Paul Johnson - The Soul collector

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. Twenty-Five 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 lookedforeign." 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."

When Oaten and her subordinates had arrived, an ambulance was taking away the third and last body. Even though uniformed personnel had arrived very quickly, the shooters had dispersed and none of the "big, black cars" had been found.

"Did you see the men come back out of the house, Mrs. Jones?" Amelia Browning asked.

"Ooh, call me Maisie, love," the old woman said, with a loose smile that revealed ill-fitting dentures. "Yes, I did. The young bloke was marched to the second car and another man got in the back with him. I think he was the boss, because three or four others were standing around him to make sure he didn't get hit. Quite a few of the men in suits were hit, but only the one got left behind. They tried to grab his body, but they were outnumbered by then, so they had to drive off."

They waited for more, but Mrs. Jones seemed to have said her piece.

"Would you like Sergeant Browning here to help you home?" Oaten asked. "See if she saw anything else," she added, in a low voice to Amelia.

"Wonderful," Paskin said. "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. When we got here, the kids were picking up the cartridge cases and throwing them at each other. Thank Christ no actual weapons were left behind."

"The local gang members would have grabbed them," Turner said. "This is Shadow territory, isn't it?"

The superintendent nodded.

"What about the intruders?" Oaten asked.

"Albanians, we think," said Paskin. "The dead guy had a letter in his pocket. One of my team has been learning the language."

"Do you think this was an attempt to move into the area, guv?" the Welshman asked.

"No, Taff. They don't work that way, do they? At least, not in broad daylight."

Karen Oaten nodded. "You're right. The Albanian families tend to buy their way in using middlemen. When they've got a foothold, they either kill or kidnap the local leaders and their families. They don't go for all-out war in the streets."

"So what were they doing here?" Turner asked.

Paskin looked up at the second-floor windows. A uniformed officer had seen the open door and gone to investigate. He was in shock and the pathologist was still trying, literally, to piece together what had happened upstairs.

"I'd say the young guy led them to the flat. The guy whose body was dismembered was probably an Albanian."

"Sounds reasonable," Oaten said. "They'd have been hoping to find him alive. Otherwise they wouldn't have come in such numbers."

Turner looked at his boss thoughtfully. "Do you reckon the young man's still alive?"

"Not if he had anything to do with what happened to the victim, Taff," Ron Paskin said, his expression grim.

"The Albanians are usually all related," Oaten said. "Like the original Sicilian mafia." She turned to the superintendent. "I'd like to attach one of my people to your team till the situation out here is resolved."

Her former boss nodded. "No problem, Karen. I could do with an extra pair of hands." He looked down the street ruefully. "An extra hundred pairs of hands."

Oaten and Turner glanced at each other. They both knew that feeling. They walked to the chief inspector's car, the Welshman asking bystanders to move aside.

"What do you think, guv?" he asked.

"That the killer's losing his grip. Dismembering a body is a big step from the earlier killings." She got in and started the engine.

"We don't know that the person who chopped up the Albanian also killed the Kurds and the Turks," Turner said.

Oaten looked over her shoulder and reversed down the street. "Not for certain, no. The CSIs have got plenty of fingerprints in the flat here, but nothing to compare them with from the other scenes. But you know the murders are connected, even if the same person didn't actually carry them out. Personally, I think it is the same killer."

"Could it be Sara Robbins?"

"If it is, Matt had better keep his head down because she's really lost it now."

Turner pushed himself back in his seat as she accelerated. "Steady, guv. It's a busy road."

Karen Oaten braked hard behind a bus. "Remember something else," she said. "The body in the house in Oxford. It looks like she owns that property-the name on the deeds is a composite of her mother's maiden name and the names given to Sara and her twin before they were adopted. What kind of person keeps a rotting corpse in their hall?"

John Turner didn't answer. He remembered all too well the last person he knew who had done something similar.