The First Stella Cole Boxset Read online

  10

  Absence of Evidence

  “No, no, no, this isn’t possible,” she hissed into the empty air. “There has to be something. There has to be!”

  Somehow, Stella had convinced herself that once she got Reg out of the way, the case would open up before her like the pages of a pop-up book. She’d pull them away from each other, and the fairy-tale castle with its turrets and flags would present itself with the evidence she needed to convict Deacon of murder stuck on its topmost tower. Her breathing came in short gasps as the castle crumbled, raining shards of stained glass on the handsome prince climbing up the outside and decapitating him.

  Head in hands, she forced herself to stay calm and to follow the mantra she’d had drilled into her at Hendon and on numerous courses since – that it was a detective’s job to think.

  All evidence from a crime scene had to be logged against the case number. Standard procedure unless you wanted never to find anything ever again. That way the databases would all speak to each other, and you could find what you wanted. It might be a needle in the exhibits room haystack, but as long as you had the right case reference, you could find it in seconds. She had the right case number, but the database search was telling her there was nothing to find.

  “Come on,” she breathed, “give me something. I’ve waited so long for this.”

  She leaned back and stared at the ceiling, massaging the back of her neck. Then she frowned.

  Somewhere in the primitive part of her brain, a buzzer had just gone off. A buzzer that said, Hey! I just noticed something important and we should do something about it now. Had Stella been a cavewoman, that “something important” would have been large, fierce and possessed of long, sharp teeth. Now it was a piece of information. Equally important, but unlikely to consume her for its dinner.

  It was something Reg had said the other day. She couldn’t retrieve the memory.

  “For fuck’s sake!” she moaned, rubbing her scrunched up eyes with her fingers.

  Then she removed her fingers and opened her eyes. That was it. That was what Reg had said the other day. FFS. Not the expletive, but Fat Finger Syndrome. He switched numbers around when he was typing. That was why he tried to avoid it.

  She leaned forward and stared at the screen again. She shook the mouse impatiently and when the screen glowed back into life, clicked back out to the case home screen.

  There it was. The case number.

  Hit and run: 06/05/2009–CASE NO. F/PG/658832/67

  File created by: P Evans

  Could it be this simple? Stella opened the search box and rekeyed the case number.

  F/PG/568832/67

  She held her breath. Said a quiet prayer. And hit Return.

  The hour-glass icon rotated in a series of one-hundred-and-eighty-degree jerks.

  Stella could hear her pulse roaring in her ears.

  Then it stopped and the screen refreshed. Still no evidence.

  “Come on, Reg, please tell me you fucked up your typing.”

  She tried again.

  F/PG/658823/67

  She held her breath, willing the screen to yield its secrets. After another agonising wait, the screen refreshed with the same depressing message.

  “One more go. Please, be there. Please!” she almost shouted.

  F/PG/658832/76

  The hourglass went through its routine again. Stella stared so hard she thought she could feel the blood in her own eyeballs pulsing. The hourglass stopped tumbling.

  And there it was: a single record logged against the non-existent case file. An evidence reference.

  F/PG/658832/76-E/RW/1

  The same case reference, then E for evidence, RW for Reggie Willing and 1 – indicating it was the first, and only, exhibit.

  She clicked it.

  ITEM: paint chip

  CASE REF: F/PG/658832/76

  EXHIBIT: 1

  LOCATION: M71

  Stella let out a slow, audible breath, somewhere between a groan and a gasp.

  “Thank you, God,” she said, staring at the reference and gripping the edges of the screen with white-knuckled fingers and thumbs. “And you, Reg. Sorry about the food poisoning.”

  She scribbled the reference onto a scrap of paper and left to find the shelf in the exhibits room where the paint chip had been misfiled.

  Exhibit location M71 was at knee height. Stella squatted in front of the shelf, eyes flicking left and right, looking for the object she believed would lead her to justice for her husband.

  There. Between a hammer and a pair of dirty, off-white knickers stiff with dark brown bloodstains. She plucked the transparent plastic bag from the shelf and held it up to her eyes. To a casual observer, she would have looked very strange. A woman, her face smudged with dirt, her clothes dusty, inspecting a transparent polythene sandwich bag with an open-mouthed expression of reverence as if it contained a priceless religious relic.

  The observer, moving closer, would have frowned in puzzlement. Because the sandwich bag was empty.

  No, not empty.

  In the tip of the left-hand corner, winking in the light from the overhead neon tubes, was a tiny flake of glittering material. It might have been nail varnish, chipped from a rape victim’s scrabbling finger. Or a fleck of plastic from an abducted child’s favourite toy.

  As Stella’s eyes picked out the flake, her own expression changed. The lips compressed into a red line and her eyes narrowed. The forehead, smooth a minute ago, crinkled into lines as if scored with a thin blade. She turned and grabbed a magnifying glass from a nearby desk. No Sherlock Holmes number this, made of ebony and brass. It was rectangular, about the size of a paperback book, and made of pale, lard-coloured plastic. The handle had become grimy through much handling, narrow black furrows between the ridges.

