The Death List

20

I spotted the cops after I’d got dressed. I was wearing my leather jacket, black shirt and trousers, and Dr. Martens-standard male crimewriter’s garb. The cops were in a blue Rover about fifty yards down the street. I hadn’t seen them in the morning when I went running. Maybe they weren’t on shift then. I hoped they hadn’t spotted me making the phone calls. That would have piqued Karen Oaten’s curiosity. I thought about her for a moment. There was something about her, even though she was potentially an enemy thanks to the Devil.

I left the flat, looking as nonchalant as I could about the men on my tail. They were welcome to follow me now. I walked down to Herne Hill station and bought a travel card. I spotted a guy in a crumpled parka getting on the carriage behind mine. I paid him no further attention. At Victoria, I took the Tube up to Tottenham Court Road and walked to the nearby square where Sixth Sense Ltd., my former publishers, had their office.

“I’ve an appointment with Jeanie Young-Burke,” I said to the attractive, raven-haired young woman at reception. I’d never seen her before. The rapid turnover of receptionists had always struck me. Presumably they were driven up the wall by would-be novelists trying to do a sales job on their magnum opus, or by previously published writers like me desperately trying to get back into the business.

“Ah, yes, Mr. Stone.” She gave me a brilliant smile. “My name’s Mandy. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I love the Sir Tertius books.”

I was taken aback by her friendliness and we got talking. Like all the postuniversity recruits, she wanted to become an editor. The way she spoke about writing, not just mine, suggested that she would make a pretty good one. Our conversation was interrupted by a courier and I sat down. I was still surprised that my former editor had agreed to see me. Then again, I had told her a very large lie.

A tall, solemn young man wearing round glasses came through the security door. “Mr. Stone? Matt?”

I stood up and shook his hand. “And you are?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, blushing. He looked like he wasn’t long out of primary school. “Reggie Hampton. I’m Jeanie’s assistant.”

“Right,” I said, following him through the door. My ex-editor went through staff even quicker than the front desk. There were rumors that, since her divorce, she used them for bedroom as well as office services. “How do you find it here?”

“Fascinating,” he said, flashing me a toothy smile. “I want to be an editor myself.”

I refrained from pointing out to him that the attrition rate of editors was almost as high as that of subalterns on the Somme-unless they found a copper-bottomed bestseller sharpish. Then again, what did I know about bestsellers?

Reggie left me at Jeanie’s workstation. It was separated from the rest of the open-plan office by glass panels, indicating her seniority. I’d lost touch with her job title. It seemed to change every few months. The last one I remembered was associate publisher, but no doubt that was out of date.

My former editor waved me to a seat in front of her desk. She was on the phone. I soon realized she was telling some unlucky agent how little she appreciated being sent a book that she described as “terribly substandard.” She’d probably used a similar phrase about my last contracted tome.

“Matt!” she said, putting the phone down and extending a well-manicured hand. She didn’t get up. Jeanie Young-Burke was in her late forties, but she looked older. Her make-up was applied skillfully enough, but it couldn’t completely hide the lines that twenty-five years in publishing had given her. “What a surprise!”

“Hello, Jeanie.” I tried not to stare at the publicity photo of her latest prodigy-a stunning former model who had written, or at least put her name to, a novel about murders in the rag trade.

“Nice to see you, too. Prospering, I presume?”

“Darling, everything’s wonderful,” she replied, putting a piece of chewing gum between her scarlet lips. She’d given up smoking a couple of years back, but it seemed she always needed something in her mouth. “So sorry we couldn’t publish any more of your lovely Zog books. The market just didn’t seem to like them.”

I tried to look nonchalant as Reggie arrived with a tray of coffee.

“Thank you,” Jeanie said, fluttering her eyelashes at him. “Sweet boy,” she whispered after he’d left. “He’s got a first from Oxford, you know.”

“I’m sure that’ll do him a lot of good in this business.”

That made her raise an eyebrow. “Bitterness is a most unendearing trait, you know, Matt.” She poured me a cup of coffee. “Now, tell me all about this new project of yours. It sounds very exciting.” She gave me an arch smile. “Especially since you’ve parted company with Christian Fels. I never liked doing business with him.”

