The Soul Collector

by Paul Johnston

  After what Faik thought was about twenty minutes, the car drove over gravel and stopped. He was told to stay as he was, then a door opened and a black hood was pulled over his head. He was led inside, tripping on steps. It seemed they walked for a long time before he was pushed into a seat and the hood tugged off.

  Faik blinked and took in a large, young-looking man with close-cropped black hair. He was sitting behind an enormous desk.

  “I’m Safet Shkrelli,” the man said, picking up a silver revolver with pearl handles. “Tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you right now.”

  “You know why,” Faik replied. His voice was steady; he had nothing to lose. “I can take you to your numbers man.”

  “Where is he?”

  Faik shook his head slowly. “I take you there,” he repeated. “Then you protect me.”

  Shkrelli thought about that. “Is he alive?” he asked.

  “He was when I last saw him—just.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “I’ll tell you when we get there.”

  The muzzle of the weapon was suddenly pointing at Faik’s face. “Are you setting me up, boy?” the Albanian asked. “Are your people planning on ambushing me? I use dum-dum bullets. Do you know how much damage one of them can do? Your own mother won’t recognize you.”

  Faik held his gaze. “This is no setup, Mr. Shkrelli. There is no ambush. All I want is for you to protect me until you find the…the person who took your man.”

  Safet Shkrelli drank from a bottle of water. “So take me, boy. Tell me the district.”

  “Stoke Newington.”

  The hood came back down over Faik’s head. He was taken through the process in reverse and heard someone else join the driver in the front of the car. After they had driven for about a quarter of an hour, the hood was removed. Faik looked around, recognizing the streets around Finsbury Park station. Ahead, he could see two more black Mercedes and behind was a black Land Cruiser. All the vehicles were full.

  “Tell us the address,” the driver said.

  Faik did so and the driver relayed it via his hands-free device. The column drove down Green Lanes. People stared and some of them raised cell phones to their ears. The local gangs—the Shadows, the King’s men—wouldn’t be slow to gather. Faik’s armpits were drenched in sweat, but his breathing was regular. The lead car turned into the street and stopped, blocking the road. Men got out, their hands in their jackets. The man with the thin mustache got out and beckoned to Faik to follow. He did so, then headed for the door he had come out of that morning—it seemed like days had passed.

  When he pushed the door open, not particularly surprised that it hadn’t been shut by the last person to leave, he turned his head and saw Safet Shkrelli get out of the second Mercedes. Bodyguards quickly gathered around him and walked him to the house. Suddenly it struck Faik that if his captor had managed to remove the body, Shkrelli would dispose of him in seconds. He went up the stair quickly, nervous for the first time.

  He needn’t have been. The Albanian numbers man was still in the second-floor flat. His body was on the living room floor, as it was when Faik had escaped. But his head was on top of the television, his hands in the bathroom and his feet in the bedroom.

  After looking around, the man with the mustache threw up on Safet Shkrelli’s shoes.

  Twenty-Four

  I walked toward Andy, signaling to him to stay where he was to avoid scaring the neighbors. I joined him at the rear of the garage.

  “It was in a trunk in the garage,” he said. “I forced the door at the back because I got curious.”

  I pulled on latex gloves like the ones he was wearing and took the skull from him. I had no idea how old it was, but it was very clean and so white that I wondered if it was plastic. But the feel of it was definitely bone. The question was, who did it belong to? And also, where was the rest of the body?

  There was the rasping roar of a motorbike engine.

  “Shit!” Andy said, running past me to the front of the garage.

  I followed him, trying to shield the skull under my jacket. I was in time to see a figure in black leathers and helmet crouching over a powerful bike, as Doris Carlton-Jones climbed on behind. Jesus, was it Sara?

  Before I could put the skull down and draw my weapon, the metallic red motorbike rocketed down the street. Not long afterward I heard a less deafening engine noise to my left.

  “Get in, Matt!” Andy said from the driver’s seat of Mrs. Carlton-Jones’s hatchback.

