The Soul Collector

by Paul Johnston

  After that the van moved more quickly. He reckoned they’d been on a motorway. Then it was driven more slowly again. Now it was stationary, he wondered if he’d reached the end of his road. He struggled desperately, but still couldn’t get the knife open.

  The rear doors opened and a torch was shone in his face. He tried to make out the person holding it, but saw only a helmet with the visor down. Was it Sara Robbins? Why was she still hiding her face? Was there some hope, if she didn’t want him to be able to identify her later? Then he saw she was carrying something, a motionless bundle wrapped in blankets. Jesus, was it a person? The face and head were covered, though loosely enough to suggest it would be possible to breathe. As he was sizing up the bundle, which had been laid on the floor on the other side of the bike, the torch was switched off. He’d seen enough to realize it wasn’t large enough to be an adult.

  Andy Jackson was in the dark in the back of the van, but he wasn’t alone anymore. He had to see if the new arrival was alive. He slid his fingers back into his back pocket and started trying the knife again. The van’s engine was started again and it moved off. Soon it was being driven at speed, presumably back on a motorway. But where were they heading? Andy realized that Matt and the others could have no idea of his location. He had to save himself and the person who had been wrapped in the blankets, if that person was still breathing.

  Fortunately Rog’s cousin had a half-decent set of wheels, a Suzuki 4x4, and Rog knew where the spare keys were.

  “You drive, Dodger,” I said. “West for the M4.”

  When we were under way, I took out my cell phone and called Karen.

  “Where are you, Matt?” she demanded. “You do realize you’re looking at prison now?”

  “Never mind that,” I said. “Remember I told you about Sara’s birth mother?” She got the name right. “Yeah, that’s her. Can you notify the authorities at ports and airports, especially in the southeast?” I gave a description. “She might have altered her appearance.”

  “What’s she done?” Karen asked.

  “For a start, she’s Lauren Cuthbertson’s mother, too.”

  There was a pause. “You mean Lauren Cuthbertson was Sara Robbins’s sister?” Karen said.

  “Half sister. You’d better advise them that Sara might be trying to go through, as well.”

  “They were issued with her details and description after the White Devil case.”

  “Yeah, but she might well look different now and you can be sure they’ll both have different identities.”

  “All right. Matt, please tell me where you are and what you’re doing.”

  “I’m trying to save Andy’s life,” I said bluntly.

  “I can send backup.”

  “Uh-uh. I have to do this on my own.” I felt Pete’s eyes on me again. “I’m not losing another of my friends. I’ll be in touch.” I cut the connection.

  “You have to do it on your own?” Boney said ironically.

  I caught his gaze. “If this gets messy, which it could well if Sara’s around, you two are in the clear as far as the authorities are concerned.”

  “If we don’t get wounded,” Rog pointed out.

  “Or killed,” Pete added.

  “Matt,” Rog said, turning his head. “Something’s been bothering me about the properties Sara bought. Why did she put them in her mother’s maiden name? Surely she’d know we might spot that.”

  I thought about that. “I’m not sure she would. I didn’t mention her mother’s maiden name in The Death List. It’s true that the tabloids dug it up, but I think Sara was probably cocking a snook at everyone looking for her. You know, giving us a pretty obvious clue and seeing if we noticed it. Besides, the name on the deeds was Angela Oliver-Merilee, remember? She also used the names she and her brother had been given by Doris. Not many people are aware of them.”

  “Why didn’t she use Lauren Cuthbertson’s original first name, as well?” Pete asked.

  “There wasn’t one in the files,” I replied. “For some reason, Doris Carlton-Jones didn’t give her a name. Maybe Sara doesn’t know about her.”

  “I doubt that,” Rog said.

  “So do I.”

  “Sara will know we went to the flat in Hackney,” Pete said. “Was Lauren staying there, do you think?”

  “Probably,” I said. “There’s no current address for her in Stoke Newington. I doubt it was Sara. She’ll be staying in the Ritz or such like.”