I had a flash of my former agent and hoped that the Devil hadn’t got to him yet, even though I despised him. “Well, these things work for a while and then they lose their momentum. My fault as much as anyone’s.”

“How very magnanimous of you,” Jeanie said, not looking too convinced. “So, this book you’ve written…”

“Right,” I said, taking a deep breath. “It’s provisionally called The Death List and-”

“Excellent title,” she interrupted, making a note.

“-it’s a revenge story.”

“Excellent, again. Readers love revenge tales. All that vicarious violence they’d like to visit on their spouses, their bosses, their family…”

“Quite,” I said, taken aback by her fervor. I hadn’t accounted for that in my plan. “Um, it’s based on a true story, actually.”

“Brilliant,” she exclaimed. “Publicity will love that.” She looked up when I failed to continue. “Matt?”

“Nothing,” I said. I’d experienced a sudden loss of confidence in my strategy. Then I remembered Lucy’s face in the playground and persevered. “Actually, Jeanie, do you mind if we pop round the corner to that cafe where you like to talk in private?” I glanced out at the people in the office. “It’s a bit sensitive.”

Jeanie gave me a dubious look before enlightenment flooded her face. “Oh, the true-story bit, you mean.” She looked at her watch, a diamond number that she’d been given by one of her biggest successes. “Well…all right. I’ve got the editorial meeting in forty minutes…”

“Great,” I said, standing up. “I won’t need that long.”

She collected her coat and voluminous handbag, and then led me out. “I’ll be back in time for the meeting, Reggie,” she trilled.

I followed her through the office, smiling at Mandy when we got to reception.

I steeled myself as we cleared the security door and went out onto the street. It was now or never.

“Jeanie?” I said, crowding close to her. “Look at this.” I jabbed the Luger that my father had obtained in Hamburg after the war into her side, giving her just a glimpse of the barrel in my pocket. It wasn’t in working order, but she wasn’t to know that. “Don’t make a sound,” I hissed.

She seemed to get the message. We walked round the square and onto Charing Cross Road. I hadn’t seen the policeman who’d been tailing me. If he was still around, I hoped he hadn’t noticed anything amiss. I hailed the first cab that passed and bundled Jeanie in the back.

“Heathrow,” I said to the driver. “And could we have some privacy, please?” He closed the glass partition and switched off the microphone.

“What the fuck are you playing at, Matt?” Jeanie demanded, her eyes wide.

“The gun is still pointing at you,” I said, my hand in my pocket. “But I’ll leave it alone if you listen to what I have to say. All right?” I waited for her to nod. “But you have to understand that Lucy, the woman I love and everyone else I know are in mortal danger. If you make a fuss, I won’t hesitate to silence you. You know how important my daughter is to me.”

My ex-editor stared at me, and then relaxed slightly. “It’s a pity you didn’t get some of that passion into your writing, Matt,” she said with heavy irony. “All right, tell me.”

So I did. Without going into all the details, but giving her enough to persuade her how serious I was. I also told her that she would have first option on the book I would write based on my experiences. The latter seemed to convince her to play along, even though she was unimpressed with my earlier lie about having already produced a manuscript.

“So let me get this straight,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “You want me to take the first plane that I can to a European destination of my choice and hide out there until you give me the all clear to come back.” She shook her head. “This is madness. What about my work? Can’t I contact the office?”

“Call them once from a payphone in the airport and tell them your mother’s been taken seriously ill. That’s it, unless you want to risk being located. This guy is an expert. Don’t answer your phone unless it rings four times first, okay? And don’t tell anyone where you are, including me.” I turned the screw. “You remember what happened to that poor woman, Miss Merton, in Essex?”

She shivered. Like many people in publishing who dealt with violent material, she had a weak stomach about the real thing.

“You say that this White Devil is behind Alexander Drys’s murder, too?”

I nodded. I might have known that she’d be more concerned by what had happened to someone in the business. “He cut off Drys’s hands and tongue, and then stuck the latter up his backside.”

