The Death List mw-1

by Paul Johnson

  I unplugged my laptop and brought it over to the window, keeping the Internet connection attached. If I couldn’t go out to get the papers, I could at least check their Web sites. I wished I hadn’t. The details about the old woman’s murder, especially in the tabloids, were horrific. I went to the Daily Independent and found Sara’s story. She was co-credited with a colleague. Apparently there had been a late-night press conference at which Detective Chief Inspector Karen Oaten (“tight-lipped and barely controlling her outrage”) had described the modus operandi. But there had been no mention of the quotation from The White Devil. Either the bastard had lied about that, or the police were keeping it quiet. If the latter was the case, they might as well not have bothered. The tabloids were already linking the murders and splashing the words “serial” and “killer” about their copy liberally. At least no one had spotted the similarities to the murders in my novels. There hadn’t even been any e-mails to me from fans. So much for my presence in the public imagination.

  I was stuffing a piece of stale bread into my mouth when my mobile rang.

  “Mmm?” I answered.

  “What kind of telephone manner is that, Matt?” It was the Devil. “Eating breakfast on the hoof is bad for your digestion.”

  I got the mouthful down. “What do you want?”

  “A bit of politeness would be nice,” he said, his voice hardening.

  “You didn’t send me any notes this morning. I thought this was my day off.”

  There was a hollow laugh. “Very likely. You’re busy looking out for me.”

  How did he know that? He must have some kind of bug or camera in my place.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Um, yeah, I am,” I said weakly. “Well, you did tell me you’d be bringing the money.”

  “Yes, I did, didn’t I? But I didn’t tell you exactly when I’d be doing that, did I? Could be today, could be tomorrow. Who knows?” His tone got sharper. “If I were you, Matt, I’d keep a closer eye on your daughter than on the street. Who knows what dangers your ex-wife might inadvertently expose her to?”

  The line went dead.

  A wave of panic crashed over me. I grabbed my mobile, wallet and keys, pulled on my leather jacket and ran out of the house. Getting into the Volvo, I drove at speed down to Dulwich Village. I knew Caroline’s routine. She always took Lucy to the local cafe for breakfast. Then they went for a walk in the park before Lucy’s ballet class at midday. If I was lucky, they’d still be eating. I parked round the corner and walked toward the cafe.

  Before I got there, I realized two things. The first was that the Devil had very successfully got me out of the house so he could make his delivery unnoticed. The second was that I was about to be engulfed in a firestorm. Caroline was very jealous of the time she spent with Lucy. She’d made it clear on numerous occasions that my presence, even accidental, was not to be tolerated. I stopped outside the newsagent’s and decided to keep my distance. I bought a copy of one of the broadsheets that I hadn’t checked on the Internet and opened it, loitering behind a lamppost twenty meters from the cafe.

  Ten minutes later, Caroline and Lucy came out. My daughter was dressed in a pink anorak and skirt with white tights, while my ex-wife was wearing the torn jeans and baggy sweater that she affected at weekends-trying to look as unlike a City highflier as she could, as I’d pointed out before the divorce at the cost of a serious ear-bashing. They set off toward College Road. I followed them at what I thought was a discreet distance, the newspaper flapping in front of me like a sail buffeted by the breeze. When they turned into the park, I gave them a minute and then went in. I watched as Lucy ran ahead. She loved the boating lake and its birds. Caroline didn’t make any effort to keep up with her. She knew that Lucy was careful. But she didn’t know about the White Devil. I felt a pang of guilt. I should have found a way to tell her. Then I remembered how dangerous the bastard was.

  Caroline sat down on a bench near the water and studied her paper. I moved along the line of bushes behind her with my eyes on Lucy. She was crouching down and throwing bread to the birds. The park was quite busy with couples, children, dogs, buggies. It didn’t seem like a place where the Devil could get to Lucy.

  I looked to my left and watched a skinny man in his thirties limping past. His clothes were ragged and dirty, his hair unkempt. Probably a junkie who’d spent the night in the undergrowth. Turning back, I couldn’t see Lucy. Shit. Caroline was still reading her paper on the bench. I ran behind her, resisting the urge to shout my daughter’s name. The ducks and seagulls that had gathered around the bread she’d scattered made noises of outrage and flapped their wings as I went through them. Where was she?

