The Death List

33

D.S. Paul Pavlou went to the corner of the ops room and called a number on his mobile. “I’ve got something,” he said in a low voice.

“Shoot,” Wolfe said.

“Wood supply depot in Bethnal Green. It’s under the name of our man’s mother.”

“Give me the address.” Pavlou did so, hearing the team leader repeat it, and then the sound of an engine being gunned. “Are your lot on the way?”

“Not yet. I haven’t reported the location.”

“Hold off for a bit. We won’t need long.”

Pavlou swallowed nervously. “There better not be another dismembered corpse.”

“We’ll do what we have to do. Your debt is paid.”

Pavlou put his phone back in his pocket. He felt queasy, but also relieved. The weight of his uncle’s obligation to the old soldier Jimmy Tanner had been passed to him by his mother, his Cypriot father being kept unaware of it. At last a few seconds of heroism under Argentinian fire in the South Atlantic had been canceled out.

But at what cost in blood?

I was so shocked that I couldn’t move. Dave, one of the Devil’s sidekicks? It was impossible. What about his family? Ginny was lying unconscious. Who else was under the sheets?

Not everyone was as stricken as I was. I turned when I heard a loud expulsion of breath. Pete had managed to extract a medium-size kitchen knife from his trouser pocket and bury it in the thigh of the other figure wearing a balaclava. Showing agility that I wouldn’t have credited, he wrested the machine pistol from his captor’s grip and drove the butt into the covered face. But before he could pull the balaclava off his victim, a volley of shots made both of us dive to the ground. I watched as the Devil ran behind a screen, Dave firing after him.

“What’s going on?” I shouted, my ears ringing.

“I improvised,” Dave said. “I came across one of his accomplices and relieved her of her gear.”

“Her?” I said as a burst of fire was returned by the Devil. Forgetting the question, I ran to the tables and pulled the sheets off the smaller figures. Dave joined me. In a few seconds we’d freed Lucy and his kids, and pulled them under the worktops. They all had their eyes closed, but I could feel a pulse in Lucy’s neck. Thank God, she was breathing normally.

Bonehead joined us, bullets kicking up dust behind him as he ran. “Jesus,” he gasped. “For more than a moment, I thought you were with him, Psycho.”

“What about the one who hit you?” I asked.

“Dead,” Peter replied. “Your Devil got him instead of me.”

That reminded me. I turned to Dave. “You said ‘her.’ You mean the other person was a woman?”

“Genius,” Dave grunted. “We’ve got to turn the tables into barricades now. You guys do it. I’ll cover you.”

There followed a blur of activity as Boney and I struggled to turn the heavy wooden objects over, while Dave blasted away at the Devil. Finally, we managed to get them all down. Ginny was mumbling, apparently coming round. Caroline, Rog and the three kids were still out, but apparently unharmed. Andy was swearing loudly, a fresh wound in his forearm pumping out blood. We undid the leather straps and got them under cover. But where was Sara? Had the monster killed her already?

Dave and I were crouching behind the worktops. Pete stood up and loosed off some bursts from the machine pistol, a wild look on his face. I signaled to them both to stop firing.

“Lawrence!” I shouted. “Leslie! Give it up. The police will be on their way.”

“They’ll never take me,” the Devil called back. “And neither will you.”

“For Christ’s sake, it’s finished. Throw out your gun.”

There was a pause. “Don’t you want to know why I chose you, Matt?”

“Keep him talking,” Dave said, preparing to move to the right. “By the way, I disabled the detonators on three caches of high explosive that the bastard planted inside the warehouse. Okay…now!”

“Yes,” I shouted to my tormentor as Dave ran out in a crouch. There was no firing from the Devil. “There’s plenty I want to know. Why me will do for a start.”

I heard a bitter laugh.

“Why not you?” the Devil said. “There’s no shortage of bloodsucking crime novelists I could have used. It just happened that I’d met you. Twice.”

“What?” I said in amazement.

“Oh, you wouldn’t remember. Your career was on the up then. You didn’t register the faces of the people who queued to have their copies of your books signed. Then again, the second time I met you, things weren’t looking quite so good. It was when Lizzie Everhead tore into you.”

“You were there, at King’s?”

“Yes. I knew you wouldn’t remember. You signed my copy of Red Sun Over Durres. Not that you bothered to make your signature legible.”

I saw Dave scuttle unnoticed behind a partition wall.

“You mean you got me into all this shit because you met me twice?”

“Well, I felt sorry for you, Matt.” He sounded distracted. “Your books aren’t as bad as Dr. Everhead, rhymes with ‘dead,’ made out. I killed her for you. I hope you appreciate that.”

I clenched my fists to restrain myself. The vicious, scheming bastard. “Why my family? What were you going to do with them?”

