The Soul Collector

by Paul Johnston

  “Scary woman,” Pete said. He clicked off the photo and on to her patient file. He moved through it slowly so they could both get the gist. It seemed that the tumors, though not malignant, had grown substantially in the year before the operation. The nose had been damaged in a fight when Lauren Cuthbertson was a teenager. The surgeon, James Maclehose, the man whose body had been found by Pete and Andy in the house in Oxford, had been successful in removing the tumors and in fixing the nose. However, the upper lip had been damaged during surgery. Furthermore, skin grafts placed over the wounds left by the removal of the tumors had not been successful. The patient had been advised to undergo further surgery, but she had refused, claiming that Maclehose was incompetent. The surgeon’s notes stated that she had been abusive, and had threatened him and his staff. The last time she was in the clinic, the police had been called after she smashed an antique vase over Mr. Maclehose’s computer.

  “What do you think?” Pete asked.

  “What was the date of the operation?”

  “January 21st. And she was last in the clinic on February 29th.”

  “Under a month ago.” Rog ran his hands through his hair. “You think she killed Maclehose?”

  Pete nodded. “She’s five foot ten and twelve stone three. If she works out—and the notes say that her level of physical fitness was high—she could have overpowered him easily. You saw the most recent photo. She didn’t exactly look friendly.”

  “Mm.” Rog moved closer and hit the keys until he found the payment records. “I tell you what puzzles me. She lives in Stoke Newington, in what doesn’t sound like high-end housing. How did she afford a Harley Street surgeon?”

  “Good point.”

  Rog brought up a statement of account. “Look,” he said, pointing. “She paid by cheque. Twelve thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven pounds.”

  “And seventy-three pence,” Pete added. He shrugged. “Maybe she inherited the dosh.”

  “Or she’s protected.”

  Pete looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “All those murders in East London—she lives in the vicinity.”

  “You mean she’s in one of the gangs?”

  Rog nodded. “Could be. They’re not all from abroad, you know. And, as far as I can remember, no one in the home-grown gangs has been murdered.”

  “Bloody hell, Dodger, you’re using your imagination a lot there. Anyway, why was the body of the surgeon left in a house owned by Sara Robbins?”

  “That I don’t know.” Rog smiled. “Yet. I’m going to get into this Lauren’s bank account and find out where the money came from.”

  “If she’s in a gang, it could have all been cash deposits,” Pete pointed out. “We should tell Matt.”

  “Tell him what? Wait till I’ve checked the source of her funds. My money’s on it being dirty.”

  Pete shook his head. “I’m not taking that bet. What I don’t like is the idea that the cow’s running around scot-free. If she really did kill the surgeon, you’d better hope she doesn’t realize you’ve been snooping on her bank account. Otherwise you might be her next victim.”

  “We, Boney,” Rog corrected.

  Pete looked nervously at the door and drummed his fingers on the butt of his pistol.

  After Andy and I had got back to Victoria, we exited the station and headed for a cyber-café. I needed to see if Caroline and Fran had come up with anything on the clue. My own thoughts were still random and chaotic, and there were only two hours left till the next deadline. Even though Doctor Faustus had killed Josh Hinkley instead of Adrian Brooks, I had to believe that I could save the target.

  While Andy went to the counter to buy coffee and a Danish, I logged on to my e-mail program. My heart skipped a beat. There was nothing from Caroline or Fran. Jesus, could Sara have got to them via the signals? Surely that was impossible. I’d been moving around and the likelihood of her picking up my wi-fi signal in the huge city was minimal. So why hadn’t they replied? Maybe the message hadn’t got through. I sent it again, then looked at my watch. I couldn’t afford to wait. Someone’s life was hanging by a thread. I had to find the solution.

  Andy came back with a mound of pastries and two mugs of coffee.

  “On a diet?” I asked, taking out my notebook.

  “Yeah, boss,” he said, grinning. “Whatever you say, boss.”

