The First Stella Cole Boxset Read online

  He turned on his heel and left.

  “Wonder what that’s all about,” Jake said. “Is it true you’re going to confess to being the phantom KitKat stealer?”

  “Fuck off, Jake,” Stella said, rising from her chair.

  She reached DCS Collier’s office three minutes later, knocked once, then entered, as was station protocol when summoned by a senior officer for a private chat. Usually it meant either a promotion board was coming up, or you were in the shit. But Stella hadn’t heard of any vacancies for a DCI, and Collier hadn’t called her “DI Cole” either, so a bollocking wasn’t on the cards.

  Collier was immaculate in his charcoal-grey suit. He always was. They called him “The Model” behind his back because he looked like he’d been recruited from an agency to promote a healthy and clean image of the force. His white shirt gleamed in the light from the fluorescent tube above his head, and the knot on his bright pink tie was a perfect equilateral triangle. He glanced up, found Stella’s eyes and held her gaze. His smooth-shaven cheeks looked tight, and there were creases around his eyes that brought his upper lids down to darken their irises.

  “Have a seat, Stella,” he said in a soft voice.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, frowning. “Everything okay? You heard my lot just nicked Wayne Stebbings for the Mannequin Murders?”

  “Yes, yes I did. Excellent work. We can close Operation Palermo today. Really, very, I mean, yes, a great result.” He looked down at his fingers. “Look, I’m afraid I have some bad news. Normally we’d have a family liaison officer here, and someone close to you, as well, but we go back, so…”

  Stella’s pulse suddenly began bumping in her throat, and a surge of adrenaline flushed through her body.

  Oh, no. Please, God. Not Lola. Please not Lola.

  “It’s the worst, I’m afraid.”

  No. Anything but that. My house burnt down. I’m being kicked off the force.

  “There was a fatal traffic accident. Richard–”

  That’s funny. Who turned the sound down? I can see your lips moving but I can’t hear what you’re saying. Why call me in about a FATACC anyway?

  Stella sat very still in her chair watching as The Model’s mouth opened and closed. She could hear surf roaring in her ears, waves crashing in over shingle, then shushing back out to sea again. Her hands gripped the hard, plastic arms until her knuckles turned the colour of bone. Slowly, oh so slowly, she let her head fall back on her neck until she was staring at the ceiling. One of the tiles had a crack in it that looked like a duck. Or maybe it was a rowing boat. Or Portugal. She drew in a deep breath. And groaned it out again. It wasn’t a scream. Not as such. More like the sound of an animal in pain. Her mouth hung open, and she let the deep, wounded cry sail out from between her stretched lips.

  Collier leapt to his feet and came round the desk to comfort her. He knelt in front of her and pulled her unresisting body towards him and hugged her tight. The moaning went on, even when her head flopped forward like a rag doll’s, and she buried her still-open mouth in his shoulder. Frankie O'Meara appeared at the door.

  “Sir?” she asked, green eyes open wide at the incongruous sight that greeted her.

  “Can you help me up, please, DS O'Meara? I’ve just had to give Stella some bad news. The worst. And maybe take care of her? I’ve got an FLO coming up to talk to her but, you know, a friendly face…”

  As his words tailed off, Frankie came forward. She prised Stella away from Collier and hugged her shaking body to her chest.

  “Come on, Stella. Let’s get you somewhere quiet where you can sit down. Then I’ll run you home.”

  2

  The Whole Truth

  22 JULY 2009

  Inhabiting her own body like a spirit, Stella sat on the hard, wooden bench outside the courtroom. Beside her, holding her hand in a soft grip, was her FLO, a plump, sweet-natured cockney WPC called Jaswinder Gill. It was 11.30 in the morning, and Stella’s first pill of the day, washed down with a tooth mug full of white wine, was smearing her grief into something harder to get hold of and therefore less painful to bear. She’d not been able to attend any of the trial, but under Jaswinder’s urging had agreed to come for the verdict.

  A clerk emerged from the polished double doors.

  He looked down at the two police officers.

  “They’re coming back.”

