The Soul Collector (10 page)

“This is Andy. Get in here, both of you. The house is clear.”

The American came thundering down the stairs, then
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unlocked the front and back doors. I felt his hand on my shoulder again.

“Come on, Wellsy,” he said, “let’s get you out of here.”

“No!” I screamed. “I can’t leave him! I’m not leaving him on his own.”

“Fucking hell,” Rog said, retching. He ran out, a hand to his mouth.

“What the…” Pete was standing next to us, his mouth slack. “What animal did this?”

“You…you know who did it,” I said, staring up at them through the blur of tears. “It was… It must have been Sa…Sa…” I couldn’t complete the name of the woman I had once loved. But even if she had been the one who’d pulled the trigger, I knew I was the true author of Dave’s death. If I had refused to get involved with the White Devil, this would never have happened. I felt the weight of that knowledge bear down on me. The sight of my friend’s ruined body added years to my life in a few seconds.

Pete and Andy pulled me to my feet and walked me out of the room. I wiped my eyes with the back of my arm and saw Rog leaning over the kitchen sink, a string of vomit hanging from his lower lip.

“Call…call Karen,” I said as they sat me at the breakfast table. Andy dug in his pocket for his phone.

“No,” I said, batting his arm away. “Me. You have to go, all of you. I’m…I’m responsible.”

“Screw that,” Pete said. “We haven’t done anything wrong.”

Andy lifted up his automatic and pointed at the case that held the sniper’s rifle. “Um, I think you’re wrong there, Boney.” He stuck his empty hand out at me. “Come 90

Paul Johnston

on, Matt. Hand ’em over. Glock, knife, walkie-talkie, everything you’ve got.”

I complied, too numb to protest. He was right. There was no point in me putting Karen in a difficult position by being in possession of an illegal firearm.

“Car key, as well,” Andy said. “I’ll drive the Saab around here for you, okay?”

Pete gripped my wrist. “You don’t have to stay here on your own, Matt,” he said. “You can come with us. Karen will understand.”

I shook my head. “No, Boney. I have to do this.” I swallowed a sob. “For Dave.”

“You two go,” Pete said, tossing keys to the Cherokee to Rog. “I’ll meet you at the end of the road.”

Andy nodded at me, and then pushed Rog gently to the back door. “Lock this after us,” he said to Pete. I pushed my chair back and stood up.

“What are you doing?” Boney asked. “Don’t—”

I swerved past him, my breathing ragged. There were two things I had to do before Dave was taken beyond my reach. I forced myself to look at the remains of the bravest man I’d ever known. I was looking for a message—the White Devil had inserted messages inside many of his victims’ bodies. His mouth was partially open. I kneeled down and mumbled an apology to him, though I knew he would have understood. I was still wearing a glove. Trying to ignore the torn tissue and splintered bone, I moved his jaws farther apart and peered inside, blinking away my tears. There was nothing. I couldn’t find any pieces of paper inside his blood-drenched trousers. I had to move him to each side to get to the back pockets. His blood transferred to my jacket, and I swore to myself that I’d never wash it again. I took off his shoes, but again didn’t
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find a thing. It was beyond me to put them back on the feet that had carried him past despairing opposition players so often on the rugby pitch.

Rocking back on my heels, I took in the mutilated face and legs. The White Devil had been dispatched by pistol shots to the head, and I was certain Dave’s wounds were a deliberate imitation of that. She had also shot him in the legs back then—those wounds had been repeated. Perhaps those were the only messages I was going to get this time. They were enough.

I stood up and bent over the body. Then I took off my glove and closed Dave’s eyes beneath the partially congealed slick of blood. I didn’t care that my fingerprints would be on the eyelids. There were some duties that friends had to discharge, whatever the circumstances. I leaned close and spoke to my friend for the last time.

“We’ll get her, Dave, I promise you that. And we’ll look after Ginny and the…and Tom and Annie.” His son was the same age as Lucy, his daughter two years older. The horror that they would have to face made me blink hard. Then I opened my eyes again and inhaled the coppery smell of fresh blood.

