The Soul Collector mw-2 Read online

  Andy launched himself over the motorbike, one arm whipping around the biker’s neck. It was then that he realized he might have screwed up. Sara was still wearing her helmet. She was also in good shape, pushing back hard and almost loosening his grip. But he wasn’t standing for that. With his free hand, he raised the knife and jammed it into her upper arm. That brought a yell of pain, then an elbow in his chest. He concentrated on moving the knife as much as the leather would allow and forgot about the helmet for a few moments, during which his captor crashed it into his face. He felt his nose shatter, not for the first time in his life. That made him change tactics. He let go of the neck and dragged the woman over the bike. Then he picked her up by scruff and groin, and rammed her head repeatedly against the side of the van. When he judged her brain would be suitably scrambled, he dropped her, moved around the motorbike and picked up the shrouded figure.

  As Andy leapt from the van, he was aware of another person standing nearby. He couldn’t understand why Doris Carlton-Jones was dressed so weirdly, but he wasn’t sticking around to ask as she was holding a silenced pistol. He shoved her backward with his spare hand and took the low hedge in a running jump. He heard the cough of the pistol a couple of times, but didn’t feel any hits. Then he was sprinting downhill, heading for a substantial wood beyond the field that was visible in the moonlight. His knees were creaking, but they didn’t give out.

  When Andy got to the tree line, he burrowed into a heap of leaves, blowing like a walrus. There was no way Sara or her mother would find him now. Sure enough, the van started up and moved off a few minutes later. Then it struck him. He’d seen Doris Carlton-Jones’s face, but he hadn’t seen Sara’s. Maybe it hadn’t been her in the helmet after all.

  There was a faint groan from the cocooned figure he had laid on the leaves. Andy tugged the blankets away and sat back in amazement as the silvery light fell on a dirty, tear-stained face; one that he knew very well, indeed.

  I shone my torch down the dark stairway. It turned back on itself after ten steps. I stopped at the corner, one arm raised to restrain the others.

  Rog sniffed. “What’s that smell?”

  The air was filled with the unmistakable odor of burning flesh. I immediately thought of Andy. What were the lunatics doing to him?

  I moved my head around the stone wall. The next flight of steps, about twenty, was clear. Light showed at the bottom. I beckoned the others forward and we went down as quietly as our boots allowed. An ornate doorway had been cut into the stone. It was covered in strange symbols.

  When we reached the bottom, I became aware of a monotonous chanting. It sounded like there were dozens of people in the cavern ahead. I struggled to understand what was being said and then I realized it was in Latin. The only word I could make out was “diabolus.”

  “Oh, great,” Pete whispered. “How many of them?”

  I looked cautiously around the doorpost. I could hardly believe my eyes. The place was as ornate as the most baroque Catholic church, the walls covered in frescoes and light coming from gold chandeliers. Then I saw what the paintings depicted-demons tormenting the damned, monstrous beasts as foul as those spawned by the imagination of Hieronymus Bosch, and, in the center, a huge, black, bat-winged Lucifer rising out of the earth.

  Then I heard a terrible scream. Over to the right stood two people in what looked like monks’ robes, the cowls raised. They had their backs to us and were watching the smoke billow from a raised altar. I tried to locate the people who were singing. There was no sign of anybody else and I realized that the chant was coming from speakers set in the rock walls. It was a recording, unless there was some choir loft nearby.

  I pulled my head back. “Action, guys. Looks like they’re in the middle of a sacrifice.”

  “Andy?” Pete asked, his eyes wide.

  “I can’t see, but we have to go in now. There only seem to be two of them. My guess is that one is Sara.

  “We’ll start with a couple of smoke grenades to mix things up,” I said. “Then, Rog, you go right, you left, Pete. I’ll head straight toward the bastards. Only fire if you’re sure you’re in danger. Okay, let’s do it.”

  We clasped hands, then Rog took the grenades from Pete’s pack.

  “One left, one right, Dodger. Try to leave some visibility for me in the middle.”

  “Check.” Rog pulled the pins and released the catches. Then he tossed the grenades where I wanted. They went off with more of a thump than a bang.

