The Soul Collector

by Paul Johnston

  Then Taff Turner came in and said that Dave’s wife and kids had arrived. I’d spoken to Ginny on her cell phone and told her to come home as quickly as she could. Now I had to tell her what had happened to Dave. Karen would have done it, but it was up to me. That was what Dave would have wanted.

  Contrary to the agreed procedure, the Cherokee and the Hornet rendezvoused at the burnt-out remains of the Cutty Sark in Greenwich. Andy Jackson got off his bike and got into the front seat of Pete’s vehicle, then looked over his shoulder. Roger van Zandt was bent double in the backseat of the Grand Cherokee, his head between his knees.

  “Deep breaths, Dodger,” the American said. “Remember that try you scored against the Lambeth Lions? You went past four players and touched down under the posts. Remember what it felt to go over the line.” He glanced at the driver. “You remember that try, don’t you, Boney? Must have been the season before we retired.”

  “No. It was the year after I was voted off the committee.”

  “Jeez, I’m trying to distract him,” Andy said, in a loud whisper.

  Rog mumbled something.

  “What?” Andy said.

  “It was…it was Dave who passed the ball to me.”

  Pete groaned. “Look, Rog, we’re all shocked, but we’ve got to be strong now. We’re targets of that madwoman and we’ve got to get her before she picks us off.”

  “Yeah, that’s really gonna help, Boney,” the American said under his breath. He glanced at the dirty gray river. Sometimes he wondered why he’d settled in the U.K., not that the part of New Jersey he’d grown up in was any better. He had run with a street gang when he was a teenager and if he hadn’t had a dedicated football coach at high school, by now he’d either have been a low-level dope dealer or dead. His parents had kicked him out when he was fourteen, and they didn’t want to know what became of him, even when he almost made the NFL. His suspect knee had let him down, though it had been good enough for eleven seasons of amateur rugby league. His folks hadn’t believed human beings could change or that everyone had some innate goodness in them. They worked in a meat-packing plant, until they’d both got cancer and died within a few months of each other. Andy had left the States to find a new life, having finished basic training as a chef and able to work anywhere. The fact that he’d met a stunning English-woman in Central Park had made the move easy, even though she’d ditched him a month later.

  Andy scratched the light-colored stubble on his chin. His mom and dad had been wrong about people. The world wasn’t full of assholes. Matt and the others were stand-up guys—even Rog, whose curly hair and slim build made him look like a typical computer nerd, despite having put in some of the most bone-shuddering tackles Andy had ever seen. As for Dave, he’d been a hero and he had the medals to prove it, even if he wasn’t allowed to talk about his old SAS operations. But Sara Robbins—it didn’t matter if she’d killed him herself or paid some other fucker to pull the trigger, she was the exception that proved the rule. Poison ran in her veins like it had when she’d killed with her brother, and her mind was still a hive of hate and perversion.

  “All right,” Rog said. “I’ll do what I have to do.” He glared at Andy. “But after we’ve finished, I’m going to mourn Dave any way I like. Is that okay by you, Slash?”

  “Sure,” Andy said with a loose grin. “We’ll have a wake. Dave would have gone for that.” His expression hardened. “In the meantime, are you both clear about what you’ve got to do?”

  Rog and Pete nodded. They’d practiced the drill. No one told the others what they were up to in case they were caught. Everything each of them discovered about Sara or any other adversary would be uploaded daily to a special site that Rog had set up.

  Andy opened his rucksack. He unscrewed the silencers from his and Matt’s pistols, and ejected the magazines.

  “Okay, my men. I hope we see each other soon.” He punched Rog lightly on the shoulder, then squeezed Pete’s thigh. “Maybe some of us thought Matt was overdoing it on the planning side, but we all knew that Sara would be back eventually. Let’s get the bitch. For Dave.”

  “For Dave,” the others repeated.

  “Don’t forget to take the SIM cards from your cell phones and drop them down a storm drain,” Andy added. He got out and went over to his bike.

  Rog watched him go. “What do you think Matt’s got him doing?”

