The Death List

13

I went back to the Volvo and drove home, having placed the leather bag unopened on the front passenger seat. I felt even more intensely the mixture of rage and impotence that had weighed me down since the Devil first got his claws into me. But there was another emotion now. I tried to resist it because I knew he had planted it in me and was assiduously cultivating it-the desire for revenge. He had spoken to Lucy, he’d touched her. I was going to make him pay. He’d been studying me; he knew how my mind worked even though he’d never met me. But why did he want me to go after him? Did he have some weird kind of death wish, or was he sure that he could keep me at a distance?

I parked outside my place and went inside, the bag under my jacket. For some reason I didn’t want anyone to see me carrying it. As I was climbing the stairs, I understood why not. It was blood money, tainted by the deaths of the Devil’s victims. What was I going to do with it? Hide it in the loft? The money was another part of my tormentor’s plan that I didn’t understand. He’d made me his slave by threatening Lucy and everyone else I loved. He didn’t need to pay me. Did that betray a psychological weakness, that he had to pay for attention? Or was there something more subtle in his thinking?

I checked my e-mails. There was one from Sara, saying that she was tied up with the story and would ring me when she could. There was also one from my mother, and it made my heart pound again.

Dearest,

I hope this finds you well. I know we spoke on the phone the other day, but I wanted to get in touch and I feel more comfortable writing-you understand how writers are, defter by pen and keyboard than by tongue (that could be taken as rude!). You sounded troubled when I called you. I know that your problems with publishers and agents have been getting to you. Don’t let the bastards grind you down! You just have to get on with the next book and prove them wrong. I know you can do it!

Now, something else. Have you been following the news recently? I’m sure you will have been. Those two murders in the headlines. Have you noticed how similar they are to two of the killings in your books? I looked up the particular passages. The priest in Kilburn seems to have been done as per chapter 21 of The Devil Murder. And the poor woman in Chelmsford had her arm severed, just like the vile Blakeston in The Revenger’s Comedy, chapter 26. Isn’t that extraordinary? Obviously a coincidence, but rather a chilling one. Have you had any of your fans pointing it out?

Anyway, don’t worry. I won’t bring it to the attention of the police!

Must get on with Elvira and Tiffany Go to the Beach. Give my love to Lucy (and the opposite to Caroline-sorry, only joking!).

With fondest love,

Fran

“Jesus,” I said under my breath. “Thanks a lot for that, Mother.”

Then my mobile rang. There was no number on the screen.

“Hello, Matt. What-”

“You fucking piece of shit!” I shouted. “What were you doing talking to Lucy? How dare you touch her? I’m going to-”

“You’re going to what?” the Devil answered, his voice steely. “Find me? Catch me? Kill me? Oh, yes, please, Matt. That would be so much fun. You see, I have this enormous death wish.” His laugh was as far from humorous as I could imagine. “Just calm down. What makes you so sure that I was Mr. White? I might have dozens of helpers, hundreds for all you know. Do you really think I would take a risk like that myself?”

I kept silent. I had the feeling that he was quite capable of getting a kick from a stunt like that, but I had no way of knowing how many people were working for him.

“Anyway, be a good little writer and open the bag now, will you?”

I held the phone between my shoulder and ear, and reached across for it. I could see the bundles of twenty-pounds notes before the zip was fully open.

“All right?” the Devil asked.

“There seems to be another five thousand,” I said, emptying the bag.

He laughed, this time more warmly. “I don’t think you’ve got everything I put in for you. Look in the side pocket.”

I felt a stab of concern. What else had the calculating son of a bitch sent me? I pulled the button on the small pocket open. Christ. What was it? I put my fingers in carefully and felt a wiry substance. Taking it out, I saw a mass of brown and white hairs.

“Good man,” said the Devil. “Do you know what they are?”

I swallowed the bitter liquid that had rushed up my throat. “Hair,” I said faintly.

“That’s right, Matt. Pubic hair.”

My fingers sprang apart before I could control myself and the hairs tumbled to the floor.

“A mixture of Bugger O’Connell’s and the cow Merton’s. Dear me, Matt. What are they doing in your flat? How suspicious. You’d better get rid of them. Of course, there’s plenty more where they came from. I can sprinkle them outside your place, I can hide them anywhere I like inside. What do you think of that?”

“Screw you,” I said in a defeated voice.

“I look forward to it. Oh, by the way, I thought it was pretty funny that your mother was the first to connect the killings to your books. Wow, you really are getting yourself exposed. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and visit an old enemy.” He grunted-a revolting, degenerate sound. “It’s time to bury the hatchet, or something along those lines. No rest for the wicked. You’ll be getting my notes tomorrow morning. Sorry if they mess up your day with Lucy, but I’m sure Caroline will be happy to have extra time with her. Hey, Matt, she really has got a temper on her, hasn’t she?” He laughed one last time and hung up.

