Stolen Souls Read online

As she sank, the hands left her, summoned by another voice, an animal howl in the distance.

  23

  BILLY CRAWFORD LEFT the girl to answer the thing upstairs. Always it called. Always wanting more. Never letting him be. One day it would take the light from his eyes, he was certain.

  He climbed the stairway to the attic room, his shoulders brushing the walls as he ascended. It called again, its voice tearing at him like a claw. He stood still and quiet at the door, wincing at each screech.

  “God help me,” he said, his voice not even a whisper. A private exchange between him and the Lord. “God give me the strength to endure it.”

  He opened the door and stepped inside. He breathed shallow lest its odor overcome him. Six paces took him to within its vision.

  Its eyes focused, its toothless mouth opened. It cried out, claws flaying.

  “Quiet,” he said.

  Its voice cracked as it rose, a broken wail that scratched at his hearing like a rat’s claws.

  “Quiet,” he said, more forceful now.

  Again it cried, its pale blue eyes wide and tearful.

  He placed a hard hand over its mouth, forced it back down. It stared up at him. He felt its gums slip and slither on his calloused skin.

  “Quiet,” he said. “Or I’ll hurt you.”

  It grew still. Its toothless mouth stopped seeking purchase on his skin.

  He knelt beside it. “Pray with me,” he said.

  He brought his hands together, bowed his head, closed his eyes.

  “Our Father,” he said.

  He prayed that God on high would take mercy on this creature and end its suffering soon. He prayed for a time when he could sleep through the night without hearing its wounded howls. He prayed the Lord would take pity on whatever it had for a soul, festering inside its breast.

  He prayed, and it wept.

  24

  LENNON WAS ON his way to his office, a can of Coke in one hand, the preliminary forensic report on Tomas Strazdas in the other, when a passing sergeant asked him if he’d heard about the Sydenham killing. The victim might be of interest.

  “Who?” Lennon asked.

  “Mark Mawhinney.”

  Lennon stopped. “Sam Mawhinney’s brother?”

  “That’s what I heard,” the sergeant said. “He’s well known. The first officer on the scene recognized him. They said his neck was broken. Footprints in the snow show a struggle.”

  Lennon went to his desk with a heaviness at his core. He threw the report on the pile of papers already gathered there and pressed the chilled drink can against his forehead.

  Four dead in twelve hours.

  He’d left Connolly at the flat in Bangor, along with the sergeant from C District. All they could do was wait for another forensics team to come and take over. Matching the blood to Tomas Strazdas’s was merely a formality, although it wouldn’t be this side of Christmas.

  Lennon sat down, opened the can, and cursed as its contents fizzed over the paperwork. He pulled the Strazdas report and the passport out of harm’s way and mopped up the spillage with a tissue.

  The report was little more than a sketch from the Forensic Service, a private company that handled much of the scientific duties for the Police Service of Northern Ireland. They worked from former police buildings in Carrickfergus, a setting that was entirely inadequate for the work they had to do. Their old Belfast premises had been destroyed in a bomb attack in the early nineties, and they’d been making do in the seaside town since then.

  Despite the limitations of their base, they still managed to provide one of the most advanced and comprehensive forensic services in Europe, honed through decades of investigating terrorist attacks, large and small, that had taken place on their doorstep almost daily.

  As far as Lennon knew, Tomas Strazdas’s body still lay out by the waterside, sheltered from the snow by a white tent, waiting to be packed up and brought to the new forensic mortuary at the Royal Victoria Hospital. There, a consultant from the State Pathologist’s Department would do the honors.

  On Christmas Eve, it would be whichever poor bastard was on-call for the holiday. Bad enough they’d have one corpse to examine. Now they had three more. Lennon made another silent wish that he wouldn’t have to be the officer in attendance when they got the scalpels and saws out.

  He had called by CI Uprichard’s office and asked if the related cases would be handed to one of the other districts, but Uprichard didn’t know. They were having trouble pinning anyone down on Christmas Eve, but Uprichard would call around, see if he could get a decision.