  “Bit of a risk,” Rog said with a grin.

  “I’ve had enough wordplay, thanks. She’s changed her appearance, I’m sure of that,” I said.

  “Maybe she used the surgeon who botched Lauren’s operation,” Pete said.

  That struck me as unlikely. It would have been much safer for her to have surgery abroad. But she’d probably given her half sister the money to pay for the op.

  “There is a chance she’s waiting for us to show up at the cottage,” Rog said, his face sallow in the headlights of the cars coming toward us.

  I nodded. “We’ll just have to take that chance, won’t we? For Andy.”

  “Yes, we will,” Pete said forcefully.

  I kept my laptop on as we sped down the M4. The wi-fi signal was patchy, but as we passed Slough, it picked up and I saw there were no further messages from Doris Carlton-Jones or from Doctor Faustus.

  When we approached Oldbury, I got Rog to pull in to a lay-by. There was a large house beyond and I picked up a signal. I found a mapping site and downloaded a plan of the village.

  “That must be the cottage,” Rog said, checking the description of the property on his laptop. “There are about a hundred meters between it and the next house.”

  “Let’s have a look at the cottage’s layout, Dodger,” I said.

  It appeared on his screen.

  “Single-story, but long—the two original cottages have been knocked together.”

  “What’s that?” Pete asked, pointing to a rectangular shape on the end of the building away from the village.

  “Shed or guesthouse, according to the spec,” Rog replied.

  “How do we do this?” Boney asked.

  I had been thinking about the training we’d got from Dave. “Pete, you’ve picked up some of Andy’s lock-picking skills, so you go for the front door. I’ll be right behind you. Dodger, you cover the rear in case someone makes a run for it.”

  “What if you guys come under fire?” Rog asked.

  “Blow the back door in with a grenade and take the shooter from behind,” I said.

  “And if the place is booby-trapped?”

  “Jesus, Dodger,” Pete said. “Improvise. Or run away.”

  “Screw you, Boney. Dave told us to take every possibility into account.”

  “You’re right,” I said, trying to calm them down. “But we haven’t much time. Who knows what kind of state Andy’s in by now?”

  They nodded, and Rog drove on. He stopped on the verge about a quarter of a mile before the cottage and doused the headlights.

  “Right, guys,” I said, “let’s get geared up. Keep the noise and lights down.” I opened my door carefully and got out.

  Pete swung open the rear door, and he and Rog started rummaging in their bags. I was wearing jeans and a donkey jacket. I fitted on the headset of my walkie-talkie and pulled a balaclava over the strap. I slipped off my belt and slid through the straps of my combat knife’s sheath. I stuck my second Glock 19 into my belt above my backside. The pistol with the silencer would be staying in hand.

  “Grenade?” Pete said in a low voice, holding out a bag.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” I replied, taking three. I shone my torch on them. One was a smoke grenade and the other two were fragmentation. I hoped I didn’t have to pull the pins on any of them.

  We moved apart and checked that our communication units were working. Then Rog set off across a field, heading for the back of the cottage. Pete and I found a gap in the hedge and went into the large field that went all the
way to Sara’s place on the other side of the road. We had good cover and were able to get right in front of the buildings. Parting the branches, I saw the property clearly. There were no lights on in the cottage or shed. The nearest streetlight was about fifty meters down the road toward the village, so we would be well obscured from passing cars.

  “Let’s go,” I whispered to Pete.

  He nodded and moved ahead to the gate. When he’d crossed the road and was on the short path to the door, I followed. By the time I got there, he already had the lock-breaking rods out. He fiddled with them for several minutes, but didn’t make any progress.

  “Looks like there are mortice locks near the top and bottom,” he said in a low voice. “Sara really doesn’t want uninvited guests.”

  “Any sign of an alarm system?”

  “Strangely, no.”

  “Rog?” I said.

  “Receiving. I’m in position. No lights or movement at the back.”

