The Death List

17

It was nearly three in the morning. The Hereward in Greenwich, lock-in long over, was chained up and deserted when the Orion came round the corner, Geronimo at the wheel. It took only a few seconds to deliver Terry Smail back to his local. The team took pursuit precautions after they left, but it was soon clear that no one was on their tail.

Sitting in the front passenger seat, Wolfe allowed himself to relax a fraction. They had obtained more than he’d expected from the fourth-division lowlife. It seemed that the man named Corky wasn’t the main player-the one with the pointed teeth was in charge. Smail came out with that when Rommel had taken a screwdriver to his kneecaps. Apparently, one time the slimebag had tried to ingratiate himself with Jimmy Tanner and his new friends, only to be told in a seriously menacing way by the nameless man to leave them alone. It seemed hard to believe that the old soldier could have been taken by a pair of wide-boys, no matter how good they were, but the drink had really got to him-he’d hardly recognized Wolfe the last time they met, even though they’d served together in the SAS for more than five years.

Smail had kept the best till last. Wolfe knew that would be the way. That was why they had moved on to their captive’s groin after damaging his knees beyond repair. Just before he passed out, Terry revealed where the bearded man called Corky lived. By squeezing him they’d find Count Dracula and they’d put a stake through his black heart-after they’d heard him tell them what had happened to Jimmy.

They were on their way to Forest Hill now.

I wasn’t in the mood for any more of the White Devil’s games when I got back from Sara’s, so I didn’t check my e-mails. If the bastard wanted me badly enough, he’d call me up when he saw that I’d returned. As it turned out, I was allowed a break. Although it took some time to come, I eventually dropped into a deep and surprisingly untroubled sleep.

Next morning I walked Lucy to school as usual. She was still subdued. Apparently the neighbors had been shouting at each other again. I tried to comfort her, but I was aware that I wasn’t doing a very good job.

When I got back, I made coffee and ate a couple of pieces of toast. Then, reluctantly, I booted up my reserve laptop. First I checked the main newspaper sites. There was plenty of speculation about the doctor’s murder, all the correspondents being positive that a serial killer one tabloid had dubbed “the New Ripper” had struck again, even though this time he hadn’t been on his own. At least they’d got that much right. The rest of their reporting had about as much substance as the worst scenes in my novels.

I logged on to my e-mail program. To my surprise, there was no message from the Devil. To my dismay, there was one via my Web site from k. oaten@met. police. uk. That was all I needed. I leaned back in my chair and worked out my choices. I could get in touch with the sternly attractive female D.C.I. I’d seen on the TV-either telling her everything I knew or dissembling as best I could; or I could keep my head down. She obviously didn’t know my real name, but it wouldn’t be long till she discovered it. All she had to do was contact my ex-editor or agent. I could get out of London, but then I’d be leaving Lucy and the others at the mercy of the Devil. I could hardly gather together my daughter, Sara, my mother, Caroline and all of my friends and their families, and spirit them away. No, there was nothing else for it. I had to talk to Karen Oaten in order to get her off my case-but I couldn’t tell her anything about my tormentor. Did I have it in me to lie to a senior police officer? I would soon find out.

I picked up the phone and dialed the mobile number given in her e-mail.

“Oaten,” she answered crisply.

“Um, hello, my name’s Matt Wells. You sent me a message.”

“Matt Wells?” She sounded puzzled.

I was pleased that I’d put her on the back foot. “Also known as Matt Stone.”

“Oh, yes. Thanks very much for getting in touch, Mr. Stone…Mr. Wells. I’d very much like to talk to you.” Her tone had turned insistent.

“You mean now?”

“If that’s all right. We can come to you.”

“Hold on a minute.” I looked around the flat. It was in a mess, but that wasn’t what was bothering me. The Devil was probably watching and listening. If I volunteered to meet the policewoman elsewhere, he might think that I was spilling my guts about him. I couldn’t risk that. “Sure, all right.” I gave her the address. She said she’d be round in under half an hour and hung up.