  “Come on, Stella,” Jaswinder said. “Let’s go.”

  Stella stood up, clutching Jaswinder’s hand tighter.

  “What if–?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge if we have to, OK?”

  They pulled a door each and made their way to the seats reserved for friends and family of the victim. To Stella’s right sat Jason Drinkwater, Richard’s younger brother. His face was a mask of stone, scarred by childhood acne, betraying no emotion. He sat straight on the bench, staring ahead. As Stella slid in next to him, he unclasped his hands from his lap and held one, palm uppermost, out to his side. Gratefully, she took it. Her parents were dead, both of cancer within a year of each other. Heavy smokers. Richard’s parents sat on the other side of Jason. His father, Harry, offered her a small, tight-lipped smile, leaning around his wife. She, Annette, offered no sign that she’d even noticed Stella. Her lips were pressed together, accentuating the creases around them and the vivid pink of her lipstick.

  Stella looked around the courtroom. The public benches were full. The usual mixture of pensioners who fancied somewhere warm to sit for the day, the trial junkies taking notes in grubby notebooks, and, she supposed, some ordinary citizens who simply wanted to see what happened when justice was enacted in their name. Also in attendance were a fair number of journalists, including a court artist, her bony hands twitching over the paper with coloured pastels.

  The whole scene felt unreal. The barristers in their grey-white wigs and black gowns like crows; the judge in her red robe and longer version of the lawyers’ wig. And there, in the dock, hateful, verminous, smiling – Why? – was the man who’d snuffed out her husband’s life: Edwin Deacon. Cheap suit in shiny blue material. Blond hair cut short and greased into shape like a sixties barber’s model. He was cleaning under his fingernails with one canine tooth and then inspecting his handiwork.

  With a huff, a door opened against a damped closer, and the jury members trooped back in to take their seats. Stella watched closely to see whether any of them would look at her, or at Deacon. A young woman, third from the front, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, looked at Stella from under a fringe of blonde hair. Her expression was impossible to read. A sad smile that could mean, ‘we’ve brought you closure’, or ‘we’ve let you down’. When they were seated and the hubbub that accompanied any personnel change in court had subsided, aided by a sharp word from the judge, he turned to face the jury foreman. He spoke, in a crisp, upper-class voice.

  “Have you reached a verdict upon which at least ten of you agree?”

  The foreman cleared his throat, then he, too, looked at Stella.

  “Yes, My Lord.”

  “What is your verdict? Please answer only guilty or not guilty.”

  The silence was total. Jaswinder squeezed Stella’s hand. Jason’s hand was sweating against her other palm. It tightened. I wonder what he’s going to say, Stella thought. Then, What will I tell Lola when she’s old enough?

  The stocky foreman opened his mouth. He seemed to have moved into slow motion. Stella could see the jerks between the frames as the movie played out in front of her. She watched his chest inflating inside his suit jacket and shirt as he prepared to speak. Then, with an audible click inside her brain, reality snapped back into focus.

  “Guilty.”

  Sighs and gasps hissed out around her. She could hear pens scratching at the reporters’ notebooks and the oily scuffing of the sketch artist’s pastels on the paper. Her mother-in-law was weeping, and a wisp of her perfume – Chanel No. 5 – curled away from her and enveloped Stella. The judge spoke again.

  “Is that
the verdict of you all or by majority?”

  “Of us all, My Lord.”

  “Thank you all. You have discharged your duty, which, as I said at the beginning of this trial, is one of the most sacred duties a citizen can perform. It is right and proper that you should feel proud of your contribution.”

  The foreman smiled at the praise, turned and nodded to the others, and sat.

  The judge looked down at Deacon, who looked, if anything, bored by the proceedings that were about to engulf him. Stella’s focus was slipping again, and the judge’s words were overlaid with a crackle of static. She closed her eyes, but that made the feeling of floating worse.

