The Soul Collector

by Paul Johnston

  The second service was for Josh Hinkley. To my surprise, he’d asked for a humanist service before cremation. The readings were from his own books (which was less of a surprise), interspersed with songs by Ian Dury, The Kinks and The Jam. There was a booze-up in a pub in Soho afterward. I only stayed for one drink, but that was long enough for me to be cut dead by the chairman of the Crime Writers’ Society and by a tiny Chinese woman with a large chest. Apparently she was Chop Suzy, the tart the dead man had been expecting the night he was murdered. Karen told me that a woman with a posh voice had told Suzy to stay away from “her husband.” Female impersonation was obviously another of Alistair Bing’s skills, unless he’d got his mother to do it.

  Then there was Jeremy Andrewes’s funeral. It took place in a pretty churchyard in Hampshire, near the family seat. No one spoke to Karen and me until we were leaving.

  “You’re Wells, aren’t you?” said an elderly, red-faced man. “How dare you show your face here? You’re responsible for Jeremy’s death. If you make money from it, I shall surely seek you out.”

  Keeping quiet seemed the best option, even though I’d already decided not to write about the case in my column or make a book out of it. I’d learned my lesson after The Death List.

  Then came the worst of all—Dave’s funeral. This time it was a beautiful day. The church in Dulwich was packed. There was an honor guard of soldiers from the Parachute Regiment and the SAS, in full dress uniform but without weapons, and the service was traditional, on the wishes of his wife, Ginny, and his parents. I stood with Karen, Pete, Rog and Andy, who’d been released from hospital with a warning, already disregarded, not to drink for a month. We sang hymns that I knew meant nothing to Dave. Unlike many soldiers, he was completely without faith and I was sure he would have laughed at the idea of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “Jerusalem” being heard at his funeral. I hoped it made the family feel better, but they certainly didn’t look comforted. On the way out of the church Ginny hugged Andy, Rog and Pete, but kept her hands by her sides when it was my turn. She didn’t let me finish the first word of my condolences.

  “Bastard,” she said, her eyes wide. “You killed him, not that bitch you used to fuck.”

  Her kids started crying and an elderly man tried ineffectually to lead her away.

  “You killed him,” she wailed, trying to pull her hand away to hit me. “You killed my Dave…”

  As Karen took my arm and walked me to the gate, I caught sight of Lucy and Caroline. My daughter looked horrified, while my ex-wife’s expression was inscrutable. She certainly wasn’t displaying anything akin to sympathy, but there was no reason she should have.

  Karen drove my car toward Brixton, and then pulled in to the side of the road. She turned to me and took my hands.

  “Look at me, Matt,” she said, waiting for me to do so. “It’s not true. You didn’t kill Dave. You did everything you could to save him, with your alert codes and reporting systems. It isn’t your fault that he opened the door to Sara. Do you hear me? It isn’t your fault.”

  My breathing was rapid and the blood was rushing through my veins and arteries in a hot flood.

  “I love you,” Karen said. “Do you hear me, Matt? I—love—you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. No one could have done more to find Dave’s killer. You should be proud of that.”

  But I wasn’t. I knew I never would be. After a time, the weight of what Karen had said finally hit me.

  “You…you want to spend the rest of your life with me?” I repeated, turning to her.

  She nodded and smiled.

  And suddenly it struck me that I wanted that, too. More than anything, even catching Sara.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s spend our lives together.”

  Karen laughed. “That’s another bloody song, isn’t it?”

  “Sort of. The Stones.”

  “Ha!” she said, and started the engine. “Jagger and Richards. Old rockers never die.”

  “Well, that’s reassuring, isn’t it?” I said, rummaging in the glove compartment and coming out with a CD.

  It was only as the first tom-tom beats of “Sympathy for the Devil” came from the speakers that I remembered it had played at full volume, over and over, in Mary Malone’s house after her murder.

  Alistair Bing and his demented Faustian pact had successfully ruined one of my favorite pieces of music.

  Gradually, things got back to normal. I changed the alarm codes in my apartment and had a new security system installed in the Saab. Lucy went back to school, though the teachers said she was hard to reach for some weeks. Caroline told me our daughter needed to see a psychiatrist because of what I’d got them into, which made me call her a fool for failing to check her car for bugs—one was found by the police, obviously put there by Sara. Strangely, that seemed to clear the air and we managed to spend a day with Lucy and talk her through what she’d been through. She started to feel better almost immediately.

  My mother was more shaken than any of us, and I had to go over her house changing the security locks and upgrading the alarm. She had difficulty getting back to writing stories. I’d been struggling with exactly that since the White Devil had first got his claws into me, but at least I had plenty of years to get back into things. Fran seemed to have aged enormously in the course of a few days.

  As for my friends, they seemed to have taken most of what had happened in their stride. Andy, Rog, Pete and I met for dinner every week, but we didn’t go to the pub. It wouldn’t have been the same without Dave.

  I found myself waking up in the middle of the night, even on the few occasions when I wasn’t plagued by violent dreams. For a few seconds I would feel all was well with the world, then I’d remember that Dave wasn’t in it any longer—and that Sara was, even though she’d lost a large part of her funds and her five properties in the U.K. had been sequestered. When the CSIs were going over the cottage, the flat and the houses, in each one they found the words “The Soul Collector” carved in a hidden place. Sara had collected Dave’s soul, as well as those of the three SAS men who had killed her brother. It was only a question of time before she made another attempt to take mine. In the meantime, I planned to make the most of life with Karen.