I spent the time saving to diskette and then deleting the last messages to and from the Devil. I didn’t imagine she’d be turning up with a warrant to search the place. If she did, I was stuffed-unless I got rid of the laptop, which would immediately raise her suspicions as I’d obviously read her e-mail. No, I’d have to brazen things out. I tried to think myself into the minds of my two fictional investigators. How would Sir Tertius and Zog have prepared for an interrogation? With total lack of concern in the former case and deep foreboding in the latter. Neither was much help to me.

When the bell rang, I made myself walk downstairs at a leisurely pace. The woman I opened the door to was accompanied by a burly man in a crumpled blue suit. She was tall and well proportioned, with the look of an ex-athlete who’d kept in shape. Her blond hair was pulled back, emphasizing features that were more striking in real life than on TV.

“Mr. Wells?” she asked. “I suppose I should use your real name.”

I nodded. “Hello.” I gave her what I hoped wasn’t too expansive a smile. “And I suppose I should see some ID.”

She opened her wallet to display her warrant card, her colleague doing the same.

“This is Detective Inspector Turner,” Oaten said. “We won’t take up much of your time.”

I led them upstairs, my heart racing. These people clearly knew what they were about. I felt like a total amateur, despite my theoretical knowledge of police procedure.

“Not working?” the chief inspector asked, glancing at the dark screen of my laptop.

“Thinking,” I said, tapping my head. “Unfortunately, writers never get even a minute off.”

They both looked at me dubiously.

I ushered them to the sofa. “Coffee? Tea?”

“No, thanks,” Oaten replied. “We’re rather busy, as you’ll no doubt appreciate.”

“How do you mean?” I said, playing dumb.

“Mr. Wells, I imagine you’re aware of the recent murders in and around London,” the chief inspector said. Her colleague took out a notebook and pen.

“I’ve seen the news,” I replied, raising my shoulders. I had to be careful here.

The Devil had told me plenty of details that hadn’t been made public.

Oaten leaned forward, long fingers splayed on the black fabric of her trousers. “Mr. Wells, has it struck you that there are certain similarities with certain murders in your novels?”

I kept my eyes on her. “I had begun to wonder. Though the reports haven’t gone into enough detail for me to take the links too seriously.” I hoped I was playing the scene with sufficient cool.

The chief inspector pursed her lips. “What if I were to tell you that the murders of Father Norman Prendegast, Miss Evelyn Merton and Dr. Bernard Keane were almost exact replicas of those in three of your books?” She turned to her colleague and he read out the titles and page references.

I felt their eyes on me, cold and unwavering. My lower jaw dropped in what I wanted to look like astonishment. “What?” I said weakly. “You can’t be serious.”

Oaten stood up and took a position in front of me, one leg in front of the other like a boxer preparing to fight. “We’re serious, all right, Mr. Wells. I need to know where you were on the following dates and times.” She raised her hand and the man, who had also got to his feet, read from his notebook.

I tried to look intimidated-which wasn’t difficult-and opened my diary. “Um, on the first, I was here. With my girlfriend. Last Friday I was here, working. On Saturday afternoon I was here.” My stomach was in turmoil. “Both times, on my own.” I stared up at them.

“Did you know any of the victims?” the inspector asked. He had a Welsh accent.

“Of course not.”

Karen Oaten was still standing over me. “Mr. Wells, you’re familiar with a seventeenth-century play called The White Devil.” It was a statement rather than a question.

“Yes, I am. I studied English literature at university.”

“And you used the dramatist John Webster as a minor character in your novel The Devil Murder.” The chief inspector glanced at her colleague and they sat down again.

“You’ve read my books?” I said, unable to conceal the novelist’s pleasure at finding readers even in a nightmare situation like this one.

“As much of them as I had to,” Oaten replied with a grimace. “This is strictly confidential. The killer left a quotation from The White Devil in each victim.”

“In each victim?” I said, sounding horrified.

She nodded. “I’ll spare you the details. Why do you think he-or she-would do such a thing?”

