The First Stella Cole Boxset Page 6

Stella had never had cause to visit the seventh floor before. The haunt of Corporate Affairs and its bastard offspring – Communications, Public Relations and, God help us, Stel!, Marketing – it was the sort of place hardworking police officers tended to avoid if they could possibly help it.

  Christine Flynn’s office appeared to have been airlifted in from some other sort of organisation altogether. Whereas her operational colleagues of comparable rank enjoyed offices that reeked of officialdom, with photographs of their possessors shaking hands with the Queen or the current Prime Minister, a smooth-faced Old Etonian, Flynn’s was an intensely personal space. The walls, for a start, were a shade of dusty blue that made Stella think of early summer days at the beach, misty skies not yet burnt clear by the sun. On those south coast expanses of pale-blue paint were hung paintings – or were they prints? – anyway, pictures of children picking daisies in meadows, flying kites on windy hillsides or, again, squatting on the sand, wavelets lapping at their feet as they built castles or dug little moats. A bundle of saffron-coloured sticks stood in a glass cube half-filled with an oily-looking liquid. They perfumed the office with vanilla.

  The woman behind the empty desk was about forty. Auburn hair cut short. Minimal makeup. Her wide mouth was curved upwards into a smile so radiant Stella felt the heat of the woman’s personality from across the room. She stood and walked round the corner of the desk, hand outstretched. Her long legs were encased in tailored trousers cut from some soft, dove-grey fabric that broke gently across the fronts of dark-green, snakeskin print shoes. All in all, a statement.

  They shook hands, and Flynn gestured for Stella to take one of two low armchairs, upholstered in pale grey suede, opposite each other across a coffee table made from a single slab cut through a very large tree-trunk. Its rings of age were enhanced by some sort of staining process.

  “DI Cole, welcome back. I know this will mean very little, but I am so sorry for your loss. Would you like some coffee? Or tea? I have chamomile, peppermint, ginger and–” she paused “–builder’s, if you’re like me and can’t get on with all that hippy shit.”

  Stella’s eyes popped wide open and she choked out a sudden laugh, caught out by the woman’s earthy expression, the more so for its having been delivered in a cultured drawl from somewhere in the Home Counties. Maybe there were normal people in CA after all.

  “Builder’s. Please. And please call me Stella.”

  “Very well, then. Stella. And please call me Chris. Only my Mum and Dad call me Christine. Makes me feel ten years old.”

  The tea made and poured, Flynn spoke again. “I won’t dress this up for you, Stella. You’re a frontline detective, and a damn good one from what Adam tells me. So working in admin must feel like a prison sentence to you.”

  Stella took a sip of her tea, which was made from fresh leaves and so fragrant she could almost picture the hillsides of Sri Lanka where they had been picked. She shrugged and raised her eyebrows. “It wouldn’t have been my first choice after a year of compassionate leave.”

  “No, I’m sure it wouldn’t. However, this is a temporary posting, as I’m sure DCS Collier made clear. To give you some time to acclimatise.”

  “But what does it actually involve, this task force? I’m not going to be difficult, but me and meetings? Let’s just say I have a low tolerance for boredom.”

  “The task force itself, which, by the way, the brass have decided in their wisdom to call Operation Streamline, is very much about meetings. But you personally won’t be required to attend any.” Flynn stopped again and frowned. She put her teacup down, dead-centre in its matching saucer. “It’s records management we want you for.”

  Feeling some sort of show of disgust was called for, Stella clinked her own cup down, making sure to spill a little tea as she did so. “A filing clerk!” She let her voice rise upwards. “I’m a DI in the Met with eight years under my belt, and you’re putting me in the fucking basement sorting out paperwork?” Her blue-green eyes flashed as she widened them, and she was gratified to see Flynn pull her head back under this mild assault.

  “In a nutshell, yes. There are still files that haven’t been digitised down there. The Evidence Room looks like something from the eighties. I want you to sort it out for me. By the time you’re done, we should be ready for another psych eval. Then, all being well, you’ll re-join your colleagues on an MIT and off you go, hunting down the bad guys. And girls, of course.” Flynn risked a smile. She really was very attractive, Stella thought. Good skin. Epic haircut: all angles and sharp edges. Must cost her a fortune.