  I looked at the clue. “Bestial Ozzies.” Could that mean animals from Australia? Possums? Crocodiles? Wallabies? Tasmanian devils? Koalas? None of them seemed to get me any further. I reread the last two lines. There was some game being played with Cain and Abel. Why was “Cain” “blind”? I tried to remember the conventions of cryptic crosswords—this may not have been a crossword, but it was definitely full of hidden secrets. Repunctuate. I did that, removing all the full stops, commas and brackets. Zilch. I removed all the capitals. Ditto. What else? Anagrams. Bugger that—too time-consuming. Word order. I fiddled with that for a couple of minutes, but, again, decided it would take hours. Homophones. The only one that struck me was “Abel”—it sounded like “able.” Words with two or more meanings. I’d already played around with “bestial,” meaning “animal,” and got nowhere. It also meant “brutish”—brutish Australians? The only Aussie crime writer I knew was clever, witty and remarkably well-behaved. How about part for whole? Could “Ozzies” mean a specific Australian rather than Australians, plural? And the same for “Scotsmen”?

  Andy put a sticky finger on the first line of the clue. “The English enslaved the Scots, didn’t they?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” I said, raising an eyebrow at him. And then I got it. “Shit!” I said, making the pretty girl at the till laugh. “You’re in this, Andy. Or should I say Andrew?”

  He stared at me. I looked back down at the clue. “‘I have enslaved Scotsmen.’ They’re Andrews, plural.” I brought my hand down on my knee. “That’s it. Jeremy Andrewes.”

  “The shithead journalist who’s been busting your balls?”

  I nodded. “Like the other clues, this is a series of alternatives for the different syllables. ‘I have enslaved Scotsmen’ means that the Scotsmen, the Andrews, are mine—so ‘my Andrews.’ ‘My’ is made up of the last two syllables of ‘Jeremy.’”

  The American was chewing slowly, his eyes on the clue.

  “‘As well as’ is another way of saying ‘and,’ as in ‘Andrews.’”

  Finally, I understood the “bestial Ozzies.” I’d been close. “It is an Australian animal—the kangaroo, also referred to as ‘roo.’”

  “He was in Winnie the Pooh,” Andy said. “I used to like that cartoon.”

  “I’m very happy for you, Slash. ‘Roos’ sounds like ‘r-u-e-s,’ meaning ‘repents’ or, I suppose, ‘feels sad,’ as in ‘sadly’ in line three.”

  Andy was struggling to keep up. “What about ‘Tiny Goethe polishes,’ then?”

  I thought about that. Sara or her sidekick had no doubt chosen Goethe to distract me because of the Faust connection. “Goethe was a German. We would have called him a ‘gerry’ if he’d turned up in the Second World War.”

  “You mean, like the first bit of ‘Jeremy’?”

  “Well done, big man.”

  “Yeah, but why ‘tiny’?” Then Andy laughed. “Maybe it’s the mouse in Tom and Jerry. He was pretty small.”

  I thought it was probably just that Jerry was a diminutive of Jeremy, but I let him have it. “‘Building cheaply’ is ‘jerry-building’ and ‘blind Cain’…what is that? Blind. Yes! To make someone blind, you take out their eyes. ‘Eye’ sounds like the letter i—take it from ‘Cain’ and you get ‘can,’ which means ‘able,’ as in sounds like ‘Abel,’ the Biblical character. Voilà.”

  “Jeez, Wellsy, it’s a hell of a lot just for two names.” He peered at the clue again. “What about ‘polishes’?”

  I looked at the letters that made up Andrewes. “It’s an anagram. You can get ‘sand’ or ‘sander’ out of the surname. Sanding is a
form of polishing.”

  Andy looked at his watch. “We’ve still got an hour and a half. Are you going to tell this Andrewes guy to watch out?”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m not. I’m not going to send the right answer at noon, either.”

  Andy switched into John MacEnroe mode. “You cannot be serious. Sara might take him down.”

  “Not if we’re looking after him.”

  He smiled. “I get it. You’re going to use Jeremy Andrewes as bait.”

  I nodded. “I think he deserves that, after all the bollocks he’s written about me recently.”

