The Death List mw-1

by Paul Johnson

  There followed a cataclysm of noise-gunfire, shouts, screams, some of the latter coming from me. I saw that Andy had crawled round the table and grabbed the Devil’s ankles. Sara turned and ran, her head down. I hit the Devil with a crushing tackle in his midriff before he could bring the machine pistol to bear on Andy.

  The three of us lay in a heap. It was then that I became aware of footsteps drawing close.

  “Well…done…Matt,” my tormentor said, gulping for breath. He attempted a smile, and then scrabbled at the front of his overalls.

  “The explosives have been deactivated,” I said, taking in the remote control pad on his chest and the blood that was flowing freely from several bullet wounds.

  “Drop your weapons! All of you!”

  I looked round and saw three men approaching fast. They were dressed in black, balaclavas over their faces and automatic pistols in two-handed grips pointing at us. “Who the-”

  The man in the lead shook a finger at me to shut me up. “You,” he said, directing his aim at the White Devil. “You. Jimmy Tanner. Tell me what happened to him.”

  The Devil gave a choked laugh. “So you finally got here. Who are you? Brothers-in-arms of the old piss-head?”

  The man in black stepped forward and grabbed the Devil by the throat. “Where’s Jimmy Tanner?” He looked at the weapons on the ground. “He taught you how to use those, didn’t he?”

  The White Devil nodded slowly. “And I put what I learned to good use.”

  “You’re the fucker who’s been slaughtering people, aren’t you?” said one of the other men.

  “Shut it, Rommel,” said the first man. He bent low over the Devil. “Where’s Jimmy? Did you kill him?”

  “Among many others.” He squealed as his assailant took his nose between thumb and forefinger and twisted it hard to one side. Then he moved his head slowly toward me. “Remember what Webster said, Matt?” he asked. “‘If the Devil Did ever take good shape, behold his picture.’ This will make a great ending for your book.”

  The other men in black stepped close, grabbing the Devil by his armpits. That made him yelp.

  “Execution time,” the first man said.

  I averted my eyes as a fusillade of shots rang out. Then I saw the men turn away. But before they made off, the one called Rommel leaned over Dave.

  “What the fuck are you doing here, Patton?” he asked, and then headed quickly away with the other two.

  I took in my tormentor’s head. It was a broken mass of crimson and grey, his white overalls splashed liberally.

  “Jesus,” Andy said, his hand clamped over his wounded arm.

  “Christ,” completed Pete. “Who were those guys?”

  “Armed police!” came a yell from the door. “Move away from the weapons!”

  We did as we were told.

  I cast one last look at the monster who’d ensnared me. The White Devil’s soul had left his body.

  I hoped it had gone straight back to hell.

  34

  Karen Oaten stood watching as Matt Wells’s family and friends were loaded into ambulances. As soon as she and Turner heard the report of gunfire in Bethnal Green, they’d driven over at high speed. The fact that Leslie Dunn had grown up in the area was too much of a coincidence to pass up. But, by the time they got there, Pavlou having confirmed that the property was in the name of Leslie Dunn’s mother, the action was over.

  She’d talked to Matt briefly before he was allowed to accompany his daughter and ex-wife to hospital. There would be plenty of time to question him in detail over the following days. She found the fact that his girlfriend, Sara Robbins, had been the Devil’s partner and sister almost as astonishing as he did. The problem was, she had disappeared. A general alert had been issued, but if she’d learned her trade from her brother, there wouldn’t be much chance of catching her. As for the men who’d killed the Devil, there was no trace of them whatsoever.

  “I guess you were right, guv,” the inspector said with a rueful smile. “Sorry I doubted you.”

  “I’ll let you off, Taff,” she said, returning the smile, “if you buy me several very large drinks. To be honest, I don’t think even Matt Wells could have dreamed up a plot like this in one of his books.”

  He nodded. “Wonder if he’ll be using it in his next one.”

  “More crap odds,” Oaten said, moving to the car. “Come on, the commissioner’s waiting to shake our hands.” She sniffed. “Not that we did much to solve this bloody case.”

  “Who cares?” the Welshman said. “It goes down in the book as one of ours, and the press will plaster your picture all over the front pages.”

  “Wonderful,” she said, pushing a loose strand of hair back. “Who do you think the assassins were? Hit men put on to the killer by some gangland scum he’d offended?”

  “As likely as not,” Turner said with a shrug.

  Karen Oaten headed outside to face the cameras, her hand on her hair again. Now that the White Devil had gone, maybe she’d finally get the chance to tart herself up. But what was the point? Who would fancy a hard-faced detective with blood on her hands?

  Then again, she’d noticed Matt Wells giving her a look that made her entertain some hopes.

  Peter Satterthwaite and I went to visit the guys in hospital. They’d managed to talk the doctors into putting them into a room together. It probably hadn’t been too difficult. That way the myriad reporters could be kept at bay.

  “How much have you been offered by the vultures, then?” I asked, after I’d established that the three of them were on the mend.

  “Twenty-five thousand and counting,” Andy said, grinning.

  “Ditto,” Rog said. His head was covered in a bandage.

  “Thirty-five,” Dave said. “I was the military mastermind, after all. Problem is, Ginny wants half of it. Says she’s traumatized, but I know she’s harder than that. Shit, I’m the one with shell shock.”

  There was a flare-up of laughter and abuse, then they all looked at me seriously.

  “What about you, man?” Andy asked. “Lucy’s okay, isn’t she?”

