Stolen Souls

by Stuart Neville

  Galya did.

  But she kept that knowledge buried, forced it down inside, in case it might show on her face as she approached the security man who waited ahead.

  “Boarding pass, please,” he said.

  Galya handed it over.

  He looked at her clothing, a glimmer of distaste on his features. Galya read his thoughts. Just another migrant, another miserable parasite leaving its host now the money had burnt away.

  She smiled for him when he scanned the pass and handed it back.

  “Better get a shake on,” he said. “It’s probably boarding by now.”

  “Thank you,” Galya said.

  She joined the short queue for the security search, obediently placed the shoes and coat Susan had given her in the trays provided, the bandages on her feet hidden by thick socks, and patiently waited until it was her turn to pass through the magnetic gate. On the other side, she did not complain when the female security guard patted her down.

  A short walk took her to the departure gate where a flight attendant gave her documents only the briefest of glances. Another walk across the tarmac to the airplane, and then she boarded. She found row twelve and sat down.

  When the lady in the seat next to her asked if she was all right, Galya said yes, thank you, and wiped the tears from her cheeks with her sleeve.

  Everyone believes in God when they fly, she thought.

  She said a prayer for Jack Lennon’s soul.

  89

  STRAZDAS SAT IN the hotel foyer, his suitcase at his feet. Eight forty-five, the contact had said. He checked his watch. Eight forty-seven.

  His phone rang.

  “The taxi is on its way,” the contact said. “Get in it, get on the plane.”

  “And the girl?”

  “I suggest you give the driver a decent tip,” the contact said. “It’s Boxing Day, after all. He’s done me many favors in the past.”

  “What about the girl?” Strazdas asked.

  Silence for a moment, then, “She got away. It went wrong.”

  Strazdas took his knuckle between his teeth and bit down hard, tasted salt. He breathed through his nose, a low groan resonating in his throat.

  “It’s done, and that’s all there is to it. A good man died in the process. Just remember that. He didn’t have to but for your stupid bloody vendetta. Now let it go.”

  Strazdas noticed the receptionist’s attention on him. He forced himself to release his knuckle form his teeth. Something hot dripped on his chin. He wiped it away and smiled at her. She turned her gaze back to her paperwork.

  “You hear me, Arturas?” the contact asked. “It’s over. There’s nothing more can be done.”

  “There is one thing,” Strazdas said. “I will send a letter to your superiors. I will name you as Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Hewitt. I will enclose a record of all the payments you have received over the last eighteen months. Those payments will not be retraceable to me or any of my companies, but will cause your superiors to examine your bank accounts, your investments, your lifestyle.”

  Strazdas saw the taxi pull up beyond the hotel’s doors.

  “Be careful, Arturas,” the contact said. “Once these things are spoken, they can never be taken back.”

  “Good-bye,” Strazdas said. “I have a flight to catch.”

  90

  IT ALL CAME at Lennon as flashes of light, images, tableaux, faces, smears of waking, all of it punctuated by the pain.

  First the sky, lost in fog, but all the blacker for it. Then the policemen gathered around him, fingers in his mouth, his head moving through no will of his own. The need to cough, and the agony as it seemed to tear him in two.

  Next, the inside of the ambulance, lights so bright they cut into his skull and burrowed into his brain. The paramedics busy around him, the oxygen mask that made him feel as if he were drowning.

  Then the hospital, more lights, nurses and doctors, more probing, the urgent voices, the bloody swabs, a long needle that pierced his chest, whines and beeps, then a constant high tone, like a string made of cotton and noise that stretched on and on until it faded to black, and he thought of Ellen and how he wished he’d known her all her life, and Susan with her sad eyes and how he’d like to see them once more, but the darkness was so warm, like a bed on a cold morning and—

  Then a lightning crack, and he was back with the pain and the bright, punishing lights, then another mask, and he was gone again.

  91

  THE DRIVER DID not speak when he took Strazdas’s case, nor on the journey toward the airport. The vehicle looked like the cabs that worked the streets of London, but he had seen many of them in Belfast from the window of his hotel room. A Perspex window separated him from the squat man with the pimpled neck who gripped the steering wheel.

  As they travelled, Strazdas pondered what he might say to his mother. The very thought made his scrotum shrivel within his trousers and his bladder ache. Most likely he would say nothing, yet. When he landed in Brussels, he would immediately seek out a flight to some other destination. From there, he would begin tracing records of the girl, who had supplied her to Aleksander, where she came from, her family, anything that might help him track her down.

