The Soul Collector (47 page)

“No sweat,” he said. “They breed us tough in New Jersey.”

Karen chose that moment to step through the cubicle curtains.

“Hi, doll,” Andy said with a grin. “How’s it hanging?”

I managed to swallow my laughter. The American really was a hero for talking to her like that. We left him and went outside.

“Any sign of Sara?” I asked.

Karen shook her head. “We’re still checking, but…”

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Her words trailed away and she ran her eyes over me.

“Where are your weapons?”

I feigned innocence.

“And where are Rog and Pete?”

“I’m not sure.” That was partly true. Pete had gone off in a taxi to pick up his Cherokee, taking all our gear with him. He was somewhere between East Grinstead and Bromley. Rog, however, was out in the car park. I didn’t mention that.

She laughed. “Honestly, Matt, what do you take me for? Someone blasted their way into Sternwood Castle and several shots were fired in that awful cave. I suppose you’re going to tell me the earl and Alistair Bing did all that.”

I remembered the tape. “Em, no. But I promise we had no choice.”

“The AC will be the judge of that, and you’ll need to convince the local force, too.”

I raised my shoulders. “Piece of cake. Are you okay?”

She shook her head at me. “I’m at the end of my tether.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” I said, putting my arm around her.

“Isn’t that a song by Meat Loaf?” she asked, shaking free of me but managing to smile wanly.

“It is,” I said. “You always did have a worrying taste in music.”

She stopped and faced me.

“Don’t think you’re in the clear, Matt. There are things ordinary citizens can’t do.”

“Like murder and mutilate innocent crime writers, spray knockout gas into people’s faces, attach bombs to them and bury people alive?” I asked.

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“And you believe that’s a valid justification for taking the law into your hands?”

“No,” I said, taking hold of both her hands. “But this is.” I kissed her on the lips, and eventually she responded. By raising her leg to my groin.

“Don’t take advantage of me when I’m on duty,” she said, her voice softer than her knee.

I stepped back and watched her walk away. It hadn’t been necessary that she came to meet me. The fact that she had suggested that we weren’t completely washed up. I said good-night to Lucy before Rog and I went back to London.

For the rest of the night, Meat Loaf had no chance. There was only one song playing repeatedly in my head. It was by Bob Dylan and it bore the name of my former lover and perhaps future nemesis, Sara.

Thirty-One

Andy, Pete and Rog showed up at New Scotland Yard the next morning to give statements, as did I. The VCCT

threw the kitchen sink at us. We were questioned on our own by Taff Turner and a young sergeant called Amelia Browning. She was smart and almost got me to contradict myself several times. Then the assistant commissioner stepped in and interrogated me himself, but I still didn’t change my story. I was charged with the manslaughter of Lauren Cuthbertson, but my lawyer didn’t think it would go to trial. There were plenty of people who had seen the dead woman murder Jeremy Andrewes and attack me.

Doris Carlton-Jones refused to say a word, presumably forewarned by Sara. That left her at the mercy of the detectives and prosecutors, but I wasn’t complaining—she could have made life difficult for me and Andy if she’d accused us of impersonating police officers. Then again, she had a lot of explaining to do herself, not least about her husband’s skull. Then came the funerals. Karen warned me not to attend, but I felt it was my duty. She
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felt it was hers, too, so we went to four of them together. Two of the dead passed without ceremony. Lauren Cuthbertson had no family willing or able to arrange a service—so much for Sara and her birth mother’s feelings for her. Sandra Devonish’s mother and father collected her body from the morgue. Her funeral would take place in Texas. Karen said they seemed bewildered rather than grief-stricken. Not for long, I suspected. I decided to steer clear of Earl Sternwood’s service; according to one of the newspapers, it was “pagan in the extreme,” whatever that meant. And I left Alistair Bing/Adrian Brooks to his mother to bury—I hoped without any memorial stone. The first funeral we attended was Mary Malone’s. It took place in a churchyard in Wiltshire, where her parents were buried. It was a cold, wet day and the rooks were screaming at each other from the tops of the bare trees. There was only a handful of people. In death, as in life, Alistair Bing’s first victim passed almost unnoticed. An elderly woman wept continuously throughout the service. I found out from the vicar that she was a devoted fan, who had traveled from the south of France. That made my eyes damp.

