The Soul Collector

Sixteen

I was woken by a hand shaking my shoulder.

“Matt? You’ve got to see this.” Pete’s expression was a mixture of anger and dismay.

“What is it?” I asked, sitting up and stretching my arms. I looked at my watch and saw it was eight-thirty.

Rog was sitting in front of a computer. He looked over his shoulder. “Morning, Matt. Take a deep breath.”

I rubbed my eyes and bent over to read the text that was displayed. I immediately recognized the layout of the Daily Indie’s Web site. Then I started to read.

“‘American Novelist Murdered-Five Questions for Matt Wells.’”

I sat down heavily on the chair that Pete had brought over. “What is this?”

“That scumbag Jeremy Andrewes seems to think you’re behind the killings,” Rog said.

After a description of the event, written in a tone more appropriate to the paper’s tabloid rivals, came the questions:

One-why did Matt Wells’s name appear on a note left on Sandra Devonish’s body?

Two-why is Matt Wells not answering any of his phones?

Three-what is the connection between this murder and the shooting of Matt Wells’s close friend David Cummings?

Four-has Matt Wells been in contact with his former lover, Sara Robbins, sister of the notorious White Devil?

And, five-does Matt Wells hate his fellow crime writers so much that he could kill them?

There followed a lengthy list of my supposed transgressions at crime-writing festivals and events, largely based on the testimony of the bullshit-merchant Josh Hinkley. Throwing him out of my apartment had obviously not been such a smart move.

“How much of this is true?” Rog asked.

“A bit,” I admitted. “But it’s all been given the worst possible spin. For instance, I did pour a pint of beer over Josh Hinkley in Manchester, but that was because he kept feeling up my publicist. I did tell Sandra Devonish to fuck off, but we were both rat-arsed, and she said it to me first. And I suppose, though my memory’s a bit hazy about this, I might have called the Crime Writers’ Society ‘the Jurassic Park of literature’ during an event in Aberdeen, but that was probably because bleeding Josh had called it something much worse. I could kick that wanker’s teeth in.”

“Probably not a good idea at this current juncture,” Pete said.

There was a series of knocks on the door.

Pete walked over, silenced Glock in hand. He looked through the spy-hole. “Slash,” he said, taking off the chain and letting the American in.

“Goddamn English weather!” he said, shaking his soaked blond mop. He was carrying a flagon of milk in one hand and a large bag of shopping in the other.

I scrolled down the rest of the article. There was a section about Sandra Devonish, mentioning her best-known books and the movies that had been made from them-one was pretty good, I remembered. There was also what was obviously a publicity photo of her standing against one of those huge cacti in a red desert. Then there was a sanctimonious wrap-up from Jeremy Andrewes, in which he regretted putting “this paper’s own crime columnist on the spot,” but that “the truth and the need for the police to carry out their duties without interference from a misguided crime writer take precedence over personal considerations.” He wouldn’t be getting a Christmas card from me again.

“What now?” Pete asked, patting my shoulder.

“I have to make sure that Lucy, my mother and Caroline, let alone everyone else, have checked in okay,” I said.

“Breakfast coming up,” Andy said.

I took out my laptop and logged on to my e-mail server. Everyone had sent confirmation messages. I knew that Caroline would be climbing the walls wherever she and the others were, especially if she’d seen Jeremy Andrewes’s article. There wasn’t anything I could do about that. I thought about contacting Karen. It would have been easy enough to send her an e-mail or a text, but I didn’t want to. The bottom line was that any message from me would compromise her even more in the eyes of her boss and of her team. We were going to have to work out our own solutions to this nightmare. She’d be up to her ears in other business anyway, given Dave’s murder and what looked like the start of a serious gang war in the East End.

Andy prepared the usual gargantuan breakfast, but none of us was complaining. We might not get the chance to eat for some time, and sitting around the table gave us the opportunity to work out a plan of action.

“I vote we go and throw those shitheads into the river,” Andy said, dipping a sausage into the yolk of a fried egg.

“You mean Andrewes and Hinkley?” I said. “I’ll get them when this is all over. The question is, what do we do now?”