  Somehow I managed to do that without dropping the skull. Andy reversed at speed, spun the wheel and set off down the street.

  “Hot-wired,” I said. “Nice one, Slash.”

  “Being in a teen gang had its uses,” he said, swerving out of the driveway and accelerating after the motorbike. “So the old woman was in on it all along. I’ve seen that machine before.”

  I grabbed my door handle as he braked hard and then turned out of the crescent. The motorbike was still in sight, but there were several cars between it and us.

  “Looks like Sara and she have had a family reunion,” I said. “Bloody hell, what are you doing?”

  Andy had veered into the opposite lane, provoking loud horn blasts.

  “That’s an idea,” he said, hitting his horn. In under a minute, we were only one car behind the bike. “It’s a Transalp, a powerful beast. This piece of crap has got no chance of catching it on an open road.”

  “Cool it, big man,” I said, my heart still pounding. “The rider’s bound to have seen us.”

  “Good,” the American said, slamming the gas pedal to the floor and overtaking the car ahead. “Maybe she’ll make a mistake.”

  There was no sign of that. The motorbike had clear space in front of it and we struggled to stay in touch. The lights ahead were green, but by the time we approached, they were changing.

  “Brace, brace!” Andy yelled, following the bike to the right and narrowly missing a pair of boys who had started to cross the road.

  “Will you slow down, Slash?”

  The bike had sped away again, toward Dulwich.

  “Where do you think they’re heading? Maybe they’re going to murder someone else,” he said, running another light, just as it was clear the motorbike was gone for good.

  “Fuck!” Andy roared, slamming his hands on the wheel.

  “Did you see which way it went?”

  “No. That supermarket rig got in the way.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “Pull in over there. I need to see if Doctor Faustus has sent another message.”

  I pulled out my laptop. It took a few minutes for the wi-fi card to latch on to a signal. I opened my e-mail program and watched the new messages stack up. Most were from family and friends, reporting in. Caroline said Fran and Lucy were fine, but I could tell she was going spare in the safe house. I assumed the last message was porn spam—the sender was mynameishelen—but I checked before deleting and saw I’d nearly screwed up in a big way. It was from the killer. I read it aloud:

  Well, Matt, here I am again. I bet the sender name’s got you wondering. Call yourself an English graduate? Who did Faustus lust after? That’s right, Helen of Troy. Why am I using her name? That’s for you to work out. Hey, guess what. It’s deadline time again. Since you identified Adrian Brooks correctly—even though I couldn’t resist dealing with your treacherous friend Hinkley instead—I’m giving you even less time. Answer this by twelve midday, and I mean today, clever boy:

  I have enslaved Scotsmen

  As well as bestial Ozzies.

  Tiny Goethe polishes us sadly,

  Building cheaply for blind Cain.

  (Not to mention Abel.)

  See you in hell!

  Helen.

  (And Doctor Faustus, of course)

  “What’s that all about?” Andy said with a groan.

  I was writing the clue down in my notebook. When I’d finished, I sent it to Caroline and my mother, then logged off and closed the lap
top.

  “What does it mean?” I repeated. “We’ve got just over three hours to work that out.” I looked at the title again. “Helen. Is that Sara finally hinting that she’s been sending the messages and doing the murders?”

  “What, because she’s used a woman’s name?”

  I nodded, still examining the words. “Goethe wrote a version of Faust, so Helen fits with that, as well as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.”

  “Who’s Goethe?”

  “Eighteenth-century German writer,” I replied. “Bestial Ozzies? Is that a reference to the ex–Black Sabbath singer?”

  “What? Ozzie Osbourne?” The American grinned. “I saw him live when I was a kid. Sick, but a gas.”

  “Yeah, bestial would go with him,” I said, trying to concentrate. “Bestial means ‘beastly’ or ‘brutish.’”

  “There was that story about Ozzie biting the head off a bat on stage. That was pretty brutish.” Andy looked around. “Are we staying here?”

  “What? No.”

  “Shall I take this heap back to the Carlton-Jones pad?”