  If he was lucky, she would return home, and there she would be vulnerable. And once her stain was wiped from his mind, he could return to his mother, an honorable son.

  Daylight seemed to struggle for a way through the fog, but Strazdas could feel rather than see that the taxi had settled onto a long straight when the driver looked up at his mirror.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  Strazdas turned in his seat to look out of the rear window. He saw the flashing blue lights first, then the silhouette of the car solidifying in the murk. A siren whooped.

  The driver flicked an indicator on and applied his foot to the brake.

  “What are you doing?” Strazdas asked.

  “I’m pulling in,” the driver said. “What the fuck do you think I’m doing?”

  “No,” Strazdas said. “Keep going.”

  “Your arse,” the driver said as the taxi mounted the hard shoulder and slowed to a halt.

  The car eased up behind and its lights died. The driver’s door opened and a suited man climbed out. As he limped up alongside the taxi, the driver wound his window down. The suited man looked along the road in one direction, then the other.

  The driver asked, “Jesus, Dan, what’s going on? You scared me there. I thought I was getting a ticket. I can’t afford any points on my—”

  Hewitt pulled a pistol from his waistband, aimed at the driver’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.

  Strazdas moved before he heard the shot, grabbed the passenger-side door handle, and threw himself out of the taxi. He hit the ground shoulder-first, hauled himself up on his feet, and lurched up the grass embankment, his feet slipping on the snow.

  A gunshot cracked through the cold air, and something slammed Strazdas’s leg from beneath him. He howled as he fell back and rolled down the slope toward the still idling taxi. The icy tarmac of the hard shoulder scraped at his hands and knees before he came to rest by the taxi’s rear wheel. He tried to squirm his way underneath the vehicle, but a hand grabbed his ankle and hauled him back.

  Hewitt stood over Strazdas, the pistol staring at the point between the prone man’s eyes.

  “I won’t send any letter,” Strazdas said. “It was only talk. I won’t, I swear on my mother’s life.”

  “Too late for that,” Hewitt said.

  Strazdas screamed.

  Two hammer blows to his chest, and he could no longer beg, could no longer scream, only watch as Hewitt stepped closer and leaned in. He felt the heat of the muzzle against his forehead, smelled the cordite, and cursed his mother to hell.

  92

  SUSAN WAITED BY Lennon’s bedside when he woke, Ellen in her lap.

  “Welcome back,” she said.

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  “The Royal,” she said.
“They moved you here from Antrim hospital two days ago.”

  “I don’t remember,” he said, his voice cutting through his throat like sandpaper.

  “I’m not surprised,” she said. “They had you doped up to the eyeballs.”

  “Were you there?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I held your hand in the ambulance. I’ve been with you every day.”

  “How long?”

  Susan smiled. “Well, I wished myself a Happy New Year last night.”

  “Thank you,” Lennon said.

  She nodded.

  Lennon looked at his daughter. He forced a smile for her. “Hiya,” he said.

  She kept her expression blank. “Hiya.”

  “You been a good girl?” he asked.

  She smiled then, and said, “Mm-hm.”

  He reached his right hand out toward her. She gripped two of his fingers in hers. He went to say something, he was sure it was important, but sleep outran his words.

  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER, CI Uprichard sat by Lennon’s bed.

  “The standard of visitors is going downhill very badly,” Lennon said.

  “It’s going to get worse,” Uprichard said. “You get yourself into some messes.”

  “How bad?” Lennon asked.

  “Don’t worry too much about it now,” Uprichard said. “Just concentrate on getting better. That’s the best you can do at the moment.”

  “How bad?” Lennon asked again.

  Uprichard sighed. “Pretty bad. The way things look right now, I can’t see a way out for you. Helping that girl flee the jurisdiction was probably enough to end your days as a police officer, but with young Connolly’s death, even if it was selfdefense … Well, you better have a hell of a case to present to the inquiry.”

  “Has anyone looked into Connolly?” Lennon asked. “Why was he there?”

  “His wife gave a statement,” Uprichard said. “And we got access to his bank accounts. They were in debt up to their eyeballs. Loans, credit cards, three months behind on their rent. Then two big deposits from an offshore account, one of them sent on Christmas Eve that didn’t clear until after the holiday. His wife said they were close to being put out of their house, and then he told her he’d found a way to make the cash for a deposit on a place of their own. It looks like someone was paying him good money to go after you.”

  “It was Dan Hewitt,” Lennon said.

  Uprichard stood up. “I didn’t hear you say that.”

  “It was Hewitt. He was working for Strazdas. He put Connolly up to it.”

