The Death List mw-1

by Paul Johnson

  It was the last year of primary school now.

  “Oy, Les! ’Ave you done doing it?”

  The crowd of arse-lickers around Brady sniggered. When Les didn’t answer, the bully walked quickly over to him.

  “I didn’t hear what you said,” Brady yelled, cupping his ear.

  Les felt himself start shaking, but he kept his lips together.

  “Gone all quiet, ’ave we?” Brady grinned, and then grabbed Les’s balls. “Still can’t hear you.” He squeezed harder.

  Les’s eyes were bulging. He took a deep breath and whispered two words. “You’re…dead.”

  Brady leaned closer. “What?” Suddenly he was less sure of himself.

  “I’m…going to…fuckin’…kill you.”

  The bully took a step back, his face less crimson than usual. He looked round the crowd that had gathered. “Yeah, I think ’e’s done doing it,” he said, taking his hand away.

  His cronies stared at him as he walked off, then started shouting at Les again. But he didn’t care. He knew he’d won. He’d discovered the power of words and how to wield it.

  For the rest of that final term, Richard Brady kept his distance. He still joined in when the other boys made fun of Les, but he didn’t instigate the bullying. It was as if he’d seen a small dog’s teeth and lost the will to taunt it. He even waved at Les on the last day in the playground. He was moving to Watford in the summer holidays and he wouldn’t be seeing any of his primary schoolmates again.

  By that time, Les had become an expert at concealing himself and watching people covertly. He took up a position behind some rubbish bins when the Brady family was getting ready to move out of the terraced house in Gawber Street. They had five kids and so much stuff that it wouldn’t all fit in Mr. Brady’s lorry. He’d got a friend to bring another one. When they’d filled it, old man Brady shouted out the address to the other driver.

  Les smiled as he wrote it down in his notebook.

  Two weeks later, he used some of the money he’d got from the local fences to take the train up to Watford. He had found a map of the town in the library and made a copy showing the streets between the station and the Bradys’ new place. It was a sultry day, the August sun hidden behind gray-white clouds that presaged rain. Les hid behind a battered Ford Cortina. In the early afternoon, the five kids appeared. Richard was the third by age and the only boy. He said something and all four of his sisters started shouting at him. Then they gathered together and walked away. Richard watched them leave, and then turned in the opposite direction. Les followed him, slinging the canvas bag he’d brought over his shoulder.

  Richard Brady didn’t seem to have made any new friends since he’d arrived. He mooched around on a street corner, but when none of the local boys paid any attention to him, he set off toward a patch of green at the end of a road. Les, keeping his distance, realized that it was a small wood. Beyond it could be seen recently harvested fields. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. The heat was keeping people indoors, as well as making Richard Brady’s armpits damp. Les sniffed. He could smell him.

  Brady disappeared into the trees. As Les got closer, ducking behind the parked cars, he picked up another scent. Richard was smoking from behind a tree trunk. When he reached the edge of the wood, Les squatted down and opened the bag. After he’d pulled on gloves and equipped himself, he concealed the bag beneath a bush and started to crawl silently through the undergrowth. He could hear Brady singing some horrible Sham 69 song about going drinking. He stopped when he got behind the tree. Controlled his breathing. And started the countdown. Ten…nine…On three, he tossed one of the bricks he’d brought to the left. On one, he went round the right-hand side of the tree. Brady was on all fours, looking in the opposite direction.

  Les clubbed him on the side of the head with the other brick. Brady lay moaning on the parched earth, blood coming from his ear. He wasn’t completely out, but Les wasn’t bothered. He unwound the rope and slung it over a sturdy branch about eight feet above ground level. Then he got Brady into a sitting position and fitted the noose he’d fashioned round his neck. Les had spent hours working on it, having found a diagram in a book of knots in the library. There was so much to learn in there.

  When he had it tight, he started pulling. Richard Brady was a fat pig. It took Les a few minutes to get him into a standing position, but he’d been working hard on his fitness, building up his upper-body strength. By that time, the bully was coming round. Les kept hauling away, until Brady’s feet were well above the ground. The boy started to choke, his face redder than ever. His eyes opened. When he saw Les, they got wider. They were already bloodshot. The tip of his tongue was caught between his front teeth. As Les finished securing the other end of the rope, blood dribbled down Brady’s chin. He was biting through his tongue, making throaty noises that sounded like someone trying to be sick and not succeeding.

  Les smiled up at him. He’d taken the precaution of tying his hands and legs, as he’d seen in The Big Book of Executions. He stepped close and brandished the smoldering cigarette he’d found in the dust.

  “Smoking is very bad for you,” he said, taking a drag. “Sorry, I can’t hear you. Are you done choking? Not yet? That’s all right, I can wait.”