  I stared at him. “No chance. I don’t want her to have a set of wheels.”

  “We could stake the place out.”

  I shook my head. “She probably won’t be going back there in a hurry.”

  “You don’t reckon she’ll report her car stolen?”

  I thought about that. “She might, I suppose. Give me a few minutes with this bloody clue.”

  Andy grunted. “Shit, we’d better cover that thing up, man.”

  I looked around. The skull was sitting on the backseat, its teeth set in an uneven smile. Whose body had it come from? Andy got out and took off his jacket. He put it over the skull and got back into the driver’s seat.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Okay. Park near my old flat in Herne Hill. We can get the train to the center from there.”

  As Andy drove, I ran my eyes back and forward over the lines, scribbling down ideas. “I have enslaved”—I have captured, I have taken prisoner, I have sold into slavery? Why Scotsmen? I didn’t know many, though that probably wasn’t significant. Scotsmen could be Celts. Therefore, Celtic Football Club supporters? Meaning Glaswegians? There were a couple of Glasgow crime writers who got completely pissed at festivals. Could one of them be the target? Scotsmen: Highlanders, Lowlanders, islanders, Gaelic-speakers, Picts?

  I moved on to the second line. “As well as bestial Ozzies.” I didn’t buy the Ozzie Osbourne connection. Who else were Ozzies? Was it a reference to Aussies, Australians? Or something to do with the Wizard of Oz? There were beasts in that. Flying monkeys, as far as I could remember. “Tiny Goethe polishes us.” Goethe as the author of Faust, who made use of Helen as a character? I racked my brain. What else did Goethe write? He was a polymath, but my knowledge of German literature didn’t go much further. I had a vague idea about a work called The Sorrows of Young Werther. Could that link up with the word “sadly”? But I definitely didn’t know anyone called Werther. I’d have to do a search on the Internet for Goethe’s life and works. Was he a “tiny” man? And why was he polishing? Was he into buffing things up? Buffing people up, as in “us”?

  I shook my head. I was getting nowhere with that line, so I moved on. “Building cheaply for blind Cain.” As far as I could remember from the Old Testament, Cain wasn’t blind. He was a murderer, though, which was suggestive. The first of that kind, and his victim was his own brother, the Abel of the fifth line. But Sara didn’t kill her brother, the White Devil. She worshipped him. Someone else’s brother, then, but whose? And why was the German poet “building cheaply”? Was he a cowboy builder in his spare time? Could the target be one of those? No, that didn’t work. There were thousands of such shoddy handymen in London alone. How could I find the right one? As for the last line, why was Abel not to be mentioned, even though his name was the clue’s last word? Was that significant, mentioning something even though it was said not to be? Hell’s teeth, my mind was about to experience meltdown.

  We left Doris Carlton-Jones’s car, taking the skull wrapped in Andy’s jacket. She wouldn’t find her wheels—unless Sara had put a bug on the hatchback.

  Of course, as the latest impenetrable riddle showed, anything was possible.

  Jeremy Andrewes had eaten a stodgy breakfast at an old-fashioned gentleman’s club, but the indigestion he now felt was worth it. He had got his hands on a seriously juicy story. A gangland informer he sometimes used had rung him and told him that one of the journalist’s lot—i.e. the aristocracy, or “nobs,” as the snout called them—had moved into cocaine dealing. A photo of the said nob arrived on his phone. The man in question was standing behind a table. On it were clear bags filled with a white powder and piles of banknotes. Even better, Jeremy recognized the man’s unmistakable face immediately—he was a longstanding friend of his father’s. It was easy to arrange a supposedly social breakfast.

  After they had exchanged gossip about who was marrying whom, who was two-timing whom and with whom, and who had the best chance of getting fox-hunting made legal again, the journalist cut to the chase.

  “Tell me,” he said with a sly smile, “how’s the Colombian marching powder trade?”