  I nodded. “Fortunately she slept through almost everything and there have been no serious ill effects of the gas my lunatic ex-girlfriend sprayed them all with.”

  “How about Caroline?” Rog asked.

  I looked at the floor. “Fighting fit. If she could have got out of bed, she’d have beaten the hell out of me.” I shrugged. “I can’t blame her.”

  “Aw, come on, Matt,” Dave said. His legs were enclosed in a kind of tent. He’d been lucky. The bullets had missed his arteries by millimeters. “It wasn’t your fault the lunatic dragged you into his filthy scheme.”

  “No, but I still put Lucy and her in danger. I should never have taken his money and written up his notes. But writers are whores and I couldn’t resist a good story.” I shook my head. “I couldn’t resist taking him on. I must have been mad.”

  There was an uneasy silence.

  “I also put my best friends in danger,” I said, looking at each of them.

  “Never mind,” Dave said. “The good guys rescued us in the end.”

  I took in the wide grin that had spread across his face. “What do you mean, Psycho?”

  “They were SAS,” he said in a low voice.

  “I get it. One of them knew you,” I said. “The guy called Rommel. Why was your code name Patton?”

  “Because he’s a crazy bastard who never stops an attack,” Andy said with a wide smile.

  “What the hell were they doing there?” Roger asked.

  Dave shook his head. “Don’t tell anyone who they were if you want to stay alive. Just be thankful they came when they did.”

  There was another silence. Eventually it was broken by Bonehead.

  “I hope they come again soon,” he said in his campest voice.

  The resulting uproar brought in several nurses.

  I spent two days being questioned by Karen Oaten and her lugubrious Welsh side
kick. It wasn’t a serious grilling. The chief inspector seemed to be inclined to believe me from the start, and even the man she called Taff was reasonably sympathetic, although he wouldn’t hear a word about rugby league being superior to the union code. We parted on pretty good terms. There were some details left and I was sure it wouldn’t be long before I saw them again. Actually, I wouldn’t have minded seeing Karen again on her own. It seemed I wasn’t cured of my weakness for strong women.

  When I finally went back to my flat, I used the equipment Rog had obtained to debug the place. The Devil had been very thorough. There were seven separate pinhole cameras and as many microphones, all wired to my electricity supply and linked to a common transmitter hidden in the loft. He’d presumably managed to install them when I was with Lucy in the mornings and afternoons.

  My daughter and Dave’s kids were soon back at school. They were dying to tell their friends what they’d been through. The head teacher had to ban the press from school property. I spent the nights with Luce at my mother’s. The journalists hadn’t been told about Fran’s involvement in the case. She was three days in hospital before she was discharged. Her wrists and ankles were painful, but she had come through the ordeal with her customary strength of will. I decided against telling her that the Devil had killed her husband, my adoptive father. What good would it have done? She was embarrassed by the fact that the lunatic had been able to catch her so easily. He’d arrived outside the house as she was preparing to leave for Heathrow, saying that he was a minicab driver booked by me. Before she knew it, she’d been sprayed with gas and tied up in a deserted building-I never found out where, but I reckon it was the lockup garage in Deptford that I’d checked out.

  I spent a lot of time trying to avoid my ex-editor Jeanie Young-Burke. She’d come back from Paris as soon as the Devil died, desperate to sign me up to write a true crime book about the case. She was upset about Reggie Hampton’s murder, and the receptionist’s, but the deal took precedence. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do the book, although the amount of money on offer was so huge that I wasn’t able to resist for long. Besides, the desire for revenge in me that the Devil had played with needed to be written out. Even my tormentor’s execution in cold blood hadn’t made me feel any better disposed toward him. I wasn’t proud of that.

  My former agent Christian Fels called, offering to represent me in the negotiations. I decided that, since he’d lost his lover and been terrorized by the Devil, he was entitled to a cut, so I signed up with him again. As for the ten thousand pounds I’d been given by the bastard, I wrapped it up and had it couriered to a charity that helped adopted children with psychological problems.

  Relations with Caroline went from bad to worse. One of the Devil’s final acts had been to send a digital image to her office e-mail address. It showed me burying the neighbors’ dog near Farnborough. I managed to convince her not to show it to Shami and Jack, but explaining why I’d done it was a tough one. I was protecting Lucy, but she couldn’t see it that way.

  Things got more or less back to normal two weeks later. Dave and the others were out of hospital, Lucy was highly enamored of the neighbors’ new Husky puppy and summer seemed to be on its way. I even managed to set up a date with Karen Oaten at a new Mexican restaurant in Covent Garden. She said yes with unexpected alacrity.

  Then, that morning, I got an e-mail from the person I’d been trying to forget. As with the Devil’s messages, it was impossible to trace the account holder. The first part of the sender’s address was “sarakills.”

  Matt, Matt. You came through it. Or rather, you think you did. I saw that interview with you in my ex-paper. You said that the desire for revenge was immature, that people in a civilized society should be able to control it. My beloved brother wouldn’t have agreed. Neither do I. Although he trained me in the basics, it seems I have an excess of natural aptitude. It was difficult at first, but I soon got used to killing. Now I have access to the funds that he stashed. I’ve moved them, in case you’re wondering. I owe him. I’ll live in luxury. I’ll never have to work again. But I still have an account to settle with you. I’ll be making my own death list. Look over your shoulder every day for the rest of your life.

  John Webster put it well. “I must first have vengeance.” And I will, Matt.

  Stay well-until we meet again.

  Deep down, I’d expected the lover who betrayed me to get in touch. Now I knew for sure that, sooner or later, the horror would begin again.

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