The Death List

WD

The bastard. What had he done to Andy? I called Pete and let him know. He’d call Rog and Dave, and tell them to be especially careful.

I walked down the street. The Devil was playing with me. He knew that we had found out about the properties he owned. The question was, which one was he in? Or was he on the move? I felt that things were racing to a climax. Unless he had bought other properties under a false name, he would have guessed that the police would soon be on his trail whether we told them or not. So what was his plan? And where were Sara and Caroline?

I called Dave, breathing hard.

“Are you sure Lucy’s safe?” I asked as soon as he answered. “Is there any way the Devil could have tracked you down to wherever it is you’ve been staying?”

“I don’t see how,” he replied. “But, if you like, I can tell Ginny to get the kids into the car and hit the road.”

I thought about it. “Where are they, Dave? In an isolated place?”

“Yeah. Friend of mine who’s on holiday. He’s got a farm up on the Downs above the Elham Valley.”

I didn’t know it. “Where’s that?”

“About ten miles beyond Canterbury.”

I took the decision. “All right, tell her to get on the motorway and head toward London. Tell her not to go home, but to keep driving round the M25 till she hears different, okay?”

“All right, lad. Is everyone else okay?”

“No.” I told him about Andy and the contents of the Devil’s note.

“Christ, what a devious fuckwit. Wait till I get my hands on him.”

“Hold your horses, Psycho. There’s a lot of people at risk. Hang on a minute, what’s Ginny driving? I thought you were driving the four-by-four.”

“Nah, I left it there. My mate’s got this brilliant Chevrolet pickup, an Avalanche, that he lets me drive. I’ve been going to work in it.”

Something bothered me about that, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Whatever the case, Lucy and Dave’s family would be safer on the move.

“All right, keep in touch with Boney,” I said.

“Aye, lad. Mind how you go.”

As I walked back to the main road, I wished I had Dave with me. He’d been in the SAS. He could kill a man with his bare hands, as he’d frequently told us. Even the Devil would be scared of him. Then I remembered that my adversary had already dealt with two hundred and thirty pounds of American beef. Christ, Andy. Where was he?

I looked at my list. The next property was on Leadenhall Street in the City. I headed there.

The White Devil looked in the mirror. The two bound bodies in the back of the van were motionless and silent now. The big man had been groaning, but he’d stopped when Corky belted him about the head again. The other shrouded form had been motionless for more than two hours. The injection wouldn’t wear off for at least another one. By that time the Devil would be close to his goal-and Matt Wells would be facing the ultimate test.

His accomplice squeezed between the seats. Corky’s breath was rank, a mixture of roll-ups and dirty teeth. The Devil could remember the stink, not quite as strong, from when they were kids. But now Nicholas Cork’s face was covered in a salt-and-pepper beard. He’d traced him a year back, then found a down-and-out with the same build and smashed his head in before leaving the body on the rocks in Cornwall with ID suggesting he was Corky. That would have kept the cops guessing-or rather, fumbling around without a clue.

They both leaned forward as the van coasted to a stop. The Devil owned a shop in Brondesbury Road with a flat above it. He rented the place to a Pakistani family via an agency. There were lights on upstairs and he knew that would attract Wells’s friend. They could have taken him in East Finchley, but it had been more fun to get Matt himself up there. Seeing his mother like that would have put the shits up him, as would their daring escape.

The Devil looked down at the portable screen beneath the glove compartment. Someone was using a mobile phone across the road from his property.

“Got him,” Corky said. “He’s behind that tree on the opposite side of the road.”

The Devil drove past and then took the first right turn. He circled round until they were approaching the main road from the rear. The hunched form of Matt Wells’s friend was just ahead of them. He slowed and then stopped, checking they were alone.

“Oy, mate?” Corky shouted. “Any idea how to get to Belsize Road?”

The man watching the shop turned and walked toward the van. He was a lot shorter than the American, though he was solid enough-like all the rugby-playing fools.

He leaned in the open window. “You need to turn-”

The sentence was never finished. Corky slammed his head into the roof, and then, when it dropped, the Devil brought his short steel bar down on the top of the cranium. Roger van Zandt slumped unconscious as Corky held on to him. In a few seconds, the Devil had gone round, grabbed their victim and dragged him to the back of the van. Under a minute later, he was driving toward the city center, while Corky tied up captive number three next to the motorbike.

“Turn off his phone,” the Devil ordered. He was tempted to call Matt Wells on it, but he didn’t want to risk that. There was always the possibility that he’d invested in a scanner and was monitoring his friends’ mobiles. Besides, they were about to move to the next stage. It had been easy nailing the first three, as he’d known where to find them. For the rest, they’d be using a different strategy. Matt Wells was smarter than he’d thought. By getting himself a new phone, he’d put himself temporarily out of the Devil’s reach. But not for long. He wouldn’t be able to resist the bait that was being prepared for him.

He’d be seeking revenge. That made the Devil smile. What would mankind be without the lust for vengeance? Nothing better than the animals. No animal was driven by the desire for revenge, whatever Herman Melville thought about the great white whale. Revenge was what distinguished man from lower beasts. Revenge was mankind’s most salient feature.

The Devil laughed as he turned on to the Marylebone Road.

He was pleased to see that Corky jerked backward apprehensively.

I’d been watching the building in Leadenhall Street for ten minutes. It was a small foreign bank a hundred yards away from the Lloyd’s of London Building. There were lights on all the way up to the fourth and top floor, but I found it unlikely that the Devil was there. There were cleaners moving around on all the floors, and a few eager-to-please employees were still at their desks. It was pretty clear that he’d rented the place out.