“That was to depend on you, Matt. You did well to get as close to me as you have. I’d let you sacrifice yourself for them if I thought you had the guts.”

“What about my mother?” I shouted. “Why did you spare her?”

“When I saw your friend Roger outside the house, I decided to leave her alive. She was in a drug-induced stupor, with a knife to her throat, the times you called her. Killing her might have made you lose your grip and hand over the chase to the police. I hope you liked the pig’s blood. Good touch, wasn’t it? I slaughtered and drained the animal myself.”

I kept my head behind the tabletop. What the hell was Dave doing? “But you did your best to frame me for the Drys murder and Lizzie Everhead’s, as well as my publisher’s employees.”

“I wanted to keep you on your toes.” There was a long burst of gunfire from the vicinity of the Devil. “There you are,” he said. “I was wondering where you’d got to.”

I looked at Bonehead. His expression was grim. “Dave?” I yelled.

There was a pause.

“Dave’s got his hands full,” said the Devil, his voice stronger. “Or rather, his legs-full of bullets. Now, here’s what we’re going to do. My partner and I are going to bring your friend Dave out. He’s still alive-just. Before we do that, I need you to throw the Uzi-the machine pistol-as far as you can to the front.”

Boney and I exchanged desperate looks.

“We have to defend the others,” I said to him.

“What, and leave Dave to take his chances? No way.”

I watched as Pete took a matte black automatic from his boot. It looked to be the identical twin of Dave’s. What the hell was going on?

“He gave it to me earlier,” Bonehead explained. “Showed me how to use it, too. He reckoned I might find myself in a better position than you.”

“Looks like he was wrong,” I said. “The only way to save the others now is to cooperate with the lunatic. Toss that thing out.”

He did so, along with the machine pistol.

“All right!” I shouted. “Don’t hurt Dave any more.”

“Stand up so I can see you,” the Devil ordered.

Boney and I glanced at each other, and then obeyed.

After a pause, the Devil appeared. There was a twisted smile on his lips and he was pointing his machine pistol at us steadily. Dave, moaning, his trousers heavily bloodstained, was being dragged along the floor by his accomplice. As they came closer, I realized who the person wearing only a white T-shirt, knickers and socks was.

“No,” I gasped.

“Hello, Matt,” Sara said brightly, dropping Dave and aiming the Uzi she had picked up at me.

“You never suspected?” the Devil asked sardonically.

Suddenly, everything fell into place-Sara’s forcing herself on me at the party where we first met, the hard edge she had that I’d put down to her job, her strange moods recently. What a blind idiot I’d been.

“No, you didn’t, did you?” she said. “How’s that for authorial imagination?”

The Devil laughed. “Here’s another surprise for you, Matt. Sara’s my little sister. By twelve minutes.”

I didn’t want to believe him, but the expression on her face confirmed it.

“It took me a long time to find her, but finally I tracked down the family who adopted her. They’d moved near to Inverness. I prevailed on them to tell me her whereabouts.”

My stomach constricted as I remembered the unsolved double-murder of a retired couple in the Highlands of Scotland a few years ago. Jesus, was there no end to what the Devil had done? As for Sara, she’d obviously picked up some moves, too. She must have managed to sneak out of her flat without the police guard noticing.

“So you set up the relationship with me,” I said to her, shaking my head.

“It wasn’t difficult,” she said contemptuously. “I suppose you thought a common-as-muck journalist should have been grateful that an award-winning crime writer took an interest in her. I’ve been playing with you for months, Matt. Right up to tonight. Who do you think took care of Ginny and the children, in particular your precious Lucy? I located them by the tracker we put on the four-by-four and sprayed them with knock-out gas before they got far from the house in Kent.” She laughed harshly. “And you fell hook, line and very heavy sinker for my supposed abduction on the phone, you egotistical fool.”

I stared at the Devil. “How long have you been planning this?”

“A long, long time,” he replied. “I started writing my death list after my mother died. I knew from the start that wasn’t going to satisfy me.” He smiled. “Deep down, I’m a generous soul. I wanted to write a death list for somebody else, as well.”

“You’re insane,” Pete said.

“Clinically?” the Devil said. “I doubt it.” He frowned and glanced at Sara. “So, what are we to do with them?”

She gave him a look that was full of lust. I realized that the Webster quotation left in the old schoolteacher’s body had more than one meaning-she had been in an incestuous relationship with her brother. Was Sara with the Devil in that way, too?

“You haven’t told him the best bit yet, darling,” she said. “His father?”

“Oh, yes, his father. Or rather, his adoptive father-Paul Wells.” He gave me a sick, malicious grin. “I was the one who ran him down on the street in Muswell Hill.”

I felt what remained of my world crumble. Before I could control myself, I was climbing over the tabletop. I heard sirens in the distance, then realized that Bonehead was coming with me.

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.