by Paul Johnson
The Death List
( Matt Wells - 1 )
Paul Johnson
The Death List
Paul Johnston
’Tis not so great a cunning as men think
To raise the devil; for here’s one up already;
The greatest cunning were to lay him down.
— John Webster
Prologue
A heavy fog had come down over London that evening and the traffic was backed up all the way from the Lea Bridge roundabout to Hackney Central.
Jawinder Newton banged her hands on the steering wheel as the bus in front of her Peugeot stopped again. It was nearly eleven o’clock. Not for the first time, the monthly meeting of the Hospital Trust had overrun. September’s report was full of unresolved problems and she’d had to fight to keep her eyes open. It wasn’t just her demanding job-she was a solicitor in a busy local partnership that dealt with immigrants’ problems. The fact was, she’d only been back at work for six weeks after maternity leave. She was finding it hard being away from her beautiful Raul. He would soon be eight months old and she already felt she was losing touch with him. At least her mother was able to look after the little boy when she and Steven were out during the day. She didn’t know how people could entrust their children to outsiders.
The traffic finally cleared at the roundabout ahead and Jawinder turned right at Clapton Ponds. She found a parking place opposite the terraced house on Thornby Road and stretched for her bag. Before she got out, she turned on the interior light and looked in the mirror. She was a mess, her short black hair ruffled and her eyes bloodshot, but she didn’t care. In a few seconds she’d be lost in Raul’s delicate scent and listening to the miraculous regular intake of his breath.
Locking the car in the thick drizzle, Jawinder ran across the deserted street, house key in her hand. As she went up the steps, her heart missed a beat. Raul was screaming. Even though the nursery was at the back on the first floor, she could hear his cries clearly and immediately she panicked. What was Steven doing? Surely he couldn’t have fallen asleep in front of the television. The noise was enough to wake the dead.
She pushed the door open, letting her handbag and briefcase fall to the floor.
“Steven!” she shouted, going past the sitting-room door. It was a couple of inches open and she could see her husband’s head lolling on the back of the sofa. Jeremy Paxman was grilling some government spokesman on the television. “For God’s sake, Steven! Can’t you hear Raul?”
Jawinder dashed up the stairs, her heart pounding. The sound of her son’s voice was piercing. It was making the hair on the back of her neck stand up and her breath catch in her throat. She ran into the nursery.
“What is it, my darling?” she said, picking up the red-faced child. His eyes were wide and filled with tears. He was alternately gulping for breath and screaming as if he were completely terrified. Jawinder had never seen him like this before. She clutched him to her chest and pressed the palm of her hand against his forehead. He wasn’t running a fever. The poor thing. He must have had some awful dream. Did babies have nightmares? She cooed to him, stroking his back and feeling the heaving little body gradually calm down.
“It’s all right, my beautiful, Mummy’s home.” She picked up the blanket from the bed and wrapped it round him. “Mummy’s home to look after her little man.”
Raul looked at her with huge, tear-filled brown eyes and let out a grunt of satisfaction. Then he smiled.
“My darling,” Jawinder said, finding his bottle and putting it to his lips. “There you are. That silly Daddy. Let’s go downstairs and find out what he’s doing.” She carried the sucking child out of the bedroom, her eyes narrow in fury. She was going to tell Steven exactly what she thought of his child-care skills.
When she reached the open sitting-room door, Jawinder looked over the dark hair on her son’s head. She noticed now that the TV volume was much higher than Steven liked. He was always complaining about how loud her mother had it.
“Steven?” she said severely. “Didn’t you hear your son screaming?” The remote control was on top of the TV. She went to take it and lower the volume, surprised by its location. Her husband normally put it between his legs, something she was sure he did to irritate her mother. “Steven?”
Jawinder turned and almost dropped Raul. She managed to stifle the scream that burst from her throat, but not before her son started whimpering. She moved him round to keep his eyes from what was on the sofa.
