was the David Lean movie made in Ireland?' 'I know that,' Andy said. 'It had Robert Mitchum in it, and that woman who always gets her jugs out.' 'Kate Winslet?' Pete asked. 'Sarah Miles, you moron,' I said. 'And the movie's name is?' 'Ryan's Daughter,' Andy said, raising his arm in triumph. Rog looked at me. 'So what have we got? Ryan Brooks?' I shook my head. 'We're not finished yet. What about 'imperial'?' 'Something to do with the British Empire?' Rog asked. 'There's stuff about the I.R.A. in Ryan's Daughter,' Pete said. 'They were fighting against the empire, weren't they?' He was right, but I couldn't see where that got us. 'What about other empires?' 'The Roman,' Slash said. 'That is the biggie, isn't it?' I said, nodding. 'Wait a minute. Emperors.' My mind was working on some dimension that I couldn't control. The list of emperors that I'd learned in history at school flashed before me- Augustus, Tiberius, Nero. Then it hit me like a lightning bolt and I groaned. 'Of course. It's Hadrian.' Rog looked at me. 'How do you work that out?' 'Rian,' I said, pronouncing the last four letters of the word like 'ryan.' 'Bugger!' Rog said, glancing at Pete. 'Sorry, Boney.' I had moved on to the last line. Hadrian. Obviously there weren't many people called that these days. 'Thirsty,' I said. 'Dry. The third, fourth and fifth letters of Hadrian are d, r and i-sounds like 'dry.'' 'So?' Rog said. 'What draws people?' I asked, myself as much as the others. 'A painter,' Andy said. 'A brush.' I shook my head. 'Another sense of 'draw.' As in 'attract.'' 'A poster,' said Pete. 'An advert.' Rog and I spoke simultaneously. 'Also known as an ad,' I said. Now I saw it all. 'And 'nothing' in a well-known foreign language is?' 'Nada,' said Andy. 'Oh, Christ,' Rog said, his eyes wide. 'The French for 'nothing' is 'rien.' Ad-rien. Is that Adrienne, female, or Adrian, male?' 'Good question,' I said. 'Run a search on both Adrian and Adrienne Brooks.' He went over to his computer. I was frantically trying to think if I knew anyone called Adrian Brooks. It seemed familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Adrienne Brooks? That seemed less likely, for some reason. 'I've got another professor,' Rog shouted, 'with the female name. But she's in Alaska.'
I shook my head. We were casting the net too wide. The first two victims had been crime writers. That was where the answer lay. I went over to my laptop and logged on, then called up the Crime Writers' Society Web site. On the home page, I clicked Directory. I scrolled down the list of real names, their pseudonyms alongside. And there it was.
'Adrian Brooks,' I yelled. 'It's the real name of Alistair Bing!'
That didn't mean much to the others, but it did to me. I went back to the site's home page and clicked on Members' Details, then clicked on the letter B and found a phone number and an address in central London.
I picked up the phone, called the number and waited for the next victim to pick up. Nineteen The Soul Collector stood in the small structure next to her cottage at the edge of Oldbury village in southern Berkshire. Although it was only twenty miles from Heathrow Airport, she felt as if she was in a safe and isolated place. She looked at the earth floor. She had raked and then brushed it, so there was no obvious sign that it had been disturbed recently. It had been good exercise, digging the meter-deep hole for the three coffins. Now her hostages lay bound and gagged in their last homes. When the effect of the gas she had used to knock them out wore off, they would wake up in the darkness and they would be terrified. The Soul Collector smiled.
Her plan had gone perfectly. First she had picked up Geronimo's wife, Alison. That had been very easy. A knock at the door, having checked there was no one in the vicinity, a blast of the same gas she had used when she had been working with her brother, and into the van. Then she had driven to the school a few miles away. From her surveillance she knew that Rommel's son, Josh, walked the short distance home with the Slovenian au pair Maria. She picked him and the girl up, saying that she was a friend and the mother had been taken to hospital. She sprayed them both on the country road and dumped the au pair in a ditch. Given the disguise she was wearing and the van's false plates, she'd never be traced. Then she'd driven as fast as she could to Wolfe's house in Warwickshire. There was no time for subtlety now-Rommel's wife could be in touch any moment. She knocked out Wolfe's wife with a truncheon blow when she answered the door, cracked the son's head when he came out of the kitchen and gassed Amanda Mary. Then she had disappeared into the twilight.
