The Soul Collector mw-2

by Paul Johnston

  Andy worked his rods again and there was a click. “Dammit,” he said in a loud whisper. “There’s a mortice lock, as well.”

  Pete moved the electronic device around the window. “You’ll have to cut the glass.”

  “Sara or her sidekicks will know we’ve been here.”

  “Tough,” Pete said. “You heard Matt. Any pressure on the bitch is good news.”

  Andy took a glass-knife and two rubber suckers from his backpack. After he’d attached them, Pete held them while he did the cutting. The pane was soon removed and they climbed in.

  “Motion sensors,” Pete said, holding Andy back as he moved across the kitchen. He held up the device again. “Okay.”

  They moved forward and made it to the hall, opening the door carefully.

  “Jesus, did something die in here?” Andy said as a wave of rank air hit them.

  “Very likely,” Pete said, on his knees by the alarm box. Rog had given him another device that was supposed to scramble the unit’s brains for up to half an hour.

  “What is that stink?” Andy said, shining his torch around the spacious area.

  “Whatever it is, it isn’t far away,” Pete said, close behind him. They came around the bottom of the wide staircase.

  “You have got to be kidding,” Andy said, putting a hand over his nose and mouth.

  Pete shone his torch on the swollen figure that was lying facedown inside the front door. “I’m glad we came in the back,” he said, breathing only through his mouth.

  “Is it a guy?” Andy asked, peering at the head.

  “Those look like suit trousers. Pinstripe. Hold on.” Pete took out his digital camera and shot a series of photographs. “That’ll keep Matt happy.”

  Andy looked up at him. “We’re going to have to turn the poor bastard over.”

  They took hold of the bloated shoulders and managed to get the body on to its back. Pete stepped back and took more photos. The face would scarcely have been recognized by the corpse’s best friend.

  “Look at that,” Andy said, pointing. “Throat’s been cut.”

  Pete nodded. “Check his pockets. Maybe there’s some ID on him.”

  Andy blinked hard and then slid a hand into the trouser pocket nearest to him. He shook his head. “Zilch.”

  Pete tried the pocket on the other side. “Something in here.” He brought out a rectangular card. “James Maclehose,” he said, “and a load of letters after his name. Consultant plastic surgeon. There’s an address in Harley Street.”

  “He must have really got someone pissed,” Andy said, leaning over the dead man’s face. “His nose has been cut off. Christ. And his lips.”

  Pete had put the stained card in a plastic bag. “You know what, Slash?”

  “Tell me,” Andy said, raising an eyebrow.

  “We’ll have to turn him over again.”

  “What, so the cops don’t realize he’s been moved?”

  “No. So we can check his back pockets.”

  They maneuvered the body again.

  “Nothing in here,” Pete said.

  “But I’ve got this.” Andy held up a piece of folded paper. “I think there’s some writing, but it’s run.” He held the paper up to Pete’s torch beam. “‘Sorry, but….’” He squinted in the torchlight. “Nope, can’t make it out. Why’s someone saying sorry? For killing him?”

  “Fuck knows. Let’s get out of here before I puke my guts up.”

  Pete walked to the kitchen.

  “Hey, Boney,” Andy said, “you need to reactivate the alarm system.”

  “No, I don’t. The place is going to be swarming with cops as soon as we’re clear of it.” He went through the window space.

  When they were back on the street, Pete took out his cell phone and started texting. By the time they reached the main road, he’d had a reply.

  “Good,” he said. “Matt agrees. I’ll call the cops from the city center.”

  As they walked between medieval college buildings, Andy nudged his friend.

  “What do you think about Oxford now, Boney?”

  Pete raised his arm and sniffed his jacket. “I still stink of that poor bastard.” He glanced at the American. “What do I think about Oxford?” He shivered. “I still bloody hate it.”

  Andy nodded. “Me, too. But you get a better class of corpse here.”

  Pete stared at him and shook his head. “Sometimes I despair of you, Slash.”

  “Me, too, man,” Andy replied, watching a blond young woman in a short skirt get off her bicycle. “But I can get over it.”