  Andy started the engine and drove away from the heritage site. “We’re not supposed to think about that, but it’s pretty obvious.”

  “Is it?”

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter what he’s meant to be doing. He’ll be watching Matt’s back.”

  Rog nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  Pete nodded. “Fuck!” he said, spittle flecking the inside of the windshield. “I can’t believe it! Dave, of all people. She knows what she’s doing. He’s the one we would depend on most in a situation like this.”

  “I suppose Matt will have to pick up the slack.”

  “Matt will have enough trouble staying alive, Dodger. It’s up to us to track the murdering cow down.”

  Rog nodded. He had hacked into enough sites over the last two years to have an idea of what Sara was doing with the large amounts of money and the investments left her by the White Devil, even if she was always at least a week ahead of him. He’d passed that information regularly to Pete, who had used his contacts in the business world to find out more—at one time, he’d even invested in the same company as Sara. She had bailed out a few months later, presumably by chance, since Boney had used a false identity. The fact was, they weren’t so far from Sara, but they had deliberately held back to avoid spooking her. Now she’d made the first real move, the game had changed.

  Rog stared out into the rain and felt a wave of loneliness break over him. He shivered at the prospect of spending every night in a different hotel, all of them chosen for their cash-only policies and laxity about registration details. But he would manage because he’d be spending every waking hour on the laptop with Internet access that he would buy later on from one of the shops in Tottenham Court Road. He had no doubt that Pete would be doing something similar, though he couldn’t believe he’d be roughing it. There were luxury hotels that were just as prepared to guarantee anonymity, if you could pay for it.

  Pete stopped the Cherokee near Deptford Station and pushed his seat back as far as it would go. He opened his door and got out, bending over a raised area normally covered by the seat. He pulled up the rubber mat.

  “Is that a safe?” Rog asked, pointing to the LCD display.

  “Correct. Look away, Dodger.”

  Pete punched in numbers and there was a dull click. “Thought you might need some spending money,” he said, handing over a wedge of fifty-pound notes.

  “Bloody hell, Boney,” Rog said, counting the notes. “There’s five grand here.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll be expecting you to account for it.”

  “Sure.”

  “Pillock. Of course I won’t. Just be careful you don’t run short.”

  “I’m all right. I’ve got accounts at different banks and there are funds in each one.”

  “I don’t need to know that, Rog,” Pete said. “But remember—Sara might be monitoring our finances. She has the funds to obtain that information. So keep bank card use to a minimum.”

  Soon afterward, Pete was on his own. At least Rog seemed gradually to be coping better, he thought. The poor sod had grown up in a soft, bourgeois family and had never done anything he didn’t want to. Whereas Pete had dragged himself up from a broken home in a drug-ridden estate in Lancashire. He’d been mocked because he was smart, beaten up because he was gay and spat on when he’d started to make money. His mother had died from bad heroin and he hadn’t been back home since he was eighteen, already halfway to setting up his computer maintenance company. That turned into a full-blown computer manufacturing operation by the time he was twenty-three and it had floated on the Stock Exchange on his twen
ty-eighth birthday. Selling his shares when he was thirty-five netted him a hundred and twenty million pounds, most of which was now invested in blue-chip companies and funds all over the world. The five grand he’d given Rog meant nothing to him.

  But getting even with whoever had killed Dave did. Pete wasn’t convinced that Matt’s ex-squeeze had done the murder herself. The woman could easily have bought herself a hit man with the White Devil’s millions. There were forty-two of those the last time Pete had done an informed estimate, the bitch having obviously obtained good investment advice. Now it was time to see if some of his contacts could screw with Sara Robbins’s wealth. Not that she went by that name anymore. She had numerous identities, only some of which he and Rog knew.

  He left the Grand Cherokee in a leafy street in Bromley, having emptied the safe. With any luck, the Jeep would still be there when he came to pick it up, after Sara Robbins had been dealt with. If she came out on top, Pete would have no need of his car or his fortune—he’d have gone to the same place as Dave.

