The Soul Collector mw-2

by Paul Johnston

  She gave a hollow laugh. “If that was an attempt to get me into bed, you need to work on your technique.” She put the lid on the cup and moved around the island. “I’ll call you later,” she said, kissing me on the mouth.

  “Okay,” I said, watching her go. I went over to the door and put the chains back on. I felt bad about pumping her for information while concealing the message I’d received, but my experience with the White Devil had showed that involving the authorities wasn’t a viable option.

  I went into the spare room and knocked on the wardrobe. Andy opened the door, his silenced Glock raised. “Christ,” I gasped. “It’s only me. Karen’s gone.”

  He looked past me. “You can’t be too careful, man.”

  I knew he was right, but the problem was I had just over fifteen hours to figure out the clue I’d been sent. Right now, I hadn’t the faintest idea whose name was concealed behind “The sun set behind the westernmost dunes of Alexander’s womankind.” The only Alexander I knew was a critic who’d been killed by the White Devil. Was Sara really hiding behind the revenger’s name Flaminio? And what the hell did D.F. mean?

  Faik Jabar was cushioned in something like cotton wool, his limbs and body softly supported. His sight had become so acute, he could make out the mountains of the Kurdish homeland he had never visited. The snow on the peaks was bathed in a golden light, and in the villages below the people were waving to him, calling for him to come down, saying that his place was with them, that he was their brother-

  He screamed as he suddenly plummeted earthwards and crashed on to the stony ground. Opening his eyes, he did not recognize where he was. His right hand hurt like the bite of a rabid beast. He tried to move, but couldn’t. Looking down the iron bedstead, he saw that his wrists and legs had been strapped to the frame. The mattress he was lying on smelled of sweat and urine.

  “Hello?” he called out, first in English, then in Kurdish. He heard sounds behind the faded door. A key turned in the lock.

  “So the brave soldier is awake,” said a man in Kurdish. He had a thick mustache and was wearing a well-cut suit. “A pity about your friend.”

  The scene in the basement flashed before him, the traitor Aro Izady lying in a mess of his own blood. Faik tried to scream again, but his voice had disappeared. Then he saw the face of the killer, the man with the beard. What was it about him? Something weird…What was it? The image came back to him-the beard had come away, revealing part of the face beneath. It had not been a man’s. It was the face of a demon from-

  Faik felt a powerful slap on his cheek.

  “You will listen when I speak to you, Kurdish shit!”

  Faik blinked away the involuntary tears that had filled his eyes. He made out a different man, this one younger, maybe in his early thirties. He was wearing a brown leather jacket and his face was covered in heavy stubble.

  “Now do you hear me?” the man said. He was speaking English, but with a strong accent that Faik immediately recognized. His captor was a Turk.

  “Yes,” Faik replied. “I hear you.” He gasped as his wounded hand was squeezed hard.

  “Oh, you’re beginning to remember things, are you?” the Turk said, his voice mocking. “The doctor here is one of your people, but he is happy to take our money. He cleaned the wound and stitched it. You were lucky. The tendons are in good shape. With rest, full movement will be restored.” He gave a laugh that turned into a grunt. “If you live that long.”

  “Who are you?” Faik demanded, grimacing as the pain struck again.

  “Hurts like hell, doesn’t it?” the Turk said. “Particularly since we haven’t given you any painkillers.”

  Faik struggled to look impassive. It took him some time. He was aware that the Turk continued talking, asking him what he had been doing in the basement, what had happened to Aro Izady, but most of all, asking who had shot Izady and him.

  Faik clenched every muscle he could when the butt of a pistol came down hard on his injured hand. He closed his eyes and saw only red, a similar red to the blood that had fountained from Aro Izady’s head.

  “Who fired the shots?” the Turk yelled. “Tell me his name.”

  Faik opened his eyes and saw the gun over his shoulder. “No name,” he said with a gasp. “Izady brought him in his car.”

  His captor paused. “What happened to Aro?”

  Faik wondered who the man was, to be on first-name terms with Izady.

  “Answer!” the Turk said, his mouth close to Faik’s head.

  “Izady was a traitor. He was working for you. You are a Shadow, are you not?”

