The Soul Collector

her in Washington. I thought I could convert her.”

Jeremy Andrewes managed to bite his tongue. “Are you ready to talk now?”

“Yeah. Here I go.”

As Hinkley came out with a character assassination that Carlos the Jackal would have been proud of, the thought that Matt Wells could have been the killer kept nagging away at Jeremy Andrewes. And while he didn’t believe for one moment that Wells would murder his fellow crime writers, he knew that suspicion would sell plenty of newspapers.

The Soul Collector woke in her van. She opened the back door a few centimeters and listened. Although she had parked a long way up a track in rural Worcestershire, she couldn’t be sure no one had spotted the vehicle. The early dawn light was faint and mist had gathered over the fields. She decided she was safe for another half hour.

Sara Robbins used the time to go over her plan. She had timed everything carefully and had built in an extra ten minutes. Today was the day that she put the squeeze on the former SAS men. The cottage in Berkshire was waiting to receive guests. She’d bought it with funds that not even a genius hacker would have been able to identify as hers. The other properties were in compound names, including her mother’s, that Matt and his friends might well have found. They were welcome to check them out.

She put her papers into a folder and stuck it under the front seat. She had memorized everything and she was ready. This was the biggest test of her abilities yet. Killing people was easy, if you were cold enough about it-and she certainly was. But kidnapping people, keeping them alive, that was more of a challenge. As was luring and out- thinking three former elite soldiers. Not even her brother had managed to pull anything like that off. She loved him, but her ambition was to be even more ruthless, even more invincible. Today would be the making of her. The Soul Collector was the god beneath the ground, the final enemy of mankind-Hades, Persephone, Hecate, Dis, Proserpina, Hel, Lucifer. It was striking how many of those ancient deities were female. Women were usually seen as the source of life, but not Sara Robbins.

The Soul Collector was Death Incarnate.

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.”