  The rear of the chip was dark grey primer. The glossy upper surface of the paint flake was a deep shade of purple, almost black, like the skin of an aubergine.

  Earlier, Stella had pulled a pair of white nitrile gloves from a box in the storeroom. Now she took them from her jacket pocket and slipped them on. The rolled edges at her wrist reminded her of condoms.

  She slit the red chain-of-custody tape with a penknife on her bike keyring and, holding her breath, tipped the bag so the jewel of paint fell noiselessly into her palm. She turned her face to one side and exhaled. The last thing she wanted to do now was cough or puff or sneeze the flake of paint onto the floor or under a shelving unit. Breathing shallowly through her open mouth, she held her palm up into the light and inspected the surface of the paint flake through the magnifier.

  In the glare of the neon, its colour revealed itself as a gorgeous, rich purple, not as dark as it had first appeared. And it glittered as if impregnated with diamond dust.

  “You’re not from some crappy cut-and-shut job, are you?” she muttered. “Did Deacon nick you first?”

  The paint fleck winked back at her.

  Holding her breath again, Stella cupped her palm a little and tipped the flake back into the evidence bag and sealed it with the cut edges of the tape. Into her pocket it went, along with her keys. She picked up the folder and took it to the photocopier.

  That night, in a twenty-three-million-pound townhouse facing a semi-circular park on the border between Knightsbridge and Chelsea, a man twitched as he slept. His name was Leonard Ramage. His full title, as listed in Who’s Who and several other directories of establishment figures, was The Honourable Mr Justice Sir Leonard Ramage. He was dreaming. It was the same dream as always. And it ended the same as always.

  Ramage started from sleep, his chest slicked with sweat.

  “Fuck!” he said, reaching for a packet of cigarettes on his bedside table. He levered himself out of bed and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, snapping the vintage gold Dunhill petrol lighter repeatedly until the flame jumped from the wick and he could draw in a lungful of smoke.

  From the bed, a voice curled over towards him like the smoke now snaking
away from the glowing tip of his cigarette.

  “What’s the matter, Judge?”

  He spoke without turning. “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

  “Do you want to make love again?”

  “No. And I wish you wouldn’t call it making love.”

  “Fine.” The voice was petulant now. “Do you want to fuck me again? Is that better?”

  “Yes. And no. In fact, I don’t need you anymore today. Your money’s there, on the dresser. Get your things on and go. I’ll call you in two weeks. My wife’s back from Paris in the morning, and she’s staying here until her next trip.”

  “Fine. But I need a little extra this time.”

  Ramage turned from the window. “Why?”

  The figure emerged from the shadows and came to stand facing Ramage, rubbing a hand over small, high breasts, the left sporting a small tattoo of a red rose dripping blood, and down over a flat belly. Her eyes were smudgy with dark grey makeup, and her glossy, blonde hair was tousled with sleep. “I’ve had a journalist from one of the posh papers sniffing around like a bitch in heat. She’s been talking to all the girls on the high-end circuit. She seems to think there’s some sort of conspiracy involving senior legal types. You know, Judge. Like you. Told me I could make myself a tidy little sum if I was to give her a few little titbits of information. All off the record, of course.”

  Ramage glared at the woman, who purported to be called Kiara. As well as the rose, she had a small butterfly tattooed under the angle of her jaw on the right. He pushed a fingertip against the hard plane of her sternum.

  “Just what are you saying?”

  The woman smiled. “Nothing. Just that a girl’s got to live. And quite frankly, she’s offered me a lot more than I get,” she swept her hand around the bedroom, ending up with it pointing at the bed, “for doing this.”

  “So, you want me to pay you off, is that it?”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite like that. But the lady from the paper was quite persuasive.”

  Ramage exhaled through his nose. Then took another deep drag on the cigarette before blowing the lungful of smoke out towards the ceiling. “I haven’t any more cash here than that.” He pointed to the carefully stacked pile of banknotes on the dressing table. The money sat between an open-topped leather tray, divided into compartments for cufflinks, change and keys, and a trio of bottles of expensive aftershaves and colognes. “But I can get it easily enough. How much did she offer you?”

  “Ten.” She paused for a beat. “Grand.”

  Ramage doubted it was even a quarter of that ludicrous sum.

  “I’ll double it. But that buys your absolute and total discretion. For ever. Understood?”

  “That’s very generous of you, Judge. And, yes, of course. My lips are sealed. Except, you know, when you–”

  “Shut up and get out! Now! And take your money. I’ll call you tomorrow with a place to meet.”

  With the house to himself again, Ramage sat on the edge of the bed. He picked up his phone.

  “Bit early isn’t it, Leonard?” Howarth’s voice was blurry with sleep and edged with irritation.

  “I’ve got a problem. We have a problem.”

  Howarth’s voice sharpened and his diction improved instantly.

  “What sort of a problem, precisely? It must be serious if you’re calling me at this ungodly hour.”

  “There’s a journalist sniffing around. I’m not sure, but it sounds like she’s heard something about PPM.”

  “And you know this, how?”

  “And I know this because some grasping little tart just attempted to blackmail me. I’ve offered her double what she claimed the media bitch promised her.”

