The Soul Collector

by Paul Johnston

  He kept his eyes to the ground. “Right,” he said. I picked up an East London accent.

  “What are you? A Turk?”

  He looked up quickly and said something in a language I didn’t recognize but it was obvious he’d sworn at me.

  “I am a Kurd,” he said, glancing at Shkrelli. “I work for the King.”

  I’d heard of that gang.

  “Let him come with me,” I said to the gang boss. “He’s seen enough.”

  Safet Shkrelli thought about it and then nodded. He stood up and took a roll of banknotes from his pocket. “I thank you for helping me, Kurd. It was not your fault that my cousin was killed.” He nodded to the heavy at the door.

  A few minutes later we were back in the car, hoods on our heads.

  “Where you want to go?” the driver asked.

  “Kentish Town Station,” I said. “How about you, Faik?”

  “That’s okay,” he replied.

  When we got there, the hoods were removed and we found ourselves on a rain-dashed street corner. The young Kurd watched the car accelerate away, his face slack. I could see that he’d been through hell. He also knew things that I didn’t.

  “Faik, come with me. I have clothes you can wear.”

  He looked at me with sad eyes. “I want to go home.”

  I put my hand on his arm. “Later. I need to talk to you.”

  He considered that, and then nodded. “I need a bath,” he said. “And maybe a doctor.” His legs suddenly gave way and I caught him in my arms. I helped him into a taxi for the journey to Rog’s cousin’s flat. I didn’t think there was anyone on our tail. I almost had to drag Faik up the stairs. Pete opened the door on the chain.

  “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “Just let us in,” I said. When he did so, I took the Kurd straight to the bathroom and left him to it.

  “Any news from Andy?” I asked the others.

  They both shook their heads.

  “Any more properties bought by Sara, Rog?”

  “Maybe. I’m working on a name that I think she used only once.”

  I filled them in about Shkrelli and Faik. Then I split the investigator’s report on the ninth Earl Sternwood into three parts and handed them out.

  Pete sat back in his chair. “Very thorough,” he said. “But what makes you think this guy’s got anything to do with the murders, Matt?”

  The photo of the aristocrat had been in the section I’d kept. I showed it to them.

  “Bloody hell,” Rog said. “What happened to his face?”

  “Which is not dissimilar to Lauren May Cuthbertson’s,” Pete said.

  I nodded. “I doubt that’s a coincidence, particularly since the crime-writer murders and the gangland ones seem to be linked.” I told them about the nail and hair clippings. “And there’s more. The first Earl Sternwood was notorious for the Hell-fire Club he ran.”

  “The what?” Rog asked, looking around from his computer.

  I repeated the phrase. “It involved black-magic rituals, sexual depravity and heavy drinking. The meetings were attended by members of high society, bishops and university professors. Oh, and local wenches and nuns were brought in—most disappeared after the parties.”

  “Black magic,” Pete said. “The pentagrams and so on. But why would a peer of the realm kill crime writers, let alone gangbangers?”

  I raised my shoulders. “I think we should ask him that question, don’t you?”

  “Gotcha!” Rog said. “Another of Sara’s house buys. Nine months ago. This one’s in a village called Oldbury. In Berkshire.”

  I felt an icy finger jab into my gut. “Shit. Earl Sternwood’s castle is in the very same county.”

  A moment later Faik let out a shriek of agony.

  Twenty-Seven

  Andy Jackson’s face was drenched in sweat. He’d been heaving and twisting against his bonds and had finally got hold of the penknife. But opening it was proving a step too far. He had splintered his thumbnail against the narrow groove in the blade, and he couldn’t get it to move. The light from the rear doors had almost gone.

  Then he heard footsteps. He relaxed, making sure his expression didn’t give him away. A key was inserted into the lock in the rear door, then it opened—at first by only a few centimeters, and then enough for a torch to be shone onto him. He tried to make out a face, but the light made him blink.

  “There’s no escape, Inspector Jansen,” said a female voice. “Or should I say Andrew Jackson.” There was a bitter laugh. “Save your strength. You’re going to need it.” The light went out and the door was closed again.