Pete was fastidiously cutting away the rind from his bacon. “Are you going to stay underground, so to speak?”

I’d been thinking about that. Although the Daily Indie had demanded that I report to New Scotland Yard-having really pushed the boat out by making my relationship with Karen public-there was nothing in the article or in any of the other papers’ coverage saying that the police wanted to see me. Obviously Karen did, in order to stop me chasing Sara, but I hadn’t done anything illegal-apart from carry a pistol, and no one had any proof of that.

“I can’t see the point in breaking cover,” I said. “The only way we’re going to get close to Sara is to use what we know. If we share it with the cops, Sara will respond either with a killing spree or a rapid disappearance.”

“Or both,” Rog said, raising his knife.

“Thanks for that, Dodger.” I looked around the table. “Where do we start, then?”

“Well, we’ve got the three properties that Sara bought in the southeast,” Rog said. “The flat in Hackney, the house in Oxford and the farmhouse in Kent.”

“True enough,” I said, “not that she’s necessarily using them.”

“She’s probably got them booby-trapped,” Pete said.

Andy grunted. “Probably. What about your millionaire friends, Boney? Have they seen her recently?”

Pete shook his head. “The last actual sighting I have of her is in Zurich nearly a year ago.”

“What do you think she looks like now?” Rog asked, pushing his plate away.

I glanced over at him. “How do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Well, she’s hardly going to be letting the CCTV cameras of the capital record her as she was two years ago. She’s a fugitive, isn’t she? Wanted for her part in several murders. At the very least she’s going to be using disguises.”

“Good point, Dodger,” Pete said. Then he frowned. “What do you mean, ‘at the very least’?”

Rog grinned. “Ever heard of a thing called cosmetic surgery, Boney?”

“Shit,” I said, dropping my cutlery. “That would make our job a whole lot harder.”

Andy shook his head. “I don’t see why. We just nail anyone acting suspiciously. She’s probably hired people anyway.”

“That would be ‘nail’ as in what you failed to do with the motorbike rider you saw trying to hand something to Sara’s birth mother?” I asked with more sarcasm than he deserved. He shouldn’t have called me Oates.

“Steady on, Matt,” Pete said. “The last thing we should be doing is taking shots at each other.”

“Quite right,” I said, raising my hand. “Sorry, Slash.”

“Forget it,” he said with a grin. “I’m not the person on the front page of the newspaper.”

That made us laugh, but not for long. Andy brought over another pot of coffee and we refilled.

“Okay,” I said. “Plan. For a start, we’re not doing anything on our own. We stay in pairs. That way we reduce the chances of being surprised by Sara or her sidekicks.”

“How about checking the properties?” Rog asked. “For a start, there’s the one in Hackney. That shouldn’t take long.”

I nodded. “Okay. Who’s going to do that?”

Pete looked around the table. “We haven’t decided on pairs yet.”

“Boney, why don’t you do that with Andy?” I suggested.

They both agreed.

“What about us?” Rog asked me.

“I need to keep checking my e-mails in case Doctor Faustus or Flaminio sends another clue,” I replied. “In the meantime, you can start tinkering with those bank accounts of Sara’s you’ve been logging.”

“Tinkering with them?”

“Yes, Dodger,” I said, with a thin smile. “I want you to transfer as much as you can from them into a new account in my name. That should get her attention pretty quickly.”

“Way to go, Matt!” Andy said.

“Yeah,” said Pete. “Make her squirm!”

I suddenly felt a wave of emotion. Up till now we had basically been chasing the game, but now we were going on the attack. The question was, how many people were going to end up dead before we flushed Sara out?

Karen Oaten was sitting in front of the assistant commissioner’s desk, in a low chair that she was sure he had carefully chosen to emphasize his superior position.

“Tell me, Karen,” he said, flicking a speck of dirt from his uniform tunic. “What are you doing to find Matt Wells?”

She tried not to sigh too obviously. It was clear that her boss had paid more attention to the Daily Independent than the other papers. Then again, the Matt Wells angle was sure to be copied across the media as the day progressed.