  “Proof, Jack,” Uprichard said, waving a finger in Lennon’s direction. “Evidence. Unless you’ve got plenty of it, don’t you dare blacken a good officer’s name.”

  “It was him,” Lennon said. “I’m going to get him. I’m going to bring him down.”

  “Enough!” Uprichard’s face reddened. “Enough of that. I won’t listen to it.”

  He put his head down and bulled his way to the door. He paused, his shoulders rising and falling with his anger. Eventually, he allowed Lennon a backward glance.

  “I almost forgot,” he said. “I have something for you.”

  Uprichard returned to the bed without looking Lennon in the eye. He dropped an envelope onto the sheets. Lennon picked it up, turned it in his hands. It was addressed to “Police Man Jack Lennon, Ladas Drive Police Station, Belfast, Northern Ireland.” The postmark said “Kyyiv.”

  “I looked it up,” Uprichard said. “It’s Kiev. It came this morning. I thought you might want to see it.”

  “Yes,” Lennon said. “Thank you.”

  Uprichard shuffled his feet. “Well, I’ll leave you to it, then. Get well, Jack. You’ll need to be fit as you can to get out of this hole you’ve dug for yourself.”

  When he was alone, Lennon examined the envelope, studied the neat, girlish handwriting. He went to open it, but found his eyes too heavy to hold, too dry. He looked up at the clock opposite his bed.

  Right on cue, a nurse entered the room ready to release a dose of painkiller into the IV drip that hooked into his hand. Once she did, he would fall into a fathomless dark sleep.

  “What have you got there?” she asked.

  “A letter from a friend,” he said.

  “Do you want to read it before I hit you up and you go bye-bye?”

  He placed the letter on the bedside locker.

  “For later,” he said.

  EPILOGUE

  Dear Jack Lennon,

  I write this letter in a city south of my old home in Andriivka, near to Sumy. I will not write the name. Now this city is my home, and the home of my brother Maksim.

  I hope that you are alive. I pray to God that you are alive. I think you are not, but I will write this letter anyway.

  For to come home was five days. The train goes from Kraków to Warsaw. It goes from Warsaw to Kyyiv, and then another goes to Sumy. I sleep on the train. I have dreams about the man who took me in his house. I think I will always have dreams about him, but they will get better.

  When I come home Maksim is happy. He was afraid for me, and now he is not. I do not tell him what happens in Belfast. I tell him I could find no job. I tell him I had a car accident.

  I tell the man who lends money he can take Mama’s farm. We leave there a nd come to this city on a bus. Today, I have a job in a café. I will have only small money, but I will pay for a room for us. Soon Maksim will have a job also, and he will go to school to learn English like me.

  We will be safe. I will be safe.

  Some time when I sleep I dream about you and Susan. I hope you are alive so you will make her happy and she will make you happy. Be kind with her and your small girls. You will be happy.

  Thank you.

  Galya Petrova.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to all who have helped bring this book into existence:

  As ever, my deepest gratitude goes to Nat Sobel, Judith Weber and all at Sobel Weber Associates for their support, guidance and friendship. I couldn’t navigate these waters without you.

  Caspian Dennis and all at the Abner Stein agency for everything they do for me.

  Geoff Mulligan, Briony Everroad, Alison Hennessy, Kate Bland, Ruth Warburton, Vicki Watson and all at Harvill Secker and Vintage Books for their kindness and support.

  Bronwen Hruska, Juliet Grames, Justin Hargett, Ailen Lujo and all at Soho Press for treating me so well and showing just what a passionate publisher can achieve.

  Betsy Dornbusch for still being my friend even when I sometimes don’t show that I appreciate it, and to Carlin, Alex and Gracie for helping me explore San Francisco.

  My Soho Press touring buddies James Benn, Henry Chang and Jassy Mackenzie for making the road a much less lonely place.

  David Torrans and all at No Alibis for keeping on keeping on.

  All the indie bookstores across America who have made me welcome both in print and in person.

  The online community of readers and writers who continue to fly the flag.

  Hilary Knight for her friendship and hard work.

  Sidney McKnight for letting me in on the secret of the buttermilk shandy. But no, I won’t be trying one.

  James and Louise Morrow for being there when it mattered.

  My mother, and the rest of the clan, for just about everything.

  Jim, Sally and all the Atkinson family for letting me steal their daughter.

  And my beautiful wife Jo for making me happier than I ever deserved to be.

  Finally, the book Selling Olga by Louisa Waugh (Phoenix) helped me enormously in researching for this novel.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Table of Contents

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10


  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  Part Two

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49