Stolen Souls (16 page)

“That’s not nice,” Lennon said, keeping his tone as friendly as he could manage, given the surroundings. “C’mon, just a word. It’ll only take a minute, then you can get back to beating your friend here.”

Roscoe looked up at his compatriot, but didn’t spare Lennon a glance. He placed the cue on the table and walked past Lennon toward the door, keeping his jaw firm and his eyes averted all the way. He grabbed a coat from a hook by the exit. Lennon followed him out to the patch of waste ground that served as a car park.

“You know better than to come round here,” Roscoe said as he fished a packet of cigarettes from his coat pocket. “What makes you think I’ve got anything to say to you? You’re lucky I didn’t have your fucking brains blown out after that last time you came asking questions.”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” Lennon said. He pointed to Roscoe’s cigarettes. “Can you spare one?” “Not for you,” Roscoe said. He cupped his hand around the flame from his lighter until the cigarette caught.

Lennon plucked the cigarette from his lips and brought it to his own. He inhaled the heat.

“Cheeky cunt,” Roscoe said, taking another from the packet. “Charming as ever,” Lennon said. “This won’t take long. Help me out, and I’ll piss off. Don’t, and I’ll be round to your house for my Christmas dinner.”

Roscoe lit his cigarette and put the packet away. Snow settled on his shaven scalp. He pulled his hood up.

“Fuck, you don’t want Christmas dinner at my house. My missus wouldn’t know a turkey from a turd.” He took the cigarette from his mouth long enough to spit in the snow. “So what do you want?”

“Sam and Mark Mawhinney,” Lennon said.

Roscoe smirked. “Them two? They had it coming. Pair of scumbags. They used to do the odd wee bit for me, but they dipped their hands one time too many. I gave them a beating and told them to fuck off. They got tied up with Rodney Crozier’s lot, so they were in good company.”

“Running prostitutes?” Lennon asked.

Roscoe’s smirk turned to a grin. “You should know,” he said. Lennon felt his face redden, hot against the icy breeze. “Watch your mouth,” he said. He couldn’t hold Roscoe’s stare. “I don’t do that anymore.”

Roscoe raised his eyebrows, his grin widening.

Lennon and Roscoe once had an understanding. Lennon visited some of the apartments Roscoe ran his girls from, took advantage of the services at no charge, and in return none of them got raided. It worked out for everyone. Roscoe ran a clean business, or as clean as such an enterprise could be, and he always had an ear to the ground. Anything worth knowing was on his radar.

That understanding ended over a year ago when Roscoe let Dan Hewitt know that Marie and Ellen were hidden in one of his places. The betrayal earned Roscoe a beating. Had he not been so useful to Lennon, he would have gotten worse. “A tiger can’t change its spots,” Roscoe said.

“You mean a leopard.”

“Aye, whatever you say. Anyway, yeah, the Mawhinneys took to running whores.”

“What kind?” Lennon asked. “Trafficked?”

“Aye,” Roscoe said. “Dirty fuckers. I don’t hold with that carry-on. It’s a dodgy business, full of dodgy boys. Like I said, they had it coming.”

“These dodgy boys,” Lennon said. “Would they be Lithuanians?”

“That’s right.”

“One of them was Tomas Strazdas,” Lennon said. “You ever come across him?”

“A couple of times. Mouthy bastard, quick with his fists. Not anymore, though.”

“Not anymore,” Lennon echoed. “Sam Mawhinney cut his throat, so someone blew his brains out.”

“No he didn’t,” Roscoe said.

“What?”

“Sam Mawhinney didn’t cut your man’s throat,” Roscoe said. “Some girl did.”

“Some girl?” Lennon leaned close. “A prostitute?”

“Aye, some whore,” Roscoe said. “She cut your man’s throat and got away. The Liths held Sam responsible, so they popped him. Then Mark Mawhinney tries to get the Liths back for his brother. I heard he got his neck broke for his trouble.”

Roscoe stopped talking and started laughing. “Fuck me, you really don’t know shite, do you?”

“No,” Lennon said, not sharing his amusement. “Enlighten me.”

