The Soul Collector (28 page)

opened as he pushed it. Andy stepped in quickly, his weapon raised. He moved his arms up and down, covering the angles that a potential assailant could come from. When Pete entered the flat, Andy passed him and went through the living area to the rear. There were two open doors, one to a bathroom and the other to a bedroom.

“Nobody at home,” the American reported, lowering his pistol.

“What a relief,” Pete said. He put his weapon in his jacket pocket and looked around the place. It had been furnished sparely, but with good taste. A burgundycolored leather sofa and armchair were facing a mediumsize high-definition TV, with a modern standard lamp between them. The walls had been papered in white and there were a couple of framed Cézanne posters. At the back, a breakfast bar separated the living area from a well-equipped kitchen. The windows, front and rear, were covered by Venetian blinds that let in only a small amount of light. In the bedroom, there was an antique wardrobe and a double bed, its pale blue cover neatly in place. Pete opened the wardrobe. He found three pairs of black jeans, one of which he held against his hip. The flat’s occupant was shorter than he was, so around five foot nine, and solidly built—the shirts were size large. There were bundled pairs of socks on the floor of the wardrobe, as well as folded boxer shorts.

“Looks like a
bloke
lives here,” Pete said. Andy went into the bathroom. It smelled of pine. He touched the washbasin. It was wet, as was the bath behind the shower curtain.

“Someone was in here earlier today, Boney,” he called. He ran his eye over a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste,
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a razor and can of foam and a plastic comb. There were no hairs on the latter, nor were there any in the bath. The metal bin was empty, suggesting that the occupant was very fastidious—or very careful. Andy looked at himself in the round mirror, wondering whose face had been in it a few hours before.

Pete was in the kitchen, opening drawers. They were filled with cutlery and other utensils. The pedal bin was empty and there were no plates in the sink or on the dryingstand.

“Someone’s taking a lot of care not to leave traces,” he said.

Andy checked the cupboards. There was very little food in the place, only a few tins of tuna and mackerel. The fridge contained a tub of butter and a jar of capers, and the freezer seemed to be filled with ice-cube trays.

“Hang on,” he said, dropping to his knees. He took out the trays and stacked them on the floor. “What have we here?” He removed a clear freezer bag. Inside it was a padded envelope, with no writing on it. He felt the weight.

“There’s something heavy in here,” he said. The envelope wasn’t sealed. He slid his hand in and pulled out a switchblade knife. Pete put down his pistol and took the knife from Andy. He opened the blade and ran his latex-covered finger along it. “Jeez, this baby is sharp enough to skin a cat. It’s clean, though, and it’s been oiled.”

Pete looked around. “Look at this lot,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Nine-millimeter rounds,” Andy said. “Oh, shit. Where’s the gun?”

They searched the flat again, but found nothing. Another striking feature was the complete lack of any-258
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thing personal—documents, bills, books, music, photographs.

“Whoever hangs out here is armed,” Pete said when they’d finished.

“And it looks like he or she doesn’t have any interests except weapons.”

“I’m pretty sure that knife is a spare,” Andy said. “The other one will be in our friend’s pocket. Say, isn’t it around here that those gang murders have been happening?”

The bald man stared at him and nodded. “What are you getting at?”

“I don’t know….” Andy moved lightly over the bare floorboards. “Shall we ask the old guy downstairs about his neighbor?”

“And leave a witness that we were here? I don’t think so, Slash. Judging by the racket coming through the floor, he’s in a world of his own anyway.”

“What are we going to do, then? Wait for Armed and Dangerous to come back?”

Pete looked at his watch. “Let’s give it an hour,” he said, squatting on the floor behind the sofa, his back against the wall.

Andy dropped down behind the breakfast bar. “Hey, Boney,” he said after a few minutes.

“What is it, Slash?”

“This could be the piece of shit who killed Dave.”

“Yeah, but we have to be sure of that before it’s payback time.”

Andy gave a grim laugh. “I think I can get a confession.”

“I believe you. But Matt will have to be in on that.”

After about twenty minutes, the sound of the street
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door closing was just audible above the television. There were footsteps on the stairs.

Pete stood up slowly, gripping his pistol in both hands. Andy was also covering the door.

They heard the footsteps stop on the landing outside. There was a pause, then came an almost inaudible sniff. A key was slotted into the lock and the door was opened quickly. Something flew into the flat, landing with a thud on the floor and rolling toward the sofa. Before Pete or Andy could react, the door was slammed shut. There was a bright flash as the grenade went off. I checked the ghost site about half an hour later and opened the new folder that had arrived from my mother and Caroline. They were being very businesslike about the deadline—then I realized that Caroline must have written the text, with Fran dictating parts. They used to call my ex-wife “Ice-for-Blood” at the first bank she worked for. I was so naive that I didn’t get why they thought of her in that way, but later I went in that direction myself: Caroline referred to me as “glacier-heart” during the divorce. I’d been proud of that for about one minute, and then Lucy walked in.

There was no instant good news, but they had come up with plenty of interesting angles. “The river shrinks bears”

was hard to fathom, but they wondered if there was a diminutive at play—small bears are cubs, though they didn’t know what to make of that. Neither did I. Was the next victim a cub reporter? A debut novelist? As for “The ice crows for a wife,” Fran and Caroline thought that was a series of metaphors. “For a wife” was the easy one. Who would call for a wife? A man—so that was confirmation that the victim was male. Maybe the person who set the 260

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clue really had made this one more straightforward. But what about “the ice crows”? My mother and ex-wife had been playing with partial anagrams—they came up with

“swore” (could that be a reference to Josh Hinkley, the most foul-mouthed person I knew? He was also a crime writer, but it seemed very tenuous); “worse”; “screw” (that was probably Caroline’s); “score”; “wise” (Did I know anyone of that name? No. Anyone who was wise? Not many); and “woes.” They thought that was a dead end, and I agreed.

Moving on to “the lean man’s imperial heiress,” Fran and Caroline pointed out the male reference. Including the mention in the body of the e-mail text and in the sender’s name (thethirdisaman), that made four times that masculinity had been stressed. Could it be deliberate overkill? Maybe the target was actually a woman, a married one, as suggested by the use of “wife” in the previous line. Very helpful. As for “lean,” did I know anyone who was unusually skinny? Not really. Apart from junkies, most people were overweight these days, myself included, thanks to the additional muscles I’d acquired. My mother and ex-wife picked up on the colonial aspect of “imperial”—did I know anyone from a former colony? A few, and there were millions more I’d never heard of. Again, not much help. As for “heiress,” that suggested “daughter”—they had immediately thought of Lucy, though they accepted she was safe where they were. But was the intended victim female? The White Devil had told plenty of lies during his persecution of me—and, more to the point, he’d covered up or failed to tell me about even more things. Sara might be following his example.

In the fourth line, “Is the thirsty draw of nothing,”

Fran and Caroline spotted the opposition with the first
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line—“thirsty,” in the sense of “dry,” as against the liquid of “river.” But “draw of nothing” had them stumped. What kind of draw was meant? One where stalemate ensues, or an attraction? Perhaps there was even a hint of artistic technique—but how could you draw nothing? As for the last word, it could simply mean the letter
O;
or it could be hinting at a person, as in “no thing”; or it could just be there to show that the answer of the clue was without substance—i.e. that we were wasting our time trying to find it. Three seriously unhelpful alternatives. I thanked Fran and Caroline, sent my love to Lucy and logged off.

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. 262

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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.

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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.

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“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.