The Death List

16

D.C.I. Karen Oaten stood in front of her team at the Yard, her eyes bulging.

“Right, you tossers!” she shouted. “Who was it? Who spoke to the journalist from this piece of shit?” She held up a garishly colored tabloid. “I’ve just had the commissioner himself on the phone.” She leaned toward the detectives and watched with satisfaction as they moved back as one. “I don’t like being told that I run a leaky ship, and I particularly don’t like being told that my job is on the line.” She tossed the newspaper away. “So here’s how it is. If my job’s on the line, then so are yours. Are you getting me? All your jobs.” She moved her eyes around them slowly. “We’re chasing what could be the worst serial killer in years. He’s running rings round us. That’s why we’re all in here on a Sunday. This isn’t the time to be protecting someone who’s taking tabloid money.” She turned to her office. “You know what you have to do. I want the squealer in my office by 6:00 p.m. today.” She started to walk. “Inspector Turner, in here.”

The gathering broke up.

“Yes, guv?” the Welshman said as he came in.

“Close the door,” the chief inspector said, waiting till he’d done so. “Sorry, Taff. Nothing personal. I had to put the boot in. Someone’s taking the piss big-time. How do you think the doctor’s family feels, having the fact that his head was cut off and his stomach removed rammed down their…well, you know what I mean.”

Turner nodded. “We’d have had to come out with it sooner or later.”

Oaten’s eyes flashed. “Yes, but not the morning after he was killed, for Christ’s sake.”

“I know who it was,” the inspector said, glancing over his shoulder. The blinds were closed.

“Tell me, Taff.”

“I’d rather wait to see if he…the person comes forward or if anyone else shops him,” he said, keeping his eyes off her. “That way your grip on the team will be stronger.”

Oaten frowned as she thought about it. “Yes, true enough. But if no one appears by six, you tell me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Right,” she said, sitting down behind her desk. “I’ve got a meeting with the A.C. in half an hour. Help me go through everything we’ve got. I can’t afford any more cock-ups.”

Turner sat down opposite her and pulled out his notebook. “The initial knocking on doors didn’t get us much-only one old woman who thought she’d seen a man in a suit and a hat walk into the victim’s building around the time we have from the camera. As if we needed confirmation of that.”

“And she didn’t see if he arrived on foot or whatever?”

“Nope. We’ll be checking again, but people will be away for the weekend and it may be we don’t get anything more till they come back.”

The chief inspector sighed. “Despite nationwide television and radio requests for witnesses to come forward.”

Turner shrugged. “We’ve got the pair of them on film, anyway. Not that the hard copies we’ve printed off are much use, considering the men are obviously in disguise.”

Oaten looked at the file on her desk. “The other guy’s about the same size as the one in the suit. Maybe they’re brothers.”

“In arms?”

“Ha-ha. The question is, which one’s the killer? Or do they both get involved?” She grimaced as she swallowed coffee from a plastic cup. “The overalls worn by the bearded one could belong to any workman in the city.” Oaten turned a page. “The postmortem confirmed what the doc told us at the scene. And the SOCOs didn’t come up with much.”

“The two men must have had a change of clothes in their bags. They’d have been spattered with blood. The trail stops in the reception area. They obviously changed there.”

Karen Oaten was shaking her head. “No fingerprints, no suggestive fibers or other physical evidence. Just like the other scenes.” She glanced across at him. “They’re certainly careful.”

“And they’re working to a plan,” Turner added.

“We’re taking the motive as revenge since the lines from the play push us in that direction. But we’ve got three long lists of names to collate and investigate-from the church records, the school rolls and, now, from Dr. Keane’s patient register when he was in Bethnal Green.”

“The team will start pulling in people today, including the ones we’ve already spoken to. They know that anyone whose alibis for the three killings don’t check or who are suspicious in any other way are to be held for us to question.” Turner’s voice was downbeat. “These people are smart, guv. They aren’t going to have left anything obvious.”

Oaten nodded. “But we have to check it all, don’t we?”

“What about the writer?” the inspector asked, inclining his head toward the piles of novels on his boss’s desk. “He could be involved, couldn’t he?”

“I doubt it. He spends his days at a computer making murders up, not committing them. But there are too many coincidences with the MOs to ignore him.” She gave her subordinate a tight smile. “And we don’t like coincidences in our business, do we?”

Turner was stroking his unshaven cheek. “No, we don’t. What are you going to do about him, guv?”

Oaten started tapping on her keyboard. “The problem is, Matt Stone is a pseudonym. I’ve been on his Web site, but I can’t get the agent and publisher on the contacts page to answer the phone to find out his real name. No one in that industry answers the phone out of office hours, apparently. So I’m going to send him an e-mail asking him to get in touch.”