Back in the cottage, having closed the three padlocks on the shed, the Soul Collector assumed the lotus position. As ever, she thought of her brother. He had called himself the White Devil, but to her he would always be Leslie, the name he'd been given by his adoptive mother. Although she'd since discovered that their birth mother had dubbed him Oliver in the days before she handed them over, that name seemed as unreal as Angela, the one she'd been given. Leslie had made her life. Before he had accosted her outside the Daily Independent offices, she had been a typical soulless journalist, with her eyes only on the next story. She didn't even have a steady boyfriend, just a string of drunken one-night stands that hadn't even provided good sex. Leslie had given her that. She'd been able to abandon herself to him precisely because he was her brother-breaking the taboo of incest had been incredibly exhilarating. When he'd told her they were twins, she hadn't believed him. There was little facial resemblance between them, though once they were in contact she was able to commune with him in the strange way many twins experience. That had made working with him in his great revenge plot so much easier.
Leslie had made only one mistake. His desire for his name to go down in history had driven him to involve the writer Matt Wells. The worm who thought he had turned, the useless fuck who was now crying for his friend Dave. Although he hadn't brought about her brother's death-the SAS men who had executed Leslie would soon be paying for that-Matt's resistance had meant that not all the people her brother had planned to kill became victims. She would harvest their souls soon. Her plan had been two years in the making and Leslie would have applauded its subtlety.
Vengeance is mine, the woman thought. Was there anything purer and more life-enhancing than revenge? The Jacobean tragedians knew its worth, despite the fact that ultimately they had to kill their revengers to end their works in ways acceptable to the establishment of the time. John Webster, in particular, had more than passing sympathy for his tragic characters, not least the incestuous siblings Vittoria and Flaminio in The White Devil. Although the revengers were punished, their lives and deeds were portrayed as tragic, and therefore noble, while the supposedly virtuous characters were no less corrupt and hypocritical, but much less interesting.
Her brother had shown her that revenge was meaningless without killing. The deceived wives who put laxatives in their husbands' coffee or poured sugar into the petrol tanks of their expensive cars weren't serious revenge- takers. To earn the title of revenger, it was necessary that the people who had injured you died, preferably in as much agony as possible. When Leslie had first given her the opportunity to kill, she had flinched, but only for a few seconds. After that, she'd never had any problem.
The Soul Collector opened her eyes. It was time to make contact with Wolfe and his men. They were her first targets, even though Matt and his friends were trying to trace her. No doubt the computer expert Roger van Zandt had been responsible for transferring the money out of her accounts. She didn't care about that. She had her own hacker who would respond, but the money didn't matter. All she cared about was taking her revenge, slowly and with exquisite pain. She would deal with the fool Matt and his friends when she was ready.
She laughed. So far Matt had reacted exactly as she had expected. He had gone into hiding, and sent his mother, ex-wife and daughter to a secret location. By doing that, he thought he was minimizing the risk to them. He couldn't have been more wrong.
There was no answer from Alistair Bing's landline, but I got through on his cell phone.
'Hey,' I said, 'it's Matt Wells.' I'd met Bing at a couple of crime-writing festivals, before he became a bestseller. He'd struck me as a seriously dull person. He wasn't one of those authors who allowed themselves to be addressed both by their real name and their pseudonym, as I did. He seemed to prefer the latter. Maybe he got a kick out of hiding behind an invented identity.
There was a pause. 'Hello, Matt. I'm sorry about your friend.'
'Thanks. Listen, this might sound strange, but you're in a lot of danger.'
'Am I?' Suddenly there was tension in his voice.
'I think the person who killed Mary Malone and Sandra Devonish is planning to murder you.'
'What? Oh my God!'
'Calm down and listen carefully. It's essential you don't give away to the killer that you know. The deadline is midnight.'
'Deadline?' he asked, his apprehension replaced by curiosity. 'What do you mean? I assumed that stuff in the papers about you being in touch with the murderer was speculation.'
'I'm afraid not.'
'Can you help me, then?'
'Cool it, Alistair. Where are you?'
'In Harley Street, near my house.'
'All right, I'm sending a couple of my friends around to look after you. Do what they say and you'll be all
