Stolen Souls

by Stuart Neville

  “Quiet,” he said. “It didn’t hurt, did it?”

  She spoke only to herself, her rambling prayer continuing in that strange language of hers.

  “You could’ve had it with some coffee, maybe a bite to eat, if you’d listened to me earlier. And now look.”

  Her speech slowed and her head dipped toward the floor.

  “But it works quicker like this,” he said, taking a step closer. “You’ll be under in no time. You can sleep, let me take care of everything. Don’t worry, it’ll be all right. You’ll be home soon.”

  She lay still and quiet before he finished speaking, so the man who called himself Billy Crawford set about his work. He did not anticipate any interruptions. It was Christmas Eve, after all.

  49

  LENNON PARKED OUTSIDE the redbrick house, three stories, with a small, unkempt garden. The sort of house that, just three years ago, would have been snapped up by a property developer and split into rented apartments, or renovated to make a luxurious family home. Most of the houses in the area seemed to have gone that way, but not this one.

  He took his phone from his pocket and opened the e-mail. Connolly had copied and pasted the information into the message and attached an image from the ViSOR system. Lennon could see why this profile had rung alarm bells for Connolly: flipping between the photo and the image of the sketch, the similarity was undeniable. The same round face, the same broad nose. No beard, but that didn’t mean anything. It was the slash of pink above the eyebrow that clinched it. The sketch had the scar above the wrong eye—the photograph showed it over the left—but that was clearly a trick of the artist’s memory. This was the man the Lithuanians were looking for, no question.

  Lennon read through the rest of the message, though there was little to add to what Connolly had told him over the phone. The prostitute had been picked up on Sackville Street in Manchester city center at around ten o’clock on a Saturday night and was found tied up in the back of Paynter’s van by traffic police on a routine drunk-driving spot check at seven the following morning somewhere near Salford Precinct.

  Paynter had offered no explanation as to why the young woman was being held captive. She had received only minor injuries during her ordeal, and when interviewed, she stated that her captor had washed her feet while preaching, comparing his actions to those of Jesus. He had then tried to rape her, but was unable to achieve a sufficient state of arousal to carry the assault through.

  Another odd side note was that Paynter had spent some time examining and then cleaning her teeth.

  When it went to trial, Paynter pleaded guilty and did not appear on the stand. The proceedings were wrapped up in a day and a half.

  After his release, Paynter had gone back to his mother’s home off Eccles Old Road and registered as a sex offender. He kept his head down until his mother died two years later. Days after burying her, he notified Greater Manchester Police that he intended to move to Northern Ireland and live with his aunt in Belfast. He was a builder by trade, so the peace-fueled housing boom would have provided him with plenty of work.

  He dutifully registered as a sex offender with the Police Service of Northern Ireland, reporting in when he was required to do so for the next year.

  And then he vanished.

  The investigating officers had done as much as they could, questioning everyone who knew him—and there weren’t many who did—and had come up with nothing. He’d behaved himself since his release, and resources were tight, so his disappearance was not given a great deal of attention after a few weeks.

  The aunt had sworn blind she had no idea where he’d gone, the accountant who filed his last tax return had died of a heart attack, and the building contractor who gave him most of his work had pulled up stakes and moved to Spain as soon as the housing market started to deflate.

  Which left Lennon back at the start of the trail, at the home of Sissy Reid, Paynter’s aunt, whom he had lived with when he first came to Belfast.

  He stashed his phone away and opened the car door. A blast of cold made him curse and shiver. He climbed out, his feet crunching in snow that had not yet turned to the grayish-brown slush he was more familiar with, and locked the car.

  No footprints blemished the white covering on the garden path. He was the first to call here since the snow had begun in earnest that morning, and it looked like no one had exited by the front door in that time either. The windows showed no light.

  Was there even anyone here? The notes had said the aunt had no other family, but perhaps she was spending Christmas with a friend.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” Lennon said to himself, his lone voice sounding hard and dry in the winter air.