  “You’re not going to pay her, surely? She’ll only come back for more.”

  “Yes, thank you, Charlie. I have, actually, tried a few blackmail cases in my career. Of course, I’m not going to pay her.”

  “Then …?”

  “Call Collier for me. I’m convening a subcommittee at six a.m. I want this dealt with permanently. Tomorrow.”

  At six that same morning, Adam Collier, Charlie Howarth and Leonard Ramage were sitting around Ramage’s handmade walnut burl dining table. It had cost him more than a police constable made in a year, including overtime. His housekeeper kept the swirling copper surface buffed to a high shine with beeswax polish. They were eating flaky, buttery croissants and drinking freshly brewed coffee. And they were discussing a murder. A forthcoming murder.

  “She can’t really have anything, Leonard,” Collier was saying. “The group’s security is watertight. Airtight. Nobody would ever even hint at its existence. She’s just fishing.”

  Ramage dabbed at his lips with a white damask napkin. “Maybe she is just fishing. But she’s fishing for something in particular, and that concerns me, as it should you.”

  “Oh, it concerns me. As does your little friend’s pathetic attempt at blackmail.”

  “Can we deal with that first ?” Howarth asked. “I have to be in court at ten and if I need to arrange anything I need to get it done as soon as possible.”

  “I’m going to meet her on an abandoned industrial estate a few miles from here. One of those derelict sites down by the river the developers are snapping up like dogs after butchers’ scraps,” Ramage said.

  “That’s perfect,” Collier said. “I have someone in mind for the job. She’s very capable, aced the sniper training course, shoots for the Met in competition. I gather the army tried to poach her when they found out how good she was.”

  “Loyal?” Ramage asked.

  “One hundred percent. I vetted her myself. She’s like a pit bull with guns instead of teeth. If I were to let her off the leash, I doubt there’d be a criminal left alive in the whole of the Met’s jurisdiction.”

  “Excellent. I’ll tell the tart to meet me at two this afternoon. I’ll text you the exact location, and your attack dog can set up or whatever these people need to do.”

  “Shall we return to the subject of this journalist?” Howarth asked.

  “By all means,” Ramage said. “In fact, I have a plan for her. When I meet Kiara this afternoon, I’ll get the name out of her first. So, Adam, better tell your pit bull to hold her fire until I give her a signal.”

  “Make it something obvious. We don’t want her dead too early because you scratched your nose.”

  “I’ll point straight up at the sky. How about that? Obvious enough?”

  Collier smiled. “That should do it.”

  “Then what?” Howarth asked.

  “Then we can do some sniffing of our own, can’t we,” Ramage said. “More coffee?”

  11

  Kill #9

  Her shooting skills had been developing since her father bought her that first, beautiful rifle when she was nine. Her total official kills amounted to two. The number of people she had dispatched unofficially was six. Each kill had given her an increasing amount of pleasure. Now she was making herself comfortable on the roof of a tower block overlooking a patch of disused ex-industrial land that stretched down to the Thames. A row of abandoned Portakabins stood with their backs to the river. Their windows were covered with perforated steel sheets, which were covered in graffiti, along with the rest of the tatty units.

  Beneath her, she had spread a sheet of olive-green canvas. Beside her right elbow was her mobile phone. Next to the phone was a pair of Zeiss Conquest HD 15x56 binoculars. They’d proved their worth as spotting kit during early morning and twilight put-downs and had cost the thick end of fourteen hundred pounds, far more than she could ever have afforded; as PPM had paid, that didn’t really matter. It was the piece of kit in front of her that she was focusing on.

  The weapon wasn’t a standard-issue police rifle. For its marksmen – and they had all been men until she joined – the Met had opted for a Heckler & Koch G3K semi-automatic rifle. She had tried out a variety of rifles during a trip to the US and had decided that the Accuracy International AT308 was a better w
eapon for her specialised role. Its folding stock made it more easily portable and less likely to attract unwanted attention, although her masters would see to it that she never found herself anywhere near the inside of a courtroom. Or not from the wrong side of the dock, at any rate.

  When Adam Collier had introduced her to PPM and asked her about weapons, she had, without hesitation, told him she wanted the AT308 for her new duties. One had been procured, along with a telescopic sight, a suppressor and a bipod. Together with the .308 Winchester ammunition, the rifle spent its spare time in a black-painted, steel gun cabinet in her garage.

  The rifle was mounted on its bipod now. She had leant on the bipod’s legs to drive the spiked feet into the asphalt covering of the roof.

  She checked her watch, a black-and-gold Casio G-Shock bristling with buttons, crowns, bezels and additional digital displays on the face. She loved the watch and thought it suited her wrist, which was muscular where other women her age had slight, bird-like bones.

  13.58

  She raised the binoculars to her eyes and watched the kill zone. Off to one side, she caught movement. A dark purple car hove into view and pulled up at the edge of the concrete apron in front of the Portakabins. Cars didn’t interest her. This one was big and looked expensive, to judge from the chrome on display and the huge wheels. It was a beautiful colour. Like a glittering aubergine.