The First Stella Cole Boxset Read online

  Waiting inside was an armed police officer. Stocky, maybe five-feet-seven or -eight, shaved head, dark eyes, scowl. He wore the full tactical outfit of the Met’s firearms squad. Black trousers with reinforced knees and thighs, black shirt under a heavyweight nylon windcheater. And even a Pro-Tec tactical helmet. On his right hip was a black nylon holster, protruding from which was the black plastic grip of a Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol.

  “What’s this?” Golding brayed in his drug-roughened upper-class drawl. “You’ve laid on a SWAT team just to get poor, mad little Nigel to hospital? How sweet of you. Now then, action man, shift along, would you?”

  He sat down on the riveted steel bench next to the firearms officer and watched carefully as the two rent-a-cops took up positions on the facing bench. They glared at him. He smiled back. He was imagining what they’d look like with their heads in their laps.

  With a rumble and a throaty clatter from its engine, the truck moved away from the rear entrance to the Central Criminal Court.

  Golding nudged the firearms officer in the right bicep. “Is that real?” he asked, nodding towards the Glock.

  The man stared at him for a second, face muscles slack, then returned to his eyes-front pose, placing his right palm ostentatiously on the butt of the pistol.

  Golding looked across at the guards and rolled his eyes. He tutted. “I think guns killed the art of conversation, don’t you?”

  Then he smashed his left elbow into the armed cop’s face, bringing forth a scream and two jets of blood from his nose. At the same time, he reached down and yanked the Glock free of the holster, the handcuffs forcing him to use a two-handed grip he was familiar with from TV. He delivered a blow with the barrel across the man’s right temple. As he toppled off the bench, Golding stood, levelling the pistol at the two guards. Typical private sector: they’d frozen. One had a dark patch spreading on the crotch of his navy uniform trousers.

  “You!” he shouted at the man on the left. “What’s the signal to stop the van?”

  “It’s a radio code.”

  “Well, give it, then. Or do you want me to shoot you in the face with this?” He gestured with the Glock. “And unlock these. Now!” he shouted, pushing his hands out at the guard.

  The man shook his head violently from side to side and pulled his radio from his belt. He squinted down at it and pressed a button on the face. Some sort of emergency code generator. Seconds later, the truck screeched to a halt, throwing the two guards forward as the brakes bit. Golding had braced himself and stood above them, grinning down at the man fumbling with the handcuff keys.

  “Stay there. If you move, you die.”

  Both men chose to obey. Not paid enough for heroics, was Golding’s judgement.

  Then the lock on the rear doors scraped, and a moment after that, the left-hand door swung open. As it did, Golding leaned back and kicked at it, doubling its speed, producing a sharp, wounded cry from the other side. As he jumped down, he saw a third uniformed guard sprawled on his back, hand clamped to his face, blood running freely through the clenching fingers.

  With a laugh, Golding turned and sprinted away from the van.

  He had run a total of ten feet before a shout stopped him.

  “Armed police! Stop! Put the gun down! Armed police!”

  He whirled round, Glock still in his hand, and pulled the trigger as he pointed it at one of the five black-clad firearms officers standing in a widely spaced semi-circle in the middle of the road.

  The Glock clicked once, a sharp, metallic scrape. It was empty.

  The Heckler & Koch MP5 carbines aimed at his head and chest by the police officers were not.

  All five officers opened fire at once. The noise of the 9mm rounds exploding from the muzzles deafened Golding. But only for a moment. Then his auditory function shut down, along with all other vital signs, as the bullets found their target. With copper-jacketed rounds tearing into him, he spun and fell in a bloodied heap, the Glock still clenched in an outflung hand.

  The disarmed SCO19 officer stepped down from the rear of the truck, a blood-splotched handkerchief clutched to his nose. He managed a grim smile. He picked up the Glock, extracted a magazine from his belt and slotted it home into the grip with a solid click. Then he holstered the pistol and went to join his colleagues, who were lowering their MP5s, moving the selector switches to safe, and slinging them over their backs.