“No matter how far she goes, I’ll be on her tail,” I said, standing up straight.

There was only one more thing to say—the catchphrase that everyone who played for South London Bisons used when a game seemed to be lost.

“No mercy, no surrender.”

Pete arrived at my side. He repeated the words, and then turned me around, gently but insistently. In the hall, I took out my phone and called Karen.

“Dave’s been murdered,” I said, the words singeing my 92

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mouth. I gave her the address. After I’d hung up, I turned to Pete. “You’d better get moving.”

He pushed me back toward the kitchen. “Let him be now,” he said. “Don’t go back in there.”

I nodded my agreement. I had no appetite to see Sara’s handiwork again. Besides, I wanted to check the rest of the house. It was possible she’d left a message somewhere else and I didn’t want the police to find it first. After about ten minutes I heard sirens. But by that time I’d only managed to ascertain one thing: there was no sign of a break-in.

Had Dave willingly admitted his killer?

“Where are we going, Mummy?” Lucy asked from the backseat.

Caroline Zerb looked in the rearview mirror. “Never mind,” she said, her voice sharp. She had been watching for cars on her tail ever since they’d left the house in Wimbledon.

“It’s a magical mystery tour,” Fran said, turning her head and smiling at her granddaughter. She had been a primary schoolteacher before her children’s books had taken off, and her skills with children were far superior to Caroline’s.

Lucy raised an eyebrow skeptically. “How long are we going to go round and round the motorway?”

“Until I decide otherwise,” her mother said, accelerating up the fast lane, then cutting inside and slowing down in front of a lorry. Matt had given her a book about surveillance techniques and she had practiced how to make life difficult for a tail. The initial shock she’d felt when her exhusband sounded the alarm had worn off and now she was anxious about the meetings she’d been forced to cancel.
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Her phone rang and she pressed the button on her hands-free kit. “It’s me,” Matt said. “Listen carefully, I haven’t much time. This is a full alert.”

“What’s happened?”

“Just listen! Are you on the M25?”

“Yes.”

“Get off at the next exit and find a pay phone. Your cell phone frequency may be being scanned. Follow instruction two, repeat, two. I’ll be in touch. Give…give my love to Lucy and Fran.”

“Matt?” Caroline swallowed an expletive when the connection was broken.

“Is he all right?” Fran asked, her face drawn.

“I think so. He was in a hurry. He sent his love to you both.”

The two women exchanged glances. They both knew that something bad had happened. There had been a number of false alarms, but they’d never yet had to use the suitcases they had permanently ready. Caroline indicated left and drove up the Sevenoaks exit. Matt would explode when he discovered they were in her car. The standing instruction if she picked up Fran was for them to take the older woman’s considerably less noticeable Renault Clio. Caroline couldn’t do without her Mazda RX-8, though. It was fast, it could outpace almost any tail. Because Matt’s emergency plans were so compartmentalized, it was quite possible that he’d never find out about the car. Everything worked on a need-toknow basis—and he didn’t need to know about the black Mazda.

Eighteen months ago, she’d memorized the five instructions on the list that had then been destroyed. The second required her to call a number and ask if there were 94

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any messages for Zeppelin Delta. She’d be given the address of the safe house. Matt had told her that further instructions were taped beneath the top drawer of the chest in the largest bedroom. Although he’d bought the safe house with a small part of his ill-gotten gains from
The Death List,
he’d done so via a solicitor who’d been instructed never to give the owner details of the property or its address—the story was that the terms of the divorce settlement required that confidentiality. Caroline sometimes thought it was a ridiculous overreaction to the White Devil case; then she would remember her abduction at the hands of the madman and his sister, who was still on the loose and had threatened revenge on Matt and his circle. And she would remember that Fran and Lucy had also been taken by the bastards. She glanced in the mirror. Any inconvenience was immaterial as long as her daughter was kept safe.

Fran turned to her granddaughter when Caroline got out at the service station. “This is exciting, isn’t it, dear?”

Lucy shrugged. She was on the cusp of adolescence and nothing her elders said was satisfactory. “I don’t see why Mummy had to take my phone away.”