“I’ve applied to have his phones tapped and his Internet service provider monitored.” She rubbed her forehead. “But it’s likely that he’s using other numbers and sites. He’s been preparing for Sara Robbins’s return for some time.”

“Is that who you think murdered the two crime writers?”

“There’s no evidence of it, though the note mentioning Matt suggests someone with an agenda. Sara Robbins did threaten him in an e-mail after the White Devil’s death.”

The AC picked up an expensive-looking pen and held it like a surveyor judging an angle. “I have to tell you, Karen, that questions are being asked about your team. The outbreak of killings in East London is unlikely to have come to an end. The shooting of the Shadow hard man by someone wearing Muslim women’s clothes is going to make things worse. I understand you’ve kept Ron Paskin in charge.”

“Yes, sir. He has the experience and the manpower to handle it.”

The AC raised an eyebrow. “Is that a hint that you need more bodies, Chief Inspector?”

“I always need more bodies,” Oaten replied. “At least, living ones. My monthly report has stressed the need for more detectives and support staff in the VCCT ever since I arrived.”

“Just be thankful you have a team to command at all,” the AC said firmly. “There are plenty of senior personnel in the divisional homicide units who would be delighted to see the disbandment of what they feel is the interfering VCCT.”

“Yes, sir. I am aware of that.”

The man behind the desk opened a file. “No fresh leads in the Mary Malone case?”

“No, sir.”

He opened another file. “The Dave Cummings shooting?”

“No, sir.”

The AC looked down at her. “And the Eastern Division murders? Are they just tit-for-tat gang idiocy?”

Karen Oaten held his gaze. “I’m keeping an open mind, sir. Do you know something I don’t?”

“I have spoken to Detective Superintendent Paskin, but he assures me he’s copied you on all the case notes.” The AC pushed his chair back and stood up. “Come on, Karen,” he said. “Don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence? A series of murders starts that we can link, at least in principle, to Sara Robbins, and at the same time someone starts taking out gang members in East London?”

Karen chewed her lip. The thought had occurred to her. She didn’t like the feeling, not least because the idea was interesting. She decided to play devil’s advocate.

“There’s no evidence whatsoever tying the crime-writer murders even to that of Dave Cummings, let alone to the East End killings, sir.”

“Indeed there isn’t,” the AC said, looking at the photograph of the Metropolitan Police rugby union team that he had captained. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some connection.”

If Amelia Browning had come up with an evidence-free idea like that, Karen would have sent her off with a verbal slap. But the AC wasn’t prone to flights of fancy and he did have an outstanding record as a detective. She knew that she’d be a fool to ignore his input, even if it was nothing more than a hunch.

“So you want me to take over the cases from Ron Paskin, do you, sir?”

“Not necessarily,” her boss replied. “Just consider the possibility that there’s more to the gangland murders than meets the eye.”

“Right, sir,” Oaten said, standing up.

“By the way, how’s that young sergeant coming along?”

“Amelia Browning? She’s keen and I think she’ll make the grade.”

The AC opened the door of his office. “Good. I had a feeling she would when we interviewed her.”

As she left, Karen twitched her head. The AC might have given the impression of being the most straitlaced of commanders, but he had the ability to put his finger on things with unerring accuracy. It was about time she did the same, if she wanted to remain in charge of her team.

I watched as Rog’s fingers flew over the keyboard like a concert pianist’s. He had already managed to transfer a million dollars from an account in Venezuela to the one he’d set up in my name in London. Now he was working on the sum of two million in an Indian bank. I’d asked him before he started if he was happy about breaking the laws of numerous countries.

He just shrugged and said, “Whatever it takes to get Sara off your back.”

Sometimes my friends made me feel very humble.

Andy and Pete had left, armed and wearing baseball caps with large peaks. I didn’t think anyone would be looking for them on the CCTV cameras that were everywhere in the city these days, but there was no point in risking it. I had the feeling we were going to have to resort to disguises before the chase was over and I didn’t want to use them up prematurely.

