The Soul Collector

by Paul Johnston

“I’d got that far on my own, Josh. But what do you think Wells is up to? He’s not answering any of his phones.”

  Hinkley drew on his cigarette again. “If the White Devil case is anything to go by, he and his headbanging rugby mates are trying to track her down.”

  “They’re not exactly succeeding, are they? Did Wells give you the impression he was going to play the caped crusader?”

  “Not really. I told you, he was pretty down in the dumps about his friend Dave Cummings being shot. The fucker chucked me out.”

  Andrewes made his mind up. Screw his informer in the Homicide Central and screw Matt Wells—he was going to go for broke on this. “Josh, I want you to give me the full lowdown on Wells—bigheadedness, unreliability, what he was like when he was with Sara Robbins. Basically, anything that makes him look flaky.”

  “Yeah, I can do that,” Hinkley said with a laugh. “How much imagination am I allowed to use?”

  “As much as you like, but I’ll be quoting you.”

  “That’s all right, Jerry. I’ll do anything for publicity.”

  “Oh, and, Josh?”

  “What?”

  “I need it now.”

  “Aw, come on. I’m bloody knackered.”

  “Anything for publicity?”

  “Fuck you. All right, let me think.”

  Andrewes spent the time opening a new file in his word processing system. He titled it “Joshdumpson MW.”

  “Em, Jerry?” Hinkley’s tone was suddenly apprehensive.

  “What is it? Getting cold feet about ratting on your so-called friend?”

  “Nah, bollocks to that. I was just wondering—do you think Matt might be the killer?”

  Andrewes stifled a laugh. “What, and he left a message incriminating himself on the body?”

  “That might be a distraction. I had a killer do that in one of my books.”

  “This isn’t fiction, Josh. This is the real world, and Sandra Devonish was stabbed in the heart.”

  “Yeah, well, serves her right for being a bad-tempered dyke. She kneed me in the balls when I came on to her in Washington. I thought I could convert her.”

  Jeremy Andrewes managed to bite his tongue. “Are you ready to talk now?”

  “Yeah. Here I go.”

  As Hinkley came out with a character assassination that Carlos the Jackal would have been proud of, the thought that Matt Wells could have been the killer kept nagging away at Jeremy Andrewes. And while he didn’t believe for one moment that Wells would murder his fellow crime writers, he knew that suspicion would sell plenty of newspapers.

  The Soul Collector woke in her van. She opened the back door a few centimeters and listened. Although she had parked a long way up a track in rural Worcestershire, she couldn’t be sure no one had spotted the vehicle. The early dawn light was faint and mist had gathered over the fields. She decided she was safe for another half hour.

  Sara Robbins used the time to go over her plan. She had timed everything carefully and had built in an extra ten minutes. Today was the day that she put the squeeze on the former SAS men. The cottage in Berkshire was waiting to receive guests. She’d bought it with funds that not even a genius hacker would have been able to identify as hers. The other properties were in compound names, including her mother’s, that Matt and his friends might well have found. They were welcome to check them out.

  She put her papers into a folder and stuck it under the front seat. She had memorized everything and she was ready. This was the biggest test of her abilities yet. Killing people was easy, if you were cold enough about it—and she certainly was. But kidnapping people, keeping them alive, that was more of a challenge. As was luring and out-thinking three former elite soldiers. Not even her brother had managed to pull anything like that off. She loved him, but her ambition was to be even more ruthless, even more invincible. Today would be the making of her. The Soul Collector was the god beneath the ground, the final enemy of mankind—Hades, Persephone, Hecate, Dis, Proserpina, Hel, Lucifer. It was striking how many of those ancient deities were female. Women were usually seen as the source of life, but not Sara Robbins.

  The Soul Collector was Death Incarnate.

  Sixteen

  I was woken by a hand shaking my shoulder.

  “Matt? You’ve got to see this.” Pete’s expression was a mixture of anger and dismay.

  “What is it?” I asked, sitting up and stretching my arms. I looked at my watch and saw it was eight-thirty.