I remembered that the Devil may have been watching and listening. “I…I really don’t know.”

“Come on, you can do better than that,” the Welshman said, glaring at me.

“Well, if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it was something to do with revenge. That’s one of the main features of Jacobean tragedy.”

“So I understand,” Oaten said. “I’ve been talking to Dr. Lizzie Everhead. You know her, I believe.”

I stifled a groan. Lizzie Everhead was the academic who had laid into me in public. She’d accused me of everything from historical inaccuracy to callous brutality.

“Yes,” I said, keeping my tone neutral. “I’ve bumped into her at crime-writing conferences.”

“And,” continued the chief inspector, “since you knew none of the victims, you would have no motive for revenging yourself on them.”

“Certainly not,” I said, laying on the outrage with a trowel.

She ignored that. “Mr. Wells, I presume your fans communicate with you via your Web site, as I did. Have any of them shown…unusual tendencies?”

“A lot of them.” I tried to lighten the atmosphere by smiling. “Some want to be my best friend, or more than that. I always keep them at arm’s length. Some want me to write more books in my first series and some want me to help them get published. But, as far as I can tell, none of them is homicidal.” I imagined the Devil listening to the lie and laughing.

Karen Oaten looked at my laptop. “Would you mind if we checked your correspondence?”

I bit my lip, aware of how suspicious they were about to become. “I’m afraid I managed to pour coffee over my main computer. I’ve given it to a friend who’s an expert. I hope he can salvage the files. That one’s my old laptop. It’s been in the attic for the past three years so there’s nothing recent on it-apart from your e-mail.” I was going to ask them if they had a warrant, but managed to stop myself in time. I needed to be as cooperative as possible, without antagonizing the Devil.

“Never mind,” the chief inspector said, to my surprise. “We can always ask your Web site provider to give us access. I presume you have no objection.”

I tried to keep calm. “No.”

“We’ll need your girlfriend’s name and contact details,” the Welshman said.

I gave them to him, feeling bad about dumping Sara in the shit. On the other hand, she’d probably be happy to get a potential story angle. “She’s a journalist on the Daily Independent,” I added. That didn’t seem to impress them.

“You’ll be doing yourself a favor if you don’t tell her we’re coming,” Turner said, giving me a hard look.

Oaten got up again. “I think we’ve taken enough of your time for now, Mr. Wells. Thank you for being so-” She broke off as her mobile rang. She listened for over a minute, her expression getting more and more grave.

“Guv?” the inspector said when she’d finished.

Karen Oaten was paying no attention to him. Her eyes were locked on mine, her gaze unyielding. “Mr. Wells, do you know a man called Alexander Drys?”

A deep foreboding washed over me. “I don’t know him in person,” I said. “He’s a literary critic.” I didn’t add that he’d given me a string of vicious reviews and that I’d have happily ripped his balls off if he’d ever had the nerve to show up at a literary function.

“I see,” Oaten said, turning on her heel and heading for the door.

“What’s happened?” I asked desperately.

“Watch the news,” the chief inspector said over her shoulder. “We’ll be in touch.” That sounded more like a threat than anything else.

I heard the street door close behind them and then their car move away at speed. I had the distinct feeling that the Devil had upped the stakes once again.

“Just put the tray down and get out of here, girl,” Alexander Drys had said to the maid.

He was in the drawing room of his house on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, preparing to take morning coffee. He’d always hated interruptions, especially when he was preparing to write his monthly roundup of reviews for the magazine. If he’d been honest with himself-a rare event-he would have admitted that his temper had always been quick. He’d been spoiled from the earliest age. His father, a London Greek shipping magnate, was generous though rarely in the house, while his mother, a former model, was always present during the holidays to look after his every need. Along with the staff, of course.

Drys looked at the meager selection of fancy cakes on the tray. He would have to do something about the girl. She was Portuguese and hardly knew a word of English. He should never have listened to his butler, who was probably screwing her. The situation was particularly bad on Mondays, when all the other servants had the day off.