After I’d checked our weapons and ammunition clips, I sat in front of my laptop, trying to resist the temptation to check my e-mails obsessively. It wasn’t long before I succumbed. There was nothing of importance. While I was on the Internet, I decided to have a look at the Crime Writers’ Society Web site. I got an unpleasant surprise.

Josh Hinkley had posted a call for my immediate expulsion, on the grounds that I had brought the Society into disrepute because of my “cowardly refusal to help the police.” Fortunately, there were several other members who wrote in to say that Josh was, in varying degrees of politeness, full of shit. What the hell was wrong with him? Obviously he was in bed with Jeremy Andrewes, but that was just a publicity gimmick. I knew Josh was jealous of the fact that The Death List had sat at the top of the bestseller list for months. But laying into me on a private site was another story. Then I remembered something Andy had said. What if Sara had got to Josh? He was sufficiently lacking in morals to work for her, especially if there was money involved. Then I had another, even worse thought. What if Josh had murdered Mary Malone and Sandra Devonish?

I got up and walked over to the window. The street below was full of slow-moving cars and the pavements were busy. Somewhere out there, I was sure, Sara was plotting her next move. Could it really be that Josh Hinkley was doing the same thing? Maybe Sara had killed Dave, but it was Josh who had killed the crime writers, entirely on his own. Jesus, the nightmare was getting even worse. How many vicious bastards were out there? I thought of the gangland killings in the east of the city. The answer to that question was, plenty. But Josh Hinkley a serial killer? He had a nasty side, and he certainly loathed crime writers who sold better than he did-Mary Malone and Sandra Devonish both came into that category, as had I with my book. Plus, he was doing his best to put me in the frame for the American’s murder. Was that to keep the spotlight off him?

I went back to my laptop.

“That’s it,” Rog said, turning to me. “You’re now three million dollars better off.”

“What’s next?”

“A juicy little bank in Costa Rica, with a security system that a child could break. She’s got two million in there.” He grinned. “But not for long.”

“Shouldn’t you take a break?” I said. “I mean, log off so that there’s no chance of you being traced.”

“Trust me, Matt, there’s never been any chance of me being traced.”

I let him get on with it, wishing I had a skill that would help find Sara. But I didn’t, so I checked my e-mails again. Christ. There was a message from a sender called thethirdisaman, and the title was “Something rotten in the state of Matt Wells.” The killer was back in touch. I opened the message and read:

Did you like it, Matt? The clue, I mean. Actually, there were any number of clues in the sentence I gave you, but you didn’t get any of them. So, because I’m a gentle soul at heart, I’m giving you some help this time. Note the sender of this message. That means the next victim, my third, is a…have you got it yet? That’s right, a man. Clever crime writer. Why should you trust me? Well, have I lied to you yet? Sandra Devonish-you knew her from those ego-boosting conferences you used to go to in the States, didn’t you? — was lying in the shape of the cross. And why was that? Because I am Doctor Faustus and I have made a deal with the devil. If I gather souls for him, I can do anything I like-and, unlike Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus, I don’t have a time limit. I can continue for as long as I want, or until you catch me. There’s been no evidence so far of you pulling that off. Oh, and just to be sure that you know I’m the real deal-I spitted the lovely Sandra with a single thrust to the heart, and I left the Grateful Dead playing “Friend of the Devil.” Neat, eh?

I suppose I’d better give you the next clue now. Here we go:

The river shrinks bears

And the ice crows for a wife.

The lean man’s imperial heiress

Is the thirsty draw of nothing.

If you don’t work that out, there’s no hope for you, Matt. Or rather, there’s no hope for the person whose name is hidden in that verse. As this clue’s so easy, I’m not giving you more time. You’ve got until midnight tonight to answer. I’ll be e-mailing you at 11:59. Don’t be slow in replying…

In blood,

D.F. alone

(Flaminio’s on a break)

“Fucking hell,” I said.

Rog came over and read the message. “Oh, great,” he said. “Now the cow’s writing poems.”

“Sara never showed any interest in poetry when I knew her. Then again, this isn’t exactly at Seamus Heaney’s level.”