  I couldn’t keep quiet any longer.

  “Lucy!” I yelled. “Lucy, where are you?” I looked around frantically. Caroline had got up, alarm on her face. “Lucy, come to Daddy! Lucy!” I ran to the trees that were set back from the lake. A young couple with a Labrador were walking there. “Have you seen a little girl, pink anorak and skirt?” I demanded.

  They stepped back at the fervor of my tone, and then looked at each other.

  “Yes,” the woman said, raising an arm. “Over there.”

  “Thanks,” I gasped.

  “She was with a man, yeah?” the guy said.

  “What?” I started to run in the direction the woman had indicated. “What did he look like?” I shouted over my shoulder. They both shrugged.

  The last tree in the row was an ancient oak, its trunk thick and gnarled.

  “Lucy!” I shouted desperately. “Lucy!”

  “Matt!” Caroline screamed, about fifty yards to my rear. “Where is she?”

  And then Lucy stepped out from behind the oak. I almost pissed myself as the tension left me. She was walking toward me, a baseball cap I’d never seen before on her head and a small leather bag in her right hand.

  “Lucy!” So close to her, my voice was too loud. It scared her, tears springing up in her eyes. “Are you all right, darling?”

  “Yes, Daddy, of course I’m all right,” she said in the painstaking tone she took when she thought she’d been unjustly accused.

  “Where did you get that hat?” I asked, clutching her to me. It was red, with a cartoon character on the front. Jesus. It was the Tasmanian Devil, the cartoon one with the oversize jaws that arrived in a miniature whirlwind. The crazy bastard.

  “This is for you, Daddy,” she said, wriggling out of my arms and handing me the black leather man’s handbag.

  “What’s going on?” Caroline said, trying to catch her breath. “What are you doing here, Matt?”

  I gave her a glare to shut her up. “Where did you get the hat and the bag, sweetie?”

  “Mr. White gave them to me,” she said, no trace of fear in her voice or face.

  “Mr. White?” my ex-wife said, staring at Lucy. “We don’t know any Mr. White.”

  “Daddy does.” My daughter pointed to the bag. “Mr. White said I was to give Daddy the bag and I could keep the cap.”

  I tried to get my pounding heart under control.

  “Who is this Mr.-”

  I held my hand up at Caroline. “What did Mr. White look like, Lucy?”

  She laughed. “Silly daddy. Mr. White’s your friend. He said so. You must know what he looks like.”

  I glanced at Caroline. Her face was suffused with crimson, a sure sign that anger was about to erupt. “Just tell me what he looked like,” I said, kneeling down in front of Lucy. “So I’m sure it’s the right person.”

  My daughter gave me a curious look and then laughed again. “All right, silly daddy. Mr. White’s got long black hair.” She pouted. “And a mouse.”

  “What?” Caroline and I said in unison.

  “I said, he’s got a mouse.” Lucy burst out in peals of laughter. “Don’t you remember the story we used to read? About the boy who wouldn’t say ‘mustache’? So he said his daddy had a mouse under his nose.”

  I stood up again, ignoring the tirade
that Caroline had started. Long black hair and a mustache-it sounded like the kind of disguise you could buy in any joke shop. Still, I’d get Lucy to do a drawing of him tomorrow.

  “Are you even listening to me, Matt?” my ex-wife said, pushing me in the chest. “What the hell’s going on? What’s in that bag?”

  I looked down at the object in my hands. The money. It had to be the money. I couldn’t open it in front of Caroline and Lucy.

  “Oh, it’s…it’s some CDs I lent the guy. I…I met him in the pub and we got talking. We both like Americana.” I felt my cheeks redden. I could tell that Caroline didn’t believe me, but she wasn’t prepared to make even more of a scene in front of Lucy.

  “Yeah,” she said under her breath. “Like you have a friend called Mr. White. I suppose he’s a fan of that awful movie Reservoir Dogs like you.” She squatted down. “Lucy, you know you shouldn’t talk to people you don’t know, or take things from them.”