I let the phone drop to the floor. Jesus Christ Almighty. The Devil was all over me like the Black Death. He must have hacked into my e-mail program to have read my mother’s message. I looked around my sitting room suspiciously. Had he installed a camera? If so, what were the chances of me finding it? Even assuming I did, if I put it out of action that might provoke him to even worse horrors. He probably had my landline tapped and a scanner on my mobile, too. Why not go the whole hog? Had he put a transmitter on the Volvo? In my shoes?

Then I remembered what he’d said about Caroline. Did that prove he’d been Mr. White after all, or had he just been observing? Maybe an accomplice had told him about Caroline’s screaming fit.

I put my head between my knees. None of that was important now. The bastard was on his way to kill someone else, that much was obvious. What I had no way of knowing was who that person was. Even if I’d taken Lucy, Caroline, Fran and Sara to the police for protection and admitted everything I knew, there would be no way they could stop the murder of someone else.

For too long I’d luxuriated in the power of life and death over the characters in my novels. I’d never thought how it would feel to have such power over real people. But the White Devil had. If I was to stand any chance of playing his game, I needed to understand his callousness.

I didn’t know if my imagination could reach such depths of depravity.

“Thanks for being so flexible,” Karen Oaten said to the auburn-haired woman sitting opposite her-although she was of average height, her thinness made her seem taller than she was. They were in the cafe in the basement of a large bookshop on Gower Street. “I didn’t expect you’d be able to see me on a Saturday.”

“That’s all right. I work seven days a week. My partner, Shaz, is forever pestering me to take more breaks.” Lizzie Everhead smiled. “She’ll be pleased to know I’ve given in at last, Chief Inspector.”

That was a direct-enough statement of the academic’s sexuality to someone she’d only just met, Oaten thought. She’d been going to ask her to call her by her first name, but now she decided against it. Too much informality was never a good idea in a murder case, even if this angle was unlikely to pay off. What did she really imagine she was going to find out from this literally blue-stockinged lecturer?

“It’s pretty much a working break, isn’t it, Doctor?” she said, stirring sugar into her coffee. The literature expert was drinking hot water with a slice of lemon.

“Please, call me Lizzie.” The woman laughed. “I love what I do. This isn’t what I call work. Sitting on exam boards and the like is torture, but not this.” She tied her legs in knots, contriving to wrap her foot around her calf as well as crossing her knees. “So, how can I help…” She looked at Oaten’s card. “Karen?”

Oaten felt spots of red on her cheeks. She’d never felt completely at ease with lesbians, even though her own sex life had never been better than deeply average. There had been no shortage of opportunities for same-sex relationships at college, but she’d thrown herself into a series of hopeless affairs with married men and gormless students. For some years, her vibrator had been her only source of release. If only she had the time to find herself a decent man-even a half-decent one would do.

“Er, yes,” she said, coming back to herself. “I gather you’re an expert in Jacobean tragedy.”

“That’s right,” Lizzie Everhead said, inclining her head. She had unusually large eyes, the irises a deep blue shade. “Among other things. What do you need to know?”

Karen straightened her back. “I must warn you that the information I’m about to impart is highly confidential.”

“Ooh, how exciting!” said the doctor, rubbing her hands. She took in the look on the chief inspector’s face. “Sorry. Of course. I understand. I won’t tell anyone.” She smiled. “Not even Shaz.”

“I’ll be the one in trouble if the press gets wind of this, not you,” Oaten said. “As long as you understand that.”

The academic nodded and leaned closer. “Fire away.”

“Right.” The chief inspector lowered her voice. “I imagine you’ll have heard about the murders of the priest in Kilburn and the old lady in Chelmsford.”

Lizzie Everhead looked blank. “No, I don’t read the papers or listen to the news. Radio 3 is my cup of…” She glanced down at the table. “…hot water.” She saw how serious Oaten’s expression was. “Sorry. Tell me.”

So the D.C.I. did, leaving out only one detail. There was a strange kind of gratification in seeing the face of the distinguished scholar of violent tragedy go paler than a sheet when confronted with real-life violence.

“How utterly awful,” Lizzie said, taking an ironed handkerchief from her bag and dabbing her lips. “Unbelievable.”

“There’s more,” Karen said, and told her about the quotations that had been found in the bodies.

The academic sat back and fanned her face with the tissue. “I’m…I’m speechless. A very…a very unusual condition for me, I can tell you.” She drank from her cup and dabbed her lips again. “Lines from Webster’s White Devil? Hidden in the mouth and the…” She left the sentence unfinished. “I’m…I’m at a loss.”