  “All right, Tom?” the sergeant commanding the armed response team asked.

  “Tip top. One less on the to-do list, eh?”

  The sergeant laughed. “Yeah. One down, all the rest to go.”

  Later, after swiping his ID card to check in his weapons at the armoury, the sergeant called a number on his phone. The name by the number simply said, P.

  “Sergeant,” the voice at the other end said, “how did it go today?”

  “You’ll see on the news, sir. But, basically, smooth as silk. He took the bait, and we got helmet-cam footage of him pointing Tom’s Glock at us. Correct verbal warnings given and clearly audible. Couple of civilians took some phone footage, which we’ve had copied. Sir?”

  “What is it, sergeant?”

  “The suspensions. The investigation by Professional Standards and the IPCC. I don’t want any of my lads charged with murder.”

  “Don’t you worry about that. Leave it to me. The chairman of the IPCC is,” he paused, “a friend.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Check your account at midnight. I think you’ll be happy. As will your wife. Where was it she wanted to go this year?”

  “Florida, sir.”

  “Yes, well, I’d buy her a new bikini if I were you.”

  A pizza delivery driver looked up at the window of the four-storey house in London’s Belgravia area as he sped northward along Eaton Place. He was a recent arrival from Afghanistan and not entirely legal. What had caught his eye was a trio of faces at a third-storey window, their complexions rendered an eerie pale blue by the screen they were staring at. Then an oncoming taxi parped its horn at him, and he corrected his line and carried on towards his next drop. Had he instead delivered the pizzas to number thirty-one, he would have been greeted by Sir Christopher De Bree QC, although not with any great degree of warmth. De Bree had taken silk ten years earlier and now, as a Queen’s Counsel, was often to be found in this Crown Court or that one, and often the Old Bailey itself, prosecuting the most serious cases of murder, assault, terrorism, sexual violence and arson. He had lost his most recent case, which was why he now hosted six colleagues in his oak-panelled home office.

  Between them, the five men and two women gathered round the computer monitor had seven bachelor’s degrees, three PhDs, five law degrees, two knighthoods, and a baronetcy, and personal wealth of over seven hundred million pounds. Several would have been familiar to viewers of television news or consumers of online journalism. They would often be seen on the steps of the Central Criminal Court or the High Court, offering comments to the gathered media on the outcome of this case or that appeal.

  As well as senior positions in the law, they shared something else.

  They were members of the Executive Council of Pro Patria Mori.

  “To die for one’s country” might have been the English translation of the group’s name, but none of its august members had any intention of doing so themselves. Or, at least, not until they had reached a good and well-remunerated old age. No. The people whose deaths for Britain they had in mind were criminals. Or, not precisely criminals. People who, it was quite obvious, were lawbreakers of the most serious and unrepentant kind, but for whom the law was an inadequate adversary. Either because they were wealthy or well-connected enough to afford clever lawyers, or because failings in the chain of evidence hampered a swift and efficient prosecution, or because of witness nobbling, or, simply, because the idiots who so often seemed to turn up on juries were incapable of seeing the evil standing meekly in the dock in front of them.

  Their grumbles
coalesced around a handful of problems, as they saw them. The parlous state of British justice. The enfeebling effect of the European Union, with its damnable Court of Justice. And the new breed of hand-wringing human rights lawyers. In response, the group of senior law makers, law enforcers and law testers had met in a club in London’s St James’s district the year before and decided to do something about it.

  The result was Pro Patria Mori, or PPM as it quickly became known by its members. A club with very few rules, but the strictest penalties for breaking them. Rule number one: members to work for the good of Great Britain at all times, placing country above individual rights. Rule number two: justice is more important than the law and will be sought by members whenever and wherever their talents, connections and abilities allow. Rule number three: absolute secrecy. A handful of others had been agreed upon, including a solemn oath to support the police, but these three formed the group’s credo.

  Because the members enjoyed extremely senior positions within the British establishment, they had access to the kinds of resources that allowed them to suborn, cajole, bribe or blackmail such additional personnel as they needed from time to time. Civil servants with gambling problems, politicians with their hands in the till, police officers with larger houses and more expensive cars than their salaries should have made possible: all were under the magnifying glass – and thumb – of Pro Patria Mori.