“Mark was mouthing all round the place he was going to get even. His mate Jim Pollock let him know that big fella was going to come over to buy some gear. Seems Mark wasn’t up to the job, so the big fella gave him a doing and got away.”

“Big fella?”

“Herkel or Hercules or something like that. Big fucker, looks like he could hammer you into the ground. Works for the dead fella’s brother.”

“Herkus,” Lennon said, remembering his conversation with Dan Hewitt.

“Aye, maybe. Anyway, he’s going mad looking for this girl. He’s put the word out through Gordie Maxwell, offering money and everything.”

“Any word on where she is?”

“They think she might be with some bloke who uses whores regular.” Roscoe smiled. “Maybe that’s you.”

Lennon ignored the jibe and dropped his cigarette in the snow to fizzle out. “I’d consider it a personal favor if you give me a shout as soon as you hear anything new.”

“Might do,” Roscoe said. “What’s in it for me?”

“I don’t tell your missus what you said about her cooking.”

Roscoe grinned. “Arsehole.”

“Keep in touch,” Lennon said as he trudged through the snow back to his car.

“Away and shite,” Roscoe called after him.

Lennon unlocked the Audi and climbed in. He inserted the key into the ignition, turned it, and flicked on the wipers to clear the snow that had settled on the windshield.

The dashboard clock read coming up on one o’clock. He had intended on calling back to Susan’s flat for lunch so he could see Ellen. But Gordie Maxwell’s office was all the way across town.

A girl, Roscoe had said. All this caused by a prostitute who escaped her captors. Lennon took the passport from his pocket and studied the photograph, even though he knew it was unlikely to be her. Was she still in the city? How close was Herkus to finding her?

He dialed the front desk at his station. Moffat answered.

“I need you to put a call out,” Lennon said. “Tell everyone to keep an eye out for Herkus Katilius. You can scare up the registration number on his car.”

“What do I tell them it’s about?” Moffat asked.

“Nothing, for the moment,” Lennon said. “Just tell them if they spot him, find some other reason to give him a tug. If anyone detains him, give me a call and I’ll go to them. And warn them he’s dangerous.”

“Will do,” Moffat said. “By the way, I heard some rumblings from the higher-ups. No press release, nothing official just yet, but they’re treating all four killings as one case.”

“That’s no surprise,” Lennon said.

“There’s more,” Moffat said. “Looks like it’s falling to DCI Thompson’s MIT.”

Lennon cursed. “Which means it falls to me,” he said.

“Merry Christmas,” Moffat said.

Lennon hung up and started the engine.

33

B
ILLY
C
RAWFORD WALKED
directly to the trade section of the hardware superstore where they stocked building supplies. He hadn’t expected the girl to call so quickly or he would have been better prepared. Normally it took a week or two of abuse at the hands of their captors to make them desperate enough to find a way to call him.

But this girl was different.

If he’d known, he wouldn’t have made the contact so close to Christmas. Thankfully, it had occurred to him to double-check his tools before it was too late. On inspection, he realized he needed blades for his twelve-inch hacksaw, a new chisel bit for his handheld pneumatic drill, and ballast for mixing concrete.

The cellar of his house had a linoleum-covered floor beneath the toolbox and the few pieces of furniture that lay there. If a person were to remove those items, then pull back the linoleum, he would find a concrete surface. And if that person looked carefully, he would see five patches, each roughly a meter square, that had been dug up and filled in again.

There was room for perhaps five more such excavations. Once those were filled, he always had the backyard. Plenty of room.

The cellar’s concrete floor was only two to three inches thick, laid over packed earth. The first time he’d had to remove a square of the flooring, he’d used a concrete saw, but it had been difficult to work with in such an enclosed space, and far too powerful for what turned out to be a reasonably straightforward job. The second time, he simply used his pneumatic drill with a good chisel bit to cut the shape of a square, then set about breaking it. By the third occasion, it took less than an hour’s work to clear a patch of earth. Another couple of hours’ digging, and he was done. All that remained was to mix the concrete and refill the hole and its contents.

Even allowing for all the sawing to be done, he could start at nine in the morning and be finished by early afternoon. Tiring, certainly, but no more than a day’s work on a building site would be.