  Rog was sitting in front of a computer. He looked over his shoulder. “Morning, Matt. Take a deep breath.”

  I rubbed my eyes and bent over to read the text that was displayed. I immediately recognized the layout of the Daily Indie’s Web site. Then I started to read.

  “‘American Novelist Murdered—Five Questions for Matt Wells.’”

  I sat down heavily on the chair that Pete had brought over. “What is this?”

  “That scumbag Jeremy Andrewes seems to think you’re behind the killings,” Rog said.

  After a description of the event, written in a tone more appropriate to the paper’s tabloid rivals, came the questions:

  One—why did Matt Wells’s name appear on a note left on Sandra Devonish’s body?

  Two—why is Matt Wells not answering any of his phones?

  Three—what is the connection between this murder and the shooting of Matt Wells’s close friend David Cummings?

  Four—has Matt Wells been in contact with his former lover, Sara Robbins, sister of the notorious White Devil?

  And, five—does Matt Wells hate his fellow crime writers so much that he could kill them?

  There followed a lengthy list of my supposed transgressions at crime-writing festivals and events, largely based on the testimony of the bullshit-merchant Josh Hinkley. Throwing him out of my apartment had obviously not been such a smart move.

  “How much of this is true?” Rog asked.

  “A bit,” I admitted. “But it’s all been given the worst possible spin. For instance, I did pour a pint of beer over Josh Hinkley in Manchester, but that was because he kept feeling up my publicist. I did tell Sandra Devonish to fuck off, but we were both rat-arsed, and she said it to me first. And I suppose, though my memory’s a bit hazy about this, I might have called the Crime Writers’ Society ‘the Jurassic Park of literature’ during an event in Aberdeen, but that was probably because bleeding Josh had called it something much worse. I could kick that wanker’s teeth in.”

  “Probably not a good idea at this current juncture,” Pete said.

  There was a series of knocks on the door.

  Pete walked over, silenced Glock in hand. He looked through the spy-hole. “Slash,” he said, taking off the chain and letting the American in.

  “Goddamn English weather!” he said, shaking his soaked blond mop. He was carrying a flagon of milk in one hand and a large bag of shopping in the other.

  I scrolled down the rest of the article. There was a section about Sandra Devonish, mentioning her best-known books and the movies that had been made from them—one was pretty good, I remembered. There was also what was obviously a publicity photo of her standing against one of those huge cacti in a red desert. Then there was a sanctimonious wrap-up from Jeremy Andrewes, in which he regretted putting “this paper’s own crime columnist on the spot,” but that “the truth and the need for the police to carry out their duties without interference from a misguided crime writer take precedence over personal considerations.” He wouldn’t be getting a Christmas card from me again.

  “What now?” Pete asked, patting my shoulder.

  “I have to make sure that Lucy, my mother and Caroline, let alone everyone else, have checked in okay,” I said.

  “Breakfast coming up,” Andy said.

  I took out my laptop and logged on to my e-mail server. Everyone had sent confirmation messages. I knew that Caroline would be climbing the walls wherever she and the others were, especially if she’d seen Jeremy Andrewes’s article. The
re wasn’t anything I could do about that. I thought about contacting Karen. It would have been easy enough to send her an e-mail or a text, but I didn’t want to. The bottom line was that any message from me would compromise her even more in the eyes of her boss and of her team. We were going to have to work out our own solutions to this nightmare. She’d be up to her ears in other business anyway, given Dave’s murder and what looked like the start of a serious gang war in the East End.

  Andy prepared the usual gargantuan breakfast, but none of us was complaining. We might not get the chance to eat for some time, and sitting around the table gave us the opportunity to work out a plan of action.

  “I vote we go and throw those shitheads into the river,” Andy said, dipping a sausage into the yolk of a fried egg.

  “You mean Andrewes and Hinkley?” I said. “I’ll get them when this is all over. The question is, what do we do now?”

  Pete was fastidiously cutting away the rind from his bacon. “Are you going to stay underground, so to speak?”

