The Soul Collector

by Paul Johnston

  I pressed the button, then went over to my computer. “You’d better go into my bedroom, Andy. I don’t want Josh Hinkley to know anyone’s here. He’s got a mouth that motors all over London. Leave the door ajar so you can hear what’s going on.”

  He departed with his weapon, his jacket and his bag. I switched off my computer and made sure my Glock was out of sight. When the interior bell rang, I went to the spy-hole and checked he was on his own. Then I opened the door with the two chains still on, to make a hundred percent sure.

  “Hey, Matt,” Josh said. “Sorry about your fr—”

  I shut the door in his face, realizing that he would have heard about Dave’s murder. It had been on the TV and radio news, though Karen had managed to keep my name out of the bulletins—that wouldn’t last much longer.

  After I’d unhitched the chains, I let Hinkley in.

  “As I was saying, sorry about your friend.” He handed me the bottle of whisky and walked into the living area. “This is one hell of a pad, Matt.” He turned to me and grinned. “Got a football?”

  I cracked the seal and pulled the cork. He got a large measure, I took a small one. “Look, Josh, this is a bad time for me.”

  “I know,” he said, his expression serious. “That’s why I came. Bit of moral support. You on your own?” He looked toward the bedroom door.

  I nodded and led him to one of the leather sofas. “Well, it’s good of you, Josh,” I said, not buying what he’d said for a moment. “I think what I most need now is to get some sleep.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll wet my whistle and then I’ll be off.” He took a slug of the neat whisky. “Ah, that does the business!” He looked around at me as he put his glass down on the mahogany coffee table with a thud. “Oops, sorry.” He tried to look somber again, but it was a state that he found difficult. His default mode was cynicism spliced with crudity. “We go back a long way, don’t we? Being a crime writer, I thought I might be able to…um, like I said, offer support with a bit of empathy in it.”

  I eyed him skeptically. “How many of your close friends have you seen with their heads blown apart, Josh?”

  His cheeks reddened. “Well, when you put it like that…”

  “I’m not putting it like anything,” I said, the anger that had been building up all day finally erupting. “That’s the reality. Some fucking bastard shot my friend to death from close range. It was a horror show. Don’t tell me you’ve ever seen anything like it.”

  Josh had his hands out, like a zookeeper trying to calm down a rabid bear. “Whoa, Matt, steady on. I’m your mate, remember?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “some mate. When The Death List went to number one, you wrote an article saying that true-crime books were written by voyeurs who didn’t have enough imagination to produce decent novels.”

  He grinned slackly. “Well, you did knock me off the top spot.”

  I wasn’t finished. “You’re the mate who told my agent I’d been bad-mouthing him, and my editor that I’d said she was a randy witch.”

  Hinkley was busy putting some distance between us, his arse sliding squeakily over the leather. He wasn’t grinning now.

  “So exactly what kind of support do you think you’re qualified to offer, you poxy shithead?” I sat back, my heart pounding. Then the anger slowly dissipated. I could see out of the corner of my eye that Josh was watching me intently.

  “Don’t worry,” he said quietly. “I know what it’s like, all right. My old ma died last year.”

  Christ, now I’d given him some leverage. “Sorry,” I said, looking at him. “I hadn’t heard.”

  “It’s okay. She was over ninety. You’re still unprepared for it, though.” He took another pull of whisky. “All I was trying to say was that crime writers know something about death and killing.”

  “Correction—imaginary death and killing. They’re not the same as what I saw this morning.”

  He shrugged. “So…how come you were down at your mate’s house? I mean, your finding him seems a bit…well, a bit of a coincidence.”

  I tried to keep my breathing regular. The scumbag had just given himself away. I moved closer and poured him another drink. “Coincidence?” I said, handing him the glass. “How do you mean?”

  There was a flash of concern in his eyes. “Well, people are saying your ex-squeeze, excuse the expression, is in the frame for the killing.”

  “You mean Sara?” I said, stringing him along. I wanted to see how much he knew.