Rog looked at me as if he wasn’t sure who that was, but he didn’t have the nerve to admit it.

“Nobel literature prize winner,” I said. “From Northern Ireland.”

“I knew that,” he replied indignantly, hitting Print. In a few seconds we were both poring over hard copies.

I looked at my watch. It was eleven-thirty. We had just over twelve hours. I went back online and forwarded the message to my mother. At least she’d have more time to work on it this time.

“Can you run it through your decryption programs, Dodger?”

He nodded. “There’s something going on here, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

I looked at the clue. “There’s a truckload of things going on,” I said. “Water, the cold, crows-the most intelligent of birds, but they’re also linked with death, since they eat carrion.”

“Charming,” Rog said.

“‘Lean,’” I continued. “That could be a reference to thin or starving, linking up with ‘thirsty’ in the last line. ‘Imperial’ suggests power, colonies-”

“Mints.”

I put my elbow in his ribs. “Be serious. An heiress is a female child, one who stands to inherit something-a country, an empire?”

“Not if she’s hungry and thirsty. She’ll be dead-like the next victim.”

“Thanks a bunch, Dodger. Run your programs, will you?”

I let him get on with that. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t making any more transfers from Sara’s accounts for the time being. He’d done enough to attract her attention. I thought about sending Karen the clue. That way I’d at least protect myself from criticism of the kind Jeremy Andrewes and Josh Hinkley had poured over me. But when it came out that I’d been in contact with the police, Sara or whoever was playing at Doctor Faustus would know I’d broken the rule. That might lead to even more innocent people being murdered, including my family and the guys. No, I had to keep the clue secret. That decision almost crushed me.

I struggled to my feet and went over to the bookcase. Rog’s cousin had a decent dictionary and thesaurus, as well as a one-volume encyclopedia. I took them to the dining table, along with the hard copy of the message. Then I started checking every word for synonyms-I didn’t bother with antonyms at this stage as there were no negatives in the poem. I also split up the lines into couplets, since each pair formed a sentence. I was working on the idea that each would give me a name. It was possible that every line did that, making four names, but I reckoned the existence of sentences was significant. If the first clue was anything to go by, there would be more than one definition of each name, and the writer had said that this clue was easier than the previous one. Two names, but they weren’t necessarily in the right order.

I sat back in my chair. Was the third victim, supposedly a male, another crime writer? I’d made the mistake of not following up that angle the last time. I hadn’t brought the Crime Writers’ Society directory with me, but I could access the online version. Then again, that wouldn’t have helped me with Sandra Devonish-foreign writers could join as overseas members, but most didn’t. I considered going down the list of names, trying to fit each one to the clue, but that would have taken more hours than I had. There was no choice but to split the clue into its constituent parts-sentences, lines, words, syllables, even individual letters. I was sure there were puns and wordplay in action. I was useless at spotting those in cryptic crosswords, but my mother wasn’t. I would check the ghost site for her input soon.

In the meantime, I looked at the rest of the message. The tone was sardonic, just what I would have expected from Sara. But there were a couple of points that didn’t ring true. By the time I knew her, I’d stopped going to crime-writing conferences as I couldn’t afford them. How did the writer know that I’d met Sandra Devonish? She was only a passing acquaintance, someone I’d drunk with in a group a couple of times. I was sure I hadn’t mentioned her to Sara, who’d never shown much interest in crime novelists anyway. Had she been talking to some other crime writer, who’d witnessed me and Sandra in the bar at the conference hotels? Who could that be? Josh Hinkley was a likely suspect, but hundreds of people attended those events, the majority of them fans and booksellers rather than writers. It would be a serious struggle to identify the source of information, and a waste of precious time.

The other thing that struck me as anomalous was the whole Doctor Faustus angle. Although Sara had been brought up by her foster parents as a Catholic, she’d never shown the slightest interest in religion-in fact, one of the things that I thought kept us together was a mutual impatience with all things divine or paranormal. I forced myself to see the Sara who had betrayed me as a devil-worshipper like Faustus, but that didn’t ring true. For one thing, she was too conceited about her own abilities to make any kind of Faustian pact. Besides, she didn’t need the devil’s help. She’d already had plenty from her brother and she could hire as much as she wanted.