  “Edwin James Deacon, you have … guilty of causing death by careless driving. By your thoughtless actions, you … on this family … remorse … three years … and also banned from driving …”

  Stella was breathing fast, too fast, she knew. Her heart was stuttering in her chest. She heard Jaswinder from miles away asking her if she was OK. She nodded, but that made her head swim. Across the courtroom, she saw Deacon being led from the dock. As he stepped down, he looked directly at her. His face was clear and sharp against the darkening background. He smirked. Then his lips moved. What was he saying? It looked like, “You’ve been bad.”

  Then, mercifully, the curtains swung shut, and all was black.

  The months that followed passed in a haze of tranquillisers and thin-stemmed glasses of white wine. During her waking hours, one thought more than any other circled around and around inside Stella’s head: three years. Three! People got more than that for aggravated assault. With good behaviour, Deacon could be out in two. That wasn’t fair. That wasn’t justice.

  Somehow, she knew she was going to get herself back to work. She was going to dig into the case files and she was going to find the evidence that would see Deacon retried for murder and put away properly. Just, not yet. A pill and a glass of the old Pinot Grigio first.

  3

  Sweet and Proper

  3 NOVEMBER 2009

  The photographs spread out on the table made for disturbing viewing. In contrast to the finely figured rosewood, which smelled of freshly applied beeswax polish, the images printed on the glossy photographic paper were raw, messy and grimy. The scene was the interior of what appeared to be a cheaply built council flat. A small box of a room, no more than ten feet square, steel-framed casement window on the back wall, cheap, functional aluminium fittings on the open door.

  The lighting was over-bright: a flash aimed straight at the subject. It threw sharp-edged shadows of the few pieces of furniture onto the walls behind them. In the centre of the mud-coloured carpet lay a body. The body was female. It was dressed in a denim miniskirt, a white cap-sleeved T-shirt, through the thin, stained and ripped cotton of which could be seen a red bra, and that was all. The splayed legs revealed that she had no underwear on. The red knickers could be seen in the corner of the room, flung there, presumably, by her murderer. But the viewers’ eyes weren’t captured by the sexual aspects of the picture. That function was played by the wounds.

  Both thighs had been slit open from groin to knee. The femoral arteries had been sliced into, and her heart had pumped virtually her entire blood supply out through the obscenely gaping wounds onto the carpet. A third wound had hardly bled at all. Presumably inflicted post-mortem, the slash across her throat had almost severed her head. It lay at a ninety-degree angle to her neck, connected by a thick chunk of muscle and connective tissue at the back of the throat.

  Ignore the horror of the wounds, and what remained was a rather pretty young woman, of twenty or twenty-two. Soft, wavy, auburn hair framed a small, pointed face. The staring eyes were hazel and perfectly round, situated in perfect proportion above a small, upturned nose and a wide mouth.

  “Not guilty by reason of insanity?” one of the people staring down at the photographs said.

  “He had that clever bitch at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Chambers defending him. The new QC. Marion Clarke,” a second person said.

  “She’s the one who got the Hounslow Rapist off last year, isn’t she?” The second speaker pushed the photos around on the polished rosewood, pursing his thin, pale-pink lips at each new angle of the horror.

  “Yes. Fancies herself quite the psychologist. And she’s a demon with expert witnesses,” the first speaker said. “Had our shrink on the ropes in thirty seconds.”

  “We’ll talk about Marion Clarke QC at another meeting,” said a third speaker. “For now, what are we going to do about Nigel Golding? Did you see his face when they took him off to the loony bin? Smile as wide as you like. Evil little shit knows he’ll be out on the streets in a year or so. ‘Oh, yes, Madam Headshrinker,’” he adopted a singsong voice, “‘I feel so much better now. The voices telling me to butcher my girlfriend have all gone clean away.’”

  The third speaker brought the glossy eight-by-tens together into a pile and knocked them edge-on to the table, squaring them up into a neat stack before placing them to one side of his notebook. He looked up at the other two men.

  “Call Mark Hollingsworth at SCO19. We’ll need a team of his firearms chaps and an armed response vehicle.”

  The following day, at eight thirty in the morning, the Right Honourable Nigel Golding, Seventeenth Earl of Broome and Gresham, was being transferred to an armoured van from a holding cell beneath the Central Criminal Court on Old Bailey, the street that had given the court its popular name.

