The Soul Collector (11 page)

She looked away.

There was another knock, and Taff Turner came in. Karen nodded to him to sit down. He’d already offered me his sympathy, but I knew he was unhappy about how I’d found the body.

“There isn’t much to go on, guv,” he said. “The techies are looking for prints, but they’ll need to take all the family’s to exclude them.” He looked down at the pair of black leather gloves in front of me. “I’d put money on the fact that the killer was wearing gloves.” He shook his head at me. That was the nearest I was going to get to an admission that he knew I wasn’t a formal suspect. “The driveway is asphalt, so we can forget getting any shoe imprints from there.”

“Anything you find in the garden will have to be
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compared with Matt’s miniature army’s boots,” Karen said. “The four of them were here.”

A weary sigh passed Taff’s lips. “Wonderful,” he said.

“Anything else we need to know?” He gave me a questioning look.

“How the killer got in,” I said, still bothered by that.

“The alarm was off and there’s no sign of a break-in.” I held Taff’s gaze. “Is there?”

“No,” he said.

“So Dave must have opened the door to her,” Karen said, glancing at her subordinate. “Assuming it’s Sara Robbins.”

“Yes,” I said, “but there are two heavy-duty chains on the door. Dave knew to check through the spy-hole. He must have taken the chains off.”

“Disguise?” the Welshman suggested.

Karen nodded. “Make sure the local detectives are aware of that possibility when they’re taking statements from the neighbors.”

“No one so far has reported hearing any shots,” Turner added. “The killer must have used a silencer.”

“Interesting,” Karen said. “That suggests it was a pro.”

“Sara was trained by the White Devil,” I said. “You don’t get much more professional than that. For all we know, she’s been honing her skills over the last two years.”

Turner got up and left. At the door, he looked around.

“Are we going to take over this case?” he asked his boss. Karen ran her tongue across her lips, an action that I would normally have found provocative in another context. “I’ll have to discuss that with the AC.” Her eyes were on me. “I think it’s time you checked your e-mail, Matt. Bring my laptop in from the car, will you, Taff?”

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I wasn’t comfortable with Karen seeing any communication from Sara as I needed to have freedom of action, but there wasn’t much I could do. She had a wi-fi card and she also knew my two main e-mail addresses. I logged on to them with a display of reluctance that turned out to be irrelevant. There was no message from Sara, in any form or guise.

“What now?” I asked.

“Give me your cell phone,” she said. “Please, Mr. Wells.”

She wasn’t joking. I was an ordinary member of the public to her now. Again, I didn’t have much choice.

“What’s the password?” she asked. “And don’t even think of saying no, if you want to stay out of the cells.”

“2LZ7,” I said.

Karen hit the keys and scrolled up and down. “What are ‘GreenBoy’ and ‘Seven Emperor’?”

“Alarm codes—to my agent and editor.”

“They’ll have gone into hiding, will they? Along with Lucy and Fran, and your ex-wife?”

I nodded. Christian Fels, my agent, had been a target of the White Devil, and had sold
The Death List
to my editor, Jeanie Young-Burke. Given that the book didn’t exactly paint flattering portraits of Sara and her brother, I was pretty sure she would go after them if she could.

“You can’t do this, Matt,” Karen said, tossing the phone to me across the table. “You can’t take the law into your own hands.”

“I didn’t know going into hiding was illegal,” I countered, my voice weak. I felt terrible and I needed to get out of Dave’s house.

“It is if you’ve left the scene of a crime.”

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“Christian and Jeanie haven’t done that.” I sat up.

“Can I go now?”

She shook her head. “You’re staying with me. For a start, you need to be fingerprinted. Then I want a full statement.”

I shrugged. I was safer with her, but I wouldn’t be able to find Sara. Even if the VCCT started looking for her, I didn’t have any confidence they’d be able to track her down. I was the only person who could attract Dave’s murderer, my former lover. What she felt for me now was the polar opposite of love, not that I was surprised. Then Taff Turner came in and said that Dave’s wife and kids had arrived. I’d spoken to Ginny on her cell phone and told her to come home as quickly as she could. Now I had to tell her what had happened to Dave. Karen would have done it, but it was up to me. That was what Dave would have wanted.