My phone vibrated in my pocket.

“Matt, thank God I got you.”

“What is it, Boney?” I asked, concerned by his fraught tone.

“It’s Rog. Now he’s not answering his phone.”

“Shit.” I lashed out at the base of the streetlamp with my foot and felt a sharp pain. “The mad bastard.” The net was closing around us. I tried to think clearly. How many accomplices did the Devil have? Had he set people on all of us, or did he have some kind of top-of-the-range tracking equipment? He was certainly wealthy enough.

“Matt?”

“Yeah, hang on, I’m thinking.” Peter Satterthwaite should have been outside my tormentor’s loop since he was a late arrival at our party. As for Dave, he had a new phone. Maybe the three of us were still undetected. But what about Ginny? Christ, that was the thought that had eluded me earlier. What if the bastard had put a bug on Dave’s four by four? “Boney, how many properties have we still to check? Leadenhall Street’s a no go.”

There was a brief silence. “That leaves seven. There’s one on Dave’s list, one on mine and one on yours. The last I heard from Rog, he was outside a shop in Brondesbury Road. He didn’t think it was interesting, but he was going to hang on a bit to be sure. He had two more. And there were two more on Andy’s list.”

“Seven? Bloody hell. Okay, I’ll do my last one, that converted brewery near Tower Bridge. You do yours, and then get over there to pick me up.”

“What about Dave?”

“I’ll get him to drive there, too. Assuming those three are all clear, we’ll check out the ones Andy and Rog didn’t manage.”

I broke the connection and called Dave.

“Matt, thank Christ. There’s something funny going on with Ginny. No one’s answering their phones-not her or either of my kids.”

My stomach twisted like an oyster suddenly drenched in lemon juice. Lucy. She didn’t have a mobile. Had the bastard caught up with them?

“Wellsy?” Dave said desperately. “We’ve got to tell the police. The children…”

“Tell them what?” I countered. “You said they were in an out-of-the-way place. Did you always get a phone signal there?”

“No,” he admitted with a rush of breath. “No, you’re right. But she should be on her way by now. There’s no answer on the landline and she should be back in the network.”

“Let’s give it a bit more time,” I said, struggling to beat back the onrush of panic. I told him where to meet me when he’d done his last place.

After I rang off, I drove to the Royal Brewery in Bermondsey. On my earlier abandoned visit, it had looked a much more impressive property than any of the others apart from the bank. Did that mean it was more likely to have been used as a base by the Devil?

I tried not to envisage the horrors that might be waiting for me there.

Karen Oaten stood outside a semidetached house in Neasden. A team of uniformed officers was searching the place, overseen by John Turner. The elderly residents were less than impressed. It wasn’t long before her subordinate reported to her.

“This is a waste of time, guv,” he said, shaking his head. “They don’t have any idea what we’re on about and there’s no sign of any criminal activity. They rent the place through an estate agent and they’ve never met the owner.”

“The place is on that list Pavlou got from the council’s database,” she said lamely. “We have to check all the places that Lawrence Montgomery owns.”

“How many have you got on that list now?”

The chief inspector ran an eye down the addresses. “Eight, including the one where we found Matt Wells’s mother.”

The Welshman stared at his superior. “You realize that Matt Wells could be Lawrence Montgomery, don’t you?”

“No,” Oaten said firmly. “Lawrence Montgomery is the guy who used to be Leslie Dunn.” She fixed him in her gaze. “The guy who won the lottery and who had motives for the first four murders, including the bank manager in Hackney.”

Turner shrugged. “Wells could have killed him and taken over his identity, not to mention his money.”

The chief inspector groaned. “Have you been reading far-fetched crime novels?”

“Like the ones written by Matt Stone, aka Wells?”

Oaten stepped toward the car. “Get D.C.I. Hardy’s lot on to these two addresses,” she said, pointing at the top ones on her list. “We’ll go to Brondesbury Road.”

As she drove away with Taff speaking on the phone, she squeezed the steering wheel hard. Where was the data from south of the river? She was sure that there must be some properties down there. Did all the useless sods from the council offices in South London turn their phones off at night?

And where was Matt Wells? Had she allowed her emotions to get the better of her? Maybe Taff Turner was right. But could it really be that she’d been taken in so completely?

The idea made her tremble with rage.

“Nothing yet,” Wolfe said, putting his phone back in his pocket. He stretched his legs in the Orion’s front passenger seat.

“Are you sure your contact in the Met is on the level?” Geronimo asked from behind the wheel with a scowl. “We’ve been sitting here for hours.”

“He’s all we’ve got. Never mind the guy on the motorbike now-he’s gone to ground. But they’re checking a list of properties he and his nasty friend might be at. There’s no point in us going charging around London until we know which one the bastards are at.”

The man in the back took off his woolen cap and scratched his crew-cut head. “But when the cops find out where he is, they’ll be heading there, too.”

Wolfe laughed emptily. “You think they’ll get there before us, Rommel? We don’t need long to find out what the scumbags know about Jimmy. And to take appropriate revenge.”

The others shook their heads.

The three men settled back, their eyes half closed. They’d been on so many operations that their bodies responded automatically. When they could grab rest, they did so. When they had to go into action, be it a helicopter raid on an enemy listening post or the assassination of an IRA killer, they set off with only enough adrenaline in their veins to ensure success. This would be no different.

They were trained and experienced in death, and their list of victims was already long.