Paul Johnson - The Soul collector

"And you believe that's a valid justification for taking the law into your hands?"

"No," I said, taking hold of both her hands. "But this is." I kissed her on the lips, and eventually she responded. By raising her leg to my groin.

"Don't take advantage of me when I'm on duty," she said, her voice softer than her knee.

I stepped back and watched her walk away. It hadn't been necessary that she came to meet me. The fact that she had suggested that we weren't completely washed up.

I said good-night to Lucy before Rog and I went back to London.

For the rest of the night, Meat Loaf had no chance. There was only one song playing repeatedly in my head. It was by Bob Dylan and it bore the name of my former lover and perhaps future nemesis, Sara. Thirty-One Andy, Pete and Rog showed up at New Scotland Yard the next morning to give statements, as did I. The VCCT threw the kitchen sink at us. We were questioned on our own by Taff Turner and a young sergeant called Amelia Browning. She was smart and almost got me to contradict myself several times. Then the assistant commissioner stepped in and interrogated me himself, but I still didn't change my story. I was charged with the manslaughter of Lauren Cuthbertson, but my lawyer didn't think it would go to trial. There were plenty of people who had seen the dead woman murder Jeremy Andrewes and attack me.

Doris Carlton-Jones refused to say a word, presumably forewarned by Sara. That left her at the mercy of the detectives and prosecutors, but I wasn't complaining-she could have made life difficult for me and Andy if she'd accused us of impersonating police officers. Then again, she had a lot of explaining to do herself, not least about her husband's skull. Then came the funerals. Karen warned me not to attend, but I felt it was my duty. She felt it was hers, too, so we went to four of them together. Two of the dead passed without ceremony. Lauren Cuthbertson had no family willing or able to arrange a service-so much for Sara and her birth mother's feelings for her. Sandra Devonish's mother and father collected her body from the morgue. Her funeral would take place in Texas. Karen said they seemed bewildered rather than grief-stricken. Not for long, I suspected. I decided to steer clear of Earl Sternwood's service; according to one of the newspapers, it was "pagan in the extreme," whatever that meant. And I left Alistair Bing/Adrian Brooks to his mother to bury-I hoped without any memorial stone.

The first funeral we attended was Mary Malone's. It took place in a churchyard in Wiltshire, where her parents were buried. It was a cold, wet day and the rooks were screaming at each other from the tops of the bare trees. There was only a handful of people. In death, as in life, Alistair Bing's first victim passed almost unnoticed. An elderly woman wept continuously throughout the service. I found out from the vicar that she was a devoted fan, who had traveled from the south of France. That made my eyes damp.

The second service was for Josh Hinkley. To my surprise, he'd asked for a humanist service before cremation. The readings were from his own books (which was less of a surprise), interspersed with songs by Ian Dury, The Kinks and The Jam. There was a booze-up in a pub in Soho afterward. I only stayed for one drink, but that was long enough for me to be cut dead by the chairman of the Crime Writers' Society and by a tiny Chinese woman with a large chest. Apparently she was Chop Suzy, the tart the dead man had been expecting the night he was murdered. Karen told me that a woman with a posh voice had told Suzy to stay away from "her husband." Female impersonation was obviously another of Alistair Bing's skills, unless he'd got his mother to do it.

Then there was Jeremy Andrewes's funeral. It took place in a pretty churchyard in Hampshire, near the family seat. No one spoke to Karen and me until we were leaving.

"You're Wells, aren't you?" said an elderly, red-faced man. "How dare you show your face here? You're responsible for Jeremy's death. If you make money from it, I shall surely seek you out."

Keeping quiet seemed the best option, even though I'd already decided not to write about the case in my column or make a book out of it. I'd learned my lesson after The Death List.

Then came the worst of all-Dave's funeral. This time it was a beautiful day. The church in Dulwich was packed. There was an honor guard of soldiers from the Parachute Regiment and the SAS, in full dress uniform but without weapons, and the service was traditional, on the wishes of his wife, Ginny, and his parents. I stood with Karen, Pete, Rog and Andy, who'd been released from hospital with a warning, already disregarded, not to drink for a month. We sang hymns that I knew meant nothing to Dave. Unlike many soldiers, he was completely without faith and I was sure he would have laughed at the idea of "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and "Jerusalem" being heard at his funeral. I hoped it made the family feel better, but they certainly didn't look comforted. On the way out of the church Ginny hugged Andy, Rog and Pete, but kept her hands by her sides when it was my turn. She didn't let me finish the first word of my condolences.

"Bastard," she said, her eyes wide. "You killed him, not that bitch you used to fuck."

Her kids started crying and an elderly man tried ineffectually to lead her away.

"You killed him," she wailed, trying to pull her hand away to hit me. "You killed my Dave."

As Karen took my arm and walked me to the gate, I caught sight of Lucy and Caroline. My daughter looked horrified, while my ex-wife's expression was inscrutable. She certainly wasn't displaying anything akin to sympathy, but there was no reason she should have.

Karen drove my car toward Brixton, and then pulled in to the side of the road. She turned to me and took my hands.

"Look at me, Matt," she said, waiting for me to do so. "It's not true. You didn't kill Dave. You did everything you could to save him, with your alert codes and reporting systems. It isn't your fault that he opened the door to Sara. Do you hear me? It isn't your fault."

My breathing was rapid and the blood was rushing through my veins and arteries in a hot flood.

"I love you," Karen said. "Do you hear me, Matt? I- love-you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. No one could have done more to find Dave's killer. You should be proud of that."

But I wasn't. I knew I never would be. After a time, the weight of what Karen had said finally hit me.

"You.you want to spend the rest of your life with me?" I repeated, turning to her.

She nodded and smiled.

And suddenly it struck me that I wanted that, too. More than anything, even catching Sara.

"All right," I said. "Let's spend our lives together."

Karen laughed. "That's another bloody song, isn't it?"

"Sort of. The Stones."

"Ha!" she said, and started the engine. "Jagger and Richards. Old rockers never die."

"Well, that's reassuring, isn't it?" I said, rummaging in the glove compartment and coming out with a CD.

It was only as the first tom-tom beats of "Sympathy for the Devil" came from the speakers that I remembered it had played at full volume, over and over, in Mary Ma- lone's house after her murder.

Alistair Bing and his demented Faustian pact had successfully ruined one of my favorite pieces of music.

Gradually, things got back to normal. I changed the alarm codes in my apartment and had a new security system installed in the Saab. Lucy went back to school, though the teachers said she was hard to reach for some weeks. Caroline told me our daughter needed to see a psychiatrist because of what I'd got them into, which made me call her a fool for failing to check her car for bugs-one was found by the police, obviously put there by Sara. Strangely, that seemed to clear the air and we managed to spend a day with Lucy and talk her through what she'd been through. She started to feel better almost immediately.