  “Er, yeah. I don’t suppose she tipped you the wink? Gave you a call?”

  “What, along the lines of ‘Morning, Matt. I’ve just executed your friend Dave Cummings in his front room’?”

  There was apprehension in his eyes again. “Yeah, that sort of thing.”

  I stood up and leaned over him. “Who have you been talking to, Josh?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Met’s press release didn’t mention that I discovered the body.” I grabbed the lapel of his leather jacket and pulled him up. “So who told you?”

  He hung unevenly, trying to find his footing. I drew his face close to mine.

  “Who have you been talking to, you piece of crap?”

  “Andrewes,” he muttered.

  “Jeremy Andrewes! I might have known.” I dropped him back on the sofa. “Let me guess. You told him you’d pump me for information.”

  He nodded, his gaze away from mine.

  “What was he going to give you in return? A weekend at the family mansion?”

  He scowled at me. “A shared byline.”

  “Jesus, you’re pathetic,” I said, turning away.

  “Maybe, but at least I don’t write books that get my friends murdered.”

  I stayed with my back to him. Tears had flooded my eyes, but I wasn’t going to let him see them. “Just go, Josh,” I said, managing to keep my voice level. “You can take your whisky with you.”

  “Fuck you, Matt,” he said, as he moved away. “I might be a loud-mouthed bastard, but I’m a harmless one. I hope you can live with yourself.”

  The door slammed behind him.

  Andy loped across the room. “Want me to kick his ass?”

  “Forget it,” I said, walking to my desk. “Now I know that the crime correspondent of my own paper doesn’t care who he uses to hang me out to dry.”

  “This Hinkley guy, there’s no chance Sara could have got to him? Maybe he dropped a bug in here.”

  I looked at him over my shoulder. “I doubt it. He isn’t reliable enough. But he could easily have bugged me for that ponce Jeremy Andrewes, or even for his own reasons. I’ll do a sweep with the scanning unit later.”

  “I’ll do it now. Where do you keep it?”

  I directed him to the broom cupboard, then booted up my computer. I was desperate for a message from Caroline. If I didn’t get one, the guilt I was feeling about Dave would be augmented by helpless trepidation about Lucy and my mother.

  Could Sara have got to them already?

  The Soul Collector was in a fallow field in Warwickshire. About fifty meters away, beyond a low hedge and a wide lawn, stood a detached house. There were lights on both upstairs and downstairs. So far, through her Zeiss binoculars, Sara Robbins had made out a boy of fifteen, a girl of eleven and an over-made-up woman of thirty-eight. She knew their ages from the research she’d done on the family. Direct observation told her that the man of the house was not present. But she knew that already. She had instructed a lawyer to hire him and his colleagues.

  The woman stretched her legs on the groundsheet. She was wearing green combat fatigues, hiking boots and a black Gore-Tex cape. By her side lay her Spyderco knife and her silenced H&K pistol. It would be easy to go into the house and slaughter its occupants; the temptation tugged at her. She resisted, knowing that would only drive the husband and his comrades underground. Wolfe, Rommel and Geronimo, they’d called themselves in the SAS. They’d been discharged from the elite regiment and the army when the finge
r had been pointed at them for the shooting of her brother. She smiled. She had the worm Matt to thank for that. He had mentioned Special Forces in his book and, although there was no concrete evidence, the hard men in charge apparently had little difficulty in working out the likely perpetrators. A deal was done and they were paid off without publicity. They had even been helped to set up their own private security company.

  And now Wolfe, the former sergeant whose house she was watching, had taken Rommel and Geronimo off to Aberdeen to carry out surveillance on an oil company executive they’d been told was suspected of industrial espionage.

  The question was, when it came to it, which of these three potential victims would she take? The boy was well-built—he’d probably been put on a fitness program by his father—but she could neutralize him easily enough. The wife was heavy; she must have been at least twelve stone. She could handle that, too, but why take the trouble? The girl, Amanda Mary, was the one. Slim, almost fragile-looking, she was still at the preteen shy-as-a-mouse stage. Amanda Mary would be easy and her father would no doubt do anything to save his precious little girl.