  He opened the gate and trudged up to the door.

  No bell.

  He knocked and waited.

  50

  HERKUS FOUND THE cab driver playing a quiz machine in a chip shop on the Antrim Road. The drive there had been quick now that the Christmas shoppers were deserting the city for their warm homes. Even so, Herkus’s patience had worn so thin it had almost disappeared. It wasn’t helped by the throbbing that developed behind his eyes.

  Gordie Maxwell had said the driver’s name was Mackenzie, that he’d be recognizable by the crude UVF tattoo on the back of his hand.

  When Mackenzie realized he was being watched, he turned to Herkus, raised his eyebrows, and said, “Jesus, Gordie said you were a big fucker. He wasn’t joking.”

  Herkus took the envelope from his pocket and showed it to Mackenzie. “This man. Who is he?”

  Mackenzie turned back to his game. “Gordie said there’d be a couple of quid in it for me.”

  “Depend what you tell me,” Herkus said.

  Mackenzie smirked. “And what I tell you depends on what the money’s like. Christmas costs an awful lot these days, and these is hard times and all.”

  The pain scratched at the inside of Herkus’s skull. He cleared his throat. “I ask one time more. Who is he?”

  Mackenzie faced him. “Listen, you Polish cunt, I’m not some hood you can fuck about. You ask anyone around here about me, they’ll tell you—”

  Herkus punched him in the balls. Hard.

  Mackenzie collapsed in a breathless red-faced heap.

  The girl behind the counter squealed. Herkus pointed a scowl and a thick finger at her, and she became quiet and still.

  He crouched down over Mackenzie, who lay in a fetal position, his hands cupping his groin.

  “I am not Polish,” he said. “Now tell me who is this man.”

  Mackenzie went to argue, but Herkus seized his face in one huge hand.

  “I am bad mood,” he said. “Very tired. Don’t make fight with me or I hurt you very bad. You understand?”

  Mackenzie nodded.

  Herkus released his face from his grip. “Okay. So tell me.”

  “All right,” Mackenzie said. “I don’t know for sure if it’s him or not, but there was this fella I used to pick up from some of Roscoe Patterson’s places. You know, where he runs the girls out of. He never used to say nothing, he was always quiet.

  “One of the girls told me he never wanted to do nothing with them, he just wanted to talk to them about religion and stuff, you know, try to convert them. I never thought much of it. There’s some people’s just odd, like.

  “Thing is, he always used to get me to drop him somewhere different. Always somewhere round the Cavehill Road, but never at the one place. Like he didn’t want me to know where he lived.”

  Herkus pushed the envelope with the drawing into Mackenzie’s face. “This man? This is him?”

  “I think so,” Mackenzie said. “Looks like him, anyway, with that scar and all. But this one time, I picked him up from somewhere out near Newtownards and brought him back to the Cavehill Road. The fare was like twelve pound or something, and he gave me the money and got out. But then after I drove off I sees, fuck, he only gave me a fiver and two ones.”

  Mackenzie raised himself to a sitting
position, keeping his knees apart so as to avoid aggravating his already tender groin.

  “So I turned round to see if I could find the cheeky bastard,” he said. “I saw him cutting up an entryway to the next street over, one of them as faces onto the waste ground, and I caught up to him outside this house just as he was about to go inside. The way he looked at me when I called after him, I thought he was going to go for me. I swear to God, I thought, this fella’s a nut job.”

  Herkus stood upright and hauled Mackenzie to his feet.

  “Where is this house?” he asked.

  51

  ITOLD YOU LOT before, I don’t know where he is.”

  Sissy Reid peered through a six-inch gap at Lennon, “ keeping the door between them. A Pomeranian barked at him from behind her legs. She kicked it back with her heel.

  “I didn’t know two years ago, and I don’t know now,” she said, and went to close the door.

  Lennon blocked it with his hand. “Even so, I’d like to have a quick chat with you about Edwin. Inside might be better.”

