by Paul Johnson
I sent a message asking those questions to the last e-mail address. It bounced back with a fatal error, saying the account no longer existed.
The phone rang, making me jump.
“Matt.”
Christ, he did have a camera on me. Or was he just guessing I’d be climbing the walls?
“What are you doing?” I shouted.
“What’s your problem?” he replied mildly. “You’ve got an alibi for last night, haven’t you?”
Sara. I might have known he’d have logged her presence.
“Yeah, that’s true. But still…”
“Why am I using your modus operandi?” He gave a sardonic laugh that made the hairs on my neck stand. “Because I can. And because I genuinely like your books. But you should have written more with Sir Tertius. You disappointed a lot of your fans.”
“I can’t now, can I? I’m too busy writing your hideous story.”
“Oh, you don’t think it’s hideous, Matt. You love it. I can tell that from the chapter you sent me. I’m really looking forward to the next one, where you describe what I did to that shit-eating priest. Don’t disappoint me. You know how nasty I can get.”
He cut the connection.
I put the phone down after wiping the receiver on my shirt. I felt so dirty that a ten-minute shower did nothing to shift the muck.
I was a murderer’s accomplice, in thought if not in deed.
Later on, my inability to decide what to do disappeared faster than a wallet dropped in Leicester Square. After pacing up and down the confined space of my sitting room, I remembered the Devil’s earlier messages. I needed to keep a record, so I copied them onto a diskette, and then found myself unsure what to do with it. If I’d been a character in a crime novel, I’d have deposited it with my solicitor, in an envelope bearing the words In the Event of My Death. But my dealings with solicitors over the divorce had made me swear never to have anything more to do with their breed. I could have hidden it somewhere in the flat. Then again, my attempt to hide the money had been a conspicuous failure. What about Sara? I didn’t dare tell her anything about the Devil, but if I secreted the diskette somewhere at her place…Yes, that was a decent plan. I was going round there, anyway.
An hour later I was in Clapham. I went into her kitchen.
“Sara, my sweet?”
She was at the cooker, making an omelet. She gave me a mock suspicious look over her shoulder.
“You want something.”
“Charming.”
She laughed. “Only joking. It’s just that men are so transparent.”
I let that go. “Actually, you’re right. Did you see the news tonight?”
“Is there a night when I don’t see the news? I am the news.” She cut the omelet neatly in two and flipped the pieces onto plates. “Here you are.” We went over to the table.
“There was a murder,” I said, pouring her a glass of Chinon Blanc.
“There were several murders. If you include Iraq and Palestine, there were dozens of murders.”
“No, I mean in London.”
Sara briefly held the salad she was transferring to her plate in midair. “Oh, the priest.”
“That’s the one.” It had occurred to me that the Devil might have been messing me around. There hadn’t been many details of what had been done to the victim on the news. Sara had plenty of contacts on the paper. “Do you think you could find out what happened to him?”
“Why?” Bluntness was a quality she said she’d inherited from her father, a Yorkshireman who used to run a farm. I hadn’t met him and didn’t want to.
“Because I write crime novels,” I said, looking down at my plate.
“You revolting voyeur,” she said, pretending to be shocked. “Not to mention thief. Can’t you make up your own ways of killing people?”
This conversation was getting ironic beyond even my limits. “Ever heard of realism?” I asked innocently.
“You’re asking a reporter if she knows about realism?”
I raised my hand. “All right, point taken.” I gave her a placatory smile. “Is there anyone on the crime desk you can talk to?”
“The crime desk?” she said, laughing. “Is that how you think newspapers work these days? Everyone has their own workstation, a computer and a phone.”
“Okay, do you know anyone on the crime workstation?”
“You’re serious, aren’t you? You want me to do your dirty work for you.” She refilled her wineglass. “You’re still a journalist, aren’t you? Why can’t you use your contacts?”
“Oh yeah. I’ll phone up Maximum and talk to my mates there about murder. The death metal expert will be just the guy to ask.”
“Ha-ha.” She gave me a tight smile. “All right, I’ll make a call. Do you mind if I finish eating first?”
I managed to disguise my impatience. After we’d cleared up, I sat down and feigned interest in a women’s magazine of Sara’s. She got the message and picked up the phone.
The Daily Independent’s crime correspondent was apparently called Jeremy. I got the impression that Sara didn’t like him much-she kept making faces at me while she was listening.
“Prat,” she said as she put the phone down. “He went to Eton. But I have to admit he’s bloody good.” She looked down at the shorthand notes she’d taken. “God, this is nasty. Are you sure you want to hear it?”
I nodded, realizing with a sinking feeling that my fears were about to be confirmed. As they were. Candlestick, eyes, heart wound, altar and paper in the mouth-they were all as the Devil had listed.
“The police have banned reporting about the piece of paper,” Sara said, her forehead furrowed. “Apparently there’s something written on it. They’re not saying what.”
The quotation from Webster. I wondered what the Met’s finest minds would make of that.
“Matt?” Sara said, coming across to me. “What’s the matter? You’ve gone pale.”