Turner raised an eyebrow. “That’s a bit risky, isn’t it? If he is involved, he’ll scarper.”

“Yes, he will,” the chief inspector replied. “Then we’ll know.” She looked round at him. “The most likely result is that he doesn’t answer. He’ll probably be away for the weekend. People like him usually are.” She finished typing. “There it goes, anyway.”

John Turner stood up. “Guv?”

“Christ, Taff, you look like even more of a streak of misery than you usually do.”

“Yeah, well, lack of sleep, you know. Look, as you pointed out to the team, the time between the murders is getting shorter. There’s going to be another one soon.”

Oaten nodded slowly. “I reckon there is.”

“But we haven’t got a clue who the victim will be.”

“No.”

Turner closed his notebook with a snap. “Don’t you ever get frustrated by this job?”

Karen Oaten straightened her back. “Of course I do. That’s why I swore to myself that I’m going to catch this animal-or animals, plural, as they now are.” Her chin jutted forward. “You’ve got to stay hungry, Taff. Otherwise the beasts in the jungle out there will rip you to shreds.”

The inspector headed out. Not for the first time, his boss’s determination made him worry more about the effect it might have on her than on the people she was hunting.

I spent the day with Lucy. It wasn’t a great success. I was tired and she was fretting about Happy-there had been shouting and crying from the neighbors’ the previous night. The dog’s name had been heard frequently. So much had happened that I’d almost forgotten the Devil’s first demonstration of his power. I had a couple of flashes of the horrible scene on my daughter’s bed and felt like a total scumbag for having got her involved. But what choice did I have? I couldn’t have left Happy’s carcass where it was.

Maybe taking Lucy to the South Bank didn’t help. There was a showing of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday at the National Film Theatre and I thought she’d like Jacques Tati’s crazy behavior. She laughed a few times, but was generally subdued. Maybe she didn’t like the fact that it was a black-and-white movie. Afterward we just stood on Waterloo Bridge and watched the water flow by.

I went straight to Sara’s after I’d dropped Lucy off back home. She was just in, having been at the newspaper. We kissed and I instantly felt better.

“How are you doing?” I asked when we’d settled on her sofa with a bottle of cava.

“Not great,” she said. “I thought I was going to be able to sleep late this morning, but I got sent off to a church in Potter’s Bar. The priest declared he was gay during the week and there were all these demonstrators with placards saying Gay Clergy Get Lost and No Buggers in Church. Can you believe it?”

“Not as bad as your lot,” I said. “The pope thinks homosexuality’s abhorrent, doesn’t he? How many millions in compensation have been paid out to the victims of abuse by priests?”

“Whoa, Matt,” she said, her eyes bulging. They were bloodshot and there were dark rings around them. “I may be a lapsed Catholic, but I’m still a member of the church. You should respect that.”

“Sorry,” I said, my face reddening. “I was only messing around.”

“Yes,” she said, gulping wine. “That’s your problem, isn’t it? You spend your life making up stories and living in your little protected pocket in Herne Hill. Some of us have to deal with the real world.” She emptied her glass.

I refilled it and gradually the atmosphere lightened.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ll have to cut me some slack. I’ve been having a hard time at work recently.”

“The murders?” I said, putting my arm round her.

She nodded, but didn’t reply. I managed to get her talking by telling her about Monsieur Hulot’s idiocies-we’d seen Traffic a few months back. But her heart wasn’t in it and, after a quick meal, she went off to bed. I kissed her good-night, but I knew there was no point in joining her. Her body language made it clear that making love was off the menu. Sometimes she was hard to get to, and I’d learned to leave her be on those occasions. She always came round eventually. At the beginning of our relationship, I had been needy. My father had just been killed and she’d helped me through that. Lately it had begun to seem like she was the vulnerable one. It was just as well I hadn’t told her about the White Devil.

I spent the rest of the evening reading the Sunday papers and listening to the only band Sara had any time for-the Grateful Dead. I didn’t find out anything about the murder of Dr. Keane that the Devil hadn’t already told me. It seemed that my suspicions about there being a security camera at the scene had been right. Two men were being sought, one with the long hair and mustache that sounded very like the man Lucy had seen in the park, and another with a beard. At least I now had confirmation of my suspicion that the Devil had at least one accomplice. Eventually I turned off the stereo and went to the bedroom, but I didn’t get undressed. The expression on Sara’s sleeping face was tranquil. She’d obviously conquered her demons, so I decided not to disturb her.

I went out of the house quietly and drove back to my flat, reflecting on how far off the mark Sara was. The “protected pocket” she thought I lived in had been infiltrated by a savage killer, who was doing his best to incriminate me. If I wasn’t careful, she’d be in as much danger from him as Lucy, my mother and even Caroline were.

That thought chilled me to the bones.