  Lennon was not hopeful. He took his mobile from his pocket as he leafed through the report.

  The gash in Strazdas’s throat smiled at him as Susan answered.

  “How’s Ellen?” he asked.

  “She’s been asking for her Daddy,” Susan said. “Will you be long?”

  “I don’t know,” Lennon said. “Have you been watching the news?”

  “I’ve had it on in the background,” she said. “Somebody at the docks, and another two in Newtownabbey. Which of them are you chasing after?”

  “Right now, all of them,” Lennon said. “But you never know, maybe someone will take them off my hands.”

  “Is that likely?”

  “Not very,” he said. “Can you keep Ellen a while longer?” “You know I will,” she said. “It’ll be fun for Lucy. I don’t know what Ellen’s going to think about it though. They’re having a nap just now.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “Jack, I only just got them settled.”

  “I know,” he said. “Just for a minute. That’s all.”

  “All right,” she said, weariness in her voice.

  He turned photographs and pages while he waited. Wound to the throat the most likely cause of death, to be confirmed by the State Pathologist’s Department. Piece of material and length of electrical cord removed from the scene for examination. Lack of blood at the scene suggests death occurred elsewhere and the body transported to the location of its discovery. Presence of tire tracks further reinforces this supposition

  Forensic and pathology reports spent so much time stating the bloody obvious, Lennon thought. The details were the key. Hidden, like the points of light that are not at first clear when you look at the night sky, but come into view as you look away.

  Details like a piece of mirror glass and a girl’s passport.

  He heard a soft breath against his ear, but no greeting.

  “Hiya, darling,” he said.

  “Hello,” Ellen said, her voice blunted by sleep.

  “How’s you?”

  “Okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  “Mm.”

  “You been playing with Lucy?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Are you being good?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Did you have a nice sleep?”

  “It was okay. I had a bad dream.”

  “What about?” Lennon asked. Her dreams were seldom dull.

  “About a lady,” Ellen said. “Dogs were chasing her. They had fingers for teeth.”

  “Sounds scary,” Lennon said.

  “Mm-hm.”

  “But you’re okay now.”

  “Mm-hm. When are you coming home?”

  “A bit later,” Lennon said.

  Ellen did not answer.

  “This afternoon,” Lennon said. “Maybe this evening.”

  “Okay,” Ellen said.

  The phone clicked as she hung up.

  Lennon looked at the handset for a moment before returning it to his pocket.

  His thoughts returned to Tomas Strazdas and the other bodies that seemed to float in his wake. From what Lennon could tell, Strazdas was a low-level thug, as were the Mawhinney brothers. Not the kind of scumbags that gang wars erupted over. There had to be something underlying the killings, a root cause. Lennon suspected—no, felt in his bones—that the girl whose passport lay before him had something to
do with it.

  There had to be more to Tomas than was visible on the surface. And if you needed to see below the surface, there was one branch of the police force to talk to. Lennon hesitated for a moment, then lifted the desk phone’s handset and dialed the extension for the C3 Intelligence Branch office.

  “DI Lennon calling for DCI Hewitt,” he said.

  He listened to bland hold music and swallowed his own disgust at going to Hewitt for help. The most Lennon’s former friend suffered for his betrayals was a bullet in his leg, courtesy of a madman called Gerry Fegan.

  Fegan was dead now, along with many others. Dan Hewitt had as much blood on his hands as those he investigated, and that knowledge gave Lennon a little leverage over his former friend. He had only used it once before, during the inquiry into the events that took Marie’s life. Lennon would hold Hewitt to account one day, but for now, he was useful, as much as it made his skin crawl to deal with him.

  The hold music stopped.

  “What do you want?” Hewitt asked.

  “How are you, Dan?”

  “Fuck you, that’s how I am,” Hewitt said. “What do you want?”

  “Just a little guidance,” Lennon said. “You know about the killings of Tomas Strazdas and Sam Mawhinney, along with another unidentified male.”

