The Soul Collector

Pete had put the stained card in a plastic bag. “You know what, Slash?”

“Tell me,” Andy said, raising an eyebrow.

“We’ll have to turn him over again.”

“What, so the cops don’t realize he’s been moved?”

“No. So we can check his back pockets.”

They maneuvered the body again.

“Nothing in here,” Pete said.

“But I’ve got this.” Andy held up a piece of folded paper. “I think there’s some writing, but it’s run.” He held the paper up to Pete’s torch beam. “‘Sorry, but….’” He squinted in the torchlight. “Nope, can’t make it out. Why’s someone saying sorry? For killing him?”

“Fuck knows. Let’s get out of here before I puke my guts up.”

Pete walked to the kitchen.

“Hey, Boney,” Andy said, “you need to reactivate the alarm system.”

“No, I don’t. The place is going to be swarming with cops as soon as we’re clear of it.” He went through the window space.

When they were back on the street, Pete took out his cell phone and started texting. By the time they reached the main road, he’d had a reply.

“Good,” he said. “Matt agrees. I’ll call the cops from the city center.”

As they walked between medieval college buildings, Andy nudged his friend.

“What do you think about Oxford now, Boney?”

Pete raised his arm and sniffed his jacket. “I still stink of that poor bastard.” He glanced at the American. “What do I think about Oxford?” He shivered. “I still bloody hate it.”

Andy nodded. “Me, too. But you get a better class of corpse here.”

Pete stared at him and shook his head. “Sometimes I despair of you, Slash.”

“Me, too, man,” Andy replied, watching a blond young woman in a short skirt get off her bicycle. “But I can get over it.”

“Aw right, mate,” said Josh Hinkley, his feet in their black pointed cowboy boots on the kitchen table. “But tell Spider he’s dead if he doesn’t show up for poker on Friday. See ya.” He dropped the phone onto the book he’d been reading-Offshore Investments Made Simple. His broker had told him it was worth its weight in platinum, which had made Josh laugh. He still thought the guy was a champion arse-licker.

“Time for a drink, I reckon, Josh, old man,” he said aloud, getting up and heading for the fridge. He took out a bottle of Urquel lager and flipped the cap. “Oh, yes, my beauty,” he said after a series of gulps. Since his wife, Lou, had up and left, he’d taken to talking to himself. It wasn’t as if anyone could hear him. Or his music. From the stereo came the sound of The Kinks playing “All Day and All of the Night.” He’d always liked Ray Davies and his mates. A genuine London band with genuine London style.

Not that he was a Londoner himself. According to his Web site, he’d been born within the sound of the Bow Bells, but it would have needed a clear day and a massive sound system to have carried the ding-dongs to the hospital in Harlow. Still, at least his ma had been a real Cockney, even though she wasn’t too clear about who his old man was. It was a toss-up between an Irish laborer and a Glaswegian layabout. Josh’s money was on the former-he had a hell of a work ethic. For the last ten years he’d spent as much time as he could reading the competition. He had transposed American characters to the U.K. and altered the dialogue appropriately. So far as plot was concerned, there was nothing new under the sun, as he liked to say at book signings. Some arsehole critics had clocked what he was up to, but his readers didn’t care. And then, out of the bleeding blue, along comes that little squit Alistair Bing with his Jim Cooler books and outsells him all over the world.

The phone rang.

“’Allo, darling,” Hinkley said with a wide grin. “Yeah, you’re bloody right I’m waiting for you. Get that pretty little Chinese ass of yours over here right now, you hear?” He dropped the phone and dug around in his pocket for the bag of coke he’d scored earlier. He chopped some lines on the antique farmhouse table that Lou had made such a fuss about polishing and got to work with a rolled-up fifty-pound note.

“Yeehah!” he shouted, as he made his way unsteadily to his top-of-the-range Bang amp; Olufsen stereo system. A few seconds later, The Jam were crashing their way through his favorite track, “Private Hell”-another set of genuine London sons; well, Surrey sons. And with Chop Suzy on her way, what more could a man ask?

Josh Hinkley slid slowly to the parquet floor. His head was spinning, but he still couldn’t get Matt Wells out of his mind. The fucker. He was knobbing that blond bint from the VCCT, so he got the heads-up on every big case in the city. She probably knew exactly where he was and what he was doing. The rozzers were letting Matt break as many laws as he liked. But he was going to get the tosser; he’d already set the wheels in motion. Mr. I Know More About Crime Than Any Other Novelist was going to become a very big cropper.

The buzzer went. Hinkley went to the door and pressed the entry button. Suzy and her honey-pot would be on their way up in the lift. He spat on his fingers and smoothed them over his hair.

“All right, darling,” he said, pulling open the door, “let’s be having you!”

Before Josh Hinkley’s lights went out, he registered that something very bizarre had happened to his visitor’s face.

Twenty-Two

The half hour before midnight had passed more slowly than a penguin marathon. I looked at my watch so often that Rog asked if I’d discovered a new way of jerking off. I couldn’t make sense of what Pete and Andy had found in Sara’s Oxford house. The apologetic note on the dead man suggested that someone else may have dumped the body. I’d be thinking about that later, though there was no chance of checking the house again-Pete’s call to the cops would have turned the street into CSI Oxford. London cops would soon be swarming all over the clinic in Harley Street, too.

At last the deadline was close. I logged on to my e-mail server. There was a message from a different address, answerplease3. I wrote, Your target is Adrian Brooks, the crime writer Alistair Bing. I expect you to keep your word about not killing him.

At exactly midnight, I hit Send. The message moved to the Sent Items folder without any problems. I felt like a footballer who’d just won the Cup final. I’d taken on Sara, or whoever she’d hired to kill the crime writers, and I’d won. How would she like that?

There was a chime as an instant reply came through. My heart dropped like a stone.

Well done, Matt. Though I did say it was an easy one. The thing is, I made the rules and I can break them. You know where Josh Hinkley lives, don’t you? Maybe you should get around there. Then again, given how nasty he’s been about you in print recently, maybe you shouldn’t. The delightful Karen might put you in the frame as the killer.

Doctor Faustus

“Fuck!” I yelled.

Rog pushed me aside and keyed out a string of abuse. I managed to stop him before he sent the reply.

“Forget it,” I said. “There’s nothing we can do.” I turned away.

“Maybe it’s just a bluff,” Rog said. “Why don’t you ring this Hinkley guy from a public phone?”

It wasn’t a bad idea. There was a phone across the road. I pressed out the number, my heart thundering. It rang ten times before it was picked up.

“Hello,” came a neutral male voice.

“Is that Josh?” I asked, in a Cockney accent.

“Who’s calling, please?”

This time I recognized the voice. It was DI John Turner, his Welsh vowels not completely obscured.

I broke the connection. If Taff Turner was there, something terminal had happened to Josh Hinkley. It would be on the TV and radio stations soon enough.

“What now?” Rog asked.

“I’ve got a visit to make. You should get some sleep.”