I gave her a weak smile. “As you said, it’s pretty nasty.” Sara hadn’t read the Sir Tertius novels as she didn’t like anything set in the past, so she wouldn’t make the connection with the modus operandi. “Thanks,” I said, pulling her down and kissing her.
“That’s all right,” she said, grinning lasciviously. “You vulture.”
That didn’t come close to what I felt about myself. But I still succumbed to our mutual desires, even though the relief from my cares was only fleeting. Later, when she was asleep, I put the diskette with the Devil’s e-mails inside her copy of my last Albanian novel. I was beginning to understand what I was up against. If anything happened to me, there was a reasonable chance she’d take out my books and look through them.
I slept for almost five hours. It was the deep and dreamless kind of sleep that doesn’t make you feel you’ve rested at all. I woke up as the first gray fingers of dawn slipped under the blind in Sara’s bedroom. She was still on her side, her breath regular and her eyes tightly closed. I didn’t want to wake her, so I stayed where I was. It was time I started thinking about how to stand up to the Devil.
What did I have to go on? His first e-mails had shown that he’d read my books carefully. That suggested he was educated to a reasonable level. He’d followed up on John Webster, as well. But the material he’d sent me about his childhood, underprivileged and abused in the extreme, didn’t sit easily with that. He obviously came from a poor East End family. I didn’t think I had many readers with a background like that. Had he managed to pass some exams after his father’s murder? Had he got to college? He hadn’t given away much for me to track him down-no family name, no address or school. At least I knew the name of the priest who’d abused him.
I sat up in bed, moving slowly to avoid waking Sara. I had a lead. If I was lucky, I wouldn’t even have to do much tracing myself. The tabloid reporters would be swarming over the body, looking for a motive for the murder. His real identity would come out soon enough. If I had the name of the church he was attached to in the East
End, I’d be able to check the altar boys-there must have been records of them. I didn’t know the Devil’s age, but I could limit the number of names to the years that the priest was there. The TV news had said that he’d been ten years at St. Bartholomew’s. He was in his fifties, so he couldn’t have been more than twenty years at his previous church. I was on the bastard’s trail.
Then I remembered the threat the Devil posed to Lucy, Sara and everyone else I knew. If he was still watching me the way he had been when I got rid of Happy, then heading off to Bethnal Green would be asking for trouble.
I slumped back down under the duvet. What else could I infer about my tormentor? He’d found out a lot about my movements, and those of Caroline and the neighbors-he’d obviously been watching the houses in Ferndene Road for some time in order to work out their routines. I had another flash of inspiration. Mrs. Stewart down the road. Maybe she’d noticed someone loitering in the park. The prospect of going to talk to the desiccated old bigot wasn’t appealing, but it was a start. Even if he was watching me, the Devil couldn’t really get uptight about me going down there. I could take Lucy with me and make the visit look like a family one. Christ. I reined myself in. What was I thinking of? Lucy was already in enough danger. I’d talk to Mrs. Stewart on my own.
What else? The guy obviously had a lot of spare time on his hands. He also had the wheels that he’d used to tail me to Farnborough, and a high-quality camera. Did he have money and therefore didn’t need to work? Or was he paying people to watch me and the others? Neither of those thoughts made me feel good.
What about the White Devil’s motives? Did he really want his story written up as a novel? There must be more to it than that. Why had he chosen me? Did he really like my books? Had he obtained some insights into my character from my writing? He had an uncanny ability to foresee how I would react. I had the distinct feeling he was using me as more than his paid scribe. Was he trying to tie me to his criminal activities?
So much for the bastard. The question now was, how to stand up to him? I had friends-my mates from the rugby club, other crime writers-who would help me out. But I couldn’t risk Lucy by contacting them. Tell no one, the Devil had said. I’d seen what he’d done to Happy, and if he was the priest’s killer, he was capable of anything.
No, I was still alone. But maybe, if he gave me more to go on, I could make use of my friends. Some of them were almost as crazy as he was and others had skills that would definitely be useful.
But not yet. I had to play for time.
I didn’t manage to get back to sleep.
I made it to Caroline’s in time to take Lucy down to school. We could have gone in the car, but I’d always loved the half hour we spent walking together. My daughter was in pigtails and she was inordinately proud of them. She seemed less concerned about Happy now. I’d heard from my ex-wife that Jack and Shami hadn’t had any response to their appeals so far, and that they were both desperately unhappy. The Devil was ruining more lives than mine.
I found myself staring suspiciously at every male we passed. I tried to resist the temptation to keep looking round, but I took the opportunity to check if anyone was following us when we waited for the traffic lights to change. Unless he’d kitted himself out with a kid or kids in school uniform, there was no one out of the ordinary on the streets leading to Dulwich Village. Then the idea that the Devil was one of my fellow parents hit me. I dismissed it rapidly. I didn’t know anyone who’d been brought up in the East End, let alone anyone who could have done that to the priest. Or did I? Maybe there really was no one I could trust. Except Sara. But she was the last person I wanted to bring into the limelight. The bastard already knew about her.
I said goodbye to Lucy and watched her get into line in the playground. When all the kids were inside, I headed back to Caroline’s to pick up my car. And to talk to Mrs. Stewart. I wasn’t looking forward to that, but I forced myself to come up with an approach that wouldn’t raise her suspicions.