  My daughter got tearful again. “But he knows Daddy,” she said, giving me a heartbreaking look. “He said so. And Daddy knows him.”

  “It’s all right, sweetie,” I said, patting her head.

  “What the hell are you doing down here, anyway, Matt?” Caroline said as she stood up. “You know the rules. Saturday is my day with Lucy.” Her eyes widened. “Were you following us?”

  “No, of course not,” I said, glancing away. The couple I’d spoken to were watching us anxiously. I waved to show that things were okay, but they didn’t look convinced.

  “You better not have been,” my ex-wife said, taking Lucy’s hand. “You don’t want that piece of rubbish, darling,” she added, flicking the cap onto the grass.

  Lucy raised her head and put on the haughty look that she’d inherited from Caroline. I could tell that she wanted the Tasmanian Devil cap. I picked it up and watched them leave. I wasn’t planning on giving it back to her, though. I was planning on jamming it down the madman’s throat. I couldn’t believe he’d taken the risk of talking to Lucy. He must have seen how close I was.

  If he’d wanted to ram home the message that I was totally powerless to resist him, he couldn’t have chosen a better way.

  The three men were standing around Terry Smail. He was hanging upside down from a joist in an abandoned warehouse. His captors had all taken off their caps and sunglasses, revealing close-cropped hair and scarred faces.

  “I don’t know,” jabbered their naked victim. “Aah! I didn’t know Jimmy well. I…I don’t know who he drank with.”

  The man in charge shook his head. His lips were only a couple of inches from Terry’s inverted ear. “You know that isn’t true. Do you want us to take you down again?”

  Smail squealed and jerked his head forward. The sight of the red patch that was his groin made him shake violently, but his wrists were behind his back and the movements did nothing but give him more pain from the chain round his ankles.

  “What we did to you the last time was only the start,” Wolfe said, grabbing him by the shoulders. “After all, your wedding tackle’s still intact.”

  Rommel and Geronimo laughed harshly.

  “So far,” continued Wolfe. “Next time we won’t just be removing your pubes with this high-tech instrument.” He held up the rusty and blood-spattered painter’s scraper. “Sorry we couldn’t find anything cleaner.” His glance cut off the others’ guffaws. “It’s very simple, Terry.” His eyes, dark as coal, the pupils unnaturally black, met the hanging man’s. “Either you spill your guts or we spill them.” He paused, watching Smail’s mouth open and close. “Tell me who Jimmy Tanner drank with.”

  “I…oh fuckin’ hell, it hurts. All right, all right, I’ll tell you. Just let me down.”

  The team leader gave him another thirty seconds in the air, then nodded to his colleagues. The chain was loosened and the captive dumped unceremoniously on the rough floor.

  “We’re listening, Terry,” Wolfe said. “Talk and we’ll let you go.”

  Smail looked at him disbelievingly, and then sobbed as he took in the bloody mess of his ankles. The chain had almost cut through to the bones.

  “Jimmy Tanner drank with…?”

  “Oh, Christ, I can’t. They’ll kill me.”

  “And we won’t?”

  “All right, all right. Jimmy, he didn’t much drink with anyone. He got vicious when he’d had a skin-full and we’d seen what he could do. He broke Big Mikey’s arm like it was a stick.” Terry Smail glanced at the three men around him. “Oh, I get it. You’re like him. You’re SAS like he said he used to be, ain’t you?”

  “Keep talking,” said the leader, raising the scraper.

  The captive gulped. “It must’ve been about six months ago. These two blokes turned up at the Hereward. We all reckoned they was dodgy, but they got talking to Knives, the landlord. I reckon money changed hands. Anyway, Knives introduces them to Jimmy and soon they’re getting on like a house on fire. I heard…I heard they wanted Jimmy to show them things.” He looked at his captors again. “The kind of things you people do.”

  “What were their names?”

  “I dunno. Aah-ee!” Smail tried to swing away from the rusty blade that was being dragged down his chest. “Corky. That’s all I know. One of them was called Corky. I dunno nothing about the other one.”