  “We’re monitoring the situation, yes.”

  “And another death in Sydenham,” Lennon said. “Mark Mawhinney. Call me crazy, but I’ve a notion they’re related.”

  “We’ve considered that possibility,” Hewitt said. “But you’re getting a little ahead of yourself, aren’t you? Once the link between the killings has been formally acknowledged, an MIT will be assigned. Right now, Tomas Strazdas is the only case you’re involved with.”

  “You do keep tabs on things, don’t you, Dan?”

  “It’s my job to be well-informed,” Hewitt said. “For instance, I know that the man found with Sam Mawhinney will be identified as Darius Banys, an associate of young Tomas. His babysitter, really.”

  “Babysitter?”

  “Tomas couldn’t keep himself out of trouble,” Hewitt said. “Darius’s job was mostly to keep an eye on him, stop him from doing too much damage to himself or anyone else.”

  “What was the relationship between the brothers and Tomas?”

  Hewitt sighed. “Why don’t you do your own detective work, Jack?”

  “Because you and your mates in C3 are always one step ahead of the rest of us,” Lennon said. “And you owe me.”

  “I owe you nothing,” Hewitt said.

  “You want to test that in front of the Police Ombudsman?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Then call it a favor to an old friend. It’s a secure line. Nobody’s listening.”

  Lennon heard the change in Hewitt’s breathing and reached for a pen.

  “All right,” Hewitt said. “The Mawhinney brothers branched into prostitution over the last year or so, buying girls from a Lithuanian woman called Rasa Kairyte., girls she helped traffic from the Republic into the North. She worked mostly with Tomas Strazdas.”

  “Spell that name,” Lennon said.

  Hewitt recited the letters as Lennon scribbled on his notepad.

  “What’s European People Management?” Lennon asked.

  Hewitt paused. “How do you know about that?”

  “I saw an employment contract,” Lennon said. “It was in a drawer at the flat, along with a passport.”

  “What passport?”

  “It belongs to a Lithuanian girl,” Lennon said. “I’m guessing she’s the prostitute the Mawhinneys were keeping there.”

  “Maybe,” Hewitt said.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” Lennon said. “The employment contract was between the girl and this company called European People Management. You know something about it. I could tell by your voice.”

  “Maybe you should put in a request through the proper channels,” Hewitt said. “I’m sure you’ll get all the info you need for your case.”

  “That’ll take weeks,” Lennon said. “Why bother with that when I can go straight to the source?”

  “All right,” Hewitt said. “European People Management is the Strazdas family business.”

  “Family business?”

  “Tomas was the younger brother of a man called Arturas Strazdas, owner of a number of labor agencies, ostensibly supplying migrant workers to factories, mushroom farms, cleaning companies, that sort of thing. But we’ve had an eye on him for a long time now, at the behest of our European counterparts. We believe he’s been using the agencies as a way of supplying paperwork for women trafficked into prostitution all around Britain and Ireland.”

  “How does that work?” Lennon asked.

  “One passport will be used to travel back and forth between Dublin and places like Vilnius, or sometimes Brussels, where he’s based. The same passport might be used for a return journey once every couple of weeks, but often the immigration people don’t look that closely at the photograph. One dark-haired girl with an Eastern European accent is hard to tell from another dark-haired girl with an Eastern European accent if you’re not paying strict attention.”

  Lennon reached for the passport and opened it to the data page. Maybe this blonde girl in the photograph wasn’t the prostitute who’d worked at the flat, but rather someone very like her. Had she been there of her own free will? He thought of some of the women he’d visited in the night in the not-so-distant past. He swallowed.

  “Tell you what,” Lennon said. “I’ll run a theory past you. You tell me if it fits with what you know about the situation.” A pause, then Hewitt said, “All right.”