  There was silence, then the man’s mouth came close again.

  “Describe the man who shot you.”

  “He…he had dark hair and…and a beard.” Faik broke off, trying to put his thoughts into words. “Medium height, well built, black clothes.”

  “What language did he speak?”

  “English. He wasn’t one of us.” Faik paused. “Or you.”

  “What else?” the Turk demanded. “You’re hiding something. Watch my hand!”

  Faik saw the point of the pistol rest against the bandage on his hand.

  “Unless you want two holes instead of one, you’d better come clean, you blue-eyed fuck!”

  “I…I don’t know…how to say…”

  The Turk turned his head. “Doctor!” he shouted.

  The man in the suit reappeared, looking uneasy.

  “Tell him in your own language,” the Turk ordered Faik.

  The young man gabbled to the other in Kurdish. The doctor seemed puzzled and spoke again. Faik repeated what he had said.

  “It seems that the beard was false,” the doctor said to the Turk. “Part of it came off.” He broke off.

  “And?” the Turk said, going over to the man in the suit. “What did he see?”

  “He…he says he saw a terrible face, like a devil’s…”

  “What?” The Turk looked at the bound young man. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “It was a devil face,” Faik said. “Out of shape, swollen, scarred. I saw black and red wounds, lumps…It was horrible.”

  The Turk stared at Faik and then brought the pistol down on his wounded hand again. “Bullshit! You know who it was, don’t you?”

  Faik Jabar was in agony. He shook his head. “It’s true,” he said. “That’s what I saw.”

  “Let me try another question,” the Turk said. “Do you know who I am?”

  The young man shook his head. He didn’t want to know. If he could identify his captor, his life would be worth nothing.

  The Turk grinned. “I am known as the Wolfman.”

  Faik groaned and shut his eyes. The Wolfman was the savage who did the Shadows’ dirtiest work. But the face he’d seen beneath the false beard was much more frightening than that of the unshaven Turk.

  “Again the hair and nails of an unbeliever burn to the greater glory of the Lord Beneath the Earth!”

  The masked man in the cowl and robe lowered his arms. He looked around the cavern. The mandrill Beelzebub was squatting by the sluggish stream, splashing his paws in it. There were no fish in the shallow water. Perhaps he was trying to catch his reflection. One might have thought the fangs would scare him, but the beast was made of sterner stuff.

  As was the naked supplicant at the altar. Mephistopheles had seen some wonderfully sinister devotees in the years he had directed the order, but there had never been one such as this. His faith in his Master had been restored, as, soon, would be the family fortunes.

  Beelzebub screamed and came charging over the stone floor. When the supplicant turned, the mandrill stopped immediately and lowered his head. He had always respected the stronger, more vicious creature whose face was uglier than his own.

  Eleven

  “Shit,” I said, leaning back from my desk.

  Andy was quickly behind me.

  “Don’t worry, it isn’t another puzzle,” I said. “It’s Rog.”

  T
he American read our friend’s plea, then looked at me. “He’s right, Matt. We’re sticking together. So should Rog and Pete.”

  I thought about it. My instinct for safety told me it was a bad idea, but there was no question that Dave would have wanted us to get in Sara’s face. “All right,” I said, leaning toward the keyboard. “I’ll tell them to set up base at Pete’s place. Even Sara will have a job getting past his alarm system.”

  Andy nodded. “And maybe we’ll catch her trying.”

  I wasn’t convinced by that, but it was worth a shot. Besides, Dave had taught us how to look after ourselves and each other. Not that it had done him any good. I also sent Rog the puzzle and asked him to run it through any deciphering programs he had access to.

  An hour later, Andy and I were going through the sheets I’d printed off. Rog wasn’t convinced that the line about the sun setting on the westernmost dunes of Alexander’s womankind was algorithmic or mathematical in form, but he’d tried anyway. He knew a lot about ciphers from the programs he wrote all the time. I’d also asked Pete to think about it. He had the kind of mind that picked up unusual information and noticed things that most people didn’t. Again, I wasn’t very hopeful. I had the feeling the line was more like a crossword clue. The problem was, I’d always been crap at cryptic crosswords.