  Enjoying her role, Stella reluctantly began to wind it down again. “It’s not as if I have a choice, is it? When do you want me to start?”

  “No time like the present. Why don’t we finish these, then I can come down with you and introduce you to Reg.”

  Oh, shit! Reg the Veg. The most boring man in Paddington Green.

  Police Constable Reggie Willing, the Exhibits Manager was well known in the station, if not well liked. Fifty-one years old, but acting many years older, cruising towards his thirty and a comfortable, pensioned-off life playing golf and tending his allotment. Ambition was to Reg as winning the Grand National was to an old carthorse. Not. A. Thing. It said a lot that the powers that be had stuck him there when most other stations had a civilian running their exhibits rooms. He’d been shuffling about in the basement for as long as Stella had been working at Paddington Green nick. Now she’d be working alongside him. Where, don’t forget Stel, we want to be. Oh, yes. Sorry, Stel. My bad.

  7

  Spring Cleaning

  The general public have three basic ideas about the inside of a police station. Take the good, honest citizens, the ones who keep their noses clean and say “yes, officer, of course, officer, won’t happen again, officer,” when stopped for speeding, the ones who smile good naturedly at uniformed bobbies on the beat. They have a picture in their heads from the telly. Basically, the CID operations room. Lots of whiteboards and desks, and, if it’s made by a particularly stylish director, some impossibly modern or, frankly, just plain impossible technology involving floor-to-ceiling glass panels with computer displays whizzing across them.

  The same crowd, when called on to bail out their partied-out teenaged sons and daughters, or dodgy friends in the motor or jewellery trades, see more of the uniforms and fewer of the suits. Lots of foul, machine-made coffee and fouler tea. The faux politeness of overworked police officers who know your fence of a brother-in-law or car-stereo-boosting BFF is guilty as sin and why do they have to go through all this malarkey when banging them up now would save the taxpayer a shitload of money?

  And the bad, dishonest citizens? The ones mugging, murdering and raping their way through life, or stealing other people’s possessions and peace of mind, or generally acting like arseholes just because they can’t say no to a final pint? Well, they know about the cells, with their smell of vomit, piss and disinfectant. The weeping and screaming from the sobering-up, the panicked and the mad. The barely concealed contempt from the custody sergeant and the bored routine of the fingerprint technicians and cheek swabbers.

  But none of them know about all the background stuff that keeps a police station functioning as a building, a home for a massive public-sector organisation, and a machine for preventing, detecting and solving crime. Why would they? Sure, forensics is the new glamour job, with middle-class kids applying to study it at university. And maybe the odd computer tech gets a minor role in the latest cop drama, but basically, admin is admin the world over. Necessary, relentless and very, very boring.

  Not to PC Reg “The Veg” Willing.

  To The Veg, admin was about order. Precision. Tidiness. He’d spent twenty years on the beat. He’d pounded the pavements in the East End, breaking up fights between skinheads and gangs of Asian youths who’d decided enough was enough and had started carrying knives and baseball bats. He'd walked through the leafy avenues of Kew and Richmond, reassuring distressed, middle-class
“ladies who lunch” that the police would do everything they could to recover their nicked Mercedes convertibles and BMW four-by-fours. Generally, that meant issuing a crime report number so the cashmere-clad ladies could visit a showroom in the fullness of time and replace the Merc or the Beemer. And he’d finished the active phase of his career as a foot soldier of the Metropolitan police, strolling through the shopping streets of the West End, giving tourists directions to Madame Tussauds, listening sympathetically to tales of bags snatched and wallets filched, and complacently accepting folded twenties and fifties from Arabs, Chinese and Russians who thought this was the way to treat police officers who were helpful.