  She scowled. “On Christmas Eve? Have you nothing better to be doing?”

  “Yes, I do,” Lennon said. “But I’m doing this instead. The sooner you let me in, the sooner I’ll leave you in peace.”

  She sighed and stepped back.

  He followed her through her hallway and into the living room. She sat down on an armchair facing the television, on which an old Doris Day film played. Colored lights blinked on a small Christmas tree that sat on the hearth, an open tin of Quality Street chocolates beside it. Half a dozen Christmas cards stood on the mantelpiece.

  When none was offered, Lennon took a seat anyway, facing her from the couch. A puff of stale urine odor escaped from the cushion, displaced by his weight. The dog yipped at him all the while, dashing in circles.

  “Shut up, Dixie,” she snapped.

  The dog whined and settled by her slippered feet. It continued to glare at him, low growls coming from its throat.

  Sissy reached for the remote control, muted the sound, but continued to stare at Doris’s flirtations with Rock Hudson.

  “Go on, then,” she said.

  “When was the last time you saw him?” Lennon asked.

  “I couldn’t tell you exactly, but it was more than two years ago.”

  “What was the weather like?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Was it warm and sunny? Cold and wet?”

  She shrugged. “There was a wee nip in the air.”

  “Was it dark or light outside?”

  “Just getting dark,” she said. “I was still working at the time, and I’d just got home when he was setting off.”

  “You’d just got home. So around six o’clock, then?”

  “No, more like seven that night, I think.”

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  “I was a home help,” she said. “You know, getting tea for them that can’t do it for themselves, lighting their fires, putting out their rubbish, that kind of thing.”

  “And it was getting dark, so maybe October time?”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “Did he have any friends?”

  “No, not Edwin,” she said. “Not really. He knew people, like, but no one he really socialized with. He kept himself to himself. Quiet, but chatty when he wanted to be. He could be awful nice at times, then other times he could be crooked as anything.

  “He got that from his mother. My sister. She always had a wee bit of a lacking in her. I knew she’d wind up in the state she did.”

  “What state was that?” Lennon asked.

  “In a mental home, screaming at the walls. I sometimes think Edwin couldn’t help turning out the way he did, being raised by the likes of that.”

  “Was he born here?” Lennon asked.

  “No, over the water. Cora was a wild wee girl. Always chasing after the boys. Always thinking they’d like her better if she let them have their way with her. No sense in her at all. She got worse when the soldiers came. Throwing herself at them, she was. And she was a pretty enough wee thing, so she had plenty of soldiers wanted to take her out. Course, she didn’t have the wit to keep her legs closed, so they got what they wanted and that was that until she chased after another one. She had our poor Ma’s heart broke. There was more than one time she had to get herself sorted, and not by a doctor, if you know what I mean.”

  The corners of her mouth turned down in distaste at the idea.

  “Then there was this one soldier, he was near for coming out of the army when he took up with her. He mustn’t have been wise himself, ’cause next thing you know, they’re going together. Like boyfriend and girlfriend, I mean. So when he finishes his tour, they get married.”

  Sissy’s eyes grew distant as she spoke, memories playing out behind them, the flickering light of the television reflected in their sheen.

  “I remember it well. A registry office do, not even a church. She was starting to show then. Our Ma took us both into town to get new dresses for it, and she near died when she saw the belly on Cora in the fitting rooms. She slapped the head off her right there in the shop. Jesus, I can still hear the screams of her.

  “It was a disgrace in them days to get pregnant out of wedlock, not like today. These days the wee girls pop out babies left, right and center, doesn’t matter if there’s a daddy for them or not.

  “Anyway, thank God yous’re getting married, my Ma says, and that was that. There was no reception to speak of, just five of us in the pub with a plate of sandwiches. Cora and her fella, some mate of his, me and our Ma. Cora and the two boys got pissed as farts. Girls didn’t worry about drinking when they were pregnant in them days. Me and our Ma drank a half a Guinness each and left them to it.”

