Paul Johnston - The Soul Collector

I sat down and rubbed my eyes, then looked over at the bookcase. On the top shelf was a movie guide I’d always meant to buy. I was about to get up and have a look at it when I had a flash of insight. The words could be taken separately, and “lean” didn’t need a synonym or any other substitute word. It was a name in its own right, that of Britain’s most revered film director, David Lean-the definite article might have been used to put us off. But who was David Lean’s “imperial heiress”?

“Yes!” I yelled, punching the air.

“What?” Rog said, pushing his chair back and coming over. Andy and Pete were watching with interest.

“We’ve been made fools of,” I said, “but not anymore.” I underlined the second, third, fourth and fifth letters of “heiress.”

“Eire?” Rog said. “As in Ireland.”

“Correct. And what 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.

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.