  “Neat, my man, very neat.” The smile vanished from his lips. “There’s only one problem. To draw her out, we’re going to have to put Andrewes where he makes a good target. That means we’ll be targets, too.”

  “Correct,” I said, catching his eye. “But I’m prepared to risk it for Dave. You?”

  “Count me in,” Andy said without a second’s hesitation.

  Twenty-Five

  Karen Oaten and Amelia Browning were standing outside the house in Stoke Newington with Ron Paskin. CSIs in dark blue coveralls were going up the steps to the front door. There was a crowd of rubberneckers behind the barrier tape. Inspector Ozal and other Homicide East detectives were moving through it, asking people if they had seen anything suspicious.

  John Turner brought a painfully thin, elderly woman forward. She was dressed in a faded blue coat and tattered slippers. “This is Mrs. Maisie Jones,” the inspector said. “She lives across the street.”

  “I saw them,” the woman said, gripping Karen Oaten’s arm with a clawlike hand. “There were a lot of them. In big, black cars.” She leaned closer. “They looked foreign.” She spoke the last word with a grimace.

  “When was this, Mrs. Jones?” Paskin asked, with an encouraging smile.

  “Only about an hour ago,” she replied. “Some of them went inside. They were all dressed in suits—looked expensive—except for one man. He was young, but he was wearing the sort of clothes that old men who live on the streets have. Dirty. I bet he smelled. He looked frightened an’ all.”

  “And then what happened?” the superintendent asked patiently.

  “The men at the cars got spoken to by the locals.” Maisie Jones looked up at Paskin. “They’re mostly Turkish, you know. Criminals, the lot of them. They were telling the others to sling their ’ook, weren’t they? Well, they didn’t like that one little bit. I saw them take out their guns and the shooting started.”

  When Oaten and her subordinates had arrived, an ambulance was taking away the third and last body. Even though uniformed personnel had arrived very quickly, the shooters had dispersed and none of the “big, black cars” had been found.

  “Did you see the men come back out of the house, Mrs. Jones?” Amelia Browning asked.

  “Ooh, call me Maisie, love,” the old woman said, with a loose smile that revealed ill-fitting dentures. “Yes, I did. The young bloke was marched to the second car and another man got in the back with him. I think he was the boss, because three or four others were standing around him to make sure he didn’t get hit. Quite a few of the men in suits were hit, but only the one got left behind. They tried to grab his body, but they were outnumbered by then, so they had to drive off.”

  They waited for more, but Mrs. Jones seemed to have said her piece.

  “Would you like Sergeant Browning here to help you home?” Oaten asked. “See if she saw anything else,” she added, in a low voice to Amelia.

  “Wonderful,” Paskin said. “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. When we got here, the kids were picking up the cartridge cases and throwing them at each other. Thank Christ no actual weapons were left behind.”

  “The local gang members would have grabbed them,” Turner said. “This is Shadow territory, isn’t it?”

  The superintendent nodded.

  “What about the intruders?” Oaten asked.

  “Albanians, we think,” said Paskin. “The dead guy had a letter in his pocket. One of my team has been learning the language.”

  “Do you think this was an attempt to move into the area, guv?” the Welshman asked.

  “No, Taff. They don’t work that way, do they? At least, not in broad daylight.”

  Karen Oaten nodded. “You’re right. The Albanian families tend to buy their way in using middlemen. When they’ve got a foothold, they either kill or kidnap the local leaders and their families. They don’t go for all-out war in the streets.”

  “So what were they doing here?” Turner asked.

  Paskin looked up at the second-floor windows. A uniformed officer had seen the open door and gone to investigate. He was in shock and the pathologist was still trying, literally, to piece together what had happened upstairs.

  “I’d say the young guy led them to the flat. The guy whose body was dismembered was probably an Albanian.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Oaten said. “They’d have been hoping to find him alive. Otherwise they wouldn’t have come in such numbers.”

  Turner looked at his boss thoughtfully. “Do you reckon the young man’s still alive?”

  “Not if he had anything to do with what happened to the victim, Taff,” Ron Paskin said, his expression grim.