  He hoisted the bag containing the sniper’s rifle and the rest of his gear over his shoulder and set off toward the station. No one saw him in the rain that had turned into a heavy downpour. That was just as well. When Peter Satterthwaite was determined to achieve something, his face took on the look of a particularly savage avenging angel.

  After I’d had my fingerprints taken and dictated a statement, I was told that one of Karen’s team had driven my Saab to the car park beneath New Scotland Yard.

  “You don’t have to leave, Matt,” Karen said quietly. “If it was Sara Robbins who killed Dave, you’ll be in real danger.”

  We were in her office, the door ajar. She went over and closed it.

  I was slumped in a chair, my head down, trying to get the sight of Dave from my mind. But when I succeeded, all I saw was Ginny. She had slapped my face and told me I should never have written my book—all it had done was drive the White Devil’s sister even more crazy. And I saw Tom, trying manfully not to cry because his dad wouldn’t have liked that, and Annie, who looked at me as if I was a war criminal. Which, in a way, I was.

  “I wonder where she’ll strike next.” She shook me lightly. “Rog, Pete and Andy aren’t at home and they aren’t answering their phones. They need to give us statements about this morning to corroborate your story.” She brought her face down to the level of mine. “Where are they, Matt? They’re in danger.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I could see she didn’t believe that. “Honestly. They…they have things to do.”

  “You’ve got a plan, haven’t you? For God’s sake, Matt, you have to let me in on it. I can’t protect you otherwise.”

  I shrugged. “I told you, I don’t know where they are.”

  She stood up and walked behind her desk. “Bullshit. You must have ways of contacting them.”

  I wasn’t answering that. I got to my feet. “Can I go now?”

  Karen blinked, her expression softening. “Please, Matt. I…I love you. Why can’t you accept my help?”

  I raised as much of a smile as I could. “I love you, too, but you have to let me protect my people.”

  “Like you protected Dave?” she said sharply, her hand flying to her mouth. “I’m sorry, Matt.”

  I turned and headed for the door. I’d always suspected that Sara would come between Karen and me when she returned, but I hadn’t thought it would happen so quickly.

  Eight

  Josh Hinkley, wearing a thousand-pound leather jacket and shoes with real silver buckles, was slouched in an armchair in a coffee shop on Charlotte Street, discarded newspapers all around him. He looked up when another double espresso was placed in front of him.

  “Oh, there you are, mate.” He looked at his gold Rolex. “Just twenty-seven minutes late.”

  “Hello, Josh, good to see you, too.” Jeremy Andrewes shoved a heap of books off the armchair next to him and sat down.

  “Oy, those are review copies.”

  The other man shrugged. “Which you cast an idle eye over and then flog to the shops on Charing Cross Road, even though you don’t need the money.”

  “Bloody journalists,” Hinkley said. “Think you know it all.”

  Andrewes ignored that and ate a piece of chocolate cake.

  Josh Hinkley threw the espresso back in one. “Ah-ha! That hit the spot.” He winked. “But not like the marching powder I just snorted in the bog.”

  Andrewes concentrated on his cake. Josh Hinkley liked to play at being “the bad boy of British crime writing,” a moniker many reckoned he’d come up with himself. He certainly cultivated the image assiduously. He’d been arrested a couple of times for possession of cannabis, before the Met’s user-friendly policy came in. That didn’t impress Jeremy Andrewes, the crime correspondent of the Daily Independent. He had little time for crime novelists—apart from now.

  “So what’s this meet in aid of?” Hinkley said, running a hand through his gray hair. His face was pocked by old acne scars and his belly hung over his designer jeans. Strangely, his appearance didn’t put off the surprisingly young female fans of his books. Then again, he was rolling in money.

  “Another double es, darling!” the novelist shouted to the dark-skinned girl at the counter. “Slag,” he muttered, when she gave him a haughty look. “Not long out of the jungle.”

  “Steady on, Josh,” the journalist said, catching the other man’s eye. “Civilized people don’t talk like that anymore.” Andrewes was an old Etonian, whose great-grandfather had made a fortune exploiting workers all over the world. That should have made the journo uncomfortable, particularly as he worked for a left-wing paper, but it didn’t.