“Steven?” she repeated, her voice nothing more than a whisper.
But her husband didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. A red scarf had been tied tightly around his mouth, making his cheeks pouch out above it. His eyes, the dark blue that had attracted her so much when they met in the bank five years ago-she’d gone to negotiate a loan for the partnership-that beautiful blue was an awful parody of what it had been now that his eyeballs were bulging like an octopus’s.
Jawinder’s knees were weak, her body racked by spasms that turned Raul’s complaints to bleats of fear. She mouthed her husband’s name, her voice completely gone.
Steven Newton was sprawled on the sofa, his legs wide. He’d kicked over the coffee table and a can of beer had drained onto the carpet. But the smell of alcohol that Jawinder disliked so much was not the one making her stomach heave. That was a visceral, far more repellent stench.
It came from her husband’s midriff. His shirt had been wrenched apart and his abdomen cut open. In a cascade of blood, his inner organs had fallen forward over his groin.
Jawinder staggered to the door, keeping Raul’s face away from his father. She pulled the door shut behind her and reached for the phone on the hall table. The remote handset wasn’t there. She couldn’t bring herself to go back into the sitting room to look for it. Fumbling in her handbag, she found her mobile and hit 999.
Her son started to cry again as she stammered out her name and address in a high-pitched wail. But she couldn’t describe what had been done to Steven.
The horror of it would surely never leave her.
“Jesus Christ Almighty.”
“Steady,” Karen Oaten said. “There are enough unpleasant substances in this room already.”
“Sorry, guv.” Detective Sergeant John Turner, eight years in the job but still possessed of an unreliable stomach, managed to swallow the bitter flood that had risen up his throat. Inspector Oaten had no time for people with weak stomachs. She also had no time for people who called her “Wild” or “Oats,” so no one did, at least to her face. She was a hard one and she wanted no distinctions made between her and her male counterparts, so “ma’am” was out and “guv” was in. Turner, from Cardiff, wished he could stop the rest of the team calling him “Taff,” but he knew there was no chance of that. “What do you think?” he said. “Jamaicans? Turks?”
The inspector gave him an impenetrable look. In white coveralls with matching bootees, she managed to come across as both attractive and in control, her blond hair tied back in a bunch. She was also as smart as they came, a graduate on the fast track who’d be promoted out of the Metropolitan Police’s Eastern Homicide Division soon, Turner was sure. He just hoped she’d stay long enough for him to pick her brains.
“Certainly looks like there’s a drug connection.” Oaten glanced at the hundred-gram bag of cocaine that one of the scenes-of-crime officers had found under the upturned coffee table.
Turner looked at his notes. “According to the wife, he never touched narcotics. He was a bank manager.”
The inspector kneeled down in front of the dead man, pulling a gauze mask up over her mouth and nose. Her eyes were unwavering as they took in the wounds. “The autopsy will show that.” She looked up at the pathologist
, who was closing his bag. “Preliminary thoughts?”
“Cause of death, shock and/or loss of blood.” The thin, balding medic looked at his watch. “It’s 1:16 a.m. now. I’d say he died between 8:00 and 10:00 p.m.”
Karen Oaten leaned closer. “Weapon?”
“Very sharp, double-edged, nonserrated blade. One of the wounds exited the victim’s back above the left kidney, so it must have been at least twelve inches long, as well.”
“More like a small sword than a knife, then,” Turner said.
The inspector seemed not to have heard that. “I notice there’s a contusion on his forehead.”
“Indeed. I don’t think it would have been enough to knock him out, though.”
Turner swallowed hard. “So he was conscious when he…when he was cut up?”
The pathologist nodded. “Nasty. Very nasty.”
“Calculated or frenzied?” Oaten asked. She was notorious for keeping her words to a minimum at crime scenes.
“The former, I’d say.” The pathologist pointed to the lacerated intestines. “The pattern is pretty regular. Ten upward strokes by my count. The assailant must have had a strong arm.”