  An owl hooted from a nearby tree. The woman looked across, and then up at the cloudless, star-sprinkled sky. There were familiar spirits all around her, creatures that lived only to hunt in the dark. During her training and on the tasks she’d set herself on the other side of the Atlantic, she had become part of the community of the night. She felt most at ease when she was out of doors, when ordinary people slept. The Soul Collector had learned how to make use of the forces of darkness.

  Karen Oaten got out of her car in the street near Manor House Station in East London. CSI vans and police cars, marked and unmarked, were all around.

  “Right, Amelia, let’s go.” She led the petite young woman with the bobbed brown hair to one of the white vans.

  “’Evening, guv,” said a bespectacled technician she knew from her time in Homicide East. “You’ll be wanting a suit.”

  “Two, please, Vince. This is my new sergeant, Amelia Browning.”

  The man smiled. “Hello, Amelia. First time at one of these?”

  Browning shook her head vigorously. “Good heavens, no. I was in Homicide South before I got into the VCCT.”

  “I hear it’s nasty, south of the river,” Vince said, handing them sealed plastic bags containing white coveralls, overshoes and caps. “Never been over there, myself.”

  Karen laughed, while her subordinate tried to work out if she was being teased. “You might want to beef up your vocabulary, Amelia.”

  “Guv?”

  “‘Good heavens’? We’re not in an Agatha Christie novel.”

  Browning nodded. “Got you, guv.”

  When they’d finished covering up, Karen ducked under the tape and headed for the basement stairway, her much shorter sergeant close behind. A techie was photographing the garbage on the steps and they had to wait.

  “Footprints?” Browning asked.

  “Among other things.” Oaten walked on when the steps were clear.

  Ron Paskin was standing in the hall. “Ah, there you are, Karen.”

  “Guv.” She introduced Amelia again. “We’re getting seriously stretched,” she explained. “DS Browning only joined us a week ago.”

  “In at the deep end, then,” the superintendent said with a smile that didn’t stay long on his lips. “We got an anonymous call. One dead male Kurd inside,” he said. “Shot once in the head at close range with a 9 mm pistol. There was a cartridge case on the floor, by the door. Funny thing is, there was also another one. They’ve taken samples of the blood.” Paskin pointed to the spray on the floor and on some of the many cardboard boxes in the room ahead. “And they’re collating footprints. It looks like there were three people in here and two of them left.”

  “One having been shot by the other?” Oaten said, her brow furrowed.

  “Maybe the shooter’s accomplice got in the way,” Amelia Browning suggested.

  Paskin led them into the front room. A body lay facedown in a slick of dried blood. He inclined his head toward a smaller patch of blood. “We reckon that may be the other victim’s, the one who’s gone AWOL.”

  The two women nodded. DS Browning was taking notes keenly.

  “So there may be a witness to the murder,” Oaten said.

  “If he’s still alive,” Paskin said.

  “Or she,” Amelia put in.

  The superintendent gave her a long-suffering look. “This is a Shadow store,” he said. “You know who the Shadows are?”

  The young woman nodded. “Yes, sir. Long-established East End Turkish gang with interests in—”

  “All right, Sergeant,” Oaten said, “you’ve made your point.”

  Paskin smiled. “Good to come across people who read the files. Anyway, the Shadows don’t use women. As far as they’re concerned, women stay at home and look after their children.”

  Spots of red appeared on Amelia Browning’s cheeks. “Maybe the killer wasn’t a Shadow.”

  “Or a man,” Oaten added. She frowned at her subordinate. “Let’s stick to the evidence, shall we?”

  Paskin nodded. “Whether the second victim ever shows is another matter. He was hit fairly badly, judging by the amount of blood, so he’ll need medical treatment. Of course, the King’s men have got their own doctors.” He looked over at Browning. “Have you read the King’s files, too, Sergeant?”

  “She’s done her homework.” Oaten looked at her ex-boss. “What have the Kurds got to do with this?”