  The earl blanched. “What?” he said in a faint voice, his unprepossessing features twitching.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to write a story about you,” Andrewes lied. “I’m only interested in the people you do business with. I know you wouldn’t be foolish enough to set yourself up against them.” He was pretty sure he’d been provided with the information to ensure the earl’s good behavior—whether Jeremy exposed him or just hinted that he might do so in the future, the effect would be the same.

  “What were you doing?” the journalist continued. “Buying or selling?”

  “Selling, of course,” the earl said, glancing around the wood-paneled room. “I…I happened to, em…come across a quantity of the drug and I wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible.”

  “For what would appear to be a substantial amount of money.” Andrewes grinned. “That should help with the maintenance of the castle. As well as with your other pursuits.”

  The older man’s expression was grim, but he didn’t speak.

  “All right, tell me who you sold to,” the journalist said.

  There was a long pause. “You promise you won’t refer to me? These people were pretty…unpleasant.”

  You must have felt right at home, Andrewes thought. “My word is my bond. I’m working on a big exposé of the drugs trade in London. This will only be a small piece in the jigsaw.”

  The earl dabbed a napkin to his damp lips. “Very well. It would be a good thing if the people I sold to were cleared out of this country.”

  The journalist made no comment, even though that was hardly the Daily Independent’s line on immigration. “Let me guess,” he said, trying to make things easier for the other man. “Kurds? Turks? There’s been some messy stuff between them recently in East London.”

  “Has there?” the earl said indifferently. “No, no, these people were Albanians.”

  “Really?” Jeremy Andrewes was impressed by the older man’s nerve. The Albanians were the up-and-coming force and they were even more ruthless than the Turkish Shadows. “I don’t suppose you got any names?”

  “Nobody introduced themselves, if that’s what you mean.”

  The journalist tried to disguise his disappointment.

  The earl gave a twisted smile. “But I’m not a complete idiot. I did do my homework. They’re a family called Shkrelli.” He struggled to pronounce the name and spittle flew from his mouth.

  Andrewes felt like a runner who’d just broken the hundred meters world record. A member of the peerage selling coke to the most violent gang in the country—his editor would kiss his feet. He managed to end the conversation and get out of the club, without, he hoped, making the earl suspicious. He thought about going back to his flat to write the piece, but he wanted to be i
n the office when he submitted it.

  He hailed a taxi, took out his BlackBerry and started on a first draft. He was so engrossed that he didn’t notice the figure in black leathers to the rear, weaving through the traffic on a powerful motorbike. It was still there, fifty meters behind, when he got out and went into the Daily Indie building.

  Pete was squinting at the computer screen as he scrolled down the plastic surgery clinic’s records. Rog had got into them, but he needed a break from his laptop so Pete had taken over. There were drops of sweat on his bald head. The only problem with Rog’s cousin’s flat was that the central heating control was jammed at twenty-five degrees Celsius. Even though the window was open, the room was like an oven.

  “Gotcha!” Pete said. “Get a load of this, Dodger.” He pointed to the screen.

  “Are you sure?” Rog said. “You’ve only been looking for a few minutes.”

  “Oh, I never take long,” Bonehead said archly.

  Rog went over and leaned toward the screen. “Lauren May Cuthbertson, date of birth 23/5/1972, address Flat 15, Gannett House, Ambledon Street, Stoke Newington.” He turned to Pete. “What’s the big deal?”

  Bonehead clicked on the link titled Pretreatment Photo. “What do you reckon?”

  “Jesus.” Rog stared in horror at the face that appeared before him. The nose was bent and flattened. There were also large and pendulous tumors on both sides of the mouth. “It’s the Elephant Woman.”

  “Near enough.” Pete clicked on the Post-Treatment Photo.

  They watched intently as the image recomposed itself.

  “What happened to her?” Rog said.

  The tumors had gone, but the skin around and below the mouth was swollen, heavily bruised and scarred. But that wasn’t the worst feature. Although the patient’s nose had been straightened and reconstructed, something terrible had happened to her upper lip. It was split open, the pink gum and front teeth visible. Lauren Cuthbertson was staring straight at the camera, her expression dull-eyed.