  “I’m sending Pete around to try the locks there.”

  “Okay.”

  I nodded to Boney, and he set off around the house in a crouch. I felt exposed at the front door, so I headed away to the right, thinking I’d check the shed. But when I got there, I found three heavy-duty padlocks on the bolts. Short of blowing my way in with grenades, I was stuck. Unless there was a door at the back. I pushed my way through the vegetation at the side of the wooden structure. There wasn’t a door, but a window had been boarded over.

  “Matt?” came Pete’s voice in my ear. “This door’s got mortices, too. We’ll have to cut the glass.”

  “Okay. Run your deactivation unit around it first.”

  “I was actually intending to do that,” Bonehead said snidely.

  I smiled, then took out my combat knife and started to lever away the boards. When I’d got one off, I looked in. Complete darkness. I listened carefully. Nothing. I decided to risk my torch, briefly at first. It was soon clear that the building was empty. It didn’t look like Sara was hiding there, but I had my Glock at the ready when I’d made a space big enough to clamber through. I dropped onto the floor on my hands, feeling hard earth on my fingertips.

  “We’re in,” Rog said through my earpiece. “No one around so far.”

  I shone the torch again. There were tools hanging from a row of hooks on the wall, but apart from that there was a strange absence of the gear you’d expect to find in an outbuilding—no logs, lawn-mower, old boxes or other junk. I walked toward the front doors, then stopped. The earth beneath my boots was less firm. I looked down and made out an area several yards long and wide, with a slightly different texture. I hadn’t noticed the three low posts that came out of the floor until then. They each stood about fifteen centimeters from the surface. I went over to the nearest one and kneeled down by it. In the torchlight I could see that they were circular plastic pipes, about five centimeters across. I shone my light down, but could make nothing out. Then I heard a sound that made my flesh creep—a kind of muffled screech. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that it came from a human being.

  “Rog! Pete!” I said, forgetting to keep my voice low. “If there’s nothing in the cottage, get over to the shed. There’s a window I’ve cleared on the far side.”

  “What have you got?” Pete asked.

  “Someone who’s been buried alive. Out.”

  I shone the torch on the wall and took down a couple of spades and a snow shovel. One of the former had traces of earth on the head. Going back to the tube through which the sound had come, I hacked away at the earth around it. The surface had been smoothed down, but when I broke through the crust, I found that the earth shifted easily. By the time Pete and Rog arrived, I had already piled a heap by the wall.

  “I think there are three people down here,” I said, pointing at the pipes. “We’ll take one each.”

  It was hard work, but when I got about a meter down, my spade hit wood with a resounding thud.

  “Give me a hand here,” I said.

  Soon we’d cleared the earth from a roughly made rectangular box. We all climbed out of the hole and I inserted the spade beneath the lid. There was a loud creaking as nails came away from the wood, then the cover shifted.

  “Bloody hell!” Rog said, as we took in the diminutive figure.

  It was a young girl, her hands bound and resting on her abdomen. Her eyes were wide in terror. There was another piece of rope around her ankles, and her knees were raw from the countless times she had banged them against the coffin lid.

  I got hold of her shoulders and pulled her up as gently as I could, then handed her to Pete. When she was on the floor, Rog started cutting her bonds. That was difficult, because she was jerking around like a dying fish, croaking something that we couldn’t understand. Eventually I understood. She was desperate for water. Pete went back to the cottage to get some.

  “What’s your name?” I said, taking her in my arms.

  She continued to shudder violently, but she managed to speak again.

  “Am…Ama…Amanda Ma…Mary.”

  I smiled at her. “Hello, Amanda Mary. I’m Matt and this is Roger.”

  She stared at us as if we were aliens. When Boney came back with water and some bread that he’d found, she drank desperately, spilling much of it over her pink blouse. I reckoned she was eleven or twelve. I also had a pretty good idea who she was. To have got the former SAS men to ignore their training and allow themselves to be taken out, Sara had used their family members as leverage. The only question was, whose daughter was she? I couldn’t face telling her what had happened to her father now. I kept her in a tight embrace while Rog and Pete dug down to the next coffin. This time it was a boy, who didn’t look more than six. He couldn’t speak at all—just drank and then stuffed bread into his mouth. Finally, Pete and I got a middle-aged woman out.