  I’d been thinking about that. Although the Daily Indie had demanded that I report to New Scotland Yard—having really pushed the boat out by making my relationship with Karen public—there was nothing in the article or in any of the other papers’ coverage saying that the police wanted to see me. Obviously Karen did, in order to stop me chasing Sara, but I hadn’t done anything illegal—apart from carry a pistol, and no one had any proof of that.

  “I can’t see the point in breaking cover,” I said. “The only way we’re going to get close to Sara is to use what we know. If we share it with the cops, Sara will respond either with a killing spree or a rapid disappearance.”

  “Or both,” Rog said, raising his knife.

  “Thanks for that, Dodger.” I looked around the table. “Where do we start, then?”

  “Well, we’ve got the three properties that Sara bought in the southeast,” Rog said. “The flat in Hackney, the house in Oxford and the farmhouse in Kent.”

  “True enough,” I said, “not that she’s necessarily using them.”

  “She’s probably got them booby-trapped,” Pete said.

  Andy grunted. “Probably. What about your millionaire friends, Boney? Have they seen her recently?”

  Pete shook his head. “The last actual sighting I have of her is in Zurich nearly a year ago.”

  “What do you think she looks like now?” Rog asked, pushing his plate away.

  I glanced over at him. “How do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “Well, she’s hardly going to be letting the CCTV cameras of the capital record her as she was two years ago. She’s a fugitive, isn’t she? Wanted for her part in several murders. At the very least she’s going to be using disguises.”

  “Good point, Dodger,” Pete said. Then he frowned. “What do you mean, ‘at the very least’?”

  Rog grinned. “Ever heard of a thing called cosmetic surgery, Boney?”

  “Shit,” I said, dropping my cutlery. “That would make our job a whole lot harder.”

  Andy shook his head. “I don’t see why. We just nail anyone acting suspiciously. She’s probably hired people anyway.”

  “That would be ‘nail’ as in what you failed to do with the motorbike rider you saw trying to hand something to Sara’s birth mother?” I asked with more sarcasm than he deserved. He shouldn’t have called me Oates.

  “Steady on, Matt,” Pete said. “The last thing we should be doing is taking shots at each other.”

  “Quite right,” I said, raising my hand. “Sorry, Slash.”

  “Forget it,” he said with a grin. “I’m not the person on the front page of the newspaper.”

  That made us laugh, but not for long. Andy brought over another pot of coffee and we refilled.

  “Okay,” I said. “Plan. For a start, we’re not doing anything on our own. We stay in pairs. That way we reduce the chances of being surprised by Sara or her sidekicks.”

  “How about checking the properties?” Rog asked. “For a start, there’s the one in Hackney. That shouldn’t take long.”

  I nodded. “Okay. Who’s going to do that?”

  Pete looked around the table. “We haven’t decided on pairs yet.”

  “Boney, why don’t you do that with Andy?” I suggested.

  They both agreed.

  “What about us?” Rog asked me.

  “I need to keep checking my e-mails in case Doctor Faustus or Flaminio sends another clue,” I replied. “In the meantime, you can start tinkering with those bank accounts of Sara’s you’ve been logging.”

  “Tinkering with them?”

  “Yes, Dodger,” I said, with a thin smile. “I want you to transfer as much as you can from them into a new account in my name. That should get her attention pretty quickly.”

  “Way to go, Matt!” Andy said.

  “Yeah,” said Pete. “Make her squirm!”

  I suddenly felt a wave of emotion. Up till now we had basically been chasing the game, but now we were going on the attack. The question was, how many people were going to end up dead before we flushed Sara out?

  Karen Oaten was sitting in front of the assistant commissioner’s desk, in a low chair that she was sure he had carefully chosen to emphasize his superior position.

  “Tell me, Karen,” he said, flicking a speck of dirt from his uniform tunic. “What are you doing to find Matt Wells?”

  She tried not to sigh too obviously. It was clear that her boss had paid more attention to the Daily Independent than the other papers. Then again, the Matt Wells angle was sure to be copied across the media as the day progressed.