  The people enjoying the helmet-cam video in De Bree’s home office that night were the group’s founders. As Nigel Golding emerged from the back of the prison transport van, one of them inhaled sharply.

  “There he is, the little shit,” she said. “He wouldn’t have got away with an insanity plea if I’d been hearing the case.

  “No, Jan,” the man beside her said. “You’d have been reaching for the black silk square, wouldn’t you?”

  “Shh, you two!” said a second man. “He’s about to get the death penalty anyway.”

  Seven pairs of eyes focused on the screen as the firearms officers’ cries of “Armed police!” blared from the PC’s speakers.

  They watched as Golding swung his gun arm up and pulled the trigger on the empty weapon.

  Then the camera-bearing officer and his four colleagues opened fire.

  “Yes!” someone hissed in the room, as blood and brain sprayed from the back of Golding’s head. A dozen or more bullet wounds bloomed scarlet on the front of his blue-and-white-striped prison-issue shirt as he collapsed, twisting clockwise into an untidy pile of limbs, arms flung outward, the pistol still clutched in his right hand.

  “Good riddance,” the senior policeman said with a satisfied smile. “What’s that, seven?”

  “Eight, George. That teenaged rapist hanged himself in Wandsworth last month, remember?”

  “Oh, yes. Silly me. Eight. Not bad for less than a year’s operations, eh?”

  As the footage snapped off, the members returned to the sitting room and reclined on dark-green leather sofas to drink De Bree’s Taittinger champagne and eat lobster rolls, thoughtfully provided by their host, who had prosecuted in Crown vs. Golding, and lost. Then won.

  4

  Back in Harness

  6 MARCH 2010

  “Hello everyone. My name is Stella Cole. And I am,” she sighed, willing herself to complete the litany, “addicted to tranquillisers. And Pinot Grigio.”

  The circle of twelve faces – some male, some female, some old, some young, some clear-skinned, some ragged with sores or sunken where teeth had fallen out – turned to Stella. Most managed a smile of some kind.

  “Hi, Stella,” they said in dreary unison.

  “I haven’t had a pill, or a drink, for two months, three weeks, four days and seven and a half hours.”

  The others clapped politely at this, the routine outlining of an addict’s sobriety.

  The group were sitting in a circle on grey plastic chairs with the kind of tubular steel legs designed to make stacking easy. The room was in the basement of a church – dusty parquet flooring, an upright piano shrouded in a faded red velvet curtain on one side, posters for mum-and-toddler music classes jostling for wall space with parish notices.

  “That’s brilliant, Stella,” Clare, the youngish woman running the group, said with a smile as dishonest as her hair dye. In fact, she’d been at pains to point out to Stella when she’d attended her first meeting that she didn’t so much see her role as to “run” the group as to “look after it”.

  “I’m like a shepherd. Or a shepherdess, I suppose,” she’d said, then giggled. “If you’re my sheep, I must be Bo Peep.”

  Stella had, briefly, considered punching this earnest, bespectacled woman with her sensible, one-inch heels and neat, blonde bob with half an inch of dark roots. Instead, she’d taken her plastic cup of scalding instant coffee to a chair as far as possible from Clare’s.

  Now, she felt she actually had something to share with the group.

  “I’ve been to see our occupational health department and the FME, sorry, I mean force medical officer, and I’ve been signed off for return to duty. So, I’ll be chasing the bad guys again starting next Monday.”

  Her news brought forth a smattering of applause.

  “Well done, Stella,” the doughy, heavily tattooed woman next to her said, turning in her chair. “Just keep coming here, won’t you? I mean, the stress and everything. Don’t want to fall off the wagon, do you?”

  Stella smiled. “Don’t worry, Sue. Job or no job, you won’t get rid of me that easily. You’ll still be seeing my ugly mug around here. Even if they do keep serving this shit coffee.”

  A few people laughed, and the meeting moved on.