  “The Albanians are usually all related,” Oaten said. “Like the original Sicilian mafia.” She turned to the superintendent. “I’d like to attach one of my people to your team till the situation out here is resolved.”

  Her former boss nodded. “No problem, Karen. I could do with an extra pair of hands.” He looked down the street ruefully. “An extra hundred pairs of hands.”

  Oaten and Turner glanced at each other. They both knew that feeling. They walked to the chief inspector’s car, the Welshman asking bystanders to move aside.

  “What do you think, guv?” he asked.

  “That the killer’s losing his grip. Dismembering a body is a big step from the earlier killings.” She got in and started the engine.

  “We don’t know that the person who chopped up the Albanian also killed the Kurds and the Turks,” Turner said.

  Oaten looked over her shoulder and reversed down the street. “Not for certain, no. The CSIs have got plenty of fingerprints in the flat here, but nothing to compare them with from the other scenes. But you know the murders are connected, even if the same person didn’t actually carry them out. Personally, I think it is the same killer.”

  “Could it be Sara Robbins?”

  “If it is, Matt had better keep his head down because she’s really lost it now.”

  Turner pushed himself back in his seat as she accelerated. “Steady, guv. It’s a busy road.”

  Karen Oaten braked hard behind a bus. “Remember something else,” she said. “The body in the house in Oxford. It looks like she owns that property—the name on the deeds is a composite of her mother’s maiden name and the names given to Sara and her twin before they were adopted. What kind of person keeps a rotting corpse in their hall?”

  John Turner didn’t answer. He remembered all too well the last person he knew who had done something similar.

  Oaten’s phone rang. She fitted the earpiece and answered.

  “Yes, Dr. Redrose,” she said, shaking her head at the Welshman. “How can I help you?” She listened, her jaw dropping. “Are you sure?” She listened again, and then thanked him and signed off.

  “Jesus,” she said. “The old ghoul has his uses.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “After the case conference, his curiosity was piqued. He didn’t do the autopsies on the gang victims. He went to the morgue and checked the finger and toenails of the two Kurds. Guess what he found?”

  “Don’t tell me they’d been clipped.”

  “Yup. But only one toe in each case, as if the killer was being careful not to draw attention.” She gave a hollow laugh. “That’s how Redrose spotted it, of course. Nobody cuts only one nail themselves, at least not usually. He’s pretty sure that a small number of hai
rs have been taken from the head and groin of each dead man, too. Not enough to make a conclusive link.”

  “But the toenails do that,” Turner said. “The likelihood of both victims having cut one nail recently must be minimal.”

  Karen Oaten nodded. “So there’s a good chance that the same killer is behind the crime writer and the gangland murders. Or the same killers.”

  The inspector swallowed hard. “And that devil worship played a part in them all.”

  Neither of them needed to say it aloud, but the White Devil was even more in the frame—and, apparently, even more dangerous than ever.

  I found out from a friend at the Daily Indie that Jeremy Andrewes was in the office. Andy and I were outside in Clerkenwell Road—he was twenty meters left of the entrance to the paper’s building, and I was about the same distance to the right, both of us on the opposite side of the road. If the journalist stayed inside, I didn’t see how Sara could get to him, unless she was already in the office. I didn’t think that was too likely. You needed an electronic pass to get past the security door in reception. I could have got in using mine, but it would take me a long time to check the whole place. Besides, I was in the news. As soon as anyone recognized me, I’d have difficulty getting out again and that would screw up my plan completely. I’d removed the fake mustache. I didn’t think it would fool people who knew me well.

  Ten minutes before twelve, I nodded to Andy and then retired to a café down the road that supported wi-fi access. I booted up my laptop. On the ghost site I found a message from my mother. That was a major relief. She’d cracked the “Andrews” part of the clue, but hadn’t got Jeremy. Then again, she didn’t know the journalist, so she hadn’t been able to make the leap that I had.

  I clicked on the message that appeared at exactly eleven fifty-nine. It was from wotacarveup. I wrote my reply—Karen Oaten—and sent it. Two minutes later, an answer arrived.