  As I’d suspected from the moment I saw Amanda Mary, there was no trace at all of Andy.

  Twenty-Eight

  Karen Oaten was driving down the fast lane of the M4, blue lights flashing and siren blasting.

  “Jesus, guv,” John Turner said, hands clutching his seat. “Can we get there in one piece, please?”

  “Come on, Taff,” she said, swerving inside an ambulance that was also in full emergency mode. “When have I ever put as much as a scratch on a car?” She sounded in high spirits, but it was only for show. Matt’s call, saying that he’d found three people buried alive in a property owned by Sara Robbins, had almost made her scream—not because he’d saved three people’s lives, but because he’d told her that he’d already left the cottage. She was sure he was in pursuit of Sara, but he hadn’t bothered to tell her where he was going.

  “What did the AC say about Matt pulling a gun on you?” The Welshman was still outraged by the writer’s performance.

  Oaten kept her eyes on the road. “He doesn’t know.”

  “What?”

  “Calm down, Taff. I decided against publicizing that and I managed to get the PC to keep it to himself, at least for the time being.”

  “But why?”

  The chief inspector glanced at him. “Would you rat on your wife?”

  Turner sighed. “She’s hardly likely to wave a gun at me or anyone else.”

  “Matt left because I was taking him to the Yard.” Oaten’s hands were tight on the wheel. “What did you expect me to do? I love the stupid bugger. It’s not as if he’s a master criminal. And remember, his best friend was killed.”

  “The law’s the law, whoever you are,” the inspector muttered.

  “Oh, come on, Taff, how many times have you overlooked things team members have done?”

  He glared at her. “Involving firearms and murderers, none.”

  Karen Oaten took a deep breath. “Look, I didn’t say Matt was off the hook. At the end of these cases, I’ll review the situation.”

  “You’d better,” the Welshman said, “or the AC will tear your head off.”

  Oaten thought back to the scene in the
house in Stoke Newington—blood everywhere, but no body. It was obvious it had been in parts, though. “Nice metaphor, Taff.”

  Inspector John Turner raised an eyebrow. “What? Oh, I see what you mean. Sorry.”

  They proceeded to the cottage at Oldbury, a truce of sorts established.

  It took us only half an hour to get to the railings that marked the limit of Earl Sternwood’s domain. The moon was casting a fitful light across the acres of parkland and forest. I got out of the Suzuki and listened. Apart from the faint noise of traffic in the distance, there was no sound. We checked our gear.

  “Oh, shit, I just remembered this,” Pete said, holding up a brick-size block wrapped in clear film.

  It was plastic explosive. Dave had trained us how to use it, but this would be the first time for real.

  “Yeah, take it,” I said. “We’re trying to get into a castle, after all.” I looked at the satellite photo I’d found of the estate. A faint line wound through the dark patch of forest in front of us. “This looks like a path. If we follow it, we come out right in front of the main buildings.”

  “Fair enough,” Rog said. “As long as His Lordship hasn’t had mines laid.”

  “We’ll just have to take that chance,” I said. “For Andy.”

  The others nodded and we set off. It was quiet in the woods, apart from the scurrying of small animals and the faint flap of owls’ wings. I was glad I had company. I wouldn’t have fancied walking through the ancient forest on my own—there were too many obscure places for enemies to conceal themselves. After about ten minutes, I made out the lights on the main house. There weren’t many of them. Either Earl Sternwood was strapped for cash—which seemed unlikely, given the drugs deal he’d done with the Albanians—or there wasn’t much going on. The area that the map showed as taken up by the castle was completely unlit. If I’d located it correctly, it was a brooding, shadowless presence.