  “Excuse me for breathing,” Hinkley said defiantly.

  Andrewes finished his cake. It was a good one, almost as good as the cook produced at the family house in Hampshire. He wasn’t looking forward to asking a favor of Hinkley, but he knew it would be worth it. The novelist was a serious gossip-hound. What the man didn’t know about his fellow crime writers could be written on the back of one of his lurid novels.

  “I have a problem.” Andrewes took a sip of his latte and tried to formulate a request that didn’t make him sound too much like a supplicant before an oracle. “Well, as a matter of fact, two.” He smiled, hoping the insincerity wasn’t too obvious. “I need some background on a couple of crime writers. And you’re the man in the know.”

  Hinkley didn’t look impressed. He may have written novels with minimal literary merit, but he was smart. Most bestselling authors were, in the journalist’s limited experience.

  “I get it,” the novelist said. “I fill the column you’re paid to write. I don’t think so.” He stood up and waved a twenty-pound note at the barista. “Over ’ere, beautiful! I’ll make it worth your while.”

  Jeremy Andrewes tried to hide his face behind his hand. People all around were staring at Hinkley. To her credit, the girl stayed at the bar, forcing him to go and pick up his coffee.

  “Bloody cow,” he said, on his return. “There goes her tip.”

  “Oh, you were going to leave one?” the journalist said snidely. Josh Hinkley was a notorious skinflint.

  “Now, now,” Josh said, raising a finger. “I might be prepared to reconsider, if you make it worth my while.” He grinned, displaying expensive bridgework. “Then again, your paper doesn’t like backhanders, does it?”

  Jeremy Andrewes nodded. He had a small group of people he paid for information, but he wasn’t going to add the millionaire novelist to that list.

  “How about your name appearing a few times in the paper?”

  “Fuck you, Jerry,” Josh said loudly, provoking an outraged gasp from the elderly woman at the next table. He stood up and bowed extravagantly. “I do beg your pardon, madam.”

  “Bugger off,” the woman responded, in a cut-glass accent. The journalist almost choked on his coffee.

  Josh Hinkley collapsed into his armchair like he’d been shot, his cheeks on fire.


  Andrewes saw his opportunity. “All right, I’ll share the byline with you.” He watched as Josh nodded his agreement. It was amazing how badly a bestselling author still wanted to see his name in print. Maybe that emotional need was how he still got into the top ten, year in, year out.

  “Who are you so interested in, then?” Hinkley asked, leaning closer.

  “The first one is Mary Malone.”

  “There’s a surprise. What are you hearing from the Peelers?”

  “I get the distinct impression they haven’t got much to go on.”

  The novelist grunted. “I heard some talk of Satanism.”

  Andrewes nodded. “They’ve asked us to keep quiet about that, but it won’t be long before the tabloids go public. I don’t suppose Mary Malone was into devil worship?”

  Josh Hinkley laughed. “Dunno, mate. I never met the woman. She was secretive with a capital S—no publicity photos, no public appearances. There were rumors that she was as ugly as sin.” He beckoned the journalist closer. “I reckon she fancied herself and her smart-arse historical novels—thought the rest of us were talentless hacks.” He laughed. “Oops, sorry.”

  Jeremy Andrewes generally found laughing difficult, so he didn’t respond in kind. The White Devil case, when Sara Robbins, one of his colleagues on the paper, had turned out to be the killer’s sister and partner, had put paid to his never well-developed sense of humor. Besides, he came from aristocratic stock. “Those who rule have to maintain their dignity,” his grandfather repeatedly told him when he was a boy.

  “What’s the feeling in the Crime Writers’ Society about Mary Malone’s murder?”

  Hinkley laughed. “They’re all crapping themselves, aren’t they? Wondering who’s going to be next.”

  The journalist looked up from his notebook. “Why? The police aren’t treating this as the first in a series. The VCCT hasn’t even taken over the case.”

  “Maybe someone objects to writers who use the same investigator over and over again.”