“You have to trust her,” her grandmother said. She had turned her own cell phone off. That didn’t bother her, as she despised the things. She was more concerned at the disruption to her latest book.
The Flight of the Bumbling
Bee
was at the crucial second draft stage. At least she’d remembered to bring a disk with the text on it. Presumably there would be a computer in the safe house. The standing instruction was that laptops were not to be brought, in case bugs had been fitted. Fran didn’t see how that could happen as she never took her laptop away from home, and Matt had made sure that her home was equipped
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with armored windows and doors, enough locks and chains to keep a prison governor happy and an alarm system that must have cost him a fortune. She hadn’t been happy when he told her that an expert could still get in and out, and leave no trace.

“Gran?” Lucy said, her eyes fixed on the door of the service station. “Who’s Mummy talking to?”

Fran’s stomach clenched when she saw that Caroline was deep in conversation with a woman whose back was turned to the car.

Ignoring Matt’s strict instructions, Fran opened the door and swung her feet out. Lucy wasn’t staying on her own. She wrestled with the rear-opening door and clambered out after her grandmother.
Seven

Karen sat down next to me at the kitchen table after she’d taken a preliminary look. We were both in coveralls and overshoes. All my clothes had been taken away for examination.

“This is awful, Matt,” she said, touching my arm. My hands were in clear plastic bags prior to fingerprints being taken. “Tell me what happened.”

I had decided to come clean with her about the others’

presence—detectives knocking on doors would probably get descriptions of several men in black combats and woollen hats, and I didn’t want any potential sighting of the killer to be compromised. So I told her about Dave’s call using the alert code and the way we got in. She shook her head as I talked, her eyes lowered. When I’d finished, she looked me in the eye. “I understand you’ve just lost a close friend, but Christ, what were you thinking of, Matt? Why didn’t you call me as soon as you heard from Dave? We’d have arrived here quicker and that might have saved his life.”

I glanced away. “I don’t think so. Sara was playing
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with us. She’d have got away whatever, and sirens would just have given her more warning.”

Karen’s eyes flared. “We don’t always use sirens. Didn’t it occur to you that you might have been walking into a trap?”

“There were four of us,” I said, though I wasn’t going to tell her that Pete had been out the back with his sniper’s rifle and Rog had been waiting with his Glock for anyone who left by the front door.

“Coming through the pantry window meant you could have been picked off by a primary school bully,” she said, dropping her gaze again. “What were you armed with?”

I kept my mouth shut.

“The others took your weapon, didn’t they? Where are they?”

“I’ve no idea,” I said, and that was the truth. The plan we’d agreed on stipulated that we would split up if there was an attack on any of us.

It looked like she believed me, but I was sure there would be cars dispatched to their houses to check. They wouldn’t be there—we each had our own list of randomly selected hotels and bed-and-breakfast places that none of the others had seen.

There was a tap on the door. The potbellied form of Dr. Redrose approached. “Mr. Wells, I understand the deceased was a friend. My condolences.” He turned to Karen. “I’ve finished. Cause of death was obviously the four close-range shots to the head. CSIs have dug out what looks like a 9 mm bullet from the sofa. There were single shots to each knee and two shots to each thigh.”

His small eyes moved from Karen to me and then back again. “There’s no message in any obvious place. We’ll see what the postmortem shows. As for time of death, the 98

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body temperature suggests between two and three hours ago.” He waddled away.

Karen was studying me. “You got here at ten-fifty, you said. He was killed not long before that.”

I nodded. “I told you, she’s playing with us.”

“Why are you so sure it’s Sara?”

I shrugged. “I’ll bet you’ll find no traces of the killer. That smacks of Sara’s organizational skills. But it’s also obvious from the modus operandi, Karen. She shot Dave in the legs just before her brother was killed. He was finished in execution-style by shots to the head, as the SAS men did with the White Devil.”

“And as you described in your book that’s been read by millions of people.” She blinked at me. “Why no message?”

“There might still be one,” I said, swallowing a surge of vomit. “Inside him.”