  She paused, eyed Lennon. “You have any youngsters?”

  “A little girl,” Lennon said.

  Sissy clucked and shook her head. “Wee girls are the worst. They’ll break your heart.”

  Lennon did not answer, so she sighed and continued.

  “So off they went to England. Salford, to be exact, that’s part of Manchester.”

  “I know,” Lennon said.

  “Well, I didn’t. Not until I went over to see them one Easter. Awful auld hole they lived in. Top floor of a house, one bedroom, a sink in the corner of the living room, and a toilet they had to share with some darkies that lived downstairs. Three days I was there, and I never saw the husband once. He was out drinking all the time, chasing other women, any sort of badness he could get himself in to.

  “And Cora was going downhill by then. She did her best to let on nothing was wrong, but you could tell she was coming apart. You know when someone drops in on you unexpected, and you tidy the place in a panic? You know, shoving magazines behind the couch, throwing dirty dishes in the sink, that kind of thing? That’s what she was like. Not the house, I mean, but in herself. Like she’d scraped up all the madness and tidied it away. But you could see it there, behind her eyes.

  “And wee Edwin. He was maybe five or six at the time. Hardly the clothes to stand up in. I brought him an Easter egg and you’d have thought it was the last bit of chocolate on earth the way he took into it. But I didn’t see much of him that weekend either. Cora used to lock him in the bedroom with a Bible. Hours and hours in there.

  “Aye, she got religion while she was away. Of a sort, anyway. All weekend, she kept trying to convert me. I told her, I says, I go to the Church of Ireland every Sunday morning with our Ma, and that’s enough God and Jesus to see me through to the next Sunday. I didn’t need no preaching off the likes of her. But still she kept at it, nonstop.

  “In the end up I lost my patience with her and said a few things that needed saying. She didn’t take too kindly to that, so she put me out. I remember waiting for a taxi out in the rain, wee Edwin watching me from the bedroom window, that round face of his up against the glass. I waved at him the once but he didn’t wave back. Just kept staring.


  “We didn’t hear a peep from her for another year till our Ma got a letter saying the husband had died. Fell piss drunk into the canal and drowned. Our Ma wrote back, said Cora could come home to us if she wanted, but we never heard anything more. Not until she finally lost the head altogether and got put away.

  “Edwin was twelve or thirteen by then. When they found him, he’d been locked in the bedroom for more than a week, nothing but the Bible to keep him from going mad himself. He was lucky there was a washbasin in the bedroom, or he’d have died in there.

  “We wanted him to come to Belfast to stay with me and our Ma—he was her only grandchild, and she’d never set eyes on him—but the granny on the father’s side objected. She said she didn’t want him coming to this place, with all the killings going on. Can’t say I blamed her. You look old enough to remember what this place was like in the eighties.” “I remember,” Lennon said.

  “Aye, well, not many of us had it easy. As far as I know, when he turned eighteen, he took Cora into his care. I didn’t hear anything more from them until she died. I never went to the funeral. It was over there somewhere.

  “But not long after that, I got a phone call from him asking if he could come and stay with me. I was a bit wary, I’ll be honest with you, seeing as I didn’t really know him from Adam. But our Ma had passed on a year before, and I was finding it lonely here by myself, so I thought, what harm could it do?”

  She wagged a finger at Lennon.

  “I’ll tell you something, though. If I’d known about the other, the prison and the sex offender business, I wouldn’t have let him come near me. But by the time I found out about all that, sure it was too late.”

  When Sissy finished speaking she appeared deflated, as if the words had taken all the air out of her. Lennon considered ending the questioning, but knew she was the only connection to the man he sought.

  “What about women?” he asked. “Did he have any girlfriends here? Anyone he brought back? Anyone he visited?”

  “God, no,” she said. “Not unless you count wee Mrs. Crawford.”