  And then one morning, six weeks after Sara had disappeared, she called me. The number was withheld and it was impossible to tell where she was. I pressed the record button on my phone.

  “Matt,” she said, her voice curiously soft. “I bet you’ve just been dying to hear from me.”

  “No,” I said, determined not to show her how I felt about Dave’s murder.

  She laughed. “Come on, I know there are things you want to ask me.”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you all the same.” Her tone grew sharper. “It’s important you know that you’ve made things even worse for yourself and everyone you care for.”

  I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. “Because I killed your murdering bitch of a sister?”

  “Nicely put, Matt, but true enough. Let me ask you, when did you discover that we were related?”

  “Not long after I sent her to hell.”

  “I know you don’t believe in the rubbish that Earl Sternwood and the others did. Don’t you want to know how my sister got involved with him?”

  I did, but I wasn’t giving her the satisfaction. “No.”

  “Apparently she’d always been interested in the occult. She found out that the order behind the old Hell-fire Club still existed and she went to a meeting—a conclave, they called it. As soon as the earl saw her face, she was in. Apparently he felt she was a kindred spirit.” She laughed. “Did you know that he considered the Sternwood lip an honor and would never consent to plastic surgery?”

  “Fascinating,” I said with plenty of irony.

  Either she didn’t hear that or she ignored it. Maybe she thought I’d be writing her sister’s story, in which case she had a shock coming.

  “My mother tol
d me about Lauren over a year ago. At first I was angry that she’d kept silent for so long, but then I felt the joy of having a sibling again.”

  I managed to resist telling her exactly what I thought of Doris Carlton-Jones and what she’d done with her husband’s head, as well as Lauren’s rampages in East London.

  “After I met Lauren, I was even more delighted. I could see she had similar qualities to my brother and me. I bought her an identical motorbike to mine to muddy the waters. No doubt you already guessed that. As well as that, when I told her about the wonderful surgery I had to my face, she insisted I pay for her operations. They were much more necessary, of course. She wasn’t exactly one of nature’s beauties. After that idiot of a surgeon ruined the good work he’d done, there was so much anger in her. I know my darling brother would have loved that.”

  No doubt, I thought—given that he was a twisted piece of shit, too.

  “In case you’re wondering, Matt, I made contact with my mother a few months after your book was published. I thought she’d be sickened by it and I was right. What I didn’t expect was that she’d be so keen on helping me and, more recently, Lauren. Of course, my sister had already made her own arrangements with the late earl. Her putting the plastic surgeon’s body in my Oxford house was a surprise to me. It seems she was jealous that I have the looks I do.”

  I didn’t tell her that Lauren had left a note saying “Sorry.”

  “Then I realized that killing Dave had fired you up. I heard from my mother that a large man with a slight American accent had driven at Lauren when she was handing over a weapon. When I showed my mother a picture of your friend Andy, she recognized him immediately. She knew who you were when you impersonated a detective at her house, but you had no idea, did you?” She laughed. “That ridiculous mustache.”

  I wasn’t going to dwell on that. “How did you get into Dave’s house?” I demanded.

  She laughed again, and the sound made me shiver. “I had a Salvation Army uniform on. Strange that no one noticed me. I swapped my helmet for the bonnet before I walked up to his door. The idiot fell for it and took the chains off. I changed back into my leathers afterward.”

  I pressed my fingernails into the palms of my hands. She talked about wanting revenge for her sister. I wanted it for Dave.

  “Actually, I do want to ask you something,” I said.

  “At last.”

  “Or rather, I want to tell you that I understand exactly how your mind works. Those people you buried alive, the two kids and the woman.”

  “What about them?” she asked, as unconcerned as if they had been insects.

  “You were never going to tell anyone about them, were you? The idea that they’d take days to die, screaming themselves hoarse through their gags, made you moist, didn’t it?”

  There was a gratifying silence. Then she tried to have the last word.

  “You know exactly how to do that, Matt.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “By running a knife through your shriveled heart.” I hung up.

  I should have felt good after that fleeting victory, but I couldn’t. Even though I hadn’t meant to kill Sara’s sister, I’d become a member of the putrid club that they, their brother, Earl Sternwood and Alistair Bing belonged to—the club of those who have brought death to their fellow human beings. What made me feel worse was that, although I’d never forgive myself for Jeremy Andrewes’s death, I now had no regrets at all about my part in Lauren May Cuthbertson’s demise.

  When Karen came in that evening, she immediately saw that something had happened.

  “What is it?” she asked, after she’d kissed me.

  I’d been considering all day whether to tell her. I was inclined not to, but I’d been guilty of too many lies and omissions.

  “Screw her,” Karen said after I’d told her about the call.

  “It isn’t just her,” I said. “It’s me. I want to kill her.”

  To my surprise, she didn’t seem to be particularly shocked. She kissed me on the lips and handed me a bottle of gin. “Just make sure you do it in another country,” she said with a smile.

  That wasn’t a bad idea.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-3214-7

  THE SOUL COLLECTOR

  Copyright © 2009 by Paul Johnston.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, MIRA Books, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  MIRA and the Star Colophon are trademarks used under license and registered in Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

  www.MIRABooks.com