  Doris Carlton-Jones. When had Sara Robbins’s birth mother discovered his true identity? Surely not the first time he’d met her, when the biker shot out his windscreen. Perhaps she’d known all along, and Sara had just been toying with them.

  The front door opened and someone—presumably Mrs. Carlton-Jones—got in. The engine was started and the van moved off. Andy expected the wheelchair to shift, but it had been well-secured.

  He started fumbling with the knife again. His fingers had benefited from the short rest, and he felt the blade move under his thumb, then slip back into position.

  Andy told himself to keep calm, taking deep breaths. He could take the old woman even with his hands tied. As soon as she released the wheelchair, he’d heave it into motion. Someone would see him, someone would call the cops…

  Then he heard the roar of a high-powered motorbike behind the van. It hadn’t been the old woman who had poleaxed him. It must have been Sara Robbins.

  That made him concentrate even harder on the knife.

  Dave had taught us basic first aid. After I’d dressed the wounds on Faik’s thighs and checked there was no infection in his hand, I helped him get dressed. Rog had found some clothes.

  I checked my e-mails again. Still nothing. No text messages, either. I sat by my computer, hitting Send and Receive every minute or so. While I did that, Faik ate his way through two pizzas Pete had heated up for him. In between bites, he told me about the treacherous Kurd who’d been shot, as well as the doctor who had rescued him from the Wolfman. There was no way of knowing the identity of the person wearing the burqa and chador who had shot the Turk, but I was pretty sure it was Lauren Cuthbertson. Faik was almost more appalled that a non-Muslim might have worn the garment than he was by the deaths he had witnessed.

  The young man came from a London community that I knew nothing about, one based on violence and coercion, but also a strange kind of honor. They killed only to protect their business, which was bad enough—but why had Lauren Cuthbertson been murdering gang members? And why had she dismembered the body of the Albanian accountant? Because Sara had told her? There had to be more to it than that. At least killing the surgeon who had disfigured her made some kind of sense—she’d taken revenge, just as the White Devil had done with his first victims. She’d left no traces except that stained and almost illegible note of apology—could that have been for Sara? There had been very little evidence at the crime scenes in East London, too. That smacked of the extreme care that Sara learned from her brother. Had she trained the disfigured young woman from Stoke Newington?

  Were there others like her on Sara’s payroll?

  But I suddenly found myself thinking about Doris Carlton-Jones. Maybe she was the one behind the murders. Could the elderly woman be a cold-blooded killer like her daughter? She’d certainly kept very calm when I was searching her house. She must have called the motorbike rider, presumably Lauren, when I went upstairs. When Andy appeared with the skull (and whose was that?), she took the opportunity, while I was distracted, to dash to the road. The rider wore black leathers and helmet, as Lauren had. Maybe Karen was right when she suggested that Sara had nothing to do with the crime-writer and gangland murders. Maybe she had killed Dave and the former SAS guys, and left the rest to her mother and Lauren. But how would Doris Carlton-Jones have found a stone killer with a ruined face on her own? There wasn’t a
section for those in the Yellow Pages.

  There was a chime from my computer. I leaned forward and saw the name of the new message’s sender: dc-j/urgent. It looked like Sara’s mother was indeed calling the shots. I read what she’d written:

  There’s been enough killing. And enough pretense. I don’t know what you did to poor Lauren, but at least she’s at peace now. I’m sorry for everything she did. I tried to stop her, but she was a different person after the operations. Mr. Wells, I have to tell you that my daughter Sara has contacted me. Apparently someone has been removing large sums of money from her bank accounts. She is sure you are behind that so I have arranged for your friend Andrew Jackson to be taken prisoner. Unless the money is returned to Sara’s accounts, I will have no option but to leave him where he is. It will be a cold, slow and thirsty death, with no chance of him ever being found. When you have returned the money, I will e-mail you from a different address and tell you where your friend is.

