Paul Johnston - The Soul Collector

Back at the dining table, I started rearranging the words of the message. There was a disturbing number of permutations, but even more worrying was the fact that I wasn’t getting anywhere. It was past three-only nine hours to go. Should I call Karen? I dismissed the thought, but only after long consideration. I asked Rog what he had come up with and was handed a sheaf of printout, none of which left me any the wiser. Could the clue be an acrostic? I wrote down all the first letters-they made no sense in the order they were in. I changed the order, trying to make a name. I found “Rich”-which applied to several crime writers and a hell of a lot of other people; “Martin”-I knew several of those, both first names and surnames. Should I tell them all to go into hiding? I needed another name; “Watt”-I didn’t know anyone by that name, nor any Martin Watts. I was clutching at straws and I knew it.

I got up and went to make coffee. As I waited for the kettle to boil, I thought about the first line, “The river shrinks bears.” What was that supposed to mean? I thought back to the ground rules of cryptic crosswords. Repunctuate. If I put a comma after “shrinks,” the sense, such as it was, became very different. Rather than the ridiculous vision of large furry animals being reduced in size by the river, I now had the river doing two things-becoming smaller itself and “bearing” something-carrying? I felt the metaphorical ice in my brain crack. A shrunken river meant a smaller one. So a stream, a burn, a rivulet? I was on the brink of a breakthrough, I was sure of it.

Then my phone beeped twice. I’d been sent a text. Apart from Rog, only Pete and Andy had my new number. What had they discovered in the flat? I hit the buttons and read the message.

Josh Hinkley walked into the pub in Soho and went straight to the bar. He didn’t care if the person he was meeting was there already. He urgently needed a drink. He ordered a double ten-year-old Macallan and emptied it in one. That immediately put a different complexion on the day.

He’d spent most of it on the phone to members of the Crime Writers’ Society, or answering their e-mails. It seemed that Matt Wells had a lot of friends, and they objected to his being pilloried in the press and on the Internet. Some had even accused Josh of shamelessly seeking publicity. Well, that was true enough, not that he could admit it. So he’d given them a load of bollocks about how crime writers had a duty to assist the police. Some of his fellow novelists had refused to accept that Matt had chickened out by going underground. Eventually, Josh had told one of them where he could stick his telephone and put his own in one of the kitchen drawers. That didn’t stop it ringing, so he left.

It was only when he was approaching the Goat and Gooseberry that he remembered why he was going there. He’d got a call from another crime writer before the hue and cry had started, asking if they could meet. A year ago, Josh Hinkley wouldn’t have bothered to cross the street to talk to Alistair Bing, but now he wanted to pick the diminutive Yorkshireman’s brains. Bing had started off about ten years back with a desperately tedious series about a pair of rural coppers, set in the Moors. The fact that one of them was a black man and the other a half-Chinese woman didn’t help on the realism front. For some reason, his publishers had continued with the series for six books before finally realizing that sales so low couldn’t be justified, even with a minimal advance. Everyone-Josh included-had assumed that was the last they’d hear of Alistair Bing, but he turned out to be a persistent bugger. He managed to reinvent himself as a writer, coming out with a hard-as-nails ex-FBI protagonist called Jim Cooler, who basically went around the world beating the shit out of bad people and giving one to every luscious female he encountered. The first book had rocketed to the top of the charts in every significant country, turning Bing into a publishing sensation and a very wealthy man. Now Hollywood producers were his best friends.

“Hello, Josh.”

Hinkley turned and took in the short, bespectacled multimillionaire. He still dressed like a 1950s schoolmaster, but now the tweed jacket was bespoke and the glasses the best that Milan could provide.

“Alistair, how the hell are you? I’m just getting another. What would you like?”

“It’s all right,” Bing said, his voice still the drone of the permanently unhappy Northerner. “I’ve got one over at that table.” He moved his arm limply.

“Let’s go, then.” Josh Hinkley led him back to his own table. A half-pint glass was sitting there, three-quarters full. “Sure you don’t want a shot to go with that?”

“Oh, no, I never drink spirits.” Alistair Bing carefully folded up the newspaper he’d been reading.

“So, what brings you to London?”

“Oh, I live here now. Off Harley Street, actually.”

“Really?” Josh Hinkley had assumed Bing was tied to the north by chains of Sheffield steel. “We’re practically neighbors.”

“Yes, I walked past your place the other day. I imagine it’s nicer inside than it looks from the outside.”

Hinkley was unimpressed, both by the slur on his home and the idea of Alistair Bing checking up on him, but he managed not to let that show. “I like to be close to the people I write about,” he said, aware that he sounded like a bleeding-heart liberal. The reality was, he hated the sleazeballs who hung around the pubs and strip joints. His double flat was on the top of a building otherwise used as offices; it was an air-conditioned oasis where he could hide away and write.

“So,” he said, forcing himself to be sociable, “you’re a Londoner now.”

“Oh, no, never that,” Bing said mildly. “But I’m on national radio and TV so much that I needed a base down here. I ended up buying the whole house.” He gave a slack smile. “It’s an investment, you know.”

“Right,” Hinkley said. Now he was impressed. He was still paying off a mortgage.

Bing took a small sip of beer. “The first Jim Cooler movie’s in preproduction, so I’m flying to L. A. every month.”

Josh Hinkley bit the bullet and asked how that was going, trying to damp down his jealousy. One of his Lenny “The Gore” Gray novels had been made into a TV series, but it had been miscast and directed by a smart-arse who ballsed up the story in a big way. He was forced to listen to Bing talking about Hollywood stars like they were his best mates. But there was something different about his fellow author. When Josh had first met him, at a bookshop event somewhere in the Midlands, he’d been shy and nervous. Now he acted like he was a master of the universe and nothing seemed to faze him. He appeared on late-night review programs and took on so-called intellectuals, he wrote columns for the broadsheets that combined analysis of modern life with unexpected wit, and he even turned up on kids’ TV as the token person with a brain who didn’t mind being asked brainless questions. There must have been something in the water up north. It certainly wasn’t in the beer-Bing still hadn’t finished his half-pint.

Eventually Josh Hinkley couldn’t take any more name-dropping, even though Bing had offered to introduce him to several of the movie executives and television producers he knew. “This Matt Wells thing, Alistair,” he asked. “Where do you stand on that?”

“I’m with you, Josh,” Bing said, smiling ingratiatingly. “I think the way he’s behaving is absolutely outrageous. It was bad enough the first time around, with that White Devil killer. He should be cooperating with the police. It isn’t as if he has to go out of his way to do that-he’s sleeping with a senior detective.”