  Before I got down to serious consideration of the clue, I looked at the material Pete had sent to the Web site. He’d been talking to his friends in the City and was following up several of Rog’s leads. Background material was attached, but there wasn’t enough to act on yet.

  “What now?” Andy asked, papers on the floor around him. He looked substantially out of his depth.

  “We have to work out a strategy, Slash. I’m going to see if I can make any sense out of that bloody riddle. There’s a deadline on it, literally.”

  “Ha,” the American said. “What do you want me to do?”

  I’d been thinking about that, and about the woman who was the owner of the four British properties bought with Sara’s funds.

  “Angela Oliver-Merilee,” I said. “Mean anything to you?”

  Andy ran a hand through his blond thatch. “Should it?”

  “Oh, yes. What was the White Devil’s real name?”

  That made him think. “Shit, man, I can’t remember. Lonnie something?”

  “Close. Leslie Dunn. Except, he was adopted, remember? When I was writing The Death List, I got a copy of the adoption papers.” I held up the file that I’d taken from my safe earlier on.

  “Spit it out, smart-ass,” Andy said impatiently.

  “Well, his birth mother’s name was Doris Merilee.”

  He stared at me. “All right. But I still don’t see where you’re going with this.”

  I opened the file and pointed to a section of the poor-quality copy. “He wasn’t christened, but his birth mother had given him a name. She called him-”

  “Oliver,” he completed. “Jeez. What does that mean?”

  I shrugged. “That depends. Sara’s still hurting about her twin brother’s death and she’s been planning carefully. The first of those properties, the farmhouse in Kent, was bought six months ago. The last, the cottage in the Scottish borders, was bought only a month back. But that’s not all.” I pulled another sheet from the file. “Doris Merilee gave Sara a name, too.”

  Andy’s eyes widened. “Angela.”

  I nodded. “On the button.”

  “I still don’t understand where this leads us.”

  I wrote an address on a slip of paper and handed it to him.

  “47 Northumberland Crescent, Sydenham,” he read.

  “That’s where the birth mother lives.”

  Andy stood up slowly. “Christ, she’s still alive?”

  “According to the phone directory. She married three years after she gave the twins up for adoption. Her name’s now Doris Carlton-Jones.”

  “Okay. Shall I bring her in?”

  I laughed. “No, Slash. You aren’t a cop, remember? I’m going to give you my camera. You need to hire a van. Park it near the house and use it for cover while you carry out surveillance. Take photos of her if she comes out.” I gave him a serious look. “Take your gun with you. It’s possible that Sara’s reestablished contact with her and is down there. She might even turn up for a visit.”

  “Jeez, that would solve a lot of problems.”

  I raised my hand, aware that what I was about to say was a waste of breath. “Don’t try to grab Sara if she shows. Call me and I’ll get Karen involved.”

  He looked at me dubiously and then nodded. “Okay.”

  “Call in every hour on the hour, on the secure line.” Rog had done what he could to make the landline I used only for my friends secure. There was still a risk, but it was small and I preferred to know that Andy was okay.

  He nodded. “What about the other two properties Sara bought?”

  “There’s a house in Oxford and a flat in Hackney.”

  “Hackney, East London? That’s a bit down-market for her, isn’t it?”

  I thought about that. “It isn’t clear what she’s doing with the properties. Maybe they’re just investments. Or potential safe houses.”

  “Not anymore. We have to check them out.”

  “We do. But I have to solve this bloody clue first, remember?”

  “Shouldn’t I take a look at the places in and around London rather than watch on the mother?”

  I shook my head. “When we go in, we go in together, okay?”

  He was reluctant, but he accepted that.

  “Stay sharp,” I said, when he’d got himself ready.

  He slapped me on the shoulder. “Ditto. Good hunting with that puzzle shit.”