  I sprinted forward, Glock in my right hand. I’d removed the silencer as I wanted to scare the shit out of the targets. As the smoke began to billow up, the pair in robes turned toward me. My stomach somersaulted when I saw their faces. Both were white-one with a sick smile and a devil’s goatee and the other misshapen and pustular. Then I heard a crazed shrieking and some kind of ape came scurrying toward me, its red eyes crazed and its bared fangs yellow. I pointed the Glock at the roof and fired. The sound of the shot boomed around the cavern and the creature turned tail. I heard someone yelling the name Beelzebub.

  I kept running, but the two figures had separated and disappeared into the smoke. Maybe the grenades hadn’t been such a good idea.

  Then I heard shots and yelling from the left. Pete was in action. I made it to the altar and peered at the motionless object that was burning on a heap of wood. It was a sheep. So where was Andy?

  High-pitched screams to my right distracted me. Moving closer, I saw the ape on top of one of the masked people, its colored rump wriggling as it tried to bite. Then there was a spitting sound and the creature crashed down on its victim, its back feet quivering briefly before it expired. I ran close and held the muzzle of my Glock to the side of the robed figure’s head.

  “Let go of the gun and pull your hands out,” I said. “Slowly!”

  Rog appeared and dragged the animal off the man. I grabbed the pistol that was on the pseudo-monk’s abdomen.

  “Mission accomplished, Matt.” I looked over my shoulder and saw Pete arriving with company. He’d looped the other monk’s belt around his neck and was covering him with his Glock.

  I pulled the person on the floor up. The pair of them stood with their heads hanging, like two masked kids on Halloween who’d been overzealous with the tricks. Except these two were killers, and one of them was Sara Robbins. Before I could confirm that, Pete’s prisoner started shrieking and trying to pull away.

  “You killed Beelzebub!” came a high-pitched voice. “You killed my mandrill, my familiar…”

  “Not us,” Rog said, pointing at the other prisoner. “This asshole did.”

  Pete’s prisoner tried to leap forward, hands clawing the air. Boney elbowed the figure with the devil mask in the ribs. That stopped the movement, but the abuse and threats to the other mask-wearer continued.

  I nodded to Pete and he pulled off the mask.

  “Earl Sternwood,” I said, taking in the face disfigured by a prominent harelip.

  I turned to the other prisoner and moved closer, my heart pounding and a worm of doubt wriggling hard. “Is it you, Sara? Did you really give up so easily?”

  Manic laughter came from behind the disfigured mask. I wrenched it off and saw…someone who definitely wasn’t my ex-lover, no matter how much plastic surgery she might have undergone. I knew who it was, though.

  “Alistair Bing!” I said, failing to conceal my surprise.

  The laughter continued. Tears were wetting the cheeks of the diminutive man.

  “Aka crime writer Adrian Brooks,” I said to Rog and Pete.

  “Obviously you expected to see your former beloved,” Bing said. His Yorkshire accent was strong. “It never occurred to you that someone else could be behind the murders.”

  I stared at him. “You killed the crime writers? You sent me those puzzles?”

  He nodded beatifically, like the Pope acknowledging his worshippers-the Pope of Hell.

  “But why?”

  He laughed. “Always the rationalist, Matt. Didn’t
your experience of the White Devil teach you anything? Some people exist in a dimension incomprehensible to common humanity.”

  “That’ll be right,” I said, not stinting on the irony. “Don’t tell me. You needed the experience of killing to become a true crime writer.”

  Alistair Bing looked like I’d slapped him in the face. “You’re oh-so-clever now, aren’t you, Matt? It’s a pity you couldn’t save Sandra Devonish. Or Josh Hinkley.”

  “You broke your word with Josh, you piece of shit.”

  He gave me an icy stare. “You have no idea who you’ve been up against. I am Doctor Faustus, I’ve made a deal with the devil and-”

  “Yeah, yeah, spare me the bullshit. Just tell me why you slaughtered defenseless novelists.”

  “The great Matt Wells, global bestseller and crime columnist, clueless. How the mighty are fallen.”

  The way he said the word “bestseller” gave me an insight into his sad mind.

  “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?” I said. “You were jealous of us, weren’t you?”