The inspector’s eyes had taken in the dead man’s wrists. “There’s blood here. He was bound.”
The pathologist nodded. “Looks like by a thin rope, tied very tightly.”
Oaten looked around. “Which was then removed. What does that tell us, Taff?”
“That he’s calm under pressure.” The Welshman’s face darkened. “And that he’s working to a plan.”
The inspector nodded. “He left the body displayed. I wonder what that means.” She turned to the doctor. “Okay, thanks. I want to be at the autopsy.”
“I’ll make sure you’re kept informed of the scheduling.” He moved away.
“All right, Taff, let’s take a break.” Oaten led her subordinate out into the hall. The SOCOs were still working, but so far they had reported no obvious prints or traces. There was no blood anywhere except in the sitting room and the door showed no sign of having been forced.
“You reckon this Newton might have been a dealer who got caught up in a turf war?” Turner asked.
The inspector raised her shoulders. “Possibly. You’ll be spending tomorrow talking to the neighbors and his colleagues at work to see how likely that is.”
Turner nodded wearily. “What did you get from the wife?”
Oaten shrugged. She had spent ten minutes with Jawinder Newton before she went to her mother’s house round the corner. After a shaky start the woman had got a grip and shown a lawyer’s command of detail, but she didn’t have much to tell.
“Does this look like a robbery scene to you, Taff?” the inspector asked, staring at the telephone’s base unit.
“Hardly.” Turner tried to smile. “More like the Hackney Ripper in full flow.”
“Don’t use the R word again,” Oaten said sternly. “The media won’t need any encouragement.”
“Sorry, guv.” Turner looked away. “No, it doesn’t strike me as a robbery gone wrong.”
“You didn’t notice the laptop lead on the desk in there, then?” The inspector gave him a tight smile. “Dear me, Sergeant.”
“The wife reported a laptop missing?”
“Correct. And the landline telephone.”
“The handset?”
“Two handsets-one downstairs and one from the main bedroom.”
Oaten and Turner exchanged glances.
“Interesting, eh?” the inspector said. “Maybe there was something that incriminated the killer on the hard disk.”
“And the phones?”
“Numbers in their memories. We’ll check the phone company records.” Karen Oaten nudged Turner in the ribs. “Looks like Mr. Steven Newton might have been into more than just mortgages and small-business loans.”
The sergeant was still trying to remove the sight of the victim’s ravaged abdomen from his memory. He wasn’t succeeding.
1
The day I made my deal with the devil started the same as any other.
It was one of those sunny late spring mornings when your soul was supposed to take to the air like a skylark. Mine hadn’t. A few miles to the north, the white steel circle of the London Eye reflected the rising sun, its iris vacant and its pods already full of tourists who were more in awe of the ticket prices than the supposedly inspiring view. Suckers.
I was on my way back from walking Lucy to school in Dulwich Village. The stroll down there, hand in hand with my beautiful eight-year-old, chattering away, was one of the high points of every weekday. The other was when I met her in the afternoon. The uphill slog back to my two-room flat was the nadir. A blank computer screen was waiting for me there, and in the last month I hadn’t managed more than a couple of album reviews. Today my next novel seemed as far away as the skyscrapers of Manhattan; tomorrow it would probably have moved on to Chicago.
I had to face up to it, I told myself as I walked along Brant-wood Road. I was blocked, good and proper. Suffering from terminal writer’s constipation. About as likely to make progress as the government was to increase taxes on the rich. It was time I came up with an alternative employment strategy. There seemed to be plenty of work available destroying the pavements for the cable companies. I stepped across the uneven, recently laid strip of asphalt and went up the path to my front door. Except it wasn’t mine. I was renting it from the retired couple below. The Lambs were charming on the surface, but sharp as butchers’ knives when it came to anything financial or contractual. I’d only taken the place so I could be near Lucy after the divorce. She and my ex-wife, Caroline, were round the corner in what had been our family home overlooking Ruskin Park. The way things were going, I wouldn’t even be able to afford this dump for much longer.