  He’d avoided prison, as do all offenders deemed not guilty by reason of insanity. In fairness to his lawyer, the insanity idea had been all his own. From the moment he’d been arrested, after being found drenched in blood and out of his head on crystal meth and high-grade Dutch skunk in his eighteen-and-a-half-million-pound penthouse apartment in Mayfair, he’d begun to play the role of a paranoid schizophrenic.

  “They told me to do it!” he’d screamed at the arresting officers. “Uriel, Jegudiel, Barachiel: the archangels. They gave me orders. To stop him using the body of a human woman. She was Satan. I saw the red lights behind her eyes.”

  Then he’d sprung at the female detective, clawing at her face and earning himself a swift and brutal clout from her uniformed male colleague’s extendible baton. The journey to Paddington Green Police Station had passed for him in a hazy nightmare of grinning clowns and talking Labrador puppies.

  Throughout the booking procedure in the custody suite, the many interviews, the conversations with his solicitor, and his brief, Golding had maintained the shrieking persona he’d adopted: “Crazy Nige,” as he’d mentally dubbed himself.

  With time to kill awaiting his trial, bail having been denied, he refined and expanded his delusional narrative. The archangels were a masterstroke, he felt, but too commonplace. Waking at three one morning, he’d had a brainwave. Celebrities! Or, more specifically, a single celebrity. Rebecca Purefoy, the British actress as famous for her sex tapes and drunken selfies as her roles in a blockbuster female serial killer film.

  “She told me!” he hissed at his lawyer, dotting her palely dusted cheeks with frothy little bubbles of saliva. “She wants to marry me. But she’s under attack from Satan. He was using Francesca to get to Rebecca. ‘Kill the vessel, kill the possessor,’ that’s what Becky told me. She loves me, you see. She always has. But she needs to be safe.”

  His performance in court was as flawless as his lawyer’s complexion. Under her gentle questioning, and the rather more aggressive line of interrogation from the QC representing the Crown, he stuck to his script. At one point, he turned to the judge and began growling and gabbling in a low, guttural tone he’d seen used in a late-night rerun of The Exorcist.

  He was smiling to himself as the private guards working for the prison security contractor escorted him up from the basement cells through a tunnel to the reasonably clean and reasonably fresh air at street level on Warwick Lane. He was looking forward to kicking back at some leafy sanatorium for the criminally insane. A bit of occupational therapy, group che
st-beating with half a dozen losers with more tats than teeth, daily therapy sessions with some well-meaning cunt in a cheap suit and blood-coloured lipstick. And then, in the fullness of time, release. Or escape.

  The Right Honourable Nigel had long known the true condition that infected his soul. He suspected his father and mother had too. Hence the strict military boarding school, isolated from the rest of the world by hundreds of square miles of bleak Scottish moorland. Hence the constant observation by an ex-British marine commando they had hired as his “valet.” Hence their willingness to indulge him in solo rifle-hunting trips out onto the mountains. Where he could kill, butcher and consume whatever four-legged mammals he could bring down.

  “I’m your basic, common-or-garden psychopath,” he’d confided to a slaughtered stag one crisp autumn morning, as he’d squatted beside its gutted torso, munching contentedly on its heart and watching the steam rising from the pile of hot, stinking, silvery-purple guts beside him.

  Outside, a waxy, yellow, November sun was shining. It warmed the skin but not the air, which was as crisp and still as it had been when he field-dressed the stag. Golding lifted his face to the crystalline blue sky and stretched his lips wide in a grin.

  “Do you feel that?” he asked the guards. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” He pointed up with his cuffed hands.

  “Shut up, you,” the taller of the two men said in a low growl, yanking his prisoner’s arms down again. “You should be going to Pentonville for what you done to that lass, or better yet, a fucking deep hole in the ground.”

  Golding shrugged as the other guard unlocked the rear doors of the white armoured van and thrust a hand in the small of his back so he stumbled as he climbed in, jarring his shin painfully against the raised steel lip of the passenger compartment.