  “I’ve applied to have his phones tapped and his Internet service provider monitored.” She rubbed her forehead. “But it’s likely that he’s using other numbers and sites. He’s been preparing for Sara Robbins’s return for some time.”

  “Is that who you think murdered the two crime writers?”

  “There’s no evidence of it, though the note mentioning Matt suggests someone with an agenda. Sara Robbins did threaten him in an e-mail after the White Devil’s death.”

  The AC picked up an expensive-looking pen and held it like a surveyor judging an angle. “I have to tell you, Karen, that questions are being asked about your team. The outbreak of killings in East London is unlikely to have come to an end. The shooting of the Shadow hard man by someone wearing Muslim women’s clothes is going to make things worse. I understand you’ve kept Ron Paskin in charge.”

  “Yes, sir. He has the experience and the manpower to handle it.”

  The AC raised an eyebrow. “Is that a hint that you need more bodies, Chief Inspector?”

  “I always need more bodies,” Oaten replied. “At least, living ones. My monthly report has stressed the need for more detectives and support staff in the VCCT ever since I arrived.”

  “Just be thankful you have a team to command at all,” the AC said firmly. “There are plenty of senior personnel in the divisional homicide units who would be delighted to see the disbandment of what they feel is the interfering VCCT.”

  “Yes, sir. I am aware of that.”

  The man behind the desk opened a file. “No fresh leads in the Mary Malone case?”

  “No, sir.”

  He opened another file. “The Dave Cummings shooting?”

  “No, sir.”

  The AC looked down at her. “And the Eastern Division murders? Are they just tit-for-tat gang idiocy?”

  Karen Oaten held his gaze. “I’m keeping an open mind, sir. Do you know something I don’t?”

  “I have spoken to Detective Superintendent Paskin, but he assures me he’s copied you on all the case notes.” The AC pushed his chair back and stood up. “Come on, Karen,” he said. “Don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence? A series of murders starts that we can link, at least in principle, to Sara Robbins, and at the same time someone starts taking out gang members in East London?”

  Karen chewed her lip. The thought had occurred to her. She didn�
��t like the feeling, not least because the idea was interesting. She decided to play devil’s advocate.

  “There’s no evidence whatsoever tying the crime-writer murders even to that of Dave Cummings, let alone to the East End killings, sir.”

  “Indeed there isn’t,” the AC said, looking at the photograph of the Metropolitan Police rugby union team that he had captained. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some connection.”

  If Amelia Browning had come up with an evidence-free idea like that, Karen would have sent her off with a verbal slap. But the AC wasn’t prone to flights of fancy and he did have an outstanding record as a detective. She knew that she’d be a fool to ignore his input, even if it was nothing more than a hunch.

  “So you want me to take over the cases from Ron Paskin, do you, sir?”

  “Not necessarily,” her boss replied. “Just consider the possibility that there’s more to the gangland murders than meets the eye.”

  “Right, sir,” Oaten said, standing up.

  “By the way, how’s that young sergeant coming along?”

  “Amelia Browning? She’s keen and I think she’ll make the grade.”

  The AC opened the door of his office. “Good. I had a feeling she would when we interviewed her.”

  As she left, Karen twitched her head. The AC might have given the impression of being the most straitlaced of commanders, but he had the ability to put his finger on things with unerring accuracy. It was about time she did the same, if she wanted to remain in charge of her team.

  I watched as Rog’s fingers flew over the keyboard like a concert pianist’s. He had already managed to transfer a million dollars from an account in Venezuela to the one he’d set up in my name in London. Now he was working on the sum of two million in an Indian bank. I’d asked him before he started if he was happy about breaking the laws of numerous countries.

  He just shrugged and said, “Whatever it takes to get Sara off your back.”

  Sometimes my friends made me feel very humble.

  Andy and Pete had left, armed and wearing baseball caps with large peaks. I didn’t think anyone would be looking for them on the CCTV cameras that were everywhere in the city these days, but there was no point in risking it. I had the feeling we were going to have to resort to disguises before the chase was over and I didn’t want to use them up prematurely.