There wasn’t anything special in the mail-certainly no checks; a music magazine I was forced to subscribe to even though I wrote for it occasionally, the electricity bill, and an invitation to a book launch. Someone in the publicity department of Sixth Sense, my former publishers, was either stunningly incompetent or was winding me up. No way was I going anywhere near what they were calling “a low-life party” to celebrate Josh Hinkley’s latest East End gangster caper. When he started, the toe-rag had half the sales I had. Now I was a nobody and he was a top-ten bestseller. Could he write? Could he hell.
I made myself a mug of fruit tea, trying to ignore what Caroline had said when I gave up caffeine. “Brilliant idea, Matt. You’ll be even less awake than you are now.” She could nail me effortlessly. A top job in the City, daily meetings with business leaders, international credibility as an economist-and a tongue with the sting of a psychotic wasp. How had I managed to miss that when we got together? It must have been something to do with the fact that she was the owner of a body that still turned heads in the street. Who was the sucker now?
I logged on to my computer and opened my e-mail program. I had several writer friends who proudly said that they never checked their mail until they’d finished work for the day. I’d never had that sort of discipline. I needed to feel in touch with the world before I wrote my version of it. Or so I’d convinced myself. Deep down, I knew it was a displacement activity on the same level as arranging your paper clips or dusting your diskettes. When I was moderately successful, I still got a rush from unexpected good news, even if it was only my agent’s assistant proudly telling me that they’d sold the translation rights for one of my books to some Eastern European country for a small number of dollars. It had been almost a year since something as insignificant as that had happened.
The contact page on my Web site was connected to my inbox. For the time being. I was struggling to pay the bill, so www.MattStonecrimenovelsofdistinction.com wouldn’t be online for much longer. When my books were selling, I used to get up to five messages a day from fans bursting to tell me how much they loved my work. Now that I wasn’t the apple of any publisher’s eye, I was lucky if I got five a week. But I lived in hope.
There was nothing like a bit of undiluted praise to crank the creative engine.
After I’d deleted the usual cumshot and cheap drugs spam, I looked at what was left. A brief mail from the reviews editor of one of the lad mags I contributed to. I’d sent him a message begging for work and here he was informing me that my services were not required this month. Great. That went the same way as the spam. Then there was yet another message from WD. I had to hand it to him or her. No, it had to be a guy-he knew too much music and movie trivia. He was as loyal as it got. And as regular. Three times a week for the past two months. I had foolishly made a commitment on my Web site to reply to every message, so I’d kept the correspondence going. But WD had a solicitous way with words and I’d made my feelings about some of the issues he raised clear enough. In short, I’d given him a glimpse of the real me.
I double-clicked on the inbox icon and went into the file I’d made for WD-giving all my correspondents their own file was another displacement activity that had kept me going for days.
I ran down the messages, opening some of them. They had started off as standard fan stuff-Dear Matt (hope first name terms are acceptable!), Really enjoyed your Sir Tertius series. Great depictions of Jacobean London. Squalor and splendor, wealth and violence. My favorite is The Revenger’s Comedy. When’s there going to be another one? To which I’d replied, with the deliberate vagueness that I used to cultivate when I had a publishing contract, Who knows, my friend? When the Muse takes me. Dickhead.
WD was also one of the few people who liked my second series. After writing three novels set in 1620s London featuring “the resourceful rake” Sir Tertius Greville, I’d decided to pull the plug on him. The books had done pretty well-good reviews (sarcasm and irony, always my strong suits, turned a lot of reviewers on); The Italian Tragedy had won an award from a specialist magazine for best first novel; I’d had plenty of radio and TV exposure (admittedly mostly on local channels) and I’d done dozens of bookshop events.