  Doris Carlton-Jones

  P.S. I was very glad to find my husband’s skull in Mr. Jackson’s pack. I obtained it at some expense from the undertaker before the cremation, but I grew tired of having it on my dressing-table. It was fitting that I put it in the garage. He spent hours in there every weekend, carving wooden animals for the local children.

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention. The woman was clearly demented. She seemed to be suggesting that Lauren was responsible for all the murders. Perhaps she didn’t know what Sara had done to Dave and the other SAS men. Multiple killers were still at work, including, I was sure, Earl Sternwood. Could Sara be manipulating everyone, including her birth mother? I wouldn’t have put it past her. But what was I to do about Andy?

  I told Rog to start returning the money to Sara’s accounts. He wasn’t happy.

  “Em, what is happening?” Faik asked from close behind me.

  I tried to block the screen. “You don’t want to read that, my friend.”

  He looked at me dubiously. “Are there more like her? Is the killing to go on?”

  I shook my head. “It’s finished,” I said with more conviction than I felt.

  The young Kurd nodded. “I don’t want anyone else to die like the Albanian did.” He headed for the door. “I will send you money for the clothes.”

  “Forget it,” Rog said.

  I gave him my card. “Call me if you need help, okay?”

  He looked at me solemnly. “I’m finished with life on the streets. I’m going to study.”

  “Good for you. What do you want to do?”

  “Teach. I want to make sure kids don’t screw up like me.”

  “Good luck,” I said, extending my hand.

  He nodded solemnly.

  I closed the door behind him. At least one person had come through the cycle of violence to the good. Then I thought of Andy. Was saving him going to be simply a matter of giving back Sara’s money? Every relevant synapse in my brain was pulsing, “No!”

  The Soul Collector was driving the van skillfully, gripped by cold fury. Her motorbike was now in the back, beside the bound American. The woman next to her was silent. They had talked about the death of Lauren May Cuthbertson after her death was confirmed on the radio and decided who would pay for it.

  As they approached the London orbital motorway, Doris Carlton-Jones looked at her daughter.

  “Will he go there?” she asked. “Will he understand?”

  Sara Robbins shook her head. “Matt Wells isn’t smart enough.”

  “Is he smart enough to find Lauren’s people?”

  “Probably.”

  “That may be good for us.”

  The Soul Collector glanced at her passenger. “What do you care? Your part in this is almost over.”

  The older woman looked away. “You’re right,” she said casually. “I don’t care what happens to any of them. What about your money?”

  “Do you seriously imagine that’s important to me? Even if I didn’t have plenty in places no one can find, I’m only interested in one thing—the complete destruction of Matt Wells and everyone he cares for. You’re the one who wants the money back.”

  Doris Carlton-Jones pursed her lips, but didn’t reply.

  Her surviving child drove on to the M25 and headed eastward as fast as the van’s engine would tolerate.

  Woe betide the police officer who stopped her for speeding.

  The more I thought about it, the less I was convinced by Doris Carlton-Jones’s message. It started off sounding reasonable and then talked about Sara as if she was a normal, if rich, person, rather than a calculating killer. And as for the bit about her husband’s skull—how many widows hit the undertakers with a request to remove the deceased’s head? The woman was demented. The question was, how much of her children’s propensity for murder had been inherited? I had an idea why the skull was so shiny. She would have boiled it for days. Bottom line—how much could I trust the woman? Answer—not at all. But that didn’t change the situation with Andy. Even though Sara was getting her money back, he was obviously in serious danger. You wouldn’t want someone like Doris Carlton-Jones to decide whether a friend lived or died.

  Rog confirmed that two of the transfers had been reversed. I looked at my watch. Eleven o’clock. At least we hadn’t been given a deadline this time. I wondered about that. The implication was that Lauren Cuthbertson had written the puzzles containing the crime writers’ names before she killed them. Was she capable or educated enough to come up with such complex riddles? Since I had nothing better to do while Rog was at work, I noted down the details of the dead woman from the ghost site. I might as well see what else I could find out about her.