  But then came the breakthrough. The job Reg knew he had been born to do. Managing the records office and exhibits room at Paddington Green nick. After an interview at once laughably easy and the most stressful of Reg’s entire life, he had been awarded the crown. His kingdom stretched over a floor the size of a city-centre supermarket, and the fact that it had no natural light or ventilation bothered him not. His remit covered all historical paper case files, the hundreds of thousands of exhibits from criminal cases, supplies – which sounds dull but in fact covers everything from toilet paper and pencils to tear-gas grenades and the paperwork from incoming shipments of new weapons for the station armoury – and personnel files, HR not having yet got round to digitising the records of the station’s two thousand one hundred and seventeen employees, both civilian staff and police officers.

  Reg was busy planning his next raised-bed planting scheme on a sheet of squared paper, tongue tip protruding from between his incisors, when the heavy door on its pneumatic closer hissed. He looked up. And smiled. Smiling was Reg’s go-to facial expression. Partly because he was, at heart, a happy man. Partly because he had found, over the years, that it disarmed people, sometimes literally, and offered him time to think, a slow process at the best of times. Today, as he registered the two faces peering at him through the gloom, the smile widened into a genuine expression of good humour and welcome.

  “Look out, Reg! Hide the weed!” he called out. “A DI and the head of Corporate Affairs. You’ll be out on your ear!” Then he stepped out from behind his desk, manoeuvring his gut round the corner with a grace borne of weekends entering – and often winning – ballroom dancing competitions with his wife, and came forward to greet the two women. He brought himself into a comical approximation of an at-attention stance, held his pudgy hands wide and smiled again. “Ladies, to what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”

  Flynn sighed. “Reg, I think you know DI Cole,” she said. “She’s assigned here for a short adjustment period. A secondment.”

  “Yes, of course.” Reg looked down, coughed to mask his embarrassment at being caught clowning inappropriately, then looked up again to give Stella a direct stare. “Sorry for your loss, DI Cole. Very sorry.”

  “It’s OK, Reg. And there’s no need to call me DI Cole. Stel’s just fine.”

  Glancing at her watch, something in rose gold, Stella noticed, Flynn became all business.

  “Well, I think I can leave you two to get acquainted. Reg, perhaps you could give DI – Stella – the tour and then show her what needs doing.”

  “Naturellement!” Reg said in a French accent so ludicrous it made Stella smile with genuine good humour. “Operation Sort This Effing Lot Out needs all the manpower – and womanpower – it can get.”

  Flynn left, and in the silence that followed the hissing of the automatic door closer, Stella could almost hear Reg’s brain working. She broke the silence just as uncomfortable threatened to morph into downright painful.

  “Going to show me around, then, Reg, or do I just set off with a ball of red string?”

  “What?”

  “You know, Theseus and the Minotaur. He unwound red wool so he could find his way out of the labyrinth again.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. No, you won’t need anything like that. Just scream if you get lost and Sir Reginald of Recordsia will come galloping to the rescue.”

  He turned on his highly polished black heel and led her off into the bowels of the exhibits room. As they passed a desk cluttered with gardening magazines and a loose pile of various kinds of order forms, receipts and shipping notes, he pointed.

  “That’s where you’ll find me if I’m not roaming my kingdom, Stel. Normally, I eat my lunch there; saves time compared to going out.”

  “What do you do for lunch?”

  “Normally bring something from home that Karen makes me. Egg mayonnaise, that’s my favourite. Now,” he said, approaching a floor-to-ceiling steel mesh partition. “In there’s your exhibits. Evidence, in other words, as you obviously know,” he added as she opened her mouth to speak. “Everything that goes in or out gets signed for and countersigned by yours truly. And now by yours yours truly, as well.” He winked. “There’s enough illegal guns, Class A drugs, counterfeit cash and bloodstained clothing in there to start our own series of CSI. Mind you, we might need to work on the title a bit. CSI Paddington isn’t very sexy, is it?”

  Stella shrugged. The man’s relentlessly cheery disposition and wisecracks were already wearing her down, and she’d spent less than ten minutes in his company. Next, he led her through to another room.