  “Aw right, mate,” said Josh Hinkley, his feet in their black pointed cowboy boots on the kitchen table. “But tell Spider he’s dead if he doesn’t show up for poker on Friday. See ya.” He dropped the phone onto the book he’d been reading-Offshore Investments Made Simple. His broker had told him it was worth its weight in platinum, which had made Josh laugh. He still thought the guy was a champion arse-licker.

  “Time for a drink, I reckon, Josh, old man,” he said aloud, getting up and heading for the fridge. He took out a bottle of Urquel lager and flipped the cap. “Oh, yes, my beauty,” he said after a series of gulps. Since his wife, Lou, had up and left, he’d taken to talking to himself. It wasn’t as if anyone could hear him. Or his music. From the stereo came the sound of The Kinks playing “All Day and All of the Night.” He’d always liked Ray Davies and his mates. A genuine London band with genuine London style.

  Not that he was a Londoner himself. According to his Web site, he’d been born within the sound of the Bow Bells, but it would have needed a clear day and a massive sound system to have carried the ding-dongs to the hospital in Harlow. Still, at least his ma had been a real Cockney, even though she wasn’t too clear about who his old man was. It was a toss-up between an Irish laborer and a Glaswegian layabout. Josh’s money was on the former-he had a hell of a work ethic. For the last ten years he’d spent as much time as he could reading the competition. He had transposed American characters to the U.K. and altered the dialogue appropriately. So far as plot was concerned, there was nothing new under the sun, as he liked to say at book signings. Some arsehole critics had clocked what he was up to, but his readers didn’t care. And then, out of the bleeding blue, along comes that little squit Alistair Bing with his Jim Cooler books and outsells him all over the world.

  The phone rang.

  “’Allo, darling,” Hinkley said with a wide grin. “Yeah, you’re bloody right I’m waiting for you. Get that pretty little Chinese ass of yours over here right now, you hear?” He dropped the phone and dug around in his pocket for the bag of coke he’d scored earlier. He chopped some lines on the antique farmhouse table that Lou had made such a fuss about polishing and got to work with a rolled-up fifty-pound note.

  “Yeehah!” he shouted, as he made his way unsteadily to his top-of-the-range Bang amp; Olufsen stereo system. A few seconds later, The Jam were crashing their way through his favorite track, “Private Hell”-another set of genuine London sons; well, Surrey sons. And with Chop Suzy on her way, what more could a man ask?

  Josh Hinkley slid slowly to the parquet floor. His head was spinning, but he still couldn’t get Matt Wells out of his mind. The fucker. He was knobbing that blond bint from the VCCT, so he got the heads-up on every big case in the city. She probably knew exactly where he was and what he was doing. The rozzers were letting Matt break as many laws as he liked. But he was going to get the tosser; he’d already set the wheels in motion. Mr. I Know More About Crime Than Any Other Novelist was going to become a very big cropper.

  The buzzer went. Hinkley went to the door and pressed the entry button. Suzy and her honey-pot would be on their way up in the lift. He spat on his fingers and smoothed them over his hair.

  “All right, darling,” he said, pulling open the door, “let’s be having you!”

  Before Josh Hinkley’s lights went out, he registered that something very bizarre had happened to his visitor’s face.

&nbs
p; Twenty-Two

  The half hour before midnight had passed more slowly than a penguin marathon. I looked at my watch so often that Rog asked if I’d discovered a new way of jerking off. I couldn’t make sense of what Pete and Andy had found in Sara’s Oxford house. The apologetic note on the dead man suggested that someone else may have dumped the body. I’d be thinking about that later, though there was no chance of checking the house again-Pete’s call to the cops would have turned the street into CSI Oxford. London cops would soon be swarming all over the clinic in Harley Street, too.

  At last the deadline was close. I logged on to my e-mail server. There was a message from a different address, answerplease3. I wrote, Your target is Adrian Brooks, the crime writer Alistair Bing. I expect you to keep your word about not killing him.