  “And they used to drink with Jimmy till when?”

  “Till about six weeks ago. When he…when he stopped coming. What’s this all about? What’s happened to Jimmy?”

  Wolfe shook his head. “That’s what you’re going to tell us, Terry.”

  “I…I dunno.” Smail’s eyes moved around frantically. “Honest I don’t.”

  Wolfe pulled the scraper back. “Describe the men.”

  Terry let out a long sigh of relief. “Um, the one called Corky was nothing special. Not too tall. He had a crappy beard that had bits of food in it and he always wore a woolly hat.” He broke off and looked up at the men. “Like you guys. His nose looked like it’d been flattened by a brick and his eyes were all bloodshot. He was a pisshead, I reckon, even though he only ever drank mineral water.”

  “And the man with no name?”

  “He was smaller than me. He always wore a baseball cap, red, with some cartoon character on it. He had this shitty long hair, black, in kinda rat’s tails. Oh, yeah, and he had these weird teeth. Pointed. Looked like he was a fuckin’ vampire. That’s what we used to call him. Count Dracula.” He let out a string of feeble, cracked laughs, and then stopped when he saw the three men’s faces. “That’s all I know. Honest. Can I go now?”

  Wolfe stood up and looked at his companions. “Oh, you can go all right.” He leaned over the naked man. “You can go on the express elevator to hell. But first you’re going to tell us what you’re holding back. Who is the man with the pointed teeth? We want to meet him very badly.” He tossed the scraper to Geronimo.

  Terence Smail’s screams echoed round the empty building. The seagulls outside took up a keening chant that obscured his travails from every passerby.

  13

  I went back to the Volvo and drove home, having placed the leather bag unopened on the front passenger seat. I felt even more intensely the mixture of rage and impotence that had weighed me down since the Devil first got his claws into me. But there was another emotion now. I tried to resist it because I knew he had planted it in me and was assiduously cultivating it-the desire for revenge. He had spoken to Lucy, he’d touched her. I was going to make him pay. He’d been studying me; he knew how my mind worked even though he’d never met me. But why did he want me to go after him? Did he have some weird kind of death wish, or was he sure that he could keep me at a distance?

  I parked outside my place and went inside, the bag under my jacket. For some reason I didn’t want anyone to see me carrying it. As I was climbing the stairs, I understood why not. It was blood money, tainted by the deaths of the Devil’s victims. What was I going to do with it? Hide it in the loft? The money was another part of my tormentor’s
plan that I didn’t understand. He’d made me his slave by threatening Lucy and everyone else I loved. He didn’t need to pay me. Did that betray a psychological weakness, that he had to pay for attention? Or was there something more subtle in his thinking?

  I checked my e-mails. There was one from Sara, saying that she was tied up with the story and would ring me when she could. There was also one from my mother, and it made my heart pound again.

  Dearest,

  I hope this finds you well. I know we spoke on the phone the other day, but I wanted to get in touch and I feel more comfortable writing-you understand how writers are, defter by pen and keyboard than by tongue (that could be taken as rude!). You sounded troubled when I called you. I know that your problems with publishers and agents have been getting to you. Don’t let the bastards grind you down! You just have to get on with the next book and prove them wrong. I know you can do it!

  Now, something else. Have you been following the news recently? I’m sure you will have been. Those two murders in the headlines. Have you noticed how similar they are to two of the killings in your books? I looked up the particular passages. The priest in Kilburn seems to have been done as per chapter 21 of The Devil Murder. And the poor woman in Chelmsford had her arm severed, just like the vile Blakeston in The Revenger’s Comedy, chapter 26. Isn’t that extraordinary? Obviously a coincidence, but rather a chilling one. Have you had any of your fans pointing it out?

  Anyway, don’t worry. I won’t bring it to the attention of the police!

  Must get on with Elvira and Tiffany Go to the Beach. Give my love to Lucy (and the opposite to Caroline-sorry, only joking!).

  With fondest love,

  Fran

  “Jesus,” I said under my breath. “Thanks a lot for that, Mother.”