  He pointed out dozens of rows of dented black steel filing cabinets. “Every original paper document from 1976 onwards is in them,” he said. “Nowadays, they get scanned and entered into the system before shredding, but what with cuts and everything, there’s a teensy weensy bit of a backlog. Plus, in the racking, you've got every bit of paperwork from all our current cases. Even after they’re typed in, the originals have to go somewhere, so we get them all to log in and store.”

  “Who does the logging in?”

  He shrugged. “I try to avoid it, get one of the assistants to do it. I’m not the world’s most accurate typist.” He dropped his voice to a murmur and looked theatrically up and down the empty room. “I suffer from FFS, you see.”

  “What’s that, then? For Fuck’s Sake?”

  He shook his head, smiling. “Fat Finger Syndrome.” He held out his hands palms upwards. His fingers looked like raw pork sausages. “Can’t make them do what I want. For example, I’m always getting numbers round the wrong way, so thirty-four comes out as forty-three. Or ‘witness’. Always comes out as ‘wintess’.”

  More like witless in your case, Veg.

  The following day, on her own in the exhibits room, Stella consulted the computerised listing of items logged under ‘drug paraphernalia’. It took less than a minute to find what she was looking for. Halfway down the page was a reference number corresponding to a location on a rack and shelf. Nestling between bags of weed and assorted, brightly coloured pills was a white, cuboid cardboard box. It was about ten centimetres to a side and bore the logo of a medical devices company. The top had been slit through a shipping label that announced the contents:

  BD Emerald 2ml Syringe with 23G X 1.25” Needle (100).

  Inside the box were small plastic pouches, white on the back, clear on the front, each containing one slim syringe and a pre-fixed needle in a turquoise plastic sheath. Stella removed a single pouch. Then she went back to the computer and made a tiny correction to the record, adjusting the remaining quantity from “69” to “68”.

  8

  Fight or Flight

  By the end of her first week back on the job, Stella had learned three things. First, that the art of growing prize-winning vegetables was a lot more complicated than most people gave credit for. Second, that given the state of police record-keeping, it was a miracle any cases were successfully brought to a conclusion. And third, that she would cheerfully strangle Reggie Willing with her bare hands. His relentlessly upbeat outlook was no doubt a direct result of the full-fat pension heading his way, but it still grated.

  Home at six p.m., she heaved the Triumph onto its centre-stand in her tiny, precious square of off-street parking, fitted the canary-yellow lock through the front b
rake disc, then headed inside to change, calling out “Hi, Kristina!” to the nanny, going to find her in the nursery and then giving her precious Lola a cuddle.

  In the old, old days, Friday nights were special. She and Richard would have hugged, swapped news – his skirmishes with opposition lawyers, her dealings with arsey thugs – and opened a bottle of something cold from the fridge. If it was before Lola was born, they might have opened a second to drink with the Chinese food they had ordered. After she came along, they were both so tired it would be astonishing if they managed not to fall asleep in their microwaved ready-meals.

  In the old days, after the accident, she would have still opened a couple of bottles of wine. Still have ordered the Chinese food. Then finished the evening by pouring a large vodka and sitting in front of the TV, staring at the inane, grinning presenters and their celebrity interviewees and wishing they were all dead.

  But that was then. This was now. Stella Cole, clean and sober.

  She couldn’t remember exactly why she’d decided to get herself back together. But at some point in that year off, she’d gone to see Dr Samuels, who’d referred her to a specialist.

  “Break the routine that makes drinking easy,” her counsellor had told her. So she had. Every night, she’d go out running. A couple of miles at first, before she had to stop, doubled over and retching, before hobbling home, side pierced by a stitch, feet burning with blisters. Then, as she’d persevered, the mileage count grew. Five, six, seven … into double figures sometimes. Along with her sobriety, she’d developed a taste, even an addiction, for running. The London streets disappeared under her feet as she racked up tens, then hundreds of miles.

  After each run, she’d stand naked in front of the full-length mirror inside the wardrobe door, pink and sweating, and evaluate her physique. Her legs got stronger. The calves, quads and hamstrings took on the definition of a racehorse’s muscles. Her stomach tautened and flattened. She couldn’t stop. Not even if she wanted to.