Contrary to the agreed procedure, the Cherokee and the Hornet rendezvoused at the burnt-out remains of the Cutty Sark in Greenwich. Andy Jackson got off his bike and got into the front seat of Pete’s vehicle, then looked over his shoulder. Roger van Zandt was bent double in the backseat of the Grand Cherokee, his head between his knees.

“Deep breaths, Dodger,” the American said. “Remember that try you scored against the Lambeth Lions? You went past four players and touched down under the posts. Remember what it felt to go over the line.” He glanced at the driver. “You remember that try, don’t you, Boney? Must have been the season before we retired.”

“No. It was the year after I was voted off the committee.”

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“Jeez, I’m trying to distract him,” Andy said, in a loud whisper.

Rog mumbled something.

“What?” Andy said.

“It was…it was Dave who passed the ball to me.”

Pete groaned. “Look, Rog, we’re all shocked, but we’ve got to be strong now. We’re targets of that madwoman and we’ve got to get her before she picks us off.”

“Yeah, that’s really gonna help, Boney,” the American said under his breath. He glanced at the dirty gray river. Sometimes he wondered why he’d settled in the U.K., not that the part of New Jersey he’d grown up in was any better. He had run with a street gang when he was a teenager and if he hadn’t had a dedicated football coach at high school, by now he’d either have been a low-level dope dealer or dead. His parents had kicked him out when he was fourteen, and they didn’t want to know what became of him, even when he almost made the NFL. His suspect knee had let him down, though it had been good enough for eleven seasons of amateur rugby league. His folks hadn’t believed human beings could change or that everyone had some innate goodness in them. They worked in a meat-packing plant, until they’d both got cancer and died within a few months of each other. Andy had left the States to find a new life, having finished basic training as a chef and able to work anywhere. The fact that he’d met a stunning Englishwoman in Central Park had made the move easy, even though she’d ditched him a month later.

Andy scratched the light-colored stubble on his chin. His mom and dad had been wrong about people. The world wasn’t full of assholes. Matt and the others were stand-up guys—even Rog, whose curly hair and slim build made
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him look like a typical computer nerd, despite having put in some of the most bone-shuddering tackles Andy had ever seen. As for Dave, he’d been a hero and he had the medals to prove it, even if he wasn’t allowed to talk about his old SAS operations. But Sara Robbins—it didn’t matter if she’d killed him herself or paid some other fucker to pull the trigger, she was the exception that proved the rule. Poison ran in her veins like it had when she’d killed with her brother, and her mind was still a hive of hate and perversion.

“All right,” Rog said. “I’ll do what I have to do.” He glared at Andy. “But after we’ve finished, I’m going to mourn Dave any way I like. Is that okay by you, Slash?”

“Sure,” Andy said with a loose grin. “We’ll have a wake. Dave would have gone for that.” His expression hardened. “In the meantime, are you both clear about what you’ve got to do?”

Rog and Pete nodded. They’d practiced the drill. No one told the others what they were up to in case they were caught. Everything each of them discovered about Sara or any other adversary would be uploaded daily to a special site that Rog had set up.

Andy opened his rucksack. He unscrewed the silencers from his and Matt’s pistols, and ejected the magazines.

“Okay, my men. I hope we see each other soon.” He punched Rog lightly on the shoulder, then squeezed Pete’s thigh. “Maybe some of us thought Matt was overdoing it on the planning side, but we all knew that Sara would be back eventually. Let’s get the bitch. For Dave.”

“For Dave,” the others repeated.

“Don’t forget to take the SIM cards from your cell phones and drop them down a storm drain,” Andy added. He got out and went over to his bike.

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Rog watched him go. “What do you think Matt’s got him doing?”

Andy started the engine and drove away from the heritage site. “We’re not supposed to think about that, but it’s pretty obvious.”

“Is it?”

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter what he’s
meant
to be doing. He’ll be watching Matt’s back.”