  I undid the chains and replaced them when he’d gone out. Then I went back to my desk and concentrated on the puzzle. I’d done some research on cryptography for one of my novels set in the seventeenth century. People back then were keen on codes because of the political and religious turmoil. The problem was, there were a hell of a lot of different methods-substitution codes based on arithmetical figures, such as shifting every letter forward by three; transposition ciphers, where the order of letters is changed; anagrams, where rearranged letters make a different word; acrostics, where the first or last letters form different words-and that was just the start. I tried all those basic ideas with the “sun sets” line and got nowhere. The problem with both substitution and transposition is that, without the key, you can waste huge amounts of time crunching the numerous possibilities. That was where computer software came in, and Roger could use it-but time he spent on the clue was time not spent tracking down Sara. He was better employed doing the latter, not least because there was a good chance she was the one who had sent the message and he might kill two birds with one well-aimed stone.

  I got up from my desk, its surface covered in crumpled pieces of paper, and walked up and down the living area. My mind was all over the place, and the fact that someone’s life hung in the balance didn’t do a lot for the state of my nerves. I thought about turning the message over to Karen. Would the sender ever find out? This was different from the White Devil case-then, my flat had been bugged and cameras had been secretly installed. Andy had been over my apartment with the locating device and got nothing except the alarm system. So was it safe to tell Karen? No chance. Even if she was prepared to keep quiet about the fact that Mary Malone’s killer had contacted me, the nature of police work meant that someone would spot their involvement, even if they didn’t use sirens or send in the Armed Response Unit. Besides, the VCCT had a history of leaking to the press. As I’d seen with Jeremy Andrewes’s use of Josh Hinkley, those hounds were already on my trail. No, I had to keep Karen out of this loop, as well.

  So what now? The first time I’d read the line, I’d thought of a crossword clue. That was bad news, as I struggled to get through the so-called quick crosswords in the papers. Cryptic ones I avoided like the Black Death. I had a stockbroker friend who used
to do three cryptic puzzles as he was being driven into the City every morning-and he still had time left to scan the financial pages and close a few deals. I told him that just proved he had the cold, calculating mind of a money-making machine; he told me that any writer worth his place on the earth should be able to do a cryptic crossword in under ten minutes. We’d stopped being friends.

  “The sun set by the westernmost dunes of Alexander’s womankind.” What was going on there? I went over to the shelves where I kept books that had defeated me, but weren’t so bad that they went to the local charity shops-among them were the later poems of Ezra Pound, Finnegan’s Wake-was the line a quote from it? — and the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers. There was also a guide to solving cryptic crosswords. I’d bought it secondhand when I was trying to emulate my former friend. I took the tattered book back to my desk and ran through the clue forms it suggested. I tried inserting a comma, and then commas plural, to change the sense. No joy. I looked into the question of anagrams again, though I couldn’t see any of the usual words suggesting that reordering was necessary-there was no “mix up,” “shuffled” or the like. Then I looked into word exchange-“orb” instead of “sun,” “group” instead of “set,” “desert” instead of “dunes,” and so on. Nothing flashed up. Were there words hidden in other words? I saw “stern” in “westernmost,” but I didn’t know anyone of that name. I saw “lex” in “Alexander’s”-that was Latin for “law,” which seemed relevant if the next target was a crime writer, though it could also apply to a judge or a policeman. A shiver ran up my spine. Was that a reference to Karen? The word “womankind” certainly suggested that the victim would be a female. Again, I felt guilty about keeping the clue from her. If her life was in danger and I allowed the killer to catch her unawares, how would I feel? Shit. This was almost as bad as the contortions the White Devil put me through. Which was, no doubt, the point.

  I sat back in my chair and looked up at the ceiling. Maybe I was being too clever. Maybe the clue was more basic than I’d thought. How many Alexanders could I think of? Alexander worked as a male first name, and as a surname. “Womankind” suggested a female. Did I know any Ms. Blank Alexanders? I couldn’t think of any. I had a look at the Crime Writers’ Society directory. There were a couple of guys called Alex, including one whose surname was Black and whom I vaguely knew. He lived in Edinburgh. I thought of the cottage in the Scottish Borders that Sara owned. It was too close for comfort. I sent Alex Black an e-mail via a single-use account, suggesting he go to ground until further notice. The other Alex lived in Egypt. I reckoned he was safe enough there. As for women, there were none with the surname of Alexander. I checked the nom de plume section-no Alexanders there, either.