The second service was for Josh Hinkley. To my surprise, he’d asked for a humanist service before cremation. The readings were from his own books (which was less of a surprise), interspersed with songs by Ian Dury, The Kinks and The Jam. There was a booze-up in a pub in Soho afterward. I only stayed for one drink, but that was long enough for me to be cut dead by the chairman of the Crime Writers’ Society and by a tiny Chinese woman with a large chest. Apparently she was Chop Suzy, the tart the dead man had been expecting the night he was murdered. Karen told me that a woman with a posh voice 436

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had told Suzy to stay away from “her husband.” Female impersonation was obviously another of Alistair Bing’s skills, unless he’d got his mother to do it. Then there was Jeremy Andrewes’s funeral. It took place in a pretty churchyard in Hampshire, near the family seat. No one spoke to Karen and me until we were leaving.

“You’re Wells, aren’t you?” said an elderly, red-faced man. “How dare you show your face here? You’re responsible for Jeremy’s death. If you make money from it, I shall surely seek you out.”

Keeping quiet seemed the best option, even though I’d already decided not to write about the case in my column or make a book out of it. I’d learned my lesson after
The
Death List.

Then came the worst of all—Dave’s funeral. This time it was a beautiful day. The church in Dulwich was packed. There was an honor guard of soldiers from the Parachute Regiment and the SAS, in full dress uniform but without weapons, and the service was traditional, on the wishes of his wife, Ginny, and his parents. I stood with Karen, Pete, Rog and Andy, who’d been released from hospital with a warning, already disregarded, not to drink for a month. We sang hymns that I knew meant nothing to Dave. Unlike many soldiers, he was completely without faith and I was sure he would have laughed at the idea of

“Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “Jerusalem” being heard at his funeral. I hoped it made the family feel better, but they certainly didn’t look comforted. On the way out of the church Ginny hugged Andy, Rog and Pete, but kept her hands by her sides when it was my turn. She didn’t let me finish the first word of my condolences.

“Bastard,” she said, her eyes wide. “
You
killed him, not that bitch you used to fuck.”

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Her kids started crying and an elderly man tried ineffectually to lead her away.

“You killed him,” she wailed, trying to pull her hand away to hit me. “You killed my Dave…”

As Karen took my arm and walked me to the gate, I caught sight of Lucy and Caroline. My daughter looked horrified, while my ex-wife’s expression was inscrutable. She certainly wasn’t displaying anything akin to sympathy, but there was no reason she should have. Karen drove my car toward Brixton, and then pulled in to the side of the road. She turned to me and took my hands.

“Look at me, Matt,” she said, waiting for me to do so.

“It’s not true. You didn’t kill Dave. You did everything you could to save him, with your alert codes and reporting systems. It isn’t your fault that he opened the door to Sara. Do you hear me? It isn’t your fault.”

My breathing was rapid and the blood was rushing through my veins and arteries in a hot flood.

“I love you,” Karen said. “Do you hear me, Matt? I—

love—you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. No one could have done more to find Dave’s killer. You should be proud of that.”

But I wasn’t. I knew I never would be. After a time, the weight of what Karen had said finally hit me.

“You…you want to spend the rest of your life with me?” I repeated, turning to her.

She nodded and smiled.

And suddenly it struck me that I wanted that, too. More than anything, even catching Sara.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s spend our lives together.”

Karen laughed. “That’s another bloody song, isn’t it?”

“Sort of. The Stones.”

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“Ha!” she said, and started the engine. “Jagger and Richards. Old rockers never die.”