  At exactly midnight, I hit Send. The message moved to the Sent Items folder without any problems. I felt like a footballer who’d just won the Cup final. I’d taken on Sara, or whoever she’d hired to kill the crime writers, and I’d won. How would she like that?

  There was a chime as an instant reply came through. My heart dropped like a stone.

  Well done, Matt. Though I did say it was an easy one. The thing is, I made the rules and I can break them. You know where Josh Hinkley lives, don’t you? Maybe you should get around there. Then again, given how nasty he’s been about you in print recently, maybe you shouldn’t. The delightful Karen might put you in the frame as the killer.

  Doctor Faustus

  “Fuck!” I yelled.

  Rog pushed me aside and keyed out a string of abuse. I managed to stop him before he sent the reply.

  “Forget it,” I said. “There’s nothing we can do.” I turned away.

  “Maybe it’s just a bluff,” Rog said. “Why don’t you ring this Hinkley guy from a public phone?”

  It wasn’t a bad idea. There was a phone across the road. I pressed out the number, my heart thundering. It rang ten times before it was picked up.

  “Hello,” came a neutral male voice.

  “Is that Josh?” I asked, in a Cockney accent.

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  This time I recognized the voice. It was DI John Turner, his Welsh vowels not completely obscured.

  I broke the connection. If Taff Turner was there, something terminal had happened to Josh Hinkley. It would be on the TV and radio stations soon enough.

  “What now?” Rog asked.

  “I’ve got a visit to make. You should get some sleep.”

  “I won’t be sleeping much tonight. I want to get Sara even more now.”

  “Get back to nailing her funds,” I said, squeezing his arm. “I don’t care where you put them, but I want her running on empty. Then we’ll see how clever she is.”

  “She probably has accounts we don’t know about.”

  “Find them, Dodger. I’m depending on you.”

  “Right,” he said. “Don’t worry, Matt. We’ll get her.”

  I got my gear together and left the flat. I had to do this on my own and I couldn’t tell the others where I was going. The chips were down now and anything might happen. I had to be sure I didn’t land my friends in even more danger. The death of Dave still haunted me like a witch’s curse.

  I looked at my watch, all traces of the naive optimism I’d felt before I sent the answer vanished. I resisted the temptation to make a surreptitious visit to the crime scene at Josh Hinkley’s house, and started walking southwest.

  “Who was that?” Karen Oaten asked.

  “Some wide boy,” John Turner replied. “He hung up rather than give a name.”

  The chief inspector glanced at him. They were wearing white coveralls, the hoods up. They had arrived at eleven-thirty, called to the scene by DCI Younger. The narrow street in Soho had been blocked at both ends by patrol cars, their roof lights flashing. Uniformed personnel, some of them armed, were present and a striped barrier tape had already been set up around the street door to keep curious local residents, passersby and journalists at bay. The CSI vans were parked haphazardly and personnel in blue coveralls were already heading into the building. The ground and first two floors were used as offices. Josh Hinkley occupied the top two.

  Younger brought them up to speed. “One of the neighbors called about the noise at ten forty-three,” he said. “Uniformed officers got here at ten fifty-seven. There was no answer to their buzzing and knocking. They got the phone number and tried it. Nothing. The music was seriously loud and-”

  “Loud music’s a matter for the council, Colin,” Oaten said. “We wouldn’t usually intervene, never mind kick the door down.”

  “No, but that wasn’t all. There was blood on the outside of the street door. And the uniforms found that-” Younger pointed to a clear plastic evidence bag on the hall table “-in the lift.”

  Oaten picked it up. Inside was a long-bladed combat knife with a serrated edge. There was a streak of blood down the center of the blade.

  “The body’s upstairs,” Younger said.

  “All right,” said Oaten. “We should get up there. Was anything else reported?”

  Colin Younger nodded. “The officers said there was a strong smell of perfume.”

  Oaten looked at him. “It couldn’t have been after-shave?”

  “I asked. They were pretty sure. So there had recently been a woman in the flat.”

  “Did they see any women on the street?” Turner asked.

  Younger shook his head. “People only started to gather when the sirens started.”

  There was a bustle at the door.

