Paul Johnston - The Soul Collector

I stood up and bent over the body. Then I took off my glove and closed Dave’s eyes beneath the partially congealed slick of blood. I didn’t care that my fingerprints would be on the eyelids. There were some duties that friends had to discharge, whatever the circumstances. I leaned close and spoke to my friend for the last time.

“We’ll get her, Dave, I promise you that. And we’ll look after Ginny and the…and Tom and Annie.” His son was the same age as Lucy, his daughter two years older. The horror that they would have to face made me blink hard. Then I opened my eyes again and inhaled the coppery smell of fresh blood.

“No matter how far she goes, I’ll be on her tail,” I said, standing up straight.

There was only one more thing to say-the catch-phrase that everyone who played for South London Bisons used when a game seemed to be lost.

“No mercy, no surrender.”

Pete arrived at my side. He repeated the words, and then turned me around, gently but insistently. In the hall, I took out my phone and called Karen.

“Dave’s been murdered,” I said, the words singeing my mouth. I gave her the address. After I’d hung up, I turned to Pete. “You’d better get moving.”

He pushed me back toward the kitchen. “Let him be now,” he said. “Don’t go back in there.”

I nodded my agreement. I had no appetite to see Sara’s handiwork again. Besides, I wanted to check the rest of the house. It was possible she’d left a message somewhere else and I didn’t want the police to find it first. After about ten minutes I heard sirens. But by that time I’d only managed to ascertain one thing: there was no sign of a break-in.

Had Dave willingly admitted his killer?

“Where are we going, Mummy?” Lucy asked from the backseat.

Caroline Zerb looked in the rearview mirror. “Never mind,” she said, her voice sharp. She had been watching for cars on her tail ever since they’d left the house in Wimbledon.

“It’s a magical mystery tour,” Fran said, turning her head and smiling at her granddaughter. She had been a primary schoolteacher before her children’s books had taken off, and her skills with children were far superior to Caroline’s.

Lucy raised an eyebrow skeptically. “How long are we going to go round and round the motorway?”

“Until I decide otherwise,” her mother said, accelerating up the fast lane, then cutting inside and slowing down in front of a lorry. Matt had given her a book about surveillance techniques and she had practiced how to make life difficult for a tail. The initial shock she’d felt when her ex-husband sounded the alarm had worn off and now she was anxious about the meetings she’d been forced to cancel.

Her phone rang and she pressed the button on her hands-free kit. “It’s me,” Matt said. “Listen carefully, I haven’t much time. This is a full alert.”

“What’s happened?”

“Just listen! Are you on the M25?”

“Yes.”

“Get off at the next exit and find a pay phone. Your cell phone frequency may be being scanned. Follow instruction two, repeat, two. I’ll be in touch. Give…give my love to Lucy and Fran.”

“Matt?” Caroline swallowed an expletive when the connection was broken.

“Is he all right?” Fran asked, her face drawn.

“I think so. He was in a hurry. He sent his love to you both.”

The two women exchanged glances. They both knew that something bad had happened. There had been a number of false alarms, but they’d never yet had to use the suitcases they had permanently ready.

Caroline indicated left and drove up the Sevenoaks exit. Matt would explode when he discovered they were in her car. The standing instruction if she picked up Fran was for them to take the older woman’s considerably less noticeable Renault Clio. Caroline couldn’t do without her Mazda RX-8, though. It was fast, it could outpace almost any tail. Because Matt’s emergency plans were so compartmentalized, it was quite possible that he’d never find out about the car. Everything worked on a need-to-know basis-and he didn’t need to know about the black Mazda.

Eighteen months ago, she’d memorized the five instructions on the list that had then been destroyed. The second required her to call a number and ask if there were any messages for Zeppelin Delta. She’d be given the address of the safe house. Matt had told her that further instructions were taped beneath the top drawer of the chest in the largest bedroom. Although he’d bought the safe house with a small part of his ill-gotten gains from The Death List, he’d done so via a solicitor who’d been instructed never to give the owner details of the property or its address-the story was that the terms of the divorce settlement required that confidentiality. Caroline sometimes thought it was a ridiculous overreaction to the White Devil case; then she would remember her abduction at the hands of the madman and his sister, who was still on the loose and had threatened revenge on Matt and his circle. And she would remember that Fran and Lucy had also been taken by the bastards. She glanced in the mirror. Any inconvenience was immaterial as long as her daughter was kept safe.

Fran turned to her granddaughter when Caroline got out at the service station. “This is exciting, isn’t it, dear?”

Lucy shrugged. She was on the cusp of adolescence and nothing her elders said was satisfactory. “I don’t see why Mummy had to take my phone away.”

“You have to trust her,” her grandmother said. She had turned her own cell phone off. That didn’t bother her, as she despised the things. She was more concerned at the disruption to her latest book. The Flight of the Bumbling Bee was at the crucial second draft stage. At least she’d remembered to bring a disk with the text on it. Presumably there would be a computer in the safe house. The standing instruction was that laptops were not to be brought, in case bugs had been fitted. Fran didn’t see how that could happen as she never took her laptop away from home, and Matt had made sure that her home was equipped with armored windows and doors, enough locks and chains to keep a prison governor happy and an alarm system that must have cost him a fortune. She hadn’t been happy when he told her that an expert could still get in and out, and leave no trace.

“Gran?” Lucy said, her eyes fixed on the door of the service station. “Who’s Mummy talking to?”

Fran’s stomach clenched when she saw that Caroline was deep in conversation with a woman whose back was turned to the car.

Ignoring Matt’s strict instructions, Fran opened the door and swung her feet out. Lucy wasn’t staying on her own. She wrestled with the rear-opening door and clambered out after her grandmother.

Karen sat down next to me at the kitchen table after she’d taken a preliminary look. We were both in coveralls and overshoes. All my clothes had been taken away for examination.

“This is awful, Matt,” she said, touching my arm. My hands were in clear plastic bags prior to fingerprints being taken. “Tell me what happened.”

I had decided to come clean with her about the others’ presence-detectives knocking on doors would probably get descriptions of several men in black combats and woollen hats, and I didn’t want any potential sighting of the killer to be compromised. So I told her about Dave’s call using the alert code and the way we got in.

She shook her head as I talked, her eyes lowered. When I’d finished, she looked me in the eye. “I understand you’ve just lost a close friend, but Christ, what were you thinking of, Matt? Why didn’t you call me as soon as you heard from Dave? We’d have arrived here quicker and that might have saved his life.”