  His eyes narrowed. “The books at the top of the bestseller lists were no better than my early books.”

  “Oh, yes they bloody were,” I said. “Besides, you’re a bestseller yourself now. What was the point of killing Mary, Sandra and Josh?”

  He looked at me with arctic eyes. “I made my Faustian pact and killed three crime writers who sold better than I did in the past. You were to be next. The Death List knocked me off the top of the bestseller list in seven countries.”

  “But first you decided to make a fool of me with your smart-ass clues.”

  Alistair Bing nodded. “And I succeeded.”

  “Just like in an Agatha Christie novel, eh?” I said. “Haven’t you noticed that real life is more like heavy-duty noir than Golden Age wordplay?” I turned to Earl Sternwood. “What was your role in all this?”

  The earl was still staring at the dead mandrill. “Mine?” he said weakly. “Alistair had the benefit of my teachings. I led him to understand that only by experiencing killing would he become a successful writer.”

  “And he believed that?” I said, glancing at the sniggering Yorkshireman.

  “He did. The fact is, he did become a bestselling author after his first murders.”

  “His first murders?” I repeated. “Who were the victims?”

  “Oh, just scum,” the earl said carelessly. “Prostitutes, their customers, drunks-the detritus of humanity that disfigures London.” He seemed unaware of the irony in his words.

  “It was your idea to write ‘The Devil did it’ in Latin, was it?”

  The earl nodded. “Latin was, of course, the main language of the Christian Church, and of its opponents.”

  I looked at Bing again. “Why the music playing at each murder scene?”

  “To add to the feeling of devilry,” he said, giving me a thin-lipped smile.

  It was my turn to laugh. “What? Cliff Richard?”

  “My mother loves Cliff,” he replied, looking affronted.

  I went up to him. “You sick fuck. You couldn’t just kill them, could you? You had to get up close, and throttle them, cut them, stab them. And then cut their nails and hair.” I remembered what he’d done to poor Mary Malone. “You abused a dead woman.”

  He shrugged. “Killing that way is like sex. In fact it’s better than sex. There’s no need for consent.”

  I turned away, shaking my head. “You must have fitted in well here,” I said, glancing at the horrific artwork.

  Bing sniggered and it was all I could do to stop myself flooring him.

  “What about the gangland murders in East London?” I said to Sternwood. “We know that Lauren Cuthbertson was responsible for them. She was part of your pathetic cult, wasn’t she?”

  “How do you know that?” he demanded, confirming my suspicions.

  “It was her face,” I said. “You couldn’t resist corrupting a disfigured person.”

  The earl looked past me to the mandrill he’d called Beelzebub. “Lauren was a great help to me. We knew her as Asmodeus.” He touched his split upper lip with his tongue. “But there was no question of anyone corrupting her. She took to murder with pleasure and ease.”

  “You needed the money from the drugs she stole.” Bing sneered. “You even got me to extort money from Josh Hinkley.”

  I stared at the earl. “The killings were all about money?”

  “Not exactly,” he said, avoiding my eyes. “Lauren and Faustus here chose their victims. But she was happy to donate the funds she acquired to the Order of the Lord Beneath the Earth.” He glared at me. “Until you killed her today. The sheep was sacrificed to speed her soul on its journey to our master.”

  Pete and Rog exchanged glances that showed exactly what they thought of the cult and its worshippers.

  I looked at Sternwood and Bing. “Did you know that Lauren Cuthbertson was Sara Robbins’s and the White Devil’s half sister?”

  They both looked taken aback in a big way. Apparently not.

  “I assume Lauren was Helen in the last message,” I said to Alistair Bing, then turned to the earl. “You sent her after Jeremy Andrewes because he’d found out about your drug deal with the Albanians.”

  “You can’t prove any of this,” His Lordship replied dully.

  Alistair laughed. “Yes, he can. I hereby swear that I had nothing to do with the Andrewes murder. I only wrote the clue.”

  “Which I cracked, asshole.” I looked at Sternwood. “That means you’ll be spending the rest of your life in jail.”

  “What did you do with the nail clippings and hair from the bodies?” Pete asked.

  The earl gave him a solemn look. “We burned them, to the greater glory of Satan.”