Jeanie looked aghast for a second but quickly rallied. “He always was an arse-licker,” she said, looking at me warily. “He didn’t much like your books, did he?”

“That’s the point,” I said in exasperation. “I’m being drawn into this. If I can beat the Devil, we’ll have the book of the century.”

“You’d better be right, darling.” She gave me a crooked smile. “Otherwise I’ll have your guts for garters.”

I stayed with her all the way to Terminal One. I would have liked to make sure she checked in, but, as with my mother, I didn’t want to know where she ended up going in case the Devil was to wring it out of me.

“Call me this afternoon,” Jeanie said imperiously as she got out. “And, just to be clear, you’re paying for all this.”

I shrugged and smiled at her. Since she’d dropped me, I’d gone through the full cycle of resenting her, of hating her, of wanting to strangle her. Now I’d remembered that I actually rather liked her.

But, as the taxi drove back to central London, I put my former, and perhaps future, editor out of my mind. I had a hell of a lot to do before I could sit down to write a book.

The priority was keeping Lucy, Sara, my mother, my friends and myself alive.

Christian Fels, Eton and Trinity College, Oxford, literary agent to the rich, famous and prodigiously talented, pushed the chair back from his desk and looked out over his garden. He’d been in the Highgate mansion for twenty years now, ever since the first of his million-selling authors hit the jackpot. Single, gay and approaching retirement, he’d cut back his list recently in order to concentrate on his biggest earners. It was a shame, really. Some of the authors he’d had to let go were more talented than the bestsellers, but anyone who knew anything about publishing was aware that talent only got you so far. Down in the flower beds beyond the fifty-yard expanse of lawn, his gardener, a most accommodating young Bosnian, was busy weeding, his backside raised in a way that was deliberately provocative. Delicious youth!

Fels went to the dresser and poured himself a cup of Darjeeling. He stared at his reflection in the rococo mirror and checked that the long strands of hair were still plastered over his bald skull. There had been a footballer famous for such a hairstyle, but he couldn’t remember his name. One of the other top agents had sold his memoirs. He patted his cheeks to bring the color up in them. He was doing well for sixty-four. People often complimented him on his appearance, though he knew that most of them only did it because they wanted something out of him. He tightened the knot of his silk tie. It had cost him more than five hundred pounds. He treated himself to a tie like that every time he completed a deal. It wouldn’t be long before he bought another.

He went back to his desk. Another hour and he would have finished vetting the complex American contract for one of his children’s authors-hardcover and mass-market editions, audio and film rights, product endorsements. The deal would add a wing to his third villa, the one on the Cote D’Azur. He wasn’t sure if he would be taking Vlado there with him when summer came. There were plenty more like him in the South of France, those ones tanned and lean from water sports. Variety was the spice of life.

The doorbell rang when he’d only got through another three clauses.

“Bloody hell!” Fels muttered, throwing down his Mont Blanc fountain pen. It was probably one of the juniors from the agency. He’d told his colleagues often enough to leave him alone in the mornings, but the idiots always found something they couldn’t handle without his expert input.

He went downstairs, wishing not for the first time that he’d installed one of the agency secretaries in his house. But no, that would have made grabbing Vlado less straightforward.

Looking at the security screen, he made out a shortish man wearing a cap. He had turned away from the door. Some kind of courier, he presumed-he was carrying a box. Perhaps it contained the long-overdue script from the most tiresome of his female authors; tiresome, but extremely high-earning. He pressed the button and watched the door swing open.

“Mr. Fels?” the man said in a curiously accentless voice. He sounded like a BBC newsreader from the 1950s.

“The same. Is that for me?”

“Yes,” the man said. “And so is this.”

Christian Fels only saw the short black truncheon the instant before it crashed onto his left temple. He toppled backward onto the carpeted hall and lay motionless, his eyes misting over. He was aware of the front door closing, then of his body being dragged into the dining room. It was when he was being lifted onto the table that he realized he had more than one assailant.