  “Here we all are again,” said Redrose, the pathologist. “When did you last eat, Inspector Turner?”

  Taff muttered something that no one else caught. It could have been Welsh for “Delighted to see you, Doctor,” but Oaten thought it unlikely.

  “Come along, then,” said the potbellied doctor. “Let’s see what our killer’s left us this time.”

  Younger led the way. Three CSIs were examining different parts of the spacious flat. There was a long living area filled with high-quality furniture, including an Eames chair. An expensive-looking stereo system was on a mahogany table. There was a CD in a plastic evidence bag next to it.

  “Do we know what music was playing?” Oaten asked the nearest technician.

  “Not yet,” replied the woman. “I’ve checked the disk. The same song’s repeated all the way through.”

  “I presume there’s a timer on that machine,” the chief inspector said. “Was it activated?”

  The CSI nodded. “It was set for 10:30 p.m. And the volume was at maximum.”

  “I’ve finished with the stairs,” another white-suited technician said. “Just keep clear of the areas I’ve flagged up.”

  Oaten stepped ahead and started up the wooden staircase. It looked like it had been newly built.

  “This would originally have been attic space,” the medic said. “A friend of mine lives in a similar place around the corner. He hasn’t been able to get planning permission for a conversion.”

  “I wonder how the dead man managed that,” Turner said.

  His boss rubbed her thumb and forefinger together.

  “Surely not,” Redrose said, feigning shock. “Corruption in the City of Westminster? Never.”

  Oaten reached the top step and found herself in a wide hallway. There were five doors, all of them open. Flashes from the police photographer suggested which room was occupied by the body.

  “Look at this, Taff,” Oaten said over her shoulder.

  “Jesus.” The Welshman’s eyes were fixed on the far wall. “Is that blood?”

  Redrose pushed past them. “I think the odds are very high.” He went over to the bed, on which the naked body of a middle-aged man was sprawled.

  Oaten and Turner moved into the thickly carpeted bedroom. On the wall above the king-size bed, there was a pentagram. The circle enclosing the five-pointed star was about a meter across. The red liquid that had been used had dripped in
places, but the words within the lines were legible.

  “‘FECIT DIABOLUS,’” Turner read. “The Devil’s done it yet again.”

  Oaten took in the scene and moved forward.

  When they got to the bed, the Welshman’s hand went to his mouth.

  This time even Oaten had to blink hard. The victim’s abdomen looked like a grenade had gone off over it.

  Shortly afterward the female CSI advised them about the music that had been playing. One of the uniformed policemen had identified it as “Devil Woman” by Cliff Richard.

  “No wonder the neighbors called us,” Colin Younger quipped.

  Oaten looked at him thoughtfully. “The reference to ‘woman’ is interesting, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, you mean Sara Robbins.”

  “Maybe.” Karen Oaten saw Dr. Redrose wave.

  “Look what I’ve found,” he said, brandishing a bloodstained object in a pair of forceps.

  “It’s paper,” Turner said. “Where was it?”

  “Under the body,” the pathologist replied. “In case anybody’s interested, the cause of death was a stab wound to the throat, which was then cut from ear to ear. The abdomen has been slashed open numerous times. There was no shortage of blood for the killer to use as ink.”

  “Can you read it?” Karen Oaten asked, straining to make out the words that had been laser-printed on the paper.

  Colin Younger nodded. “It says ‘Ask Matt Wells about this.’”

  There was a sudden silence in the dead writer’s bedroom.

  I tried not to, but eventually I’d dropped off in the armchair. I hadn’t turned any lights on in the house and I’d reactivated the alarm system, so I had to keep still. Obviously I managed that, although my sleep had been anything but peaceful. Dave’s body flashed before me, and then I was chasing a woman who I thought was Sara, but showed herself to be a hideous devil when she turned on me, snarling.

  I woke up when the key was turned in the lock and the alarm started to beep. I listened to the footsteps on the polished wood hall floor. Fortunately, only one person had come in. I stood up slowly and took the silenced Glock from my pocket. I heard a bag being dropped on the floor and then a long sigh. I padded to the door, and then showed myself.