“Well, that’s reassuring, isn’t it?” I said, rummaging in the glove compartment and coming out with a CD. It was only as the first tom-tom beats of “Sympathy for the Devil” came from the speakers that I remembered it had played at full volume, over and over, in Mary Malone’s house after her murder. Alistair Bing and his demented Faustian pact had successfully ruined one of my favorite pieces of music. Gradually, things got back to normal. I changed the alarm codes in my apartment and had a new security system installed in the Saab. Lucy went back to school, though the teachers said she was hard to reach for some weeks. Caroline told me our daughter needed to see a psychiatrist because of what I’d got them into, which made me call her a fool for failing to check her car for bugs—one was found by the police, obviously put there by Sara. Strangely, that seemed to clear the air and we managed to spend a day with Lucy and talk her through what she’d been through. She started to feel better almost immediately. My mother was more shaken than any of us, and I had to go over her house changing the security locks and upgrading the alarm. She had difficulty getting back to writing stories. I’d been struggling with exactly that since the White Devil had first got his claws into me, but at least I had plenty of years to get back into things. Fran seemed to have aged enormously in the course of a few days. As for my friends, they seemed to have taken most of what had happened in their stride. Andy, Rog, Pete and I met for dinner every week, but we didn’t go to the pub. It wouldn’t have been the same without Dave.
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I found myself waking up in the middle of the night, even on the few occasions when I wasn’t plagued by violent dreams. For a few seconds I would feel all was well with the world, then I’d remember that Dave wasn’t in it any longer—and that Sara was, even though she’d lost a large part of her funds and her five properties in the U.K. had been sequestered. When the CSIs were going over the cottage, the flat and the houses, in each one they found the words “The Soul Collector” carved in a hidden place. Sara had collected Dave’s soul, as well as those of the three SAS men who had killed her brother. It was only a question of time before she made another attempt to take mine. In the meantime, I planned to make the most of life with Karen.

And then one morning, six weeks after Sara had disappeared, she called me. The number was withheld and it was impossible to tell where she was. I pressed the record button on my phone.

“Matt,” she said, her voice curiously soft. “I bet you’ve just been dying to hear from me.”

“No,” I said, determined not to show her how I felt about Dave’s murder.

She laughed. “Come on, I know there are things you want to ask me.”

“No.”

“Well, I’ll tell you all the same.” Her tone grew sharper.

“It’s important you know that you’ve made things even worse for yourself and everyone you care for.”

I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. “Because I killed your murdering bitch of a sister?”

“Nicely put, Matt, but true enough. Let me ask you, when did you discover that we were related?”

“Not long after I sent her to hell.”

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“I know you don’t believe in the rubbish that Earl Sternwood and the others did. Don’t you want to know how my sister got involved with him?”

I did, but I wasn’t giving her the satisfaction. “No.”

“Apparently she’d always been interested in the occult. She found out that the order behind the old Hell-fire Club still existed and she went to a meeting—a conclave, they called it. As soon as the earl saw her face, she was in. Apparently he felt she was a kindred spirit.” She laughed.

“Did you know that he considered the Sternwood lip an honor and would never consent to plastic surgery?”

“Fascinating,” I said with plenty of irony. Either she didn’t hear that or she ignored it. Maybe she thought I’d be writing her sister’s story, in which case she had a shock coming.

“My mother told me about Lauren over a year ago. At first I was angry that she’d kept silent for so long, but then I felt the joy of having a sibling again.”

I managed to resist telling her exactly what I thought of Doris Carlton-Jones and what she’d done with her husband’s head, as well as Lauren’s rampages in East London.

“After I met Lauren, I was even more delighted. I could see she had similar qualities to my brother and me. I bought her an identical motorbike to mine to muddy the waters. No doubt you already guessed that. As well as that, when I told her about the wonderful surgery I had to my face, she insisted I pay for her operations. They were much more necessary, of course. She wasn’t exactly one of nature’s beauties. After that idiot of a surgeon ruined the good work he’d done, there was so much anger in her. I know my darling brother would have loved that.”

No doubt, I thought—given that he was a twisted piece of shit, too.

“In case you’re wondering, Matt, I made contact with
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