Rog nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

Pete nodded. “Fuck!” he said, spittle flecking the inside of the windshield. “I can’t believe it! Dave, of all people. She knows what she’s doing. He’s the one we would depend on most in a situation like this.”

“I suppose Matt will have to pick up the slack.”

“Matt will have enough trouble staying alive, Dodger. It’s up to us to track the murdering cow down.”

Rog nodded. He had hacked into enough sites over the last two years to have an idea of what Sara was doing with the large amounts of money and the investments left her by the White Devil, even if she was always at least a week ahead of him. He’d passed that information regularly to Pete, who had used his contacts in the business world to find out more—at one time, he’d even invested in the same company as Sara. She had bailed out a few months later, presumably by chance, since Boney had used a false identity. The fact was, they weren’t so far from Sara, but they had deliberately held back to avoid spooking her. Now she’d made the first real move, the game had changed.

Rog stared out into the rain and felt a wave of loneliness break over him. He shivered at the prospect of spending every night in a different hotel, all of them chosen for their cash-only policies and laxity about reg-
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istration details. But he would manage because he’d be spending every waking hour on the laptop with Internet access that he would buy later on from one of the shops in Tottenham Court Road. He had no doubt that Pete would be doing something similar, though he couldn’t believe he’d be roughing it. There were luxury hotels that were just as prepared to guarantee anonymity, if you could pay for it.

Pete stopped the Cherokee near Deptford Station and pushed his seat back as far as it would go. He opened his door and got out, bending over a raised area normally covered by the seat. He pulled up the rubber mat.

“Is that a safe?” Rog asked, pointing to the LCD display.

“Correct. Look away, Dodger.”

Pete punched in numbers and there was a dull click.

“Thought you might need some spending money,” he said, handing over a wedge of fifty-pound notes.

“Bloody hell, Boney,” Rog said, counting the notes.

“There’s five grand here.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll be expecting you to account for it.”

“Sure.”

“Pillock. Of course I won’t. Just be careful you don’t run short.”

“I’m all right. I’ve got accounts at different banks and there are funds in each one.”

“I don’t need to know that, Rog,” Pete said. “But remember—Sara might be monitoring our finances. She has the funds to obtain that information. So keep bank card use to a minimum.”

Soon afterward, Pete was on his own. At least Rog seemed gradually to be coping better, he thought. The poor sod had grown up in a soft, bourgeois family and had 106

Paul Johnston

never done anything he didn’t want to. Whereas Pete had dragged himself up from a broken home in a drug-ridden estate in Lancashire. He’d been mocked because he was smart, beaten up because he was gay and spat on when he’d started to make money. His mother had died from bad heroin and he hadn’t been back home since he was eighteen, already halfway to setting up his computer maintenance company. That turned into a full-blown computer manufacturing operation by the time he was twenty-three and it had floated on the Stock Exchange on his twenty-eighth birthday. Selling his shares when he was thirty-five netted him a hundred and twenty million pounds, most of which was now invested in blue-chip companies and funds all over the world. The five grand he’d given Rog meant nothing to him.

But getting even with whoever had killed Dave did. Pete wasn’t convinced that Matt’s ex-squeeze had done the murder herself. The woman could easily have bought herself a hit man with the White Devil’s millions. There were forty-two of those the last time Pete had done an informed estimate, the bitch having obviously obtained good investment advice. Now it was time to see if some of his contacts could screw with Sara Robbins’s wealth. Not that she went by that name anymore. She had numerous identities, only some of which he and Rog knew. He left the Grand Cherokee in a leafy street in Bromley, having emptied the safe. With any luck, the Jeep would still be there when he came to pick it up, after Sara Robbins had been dealt with. If she came out on top, Pete would have no need of his car or his fortune—he’d have gone to the same place as Dave.

He hoisted the bag containing the sniper’s rifle and the rest of his gear over his shoulder and set off toward the
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station. No one saw him in the rain that had turned into a heavy downpour. That was just as well. When Peter Satterthwaite was determined to achieve something, his face took on the look of a particularly savage avenging angel. After I’d had my fingerprints taken and dictated a statement, I was told that one of Karen’s team had driven my Saab to the car park beneath New Scotland Yard.