I went on with the lists of alternatives. Somehow it was easier to live with the idea of Sara as the writer of the messages. If there was another ruthless killer out there, my chances of surviving would be halved.

The aristocrat put down his coffee cup and got up from the long table. His ancestors had eaten from it for over two hundred years, and it would cost a small fortune to restore it; a small fortune he didn’t have. The first earl had been ennobled by King George II for generously supporting the country’s foreign wars. The origins of the family wealth had been in slaves, tobacco and the port wine trade-about as politically incorrect as you could get nowadays. But there was none of that left. The present earl had spent far too much on his private interests, not that he regretted a penny of it.

He strolled out onto the terrace that ran the length of the family seat. It was a fine spring morning, the dew burning off in clouds of steam in the light of the sun. The prize-winning herd of Aberdeen Angus cattle was grazing in the field to the left of the arrow-straight road that bisected the open panorama ahead. The site had been carefully chosen and landscaped to keep the Berkshire countryside below out of sight. On the right were the goats that produced overpriced and foul-tasting organic cheese. The earl never ate any cheese other than Stilton. Loyalty to the traditions of England was paramount.

He stepped briskly across the uneven flagstones, the steel caps of his brogues clicking loudly. The main facade of the castle, with its high, mullioned windows, dated from the 1750s, but at the western end it had been built onto the original medieval stronghold. The gray limestone bastion stood up to receive the sunlight, rooks circling above the red-and-black family flag-in its center was the coat of arms, a unicorn rampant on a silver background. The first earl had carried out his own researches into the supernatural.

His heir paused at the bottom of the great fifteenth-century wall of the fortress. It had never been taken in battle or siege. On one occasion, the defenders had been forced to eat the horses and then every other living thing inside. Foot soldiers and archers, who complained that their womenfolk had been slaughtered for meat by their commander, were hung from the walls after the siege had been lifted. Because the country needed strong leaders, he had never been prosecuted. That set an example to his descendants.

A cell phone rang inside the earl’s tweed jacket. He answered it and spoke briefly, then walked around the tower, the bottoms of his cavalry twill trousers absorbing dew from the grass not yet reached by the sun. By the great studded door, he stopped for a moment before taking out a set of keys and opening the three locks that had been set into the black-painted wood.

Inside, the air was dry. The original ceilings were no longer there, only the firing slits remaining. They had never been closed up. It was good to have fresh air in the refurbished bastion. The second earl had no doubt found that necessary. He had been involved in a Hell-fire Club at Oxford that had been notorious for unbridled licentiousness and depravity. The university authorities had eventually reprimanded the unruly students, though only commoners were sent down-the scions of noble families were given a metaphorical clip on the ear and left to find new ways to corrupt themselves. When he was older, the second earl set up his own version of a Hell-fire Club in this very fortification. It was rumored that defrocked ministers and former monks made merry with willing nuns and local wenches carted in for the ceremonies. It had also been said that few of the latter were ever seen again.

The present earl breathed in the castle’s air, then turned on his heel after satisfying himself that the grated window at ground level was immovable. Pulling the door to, he heard the scream of a peacock, one of several he allowed to wander the grounds.

As he walked back along the front terrace, His Lordship caught sight of himself in one of the windows. He stopped and tightened his regimental tie-he had been a captain in the Queen’s Own Horse Guards-then smoothed a hand over his well-disciplined and still jet-black hair. Despite his fifty-five years, he was slim and fit. His uneven face was smoothly shaved by the cutthroat razor he stropped every day. It was a matter for regret that he had produced no son and heir. His wife, Priscilla, had died three years ago, of complications following a supposedly routine breast remodelling procedure. She was past child-bearing age, anyway. There was still time for him to marry again and continue the bloodline. If he could find a suitable bride.

The phone rang again. The earl’s expression lightened after he answered it. He went back inside through the main entrance.

Soon there would be another rite for him to preside over.