but felt to Stella like three hours. “Not our department anymore. The council outsourced CCTV to a private firm eighteen months ago. Outfit called Urban Oversight PLC. You’ll have to call them, I’m afraid.”

  “Okay. You don’t have a number, I suppose?”

  “No, we do. Hold on.” Stella heard the heavy clack of inexpert fingers on a keyboard. “Here we are. Urban Oversight.” He read out the number.

  Stella thanked him, hung up, and dialled the number.

  “That’s over a year ago,” the CCTV manager at the firm said when she finally reached the right person. “It’s probably been deleted. Hang on, I’ll have to check the archive. Could be it’s been backed up at one of our data centres; we recently leased another ten thousand square feet in Sweden, just outside the Arctic Circle, if you can believe that.” Stella could believe it, she told the man, while silently wishing him to shut the fuck up and tell her what she wanted to know. “I’m just going to put you on hold for a minute,” he said.

  The phone ticked and beeped twice and then went silent: no Vivaldi to soothe the jangling nerves or wind up the caller to breaking point depending on their state of mind. Just an eerie, echoing silence during which Stella began to wonder if she’d been cut off. Then the line clicked again.

  “Hello? DI Cole? Sorry. To keep you waiting, I mean. You’re in luck. Everything’s there. When do you want to come over?”

  Five minutes ago, that’s when. “It’ll have to be next week. Listen, can you put a flag on the footage so nobody deletes it by accident?”

  “No problem. Not that anyone would, anyway. It’s a new DAP from our CIO.”

  “A what from your what?”

  “A digital archive protocol. From our Chief Information Officer.”

  “Thanks. Okay, I’ve got it. There’s a DAP.”

  “That’s right. Can’t go breaking the DAPs can we?”

  Stella sucked air through her teeth. “More than our job’s worth. Listen, thanks. I should have said that before. To whom am I speaking, please?”

  “Dave Locke.”

  “Thanks, Dave. I’ll call you as soon as I can to fix an appointment. You’ve been most helpful.”

  “Always happy to help oil the wheels of justice, DI Cole.”

  The call over, Stella leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. Something was hovering just beyond her conscious mind. In the old days, the good old days, she’d have parked it then mulled it over while sinking a bottle of Pinot Grigio in the pub. Now, religiously sober, she couldn’t access her subconscious the way she used to. She tried slapping her forehead, but all she managed to do was give herself a headache. Maybe this was another item to add to the list of things she needed to discuss with Riley.

  She picked up the phone again and called Lucian. She spoke as soon as he picked up.

  “Do you still have the name and number of the guy you spoke to at Bentley?”

  “I’m fine thanks, Stella. How are you?”

  “Sorry. Hi Lucian, how are you? Are you fine? Good. So, I have a question for you. Do you still have the name and number of the guy you spoke to at Bentley?”

  He laughed. “Yes, I do.” She heard a clonk, then a muffled rustle. She pictured Lucian putting the handset down on his desk and sifting through bits of paper. “Here we go. Robin Brooke. Got a pen for the number?”

  The phone number noted down, Stella spoke again.

  “I want to talk to you about some more stuff. Are you free tonight?”

  He laughed. “Sadly, yes. Do you want to come round?”

  “Yes. I’ll bring food, try to return the favour.”

  “I can come to you if it’s easier.”

  “No!” She paused, slowed her breathing. “No, it’s fine. Let me come to you. Steak all right?”

  21

  Paint

  Stella called the number Lucian had given her.

  “Bentley Public Relations. Robin Brooke’s phone.”

  The voice was pleasant, light, female and very, very posh. Stella immediately felt at a disadvantage. She tried to elevate the tone of her own voice to match the cut-glass accent at the other end of the line.
/>   “Yes, hello. This is Detective Inspector Stella Cole from the Metropolitan Police. Is Mister Brooke available, please?”

  The woman sounded more amused than anxious, which further unsettled Stella.

  “Goodness me! Has our Robin been a naughty boy and broken the speed limit in Mayfair, officer?”

  “Haha!” Oh, God, fake laugh. Come on, Stella, step up. “No, madam. That would be a matter for my colleagues in Traffic.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. I’d hate to think how much taxpayers’ money it would cost to send a detective inspector after a speeding motorist. Anyway, I see him across the office. Hold on a sec, would you? Robin?” Her voice increased in volume, but retained the easy, confident tone that had put Stella off her stride. “There’s a policewoman on the line for you.” She made “policewoman” sound like “sewage worker”. Stella took a deep breath and let it out again. “Something about a speeding ticket.” Her voice returned to its previous conversational pitch. “He’s just coming, officer.”

  “Name?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Your name, madam. For my notes. We like to keep quite detailed records of everyone we speak to.”

  “Oh, err, of course. Well, it’s Miranda fforde. With two small f’s.”

  “Thank you, madam. You’ve been most helpful.”

  “Here’s Robin,” she said, quieter now.

  A young man’s voice. Not so upper class, but still cultured, and with a hint of a drawl that spoke of privilege and breeding, if not necessarily education.

  “Robin Brooke. How may I help you, officer?”