Stolen Souls

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.