He got up from the Louis XVI chaise longue and moved his twenty-stone body to the window. The river was sparkling in the afternoon sunlight, its normal sludgy tone transformed. The plebs were driving across Albert Bridge in their hundreds, off to their worthless jobs or to the shops. At least there were no kids to be seen. Thank God he’d remained single-not that there had ever been any chance of him getting married, despite his father’s insistence that the dynasty be continued. Alexander Drys had no interest in shipping and no desire to share the house with a wife, never mind mewling brats. Particularly not when he could ring up Madame Ostrovka any time he wanted and take advantage of her endless supply of blonds from the former Soviet Union. “Fuck ’em and chuck ’em,” that was the motto he’d been regaling his cronies at the club with for decades.

No, the only thing that interested him was dissecting crime novels. He blamed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He’d come across The Dancing Men in an anthology at school back in the fifties, and had been instantly hooked. After he’d finished reading English at Cambridge (an undistinguished third, but no one remembered that), he used his connections and family wealth to obtain reviewing positions on numerous publications. True, he was less in evidence now than in his heyday during the eighties-Thatcherite contempt for frivolous writing having been very much to his taste-but a notice from him could still make or, more often, break a novelist’s career. Not that he cared about that. If you wrote fiction, you deserved criticism. That was one reason why he’d never attempted it himself. Well, that and a lamentable lack of application. Anything longer than eight-hundred words was a real challenge.

Drys went back to the chaise longue and ate the five dainties quickly. After a cup of Earl Grey, he turned to the piles of books that he’d lined up on the Persian carpet. They were in four tiers. The one on the left consisted of books that he hadn’t even opened-either he knew the author wasn’t one who would interest him or he disliked the publisher. The next was made up of books of which he’d read ten pages and then given up. The third pile was of books he’d read through and decided to put the knife into-this was what his readers expected, indeed, desired. The fourth and smallest consisted of books that he would praise. Not excessively, and certainly not without caveats. The fact that the publishers of those novels had wined and dined him was neither here nor here.

Alexander Drys raised his head. He’d heard a noise at the rear of the house, a strange noise-something between a thud and a crack. What on earth was that stupid girl doing? He reached over to the art deco coffee table and rang the brass bell, a seventeenth-century piece from his ancestors’ island of Psara. When she didn’t appear, he hauled himself to his feet and went to the door.

Two men in gray boiler suits and protective helmets were standing on the landing outside.

“Wha-”

Drys fell back into the drawing room when he was struck hard in the face, landing with a crash. His vision was clouded, but he felt himself being dragged across the parquet. For a while he lost his sense of time. When he regained his senses, he found himself sitting with his legs apart, his arms stretched to opposite ends of the coffee table. He tried to move his hands. They had been tied to the table legs.

“What…what’s going on?” he gasped, blinking.

The man who squatted down in front of him was of medium height. He was wearing a mask, one of those sold by novelty shops-but instead of President Bush or Tony Blair, this one had a strangely blank expression, the artificial skin very pale.

“Who…who are you?” Drys asked, glancing round at the other man. He was wearing an identical mask. “There’s no money in the house.”

The man in front of him laughed, a horrible sound. “Oh, we don’t want money, Alex. You don’t mind if I call you Alex, do you? Alexander makes me think of the ancient hero, and let’s face it, you’re not exactly from that mold.”

Drys tried to control his wobbling chins. “How dare you?” he said in the voice he used with the servants. “I’m-”

“A vicious piece of shit who ruins people’s lives,” the masked man completed.

Drys watched as he opened a large leather bag and took out two things. The first was a blue cardboard folder, which he laid on the table. The second caused his armpits to be drenched with sweat. It was a large, stainless-steel chef’s knife.

“Wha-”

The man raised his hand.

Drys noticed that it was sheathed in latex. That made his heart beat even faster.