Karen Oaten leaned even closer, her face more composed than it had been when she’d described the bodies. “Lizzie, you have to think. Is there any reason why the murderer would have left those particular lines from that particular play?”

Lizzie Everhead sat perfectly still for several minutes before she spoke. “Are you familiar with the concept of revenge, Karen?”

“I have run into it occasionally in my line of work,” Oaten replied dryly.

“No, I’m talking about revenge as in revenge tragedy. For the playwrights and audiences of the early seventeenth century, revenge wasn’t just a personal motivation or a way of restoring family honor. It was much more than that. It was a recasting of the traditional concept of justice, the Old Testament dictum of an eye for an eye and-”

“A tooth for a tooth,” Karen completed. “I remember that from religious studies at school.”

“Mmm,” Lizzie Everhead acknowledged. “You see, it was a time when people were beginning to doubt the old certainties. Bear in mind that a Catholic king, the Scottish James VI, had been foisted on England after the death of the Protestant Good Queen Bess. And James’s son Charles drove the country to division and ended up by paying with his head. So we can see in revenge tragedy the first shoots of revolutionary thinking-that the King is not all-powerful and that a different kind of justice, one more attuned to free-thinking human beings, might apply.”

Karen Oaten looked confused. “What’s that got to do with the murders?”

“Well, for one thing, you said both the victims were Catholics.”

“That’s right.”

“I’m interested by that. You see, Jacobean tragedy tended to use foreign settings such as Italy and Spain. Catholic countries that were regarded as having more bloodthirsty customs, particularly concerning personal and family honor.”

“I understand there were quite a few plays of this kind. Why has the killer or killers chosen The White Devil?”

Lizzie gave an impatient smile. “I was coming to that. White Devils are hypocrites, people who hide their true base nature beneath a layer of respectability. Could that apply to either of your victims? It sounds like the priest was a prime example of a White Devil.”

Karen nodded. “We’re looking into the ex-schoolteacher, too.”

“Maybe she was harsh. Or maybe she had some family secret.”

“Maybe,” Karen said noncommittally. “What about the lines themselves?”

“Right. ‘What a mockery hath death made of thee.’ That is spoken by Flamineo the revenger, when he sees the ghost of his dead master, Brachiano. Flamineo himself is soon punished for his misdeeds. He describes his life as ‘a black charnel,’ that is, if you like, a mortuary. The point is, sin is repaid by death. There’s a strong parallel with the Catholic vision of damnation, of eternal suffering in Hell.”

“You mean for the person who seeks revenge?” Oaten said, her forehead furrowed. “As if the killer knows he’s going to die and suffer torment.”

“Exactly. I would guess that he or-I suppose there’s at least a small possibility-she was brought up a Catholic.”

The chief inspector made a note. “What about the other line-‘Only persuade him teach the way to death; let him die first’?”

Lizzie stroked her chin with long fingers. “That is spoken by Zanche, the handmaid of Vittoria, Flamineo’s sister. It’s probably fair to say that the latter pair are the greatest of the White Devils alluded to by the title. Vittoria is little more than a high-class whore who connives in the murder of both her husbands. Here, she and Flamineo, the second husband Brachiano’s supposedly loyal servant, are plotting against each other, despite the fact that they supposedly love each other.”

“So sin outweighs even family ties?”

The academic nodded. “Yes. But I can’t take it any further than that. Unless the dead woman had a husband who predeceased her.”

Karen shook her head. “She had a brother, though.”

Lizzie caught her eye. “Interesting. There’s a strong undercurrent of incest in The White Devil, as in many plays of the time.”

“How is that going to help me catch the killer?”

“I can’t say. But it’s certainly possible that incest is an important element in this whole ghastly affair… oh!” The doctor sat back in her chair and unraveled her legs. “How absolutely extraordinary!”

“What?” Karen said, her curiosity piqued.

Lizzie Everhead held up the delicate fingers of her left hand, as if she had plucked something out of the air. “I’ll have to check the texts, but there’s a contemporary crime novelist who’s written a series set in the 1620s. How very strange.”

“What?” the chief inspector said in exasperation.

“Well, one of my other fields of expertise is crime fiction,” Lizzie said, looking back at Karen. “This writer-his name is Matt Stone-has a detective-hero called Sir Tertius Greville. I’m almost certain there’s a murder similar to your priest’s in one of the books, and the removal of an arm in another.”

Karen Oaten stood up. She’d already bought Blood, Lust and Gender, Dr. Everhead’s study of revenge tragedy. “Thanks very much for your help,” she said. “You wouldn’t happen to know where the crime section is?”

The academic nodded. “I’ll show you the way,” she said with a crooked smile.