“Wha-” His voice sounded far away, as if it were coming from a megaphone on the other side of the city. “What…what d’you want?”

The man who had hit him leaned over. Fels realized that he had put on a mask, one that hugged the contours of his face. It made him look like a ghost, but it had the desired effect-he couldn’t remember anything about his face.

“Christian William Niall Leconbury Fels,” the man said, giving a dry laugh. “A handy moniker, I’ll say!” He looked across to his companion, who was wearing a similar mask and did not speak. “Known in the literary world as ‘the Barracuda.’” He laughed again. “Not very flattering, is it?”

Fels came back to a higher level of consciousness. “Get…get out of my house, you…you criminals. My gardener’s out the back. All I have to do is-”

“Shout and your balls will be cut off,” his attacker said, jabbing something sharp into the flesh of Fels’s thigh. “Message received?”

“Ye…yes.”

“Good. Now, I imagine you want to know what’s in the box.” The man lifted up the brown cardboard package. It was about a foot across.

Fels tried to raise his hands and realized that they were bound.

“I tell you what, I’ll open it for you.” The man ran the knife along the seal and put his latex-covered hands inside. “Do you know what these are?” he asked, lifting a pile of books out.

Christian Fels blinked away the blood from his left eye. He saw books, books with jackets that were vaguely familiar to him. He tried to make out the titles and the author’s name. The Revenger’s Comedy. Matt Stone. Tirana Blues. He knew these books and the man who wrote them.

“Yes, that’s right,” the man said, bending low over his face so that the smell of mint was pungent in Fels’s nostrils. “They’re by one of your authors, or should I say ex-authors?”

“Matt…Matt Stone,” he stammered. He remembered the fellow, of course. Average talent, if truth were told, but an unusually vivid imagination. He’d done a couple of crime novels set in Albania, hadn’t he? There was no way they were ever going to sell well, even though he himself had screwed a more than generous advance out of the publishers.

“Matt Stone,” the man in the mask confirmed. “Also known as Wells. Do you know what you’re going to do with these books, Christian? You don’t mind if I call you Christian, do you? Though behaving like a barracuda is hardly very Christian, is it?” The man let out a laugh that suggested unfathomable depths of depravity. “I’ll tell you.” He paused to ratchet up the tension. “You’re going to eat them. Every last page of them. Not forgetting the jackets.”

Fels choked before anything had been stuffed into his mouth. “What?” he gasped. “Why?”

The man looked at him with cold, dark eyes. “Because you consumed Matt Wells’s career. Now you can consume his books.” He tore out some pages and rammed them into the agent’s mouth.

“Aaaach!” Fels groaned, unable to scream, and unable to chew or swallow. “Nnnnggmmm!”

Then something very strange happened. The man and his accomplice suddenly moved away from him. He twisted his head round, frantically trying to spit out the semisodden paper. A tall, fair-haired man in a tracksuit top was standing at the door, a spade in his hand. He wasn’t Vlado.

“Well, now, what have we here?” the man asked in a strong American accent. “I think I can hear Klaxons,” he said, cupping his hand to his ear. “I can definitely hear Klaxons.”

Fels could hear them, too. Oh, blessed relief! He would reward his good-looking savior handsomely.

“No, no, you’re not going anywhere, shitheads,” the American said, moving to block the two intruders’ passage to the door.

“You’re making a mistake,” the man in the mask said, his voice icy. “Let us past.”

“Screw you, pal,” the big man said, brandishing the spade.

“Dolt,” the attacker said. There was a flash of highly polished metal and the sickening sound of flesh being punctured.

Christian Fels managed to spit the mass of pulp from his mouth. He twisted his head round as far as it would go, strands of his hair dangling over his face like jellyfish tentacles. He was in time to see the two men in caps turning toward the rear of the house.

“Vlado!” he said with a gasp.

“Never mind bloody Vlado,” said the American. He’d collapsed against the wall, his eyes fixed on the haft of the knife that was protruding from his upper chest. “What about Andrew Jackson?”

As his rescuer’s golden locks fell forward, Fels swooned clean away.