  And he did. He waited the thirteen minutes and twenty seconds it took Richard Brady to die. Then he undid the ropes from his wrists and ankles and took them away, along with the two bricks-he dumped them in cleared ground near the station.

  On the train back to Euston, Leslie Dunn couldn’t stop smiling.

  There was a small piece in the evening paper the next day about a boy found in a wood on the outskirts of Watford. The police didn’t think it was suicide and their inquiries were continuing. But it never occurred to them to come down to the East End. A month later, Les was scanning the paper in the library. The coroner had pronounced an open verdict. He said he suspected that other boys may have been involved, but the police had been unable to make a breakthrough. Richard Brady’s family was said to be distraught.

  Les looked that word up in the Oxford English Dictionary.

  “Ha!” He snorted before he could stop himself.

  “Shoosh!” said the elderly librarian, the one with her gray hair in a ponytail. She’d taken the boy under her wing and looked very disappointed by his outburst.

  “Who’s John Webster?” Karen Oaten asked. She was sitting at her desk in the glass-partitioned office on the eighth floor of New Scotland Yard.

  John Turner looked at his notebook. “He wrote plays, apparently. He was born around 1578 and he died around 1630. Here.”

  The chief inspector looked around. “What, in the Yard?”

  “In London,” Turner said, unamused. He’d spent the previous evening reading through the Penguin Classics volume of Jacobean tragedies. It was the first Penguin Classic he’d ever bought and he’d be charging it to expenses. “He was famous for two plays-The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil.”

  “Tell me the line in the victim’s mouth was from the first one.”

  Turner shook his head. “Sorry, guv. ‘What a mockery hath death made of thee’ is line 125 from act 5, scene 4 of The White Devil.”

  “Bollocks,” Oaten exclaimed. “That’s just what we need. A Satanist killing priests. The papers are already having a feeding frenzy.” She indicated the pile of newsprint that she’d dumped on the floor next to her desk.

  “Priests?” Turner said. “We’ve only got one.”

  “So far.” The chief inspector leaned back in her chair. She was wearing one of the well-cut gray trouser suits she’d taken to since her promotion. “All right, what’s the story of this play?”

  Turner sat down opposite her and gave her a resume of the action.

  “So what you’re saying is that a bunch of aristocrats go around slaughtering one another to get their own back?”

  “Basically, yes, guv.”

  She ran her hand across her hair. “Is that what this is about? Revenge?”<
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  Turner looked dubious. “Could be, I suppose.”

  “And who’s the White Devil?”

  “I’m a bit confused about that. There isn’t a character with that name. According to the notes, White Devils are evil disguised, or hypocrites. So just about all the characters are White Devils.”

  Oaten gave him a frustrated look. “Is there a priest?”

  “Yes, there is, actually. Monticelso. Well, he’s a cardinal. And he ends up pope.”

  “Does he get murdered?” she asked hopefully.

  Turner shrugged. “Sorry, he doesn’t, guv.”

  The chief inspector held her hand out. “I’d better read the thing myself,” she said. “What did you do at college, Taff?”

  “What college?”

  “Ah, sorry. I did sports science, so this is all going to be over my head, too.”

  Turner was aware that Wild Oats had been a sportswoman. The word in the Eastern Homicide Division was that she’d played hockey for the England second team and that she’d been a useful high jumper. There had been plenty of belly laughs about that when she wasn’t around. “You were a sportswoman, guv. Why did you join the force?” He fully expected to be told where to stick his question.

  Instead, Oaten put down the book he’d handed her and chewed her bottom lip. “Because I like discipline, Taff. That’s what I got from sport. I get it in the Met, too. Not the army-style rubbish that we did at the college in Hendon-marching up and down like a bunch of moronic squaddies. I mean the discipline of an investigation. Putting everything together in a logical fashion and catching the villain.”

  “And you reckon that reading a seventeenth-century play will help us catch this lunatic?”

  Oaten sighed. “I’ll take any help I can get.” She looked down at the files that covered her desk. “The SOCOs haven’t come up with anything that looks much good. No unusual clothing fibers, no blood apart from the victim’s, thousands of fingerprints in the church-but you can be pretty sure our killer’s aren’t among them since the candlestick was clean. He had gloves on throughout, obviously. The autopsy confirmed Redrose’s preliminary conclusions, and there was no sign of the eyes anywhere. The people who attended St. Bartholomew’s haven’t got a bad word to say about Father Prendegast. Now that he’s dead, at least. But we got the feeling some of them didn’t like him much, didn’t we? He doesn’t seem to have had any relatives or close friends. Devoted to the children of God, as Mrs. O’Grady said.” She glanced up at him. “Are we getting anywhere with his previous…what’s the word? Incumbency.”

  Turner laughed. “You mean his last job?” The laugh died when he saw the look on her face. “Well, he was in Ireland, in some kind of monastery.”

  “And before that?”

  “Simmons and Pavlou are checking.”

