Stolen Souls by Stuart Neville

anonymous, dull. The perfect location from which to run prostitutes. Good access from the city, just fifteen minutes by car for a lonely man, and neighbors who probably didn’t pay much attention to the comings and goings. Lennon scanned the other cars parked here as he pulled up. At least half of them were old BMWs or Audis, left-hand drive with continental license places: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania. Migrant workers lived here, many of them probably on short leases.
    Yes, a needful businessman could come here without fear of being recognized by a neighbor. Lennon wished he didn’t understand that quite so clearly.
    It had been more than six months since he’d last visited such a place himself. And then two months before that. Less than half a dozen times since Ellen had been in his care. Before, he had been able to wash himself clean of the shame after leaving some hollow-eyed young woman with a hundred pounds on a bedside locker. But ever since Ellen had taken her place in his home, he’d been unable to scrub the crawling feeling from his skin. It wasn’t that the girls were unclean, that he feared he had contracted some vulgar infection, but that he imagined the disgrace seeped from inside him, out through his pores, sticking to anything he touched.
    So he had made the decision to stop. Of course, he knew if it had been as simple as making a moral and logical choice, he never would have started in the first place. He had gone six weeks after Ellen first moved in without feeling the slightest temptation. But then one night he let her have a sleepover with Lucy and Susan, and he found himself lifting his car keys from the table, taking the lift downstairs, getting into his car, and driving to a place he knew in Glengormley. He didn’t allow his conscience a voice until he came home two hours later and his better mind began to pick over the deed. The next morning, Ellen wanted to hold his hand when he went to collect her from Susan’s apartment upstairs. He wouldn’t allow it, fearing the sin would spread from his fingers to hers, and she punished him with silence for a full day.
    Still he didn’t learn the lesson, and only two weeks later he made another late-night journey to a dark corner of the city. And again a few weeks later. Each time, he promised himself, and the part of his heart that belonged to Ellen, that he would not do it again. Each time, he knew he would break that promise.
    Jack Lennon knew a human soul could bear an almost infinite amount of shame as long as it remained there, inside, and stayed hidden from others. Many bad people survived that way. In the quietest minutes of the night, he wondered if he was one of them.
    * * *
    T HE LANDLORD’S AGENT and a uniformed sergeant from C District waited outside the apartment building. Lennon and Connolly got out of the car and presented their identification. The landlord’s agent looked worried. The sergeant looked bored.
    The agent introduced himself as Ken Lauler. He let them into the building, and they followed him up to the top floor.
    “It wasn’t us who let this place out originally,” Lauler said. “There was a different agent before us. We just took over the contract for the landlord, the maintenance, all that.”
    “What about the rent?” Lennon asked.
    “It’s paid by standing order every month, straight from a bank account.”
    “Whose bank account?”
    “It’s under the name of Spencer,” Lauler said. “Same name as the lease. The rent gets paid on time every month, we don’t get any complaints from the neighbors, so we’ve no call to be coming round asking questions.”
    “Until now,” Lennon said.
    “Quite,” Lauler said. “Here we are.”
    He inserted the key and turned it. The door swung inward.
    Lennon stepped past him. “Looks like there was a party,” he said.
    A dozen empty beer cans lay scattered on a glass coffee table along with a half-full bottle of Buckfast fortified wine, loose tobacco, and cigarette