Paul Johnston - The Soul Collector

“If she’s in a gang, it could have all been cash deposits,” Pete pointed out. “We should tell Matt.”

“Tell him what? Wait till I’ve checked the source of her funds. My money’s on it being dirty.”

Pete shook his head. “I’m not taking that bet. What I don’t like is the idea that the cow’s running around scot-free. If she really did kill the surgeon, you’d better hope she doesn’t realize you’ve been snooping on her bank account. Otherwise you might be her next victim.”

“We, Boney,” Rog corrected.

Pete looked nervously at the door and drummed his fingers on the butt of his pistol.

After Andy and I had got back to Victoria, we exited the station and headed for a cyber-cafe. I needed to see if Caroline and Fran had come up with anything on the clue. My own thoughts were still random and chaotic, and there were only two hours left till the next deadline. Even though Doctor Faustus had killed Josh Hinkley instead of Adrian Brooks, I had to believe that I could save the target.

While Andy went to the counter to buy coffee and a Danish, I logged on to my e-mail program. My heart skipped a beat. There was nothing from Caroline or Fran. Jesus, could Sara have got to them via the signals? Surely that was impossible. I’d been moving around and the likelihood of her picking up my wi-fi signal in the huge city was minimal. So why hadn’t they replied? Maybe the message hadn’t got through. I sent it again, then looked at my watch. I couldn’t afford to wait. Someone’s life was hanging by a thread. I had to find the solution.

Andy came back with a mound of pastries and two mugs of coffee.

“On a diet?” I asked, taking out my notebook.

“Yeah, boss,” he said, grinning. “Whatever you say, boss.”

I looked at the clue. “Bestial Ozzies.” Could that mean animals from Australia? Possums? Crocodiles? Wallabies? Tasmanian devils? Koalas? None of them seemed to get me any further. I reread the last two lines. There was some game being played with Cain and Abel. Why was “Cain” “blind”? I tried to remember the conventions of cryptic crosswords-this may not have been a crossword, but it was definitely full of hidden secrets. Repunctuate. I did that, removing all the full stops, commas and brackets. Zilch. I removed all the capitals. Ditto. What else? Anagrams. Bugger that-too time-consuming. Word order. I fiddled with that for a couple of minutes, but, again, decided it would take hours. Homophones. The only one that struck me was “Abel”-it sounded like “able.” Words with two or more meanings. I’d already played around with “bestial,” meaning “animal,” and got nowhere. It also meant “brutish”-brutish Australians? The only Aussie crime writer I knew was clever, witty and remarkably well-behaved. How about part for whole? Could “Ozzies” mean a specific Australian rather than Australians, plural? And the same for “Scotsmen”?

Andy put a sticky finger on the first line of the clue. “The English enslaved the Scots, didn’t they?”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” I said, raising an eyebrow at him. And then I got it. “Shit!” I said, making the pretty girl at the till laugh. “You’re in this, Andy. Or should I say Andrew?”

He stared at me. I looked back down at the clue. “‘I have enslaved Scotsmen.’ They’re Andrews, plural.” I brought my hand down on my knee. “That’s it. Jeremy Andrewes.”

“The shithead journalist who’s been busting your balls?”

I nodded. “Like the other clues, this is a series of alternatives for the different syllables. ‘I have enslaved Scotsmen’ means that the Scotsmen, the Andrews, are mine-so ‘my Andrews.’ ‘My’ is made up of the last two syllables of ‘Jeremy.’”

The American was chewing slowly, his eyes on the clue.

“‘As well as’ is another way of saying ‘and,’ as in ‘Andrews.’”

Finally, I understood the “bestial Ozzies.” I’d been close. “It is an Australian animal-the kangaroo, also referred to as ‘roo.’”

“He was in Winnie the Pooh, ” Andy said. “I used to like that cartoon.”

“I’m very happy for you, Slash. ‘Roos’ sounds like ‘r-u-e-s,’ meaning ‘repents’ or, I suppose, ‘feels sad,’ as in ‘sadly’ in line three.”

Andy was struggling to keep up. “What about ‘Tiny Goethe polishes,’ then?”

I thought about that. Sara or her sidekick had no doubt chosen Goethe to distract me because of the Faust connection. “Goethe was a German. We would have called him a ‘gerry’ if he’d turned up in the Second World War.”

“You mean, like the first bit of ‘Jeremy’?”

“Well done, big man.”

“Yeah, but why ‘tiny’?” Then Andy laughed. “Maybe it’s the mouse in Tom and Jerry. He was pretty small.”

I thought it was probably just that Jerry was a diminutive of Jeremy, but I let him have it. “‘Building cheaply’ is ‘jerry-building’ and ‘blind Cain’…what is that? Blind. Yes! To make someone blind, you take out their eyes. ‘Eye’ sounds like the letter i -take it from ‘Cain’ and you get ‘can,’ which means ‘able,’ as in sounds like ‘Abel,’ the Biblical character. Voila.”

“Jeez, Wellsy, it’s a hell of a lot just for two names.” He peered at the clue again. “What about ‘polishes’?”

I looked at the letters that made up Andrewes. “It’s an anagram. You can get ‘sand’ or ‘sander’ out of the surname. Sanding is a form of polishing.”

Andy looked at his watch. “We’ve still got an hour and a half. Are you going to tell this Andrewes guy to watch out?”

I shook my head. “No, I’m not. I’m not going to send the right answer at noon, either.”

Andy switched into John MacEnroe mode. “You cannot be serious. Sara might take him down.”

“Not if we’re looking after him.”

He smiled. “I get it. You’re going to use Jeremy Andrewes as bait.”

I nodded. “I think he deserves that, after all the bollocks he’s written about me recently.”

“Neat, my man, very neat.” The smile vanished from his lips. “There’s only one problem. To draw her out, we’re going to have to put Andrewes where he makes a good target. That means we’ll be targets, too.”

“Correct,” I said, catching his eye. “But I’m prepared to risk it for Dave. You?”

“Count me in,” Andy said without a second’s hesitation.

Karen Oaten and Amelia Browning were standing outside the house in Stoke Newington with Ron Paskin. CSIs in dark blue coveralls were going up the steps to the front door. There was a crowd of rubberneckers behind the barrier tape. Inspector Ozal and other Homicide East detectives were moving through it, asking people if they had seen anything suspicious.

John Turner brought a painfully thin, elderly woman forward. She was dressed in a faded blue coat and tattered slippers. “This is Mrs. Maisie Jones,” the inspector said. “She lives across the street.”

“I saw them,” the woman said, gripping Karen Oaten’s arm with a clawlike hand. “There were a lot of them. In big, black cars.” She leaned closer. “They looked foreign. ” She spoke the last word with a grimace.

“When was this, Mrs. Jones?” Paskin asked, with an encouraging smile.

“Only about an hour ago,” she replied. “Some of them went inside. They were all dressed in suits-looked expensive-except for one man. He was young, but he was wearing the sort of clothes that old men who live on the streets have. Dirty. I bet he smelled. He looked frightened an’ all.”

“And then what happened?” the superintendent asked patiently.

“The men at the cars got spoken to by the locals.” Maisie Jones looked up at Paskin. “They’re mostly Turkish, you know. Criminals, the lot of them. They were telling the others to sling their ’ook, weren’t they? Well, they didn’t like that one little bit. I saw them take out their guns and the shooting started.”