  Stella walked into the CID office. But why was the whole of the Murder Investigation Team laughing at her? It was her first day back on the job. She was a young widow. A recovering pill-head and alcoholic. Surely she deserved a little pity? A little compassion?

  Then she looked down.

  No trousers. Her feet stuck into scuffed black mules. And her knickers were on inside out. The label was showing. They were laughing so hard she couldn’t hear herself think.

  No. This is ridiculous. Wake up.

  Stella groaned and rolled over in bed, flinging out an arm for Richard. It met only cold, smooth sheet. She turned the clock round and squinted at the green numerals: 3:15. Of course. When was it ever any other time? Ten milligrams of generic diazepam would fix this feeling. Or a snort of Smirnoff straight from the bottle under the bed. But they’d all gone down the toilet months ago.

  She kicked the covers off and got out of bed. Wrapped her pale-pink-and-white kimono around her bony frame and wandered past Lola’s room, then downstairs, flicking on the kettle on her way through the kitchen to the back door. While it was boiling the water, emitting strange growls and bumps, she lit a cigarette and stood on the deck, one arm round her stomach, the other held out to her side, the fag gripped between index and middle fingers. Her GP, a kind Jewish man with some sort of liver complaint that turned his skin a pale yellow, had almost begged her to give up smoking. But as she’d said, “Look, Doctor Samuels, I’m off the pills and the booze. Give me nicotine or give me death.” He’d smiled at her dreadful misquote of Patrick Henry, but nodded his agreement. “Stella, after what you’ve been through, I suppose the occasional Marlboro Light isn’t such a bad thing.”

  She stood now, shivering in the dark, the wooden planks rough under her bare feet, sniffing the tobacco smoke as it curled away from the end of her cigarette. Her grief counsellor had advised her that it was natural to feel anxious going back to work after any sort of prolonged absence, let alone one caused by such extreme circumstances as hers. But now, watching thin spears of pink rocket across the sky, she felt utterly calm. Not at peace. She doubted she would ever feel that again. But calm. No butterflies. No tremors or fluttering pulse. No tingling in the extremities. She was ready.

  Except it was half past three.

  No point even trying to sleep now, Stel. Best go for
a run and compensate for the nicotine, she thought. Lola would be fine with Kristina, the live-in nanny, a sweet Polish girl built like a peasant with sturdy hips and a bosom that would have won her a job as a wet nurse a hundred years earlier.

  She returned to her bedroom and pulled on sweat pants, sports bra, T-shirt, hoodie and her faithful Asics running shoes, and was out on Ulysses Road five minutes later.

  As she ran down towards the park, feet flowing over the pavement in a familiar and comforting rhythm, she rehearsed her opening lines to Collier.

  “Thanks for having me back, sir. I know you could have requested me transferred off Homicide. I won’t let you down. I’m not over Richard’s death, but I’m coping. Managing. I go to meetings. I have my support network. I’m taking care of myself. Now, what shit is there for me to deal with?”

  Tyres screeched behind her, and she whirled round, heart pounding. A hatchback was tearing off in the opposite direction. Kids joyriding, probably. Or someone out putting their new toy through its paces.

  “Fuck!” she said. Then louder. “Fuck!”

  That was the one thing she hadn’t dealt with. Not properly. Cars. She had a problem with them. She didn’t like driving anymore. She hated it. Being a passenger was almost as bad. She’d sit there, sweating, palpitating. Feeling death was about to snatch her. In flames. Screaming. She’d had some therapy with a clinical psychologist paid for by the Police Federation. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, it was called. Supposed to deal with what the young guy treating her had called “limiting beliefs”. It had sort of worked. Enough for her to get a positive report to tag on her personnel file. She’d tackle it when it came up. She could always get Frankie or Jake or one of the others to do the driving. Or most of it, anyway.

  Back home, she stripped off her soaking running clothes and threw them in the washing machine. She turned on the shower and, while it was running, lined up her gear on the dressing table. Warrant card. Notebook. Phone. Power pack. And her little helper.