  I stared at him, but he didn’t turn away. It seemed that the paragon of the aristocracy meant it.

  “You killed Beelzebub, Faustus!” Sternwood screamed. He made a grab for Pete’s pistol and managed, after a brief struggle, to loose off a shot.

  Alistair Bing, known to his mother as Adrian Brooks, international bestselling crime writer, collapsed backward, a crimson flower blossoming on his chest.

  Pete pulled hard on the rope around the earl’s neck, while I tried to get his hand from the Glock. His eyes bulged and his face reddened. Then there was another shot and the struggle ceased immediately.

  Earl Sternwood, last of his line, lay dead by his own hand, blood welling from his doubly disfigured mouth.

  I looked around the painted cavern with its clawed demons and gaping maws. The sound of the underground river could be heard now, running away yet farther beneath the earth.

  The killer of the crime writers and his spiritual adviser had departed this life, but still we had found no sign of Sara.

  Or Andy.

  Twenty-Nine

  Caroline came around to find herself tied by the hands and ankles to the double bed in the safe house. She tried to clear her mouth, but realized she’d been gagged. As her mind cleared, she tried to remember what had happened. Someone at the door…someone had knocked, said they were with the police. A woman’s voice. Why had she opened the door? A reflex action, you didn’t expect the police to attack you…to spray something in your face that makes you crash to the floor and lose consciousness almost immediately.

  Oh, Christ, she thought. Lucy! Where was she? Turning her head, Caroline managed to see down the hall. The door to the room her daughter had been using was open, the bedclothes strewn across the floor. Lucy had been studying in there. Where was she?

  Moaning through the gag, Caroline had another thought. What about Fran? Matt’s mother had been in the sitting room. She’d said “Don’t-” as Caroline had opened the door. Had she been sprayed, too?

  The woman. There was something about her. Caroline hadn’t seen the face before, but…she seemed familiar. This wasn’t her first experience of knockout gas. Two years ago, when the White Devil had been killing people across London, the woman who’d been
Matt’s lover had leaned out of a car window near Caroline’s bank in the City and asked her something, then suddenly she had fallen into darkness. She had woken up in hospital, to find Lucy in the bed beside her and Matt revelling in having put a stop to the White Devil. The idiot. Sara had got away…and now she was back…Oh, Lucy…

  Then Caroline looked down. A belt had been strapped around her abdomen, and a red light was flashing on top of a square box that had been attached by black tape.

  She knew instantly that it was a bomb. What she didn’t know, and the tension was almost unbearable, was when it would go off.

  Amelia Browning was standing at the entrance to the foot passengers’ waiting area at Dover Eastern Docks ferry terminal. She had already checked three groups that had boarded ships, comparing faces with the images that Chief Inspector Oaten had sent to her cell phone. Three times she had returned empty-handed to the waiting room. It was beginning to look like she’d drawn the short straw. Other VCCT officers were checking vehicles for Sara Robbins or her mother, since this was the nearest port to the house the woman had bought in rural Kent-where DCI Oaten had organized surveillance with the local force. But there had been no sign of the suspects anywhere. Maybe they were lying low or had decided to risk air travel. Amelia was tired and hungry, but the terminal’s idea of catering was even more criminal than the Met’s.

  People started coming through passport control. A young couple in blue denim from head to toe, including caps and trainers in the material, were arguing in a language that Detective Sergeant Browning couldn’t identify. She took out her copy of the Daily Indie and pretended to read it, all the time casting surreptitious glances at the people who had just arrived. None of them was over fifty, never mind as old as Doris Carlton-Jones, and none of them bore any resemblance to Sara Robbins-though, if she’d had major plastic surgery, Amelia wasn’t sure she’d recognize her.

  The departure of the next ferry to Calais was announced. People started gathering up their luggage and heading for the ramps that led up to the passenger bridge. Amelia folded her paper. She was about to follow the others when an elderly Indian woman in a sari came out of the toilets. Her hair was an unnatural shade of black and she was carrying a large cuddly toy. There was something about the way she walked that caught the detective’s eye. She didn’t glide, like most Indian women in the full-length garment; her gait made the fabric bulge at the knees.