  “He was one of them.” The superintendent held out a photograph of a mustachioed man. “He’s Aro Izady, a cousin of the King. The question is, what was he doing here? He was an accountant and he didn’t have a record. He wasn’t the kind of man you’d expect to find in a storage depot owned by the opposition. There was a rumor a few years back that he killed a Shadow with a snooker cue, but there was no evidence. Actually, there was no body.”

  Oaten was studying her ex-boss. “Could that be why he’s been killed now? But why in a Shadow store?”

  “They are rather pointing the finger at themselves,” the superintendent said. “Maybe they assumed no one would phone the shooting in.”

  “Where were the Shadow guards?” Oaten said, looking at the piles of boxes containing electrical equipment that had doubtless been stolen. “They wouldn’t have left without a fight. Unless they were called off.”

  “So far we haven’t found anyone who heard shots,” Paskin added. “Some of the locals won’t talk to us on principle, but they’re not all like that.”

  Oaten’s gaze rested on the green metal trunk, the bottom of which had been spattered with blood. “Has anyone looked inside that?” she asked, pointing.

  The superintendent nodded. “It’s empty. Or rather, almost empty. There are traces of cocaine all over the inside.”

  “Meaning that maybe the shooter may have taken the stash with him,” Oaten said.

  “Or her,” Paskin said with a grin.

  Amelia Browning didn’t appear to have heard him. “Maybe the guards were lured out and disposed of. The shooter may not have been alone.”

  Karen Oaten bit her lip. “I still don’t understand why a Kurd would be murdered here.” She looked up at the letter S that had been spray-painted on the wall. “And no one in their right mind would steal drugs from a Shadow store.”

  Browning raised her hand. “Maybe Izady was a turncoat and the King found out. Killing him here would be a good way to get back at the Turks.”

  “Imaginative,” said Paskin. “But you haven’t got a shred of evidence.”

  The sergeant went back to scribbling in her notepad.

  The women headed up the steps to the pavement. Paskin followed them, pausing to catch his breath.

  “This is getting out of hand,” Oaten said. “A Turk, a Kurd and now another Kurd. Soon we’ll have a full-scale gang war on our hands.”

  Paskin’s expression was blank. “It’s a possibility.”
>
  “Still nothing on the grapevine about another gang moving in?” Oaten asked.

  Paskin shook his head. “That’s the strange part of all this. No one’s saying anything about Albanians or Russians. And this is too neat for the Jamaicans. It can’t be internal, because both Turks and Kurds are being hit.”

  Karen Oaten took off her protective cap and smoothed her hair down. “You know, there was another shooting with what we presume was a silenced pistol this morning. South of the river.”

  “I heard. Potential connection to the White Devil.”

  The chief inspector nodded. “Maybe the same person’s screwing with the gangs up here. Some serious money’s been spent to get the information these hits would have needed.”

  Paskin looked away. “Sounds like a job for the VCCT then, Karen. Are you going to take these cases away from us?”

  She sniffed. “As if I have the personnel. Taff Turner’s running the Dulwich murder. Obviously I can’t have any direct involvement…”

  “I know about your conflict of interest,” the superintendent said gently.

  “And DS Pavlou’s trying to kick some life into Homicide West over the woman author who was murdered. That’s another dead end so far, though at least she wasn’t shot.”

  Paskin touched her arm. “Are you taking over my cases or not?”

  Oaten shook her head. “Not for the time being.” She smiled weakly. “They’re in good hands. We still have no direct evidence connecting the three gang murders. The AC has insisted we take the Dulwich murder because of the press interest in the White Devil connection.” She rubbed her forehead. “If there are any more murders, my job’s going to be harder than a Middle East negotiator’s.”

  “You’ll manage,” the superintendent said. “And the weather’s so much nicer in London.”

  Karen Oaten snorted and watched Ron Paskin walk away, the coverall making him look like an overweight polar bear. She didn’t remember him making that kind of quip when she worked for him. Maybe he kept them for jackasses parachuted in from New Scotland Yard.