  Lennon began, sorting his thoughts as he spoke. “I think Tomas, this Darius bloke, and Sam Mawhinney were having some friendly Christmas drinks in that flat out in Bangor, possibly along with a prostitute they were running out of there, but they had a little bit of a tiff. That wound up with Tomas getting his throat cut. The other two stuck Tomas in their car and drove him down to the docks, meaning to dump him in the water, but they were disturbed by the harbor cop.

  “But Tomas’s people weren’t best pleased about this, and they took Sam and his Lithuanian friend out to Newtownabbey, blew their brains out, and burnt the car. Sound okay so far?”

  “It seems a reasonable train of thought,” Hewitt said. “But that doesn’t explain Mark Mawhinney.”

  “No,” Lennon said. “Any witnesses to that?”

  “Too early to tell,” Hewitt said. “DCI Quinn’s MIT have only been down there an hour.”

  “Okay,” Lennon said. “So if I wanted to talk to someone who grieved the passing of Tomas Strazdas, where would I start?”

  “You could start with the Kairyte. woman. She has a flat in the Holylands. Or there’s the driver, Herkus Katilius. Big lad, hard bastard, ex-military. But there’s a better option.”

  “What’s that?” Lennon asked.

  “Arturas Strazdas, Tomas’s brother.”

  “You said he was based in Brussels.”

  “He is,” Hewitt said. “But he flew into the International Airport last night. We, and several other organizations, keep tabs on Mr. Strazdas. He always stays in the same hotel.”

  Lennon scribbled down the name on his pad. An expensive place, good clientele, near the Waterfront theater.

  “That’s unusually forthcoming of you, Dan. What’s your angle?”

  “No angle,” Hewitt said. “You would’ve tracked him down anyway. It’s your job to chase next of kin in a case like this, inform them of their loved one’s death.”

  “A good reason to call with him,” Lennon said.

  “True. But Jack?”

  “What?”

  “Tread lightly,” Hewitt said. “Strazdas is dangerous. I won’t shed a tear if you come to harm because you got yourself in over your head, but you could balls up several live investigations in the process. I’ve told you more than I should, so I don’t want it coming back to bite me in the
arse.”

  “I’ll be a model of discretion,” Lennon said, not caring in the least what might bite Dan Hewitt’s arse.

  “I’m counting on it,” Hewitt said.

  25

  ARTURAS STRAZDAS LAY staring at the ceiling when his mobile phone rang. The cracked display said “number withheld.” He hit the answer button and asked in English, “Who is this?”

  “You know.”

  “Yes,” Strazdas said. He sat upright on the bed.

  “My condolences on the passing of your brother.”

  “Thank you. What do you want?”

  “To give you a warning. A police officer will call on you before long. Detective Inspector Jack Lennon. Be careful with him.”

  “How does he know I’m here?” Strazdas asked.

  “He’s a smart cop, that’s how. He has many sources. He might cause you some problems.”

  “Might he?”

  “Very likely. But I can help you out. Run interference. Keep you informed of what he’s up to. But I would expect to be compensated accordingly.”

  “Of course,” Strazdas said.

  “Are we agreed, then?”

  A knock at the hotel suite’s door.

  “Hold on,” Strazdas said.

  He went to the living area, put his eye against the peephole, and saw the distorted shape of Herkus waiting in the corridor. His nostrils tingled in anticipation. He opened the door, and Herkus rushed inside.

  Strazdas brought the phone back to his ear.

  Silence.

  “Hello?” he said.

  Nothing. He stared at the display for a second before remembering that Herkus had entered the room.

  “That idiot brother of Sam’s tried to take me,” Herkus said, pacing.

  “What?”

  “I went to get your stuff from Rasa’s dealer, but Mark Mawhinney was waiting for me. He fucked it up, so I finished him. Rasa’s dealer must have set me up.”

  “Where’s my coke?” Strazdas asked.

  Herkus stopped pacing. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

  “Yes, I heard,” Strazdas said. “Someone tried to hurt you. Where’s my coke?”

  Herkus stood with his mouth open, his arms wide.