  When I’d been researching The Death List, Rog had shown me how to access the databases of several government agencies. By good fortune, they covered East London, the area where the White Devil had grown up. I started snooping. I fully expected the security on the Web sites to have been improved over the past couple of years, but it seemed that the agencies hadn’t bothered. In less than five minutes, I was reading Lauren Cuthbertson’s school reports. She’d been to primary and secondary school in Stoke Newington. She had four O-Levels, all in maths and science, but she’d failed English and French. Her teachers said she was an average pupil, whose homework was often poor. There was no mention of her having been disruptive—perhaps she’d stored it all up. She left school at sixteen and was on benefits for two years. When she signed off, it was to work in a supermarket in Hackney. Not exactly master-criminal material.

  I hacked into the G.P. surgery where she was registered. The computerized records only went back five years. She had been prescribed drugs for the swellings on her face, but there was no referral to the Harley Street clinic. Who had arranged and paid for that?

  I sat back in my chair and looked out into the night. The streetlights were dulled by rain that was hitting the windows. I checked my e-mails. Nothing; and no texts from Andy. I went back to the dead woman’s past. The magistrates’ courts: maybe she had a criminal record. I followed the instructions and found myself in a well-maintained archive. Unlike the surgery, the paper records dating back twenty-five years had been scanned and classified. I typed Lauren Cuthbertson’s name in and found a single entry, referring to a shoplifting charge in 1986, her last year at school. I opened the case file. It seemed she had been caught leaving a Woolworths with three music cassettes, a book and a chocolate bar. Because she’d been stopped numerous times before, the store decided to make an example of her. I scrolled down the record. Lauren had been warned as to her future conduct by the magistrates and ordered to do a week’s community service during her next holidays. A fine was not considered appropriate because of her “troubled family situation.” That made me sit up. What family situation? I got into the local Social Services database and searched for her name. She’d been through six different sets of foster parents since she was six, as well as being in care several times. The root of the problem was that her father had murdered
her mother when Lauren was in her first year in primary school. I scrolled down farther. Wrong. Her adoptive father had murdered her adoptive—Jesus, she’d been adopted.

  I felt the blood rush through my veins. The White Devil and his twin, Sara, had also been given up for adoption. That Lauren had, too, was a hell of a coincidence. I got into the Adoption Register. That was tricky because there was a better firewall, but Rog had left me a program to get past it. I typed in Lauren’s full name and waited for the details of her birth parents to come up. It took nearly a minute, but I’d already guessed who her mother was. The archive showed her to be Doris Merilee, now known by her married name, Doris Carlton-Jones. Christ, Sara and the White Devil had a half sister. The records were incomplete, the mother having declared that she’d given birth in France and had lost the certificate. She’d also given a different man’s name as father. That had been enough for me to miss the fact that Sara’s mother had given birth to three rather than two children when I researched my book. All three children had turned out to be murderers. What did that make their mother?

  I told Pete and Rog what I’d discovered.

  “But where does that leave us, Matt?” Boney asked. “Lauren Cuthbertson’s dead. How do we find Sara?”

  “How we find Andy is more urgent,” I said. “Though he and Sara might well be in the same place.”

  “Where are you thinking?” Rog asked.

  “Where’s that cottage you found again?”

  “Oldbury, Berkshire.”

  “Right, we’ll hit it first. If it’s no good, we’ll move on to Earl Sternwood’s castle.”

  We started gathering up our weapons.

  Andy Jackson couldn’t be sure how long the van had been moving, but he guessed it was about two hours when it stopped and the engine turned off. He’d spent the time persevering with the blade, but the movement of the vehicle and the fact that all the nails on his right hand were now broken meant that he hadn’t succeeded. He listened as the front doors were opened. The wind was blowing through trees and he could hear cars in the distance. The curtains didn’t permit any helpful visuals. After stopping and starting frequently in the first half hour of the journey—standard city driving he figured—the van had stopped and a helmeted figure in black leathers had maneuvered the motorbike up a plank into the cargo space. He tried to see where they were out the rear doors and was rewarded with a heavy punch to his jaw.