He wheeled a flatbed trolley to the trade section of the hardware superstore on the Boucher Road. Seasonal music played over the public-address system, interspersed with sales messages disguised as holiday greetings. Only a few other shoppers browsed the aisles, all middle-aged men with nothing better to do over the next few days but complete some DIY project or other.

Like him.

There were smaller, friendlier stores much closer to his home, but even if they had been open on Christmas Eve, he would still have come here. He favored the anonymity. Here, they had self-service checkouts where you could scan your own goods and pay without having to engage in conversation with anyone.

He exited the trade section with a twenty-kilogram bag of ballast, a mixture of sand and aggregate to which he would add cement powder and water to make concrete.

Next he went to the tools and accessories aisle and found a pack of heavy-duty hacksaw blades. When he’d first begun, he’d wondered if he would need a butcher’s saw for this kind of work, but the blades and frames were shockingly expensive, so he’d tried a regular good-quality hacksaw and found it to be perfectly adequate for the task. He dropped the pack of blades onto the trolley beside the ballast and went looking for the chisel bit.

He searched through dozens upon dozens of drill bits, all hung on pegs, an entire wall of them. Were they out of stock? This close to Christmas, it could be days before they’d have more. What would he do with the girl for all that time? He couldn’t keep her in his house for three or four days. Even if he saved her tonight, as he had planned, by Boxing Day the smell would ripen. That had been the case the first time, before he had planned out his procedure properly. Four days it had sat there, festering, before he figured out what to do with it.

Calm, he told himself.

If they were out of stock here, they had another depot to the north of the city. He could simply drive there. The chances of their being out of stock in both places were slim.

As his heartbeat came back under control, he spotted the metallic shape in a bin of loose drill bits on the floor beneath the display. He knelt down, pulled the chisel bit from the bin, felt the heft of its thick shaft, the sharpness of its cutting edge through the thin latex skin of the surgical gloves he wore. It made a satisfying heavy clank as he dropped it on the trolley bed.

He scanned his purchases at the checkout, keeping his gaze downward, making eye contact with no one. He fed the machine paper money, waited for his receipt, and wheeled the trolley toward the exit.

As he reached his van, a voice called, “Sir? Sir!”

He stiffened, pretended he didn’t hear. He unlocked the sliding doors and heaved the bag of ballast up into the van.

The voice called again, a young woman, shrill and insistent. He tossed the hacksaw blades and the chisel bit in after the ballast.

Footsteps coming, the voice piercing.

He wheeled the trolley to the bay, wished the young woman would leave him be.

She would not.

“Sir, you forgot your change,” she said as she approached. He feigned startlement. “Did I?”

“Here you go,” she said, smiling, holding it out to him. She wore a bright orange bib that matched her poorly applied fake tan. Tinsel circled her neck like a snake, a Santa Claus hat on her head.

“Thank you,” he said, reaching for it.

She noticed the latex covering his skin.

“Eczema,” he said.

Her smile almost flickered out before she remembered the good manners her employers had taught her. She dropped the coins into his palm without touching him.

“Thank you,” he said. He checked her name tag. “Collette.” “S’okay,” she said, backing away. “Merry Christmas.”

“Same to you,” he said.

He watched her retreat to the store before he climbed into the van and started the engine. As he pulled on to the Boucher Road, he argued and counterargued the seriousness of what had just happened.

Yes, he had made her nervous.

Yes, she would remember him, the items he bought, and the surgical gloves on his hands.

Yes, she may even have noted the registration of his van.

All those things would be of concern if the police were to ask her any questions.

But what reason would the police have to question her? What crime would lead them to her door? What news item would cause her to remember the strange man in the car park and lift a telephone?

None at all.

There would be no crime.

That was why he chose them as he did. The stolen souls, the lost girls, the whores with no identities. Would the thieves of young women go to the police when in turn those same young women were stolen from them?

“I steal the stolen,” he said.

He coughed and reddened when he realized he had spoken out loud. It had been happening more often lately. At the oddest of times, a thought would fall from his mind and onto his tongue before he could catch it.

Sometimes he would follow it, respond to it, begin a conversation. He had been calling himself Billy for so long now that it seemed his old self was another person entirely. This other self and Billy would exchange ideas, concepts, argue the rights and wrongs of the world.