The Soul Collector

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The black cat rubbed its flank against Mary Malone’s fleshy arm. They were on the window seat on the third floor of the house in Ifield Road, Fulham, West London.

“Yes, Noir,” the writer said, looking down at the tombstones in Brompton Cemetery. “It’s a nasty night. But you don’t have to go out.”

The cat gave her a supercilious glance, then jumped down and headed for the stairs.

“Stubborn creature!” Mary turned back to the view from the high window. It had been a cold February with frost crimping the grass. In the last few days, the temperature had risen slightly and the evenings had been misty. It seemed to the writer that the patches of visible air above the graves were like exhalations of the restless sleepers in the frigid earth. Then again, she’d always had a vivid imagination.

Mary went back to her desk. She had written half of her latest Doctor Kasabus mystery. The series was set in eighteenth-century Paris and her hero was a freethinking medical man who had a secret life as an investigator specializing in cases of a religious nature-priests who sanctioned murder, heiresses locked up in nunneries, bishops who abused boys. Rather to her surprise, she had gained a large readership on both sides of the Atlantic. Not that she ever met her fans. At five foot one, fifteen stone and with a face best suited to radio, she kept herself to herself. The memory of school-saliva-spattered girls’ faces eagerly poking fun at the class “hippo”-still made her weep on bad days.

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