I saw her sitting in her front window as I approached. She turned and gave me a disapproving look, her eyebrows rising in surprise as I opened her gate and went to her door. There was the sound of several locks turning and bolts being undone.
“Good morning, Mrs. Stewart,” I said cheerfully.
I could see she was struggling with how to address me. She knew only my first name and she obviously wasn’t keen on using that.
“Lucy’s father,” she said at last. “Can I help you?”
“Matt,” I said, unable to resist rubbing her nose in it.
She didn’t respond and she didn’t invite me in.
“Mrs. Stewart,” I said, “I hope you can help me. I was wondering if you’d noticed a man with a camera in Ruskin Park. He’d have been there several times over the past few weeks.”
She peered at me through thick, pink-rimmed glasses. “A man with a camera?” She thought about it, and then looked at me suspiciously. “Why do you want to know?”
I smiled in what I hoped was a suitably fatuous way. “Well, I’ve got this friend, Steve Jones is his name, and we had a bet.” I saw her lips tighten. Either she recognized the name of the Sex Pistols’ guitarist or she frowned on gambling. I guessed the latter. “He’s a keen birdwatcher, you see, and he’s been taking pictures of what Ruskin Park has to offer in the avian line. Anyway, I thought he was pulling my leg-I mean, why come here when there are so many larger parks in London? So he bet me that he was telling the truth and that he’s so good at standing behind trees that I would never even see him. And I haven’t.” I smiled at her ingratiatingly. “But I was thinking, if you had, I could still win the bet. I mean, if you could tell me, if you saw him, of course, which trees he was hiding behind…”
I could tell she wasn’t convinced by my story, but she wasn’t able to stop herself showing off how observant she was.
“As a matter of fact, I have seen a man.”
I felt my stomach clench.
“I don’t remember where he was exactly, but I saw him at least three times.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “In fact, I thought about calling the police in case he was a stalker or a child molester. But I watched him through my binoculars. He never stayed long, just a few minutes in the morning and a few more in the late afternoon.”
“Can you describe him?” I asked. “Just so I can be sure it’s my friend.”
“‘Nondescript’ is the best I can do,” the old woman said, nodding as if that was how she’d expect any friend of mine to look. “He always wore a black coat and a woolen cap pulled low over his forehead. And, yes, he did have a camera.”
“What kind of size was he?”
“Medium height, I would say. At best.”
“Yes, that sounds like Steve,” I said lamely. “Mrs. Stewart, you remember when I was round at our…at Caroline’s house in the middle of the day earlier this week?”
“The day Happy went missing,” she said, her eyes narrowing.
I nodded. “Did you happen to see him then?”
She shook her head. “No, I didn’t.” She started to close the door. “I was watching you and wondering what you were doing.”
I gave her my story about shifting books. It didn’t look like she was too convinced.
“Good day to you,” she said, closing the door in my face.
I stood outside the black wooden panels and wondered exactly what she’d seen. Did she think I’d loaded Happy into the Volvo?
I walked away. All I’d learned was that the Devil, or someone working for him, had been in the park-something I already knew from the photograph. And that he-or his sidekick-wasn’t very tall. Big deal. All I’d really done was make Mrs. Stewart suspicious, and perhaps draw her to the bastard’s attention.
Too bad, I thought as I went back to the Volvo. I had other things on my mind.
In particular, the contents of the next e-mail attachment that I was sure was waiting for me back home.
8
The man was standing at the w
indow of his penthouse. Today the river looked even grayer than usual. It was amazing that salmon and other fish survived in that murk, he thought. In the past it had been much worse, though. He remembered the bodies floating downstream and being picked up by scavengers in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Back then, the Thames wasn’t grey-it was dark brown with the untreated sewage that poured into it twenty-four hours a day. But in John Webster’s time it had been better-there were millions fewer people living in London in the early seventeenth century. And yet, the filth that culminated in the Great Plague must have been disgusting. The river had always been a sewer, from the time the Romans built the first city. The river was an open drain and human beings were animals. He knew that better than anyone.
The White Devil thought about the notes he’d sent the writer that morning. He couldn’t have said that they’d disturbed him. Nothing disturbed him anymore. He was immune, driven, dedicated only to his purpose. But he’d felt stirrings of something as he put the facts down. Not remorse or anything as feeble as that. Not even hate, though there had been enough of that in the past. It took him some time to identify the emotion, but he finally got it. Pride. He was proud of what he’d done, just as he’d been proud of what he’d done to his father. People like that deserved to die, they deserved to die in agony. They had done, and soon others would be going the same way.
It was why he’d been put on the surface of the earth.
“Les Dunn, Les Dunn. Les ’as done it again! Les ’as done it again! Pissed ’is pants. Crapped ’isself.”
The words burned into him, even though they weren’t true. Richard Brady had always picked on him, from the first day in Primary One. He was big, red-faced, and he had a mouth on him. His father was a lorry driver who brought him sweets and other things he stole from his loads. Richard Brady didn’t even have to nick from the shops on the Roman Road like the rest of them. He came to school with his pockets full.