“Now, Mr. Renowned Literary Critic, I’m going to read some of your deathless prose out to you.” The man’s voice was curiously accentless, as if he’d been to too many elocution lessons. He gave another mirthless laugh. “This is a game, you see. The rules are simple. I read you three pieces. Then you tell me who the author in question is. All the pieces concern the same person. If you get it right, we’ll walk away. If you get it wrong, well-” he picked up the knife and angled it against the light “-you could do with losing some weight.”

Drys tried to speak, but found he couldn’t. This was madness. They couldn’t be serious. This sort of thing didn’t happen to people in his position. He felt a sudden need to empty his bladder. He managed to hold its contents in, but only just.

“Extract one,” said the man in the mask, opening the folder. “‘This novel is a farrago of unlikely plot twists, superficial characters and a completely unbelievable social milieu. The protagonist is one of the most unsympathetic, if not downright obnoxious, investigators to have appeared in recent times.’”

His breathing shallow, Drys tried to think. Over the years he’d written so many reviews, both stand-alones and shorter ones in the roundups, that he couldn’t possibly remember whose book these words applied to. He panicked and tried to wrench his hands out of their bonds. He saw the man in front of him nod to his companion. A rope came round his neck and was tightened. He felt his eyes spring wide open and his tongue swell in his mouth.

“Bad critic,” the man with the file said, the brown eyes behind the mask steady. “Don’t try that again. Let him breathe, Watson.”

The pressure loosened on Drys’s throat. He panted air into his lungs.

“Extract two. ‘The crime genre is replete with superbly realized private eyes and policemen. Who would willingly part with their money to grind through a tediously recounted investigation carried out by this grubby and bungling detective?’”

Another surge of panic gripped Drys. He struggled to think who that could have applied to. So many third-rate writers of crime fiction had been published, some of them unaccountably winning prizes and being feted by critics with less discrimination than he had. The words were vaguely familiar-he couldn’t have referred to too many heroes as “grubby”-but still he couldn’t place them. He stared beseechingly at his captor.

“Please, I-”

“Memory not up to scratch?” the masked man said mockingly. “Never mind. You’ve got one more chance.” He laid his fingers on the knife. “Before it’s time for me to start chopping.”

This time Drys couldn’t control himself. He sat with his face burning as warm liquid soaked his trousers.

“Bad, bad critic,” scolded his tormentor, shaking his head. “That’s an expensive piece of furniture, isn’t it?” He turned to the next page and started to read aloud. “‘This book is enough to make any right-thinking reader despair. The supposed hero is a dissolute rake who extracts sexual favors from his female clients in lieu of payment. The violence is crude and unjustified, and the historical references defective. Why do people write books like this?’”

Drys sat back in the rapidly cooling puddle he had made and tried to restrain a smile. He had remembered; he knew who the writer was. Thank God, he would soon be seeing the last of these imbeciles. Then a frightening thought struck him. What if the man behind the mask was the author himself? He kept his expression as composed as he could.

“Well, Mr. Esteemed Literary Arbiter?” asked the man, leaning forward.

“Matt Stone,” Drys said, his tone patronizing. “Now, will you kindly get out of my house?”

“Matt Stone,” mused the man in front of him, picking up the knife. “Very good, Mr. Drys.” He gave a disturbing laugh. “But not good enough. You see, Matt Stone is a pen name. I need the author’s real name. Sorry, didn’t I make that clear?”

Alexander Drys tried to scream, but a rag was stuffed into his mouth before any sound came out. He had no idea what Matt Stone’s real name was. He’d never concerned himself with the mainly talentless fools whose books he read. His eyes opened wide as he saw the man with the knife bend over his right hand. The other man was pulling hard on the rope round Drys’s neck, keeping his body upright. He felt unjustly done by. Was he really going to suffer for such an insignificant writer? There were others whose careers he had completely ruined, even one who had committed suicide.

“Matt Wells is his name,” the man said, looking at him with empty eyes. “Think about how hurtful your words were while I’m cutting.”

The critic felt the blade slice into his skin and prayed for mercy to the God he’d ignored all his life.

It didn’t come.