  “Put rockets up their arses, will you?” Oaten turned back to her papers.

  “Guv?” the inspector said nervously. “Do you think we’ve got a serial?”

  The chief inspector raised her head wearily. “Do I think we’ve got a serial? Applying the discipline of the investigation, no, I don’t. There isn’t any evidence suggesting that. The experts told me the MO doesn’t match any known pattern.” She pursed her lips. “Applying my gut feeling, I’ll put my pension on there being more killings, Taff. There will have been previous ones, too. No one carries out this kind of carefully planned and executed-excuse the pun-activity without having been there before.” She bent her head again.

  John Turner walked out of her office with a heavy heart. He had the feeling he wasn’t going to be seeing Naomi and the kids much in the coming weeks. At least he didn’t have to read any more old plays. What was the line he’d copied down? “See the corrupted use some make of books.”

  Dead right. He was glad he’d never made it past A levels.

  9

  I pushed my chair back from the desk. My armpits were drenched and my stomach was in turmoil. The lunatic. He’d murdered the boy who’d bullied him at primary school. Not only that. At the age of twelve, he’d planned and carried out the killing with what seemed like a total lack of emotion. This guy could have had a great career as a hit man. Jesus, maybe that’s what he was.

  Thinking more about the text he’d sent me, I realized I could make it into a convincing narrative without too much difficulty. Not because it would be based on real life-I was convinced the murder had actually happened and didn’t see the need of wasting time searching newspaper archives, especially when I didn’t know the year it took place or whether the name Richard Brady was real-but because I found myself empathizing with the Devil. He’d suffered years of violence from his father, so he killed him. He’d been ridiculed and physically assaulted by the bully, so he hung him from a tree. He’d been abused by the priest, so he slaughtered him in his own church. And his adoption of the White Devil as an alias suggested that, like the Jacobean playwrights, he was obsessed with revenge. That was something I could relate to, not that it made me feel proud of myself.

  Ever since I’d been cut loose by my publishers and my agent, resentment had been festering in me. In the early days after my double rejection, I’d come up with numerous schemes to get my own back-by pouring paint stripper over my agent Christian Fels’s beloved vintage Bugatti, by sending an envelope full of shit to my editor Jeanie Young-Burke, by bad-mouthing them to everyone I knew, by showing up at other authors’ launch parties and dousing with beer the critics like Alexander Drys and Lizzie Everhead, who’d knifed me. In the event, all I’d managed was the article in the newspaper bitching about the callousness of modern publishing. The following day, a crime writer who’d never liked me much sent an e-mail consisting of two words: Sad git.

  Vengeance, retribution, the avenging angel-there was something attractive about those ideas, something that seemed right. Perhaps because the Old Testament concept of an eye for an eye underpinned our concepts of justice, of crime and punishment, but perhaps also because revenging yourself on someone was an ethical act. An injustice had been perpetrated and there was nothing inappropriate about exacting due recompense. Everyone had heard of the wronged wives who cut up their husband’s Savile Row suits, buried their CD collections or broadcast tapes in the local pub of the adulterers cavorting with their lovers. They became popular heroines, women who’d taken a deserved pound of flesh. The desire for vengeance was hardwired into the human psyche. The question was, how far did you take it? How many laws were you prepared to break? In my case, the answer to the second question was a pathetic none. The Devil was clearly situated at the opposite end of the scale.

  But that didn’t mean the emotions I felt were any less strong. I didn’t want to kill Christian or Jeanie, but I’d happily have humiliated them or made them weep. How different was I from my tormentor? I thought of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-two sides of the same man, the evil “hidden” beneath the good. Or Joseph Conrad’s “secret sharer”-the doppelganger, a reflection of yourself that you struggle to come to terms with. Was that why the Devil had chosen me? Was he so smart? Nothing he’d done up till now contradicted such a conclusion. He’d read my books-Sir Tertius in the violent stew of a London enthused by revenge tragedy, Zog Hadzhi in the vendetta-stricken badlands of Albania. He’d also read my article. The bastard knew me better than I did myself. He may even have understood my fascination with revenge before I found myself in the position of wanting it.

  Sickened by the realization that I was driven by the same urges as the murderer, I hammered out a couple of thousand words about the death of the bully. When I reread it, I saw that I’d given the narrator/murderer, Wayne Deakins, a psychological profile based as much on my own as on the one I’d inferred the Devil possessed. Bloody hell. He was pulling my strings as if I were a marionette.

  By three o’clock in the afternoon, I’d had enough. I walked down to the village and went into the newsagent’s, planning to read the paper while I was waiting for Lucy. I couldn’t miss the tabloid headlin
es. Dead Priest Was Pedophile, Shame of Church Cover-Up, Murder Victim Was Pervert. I bought a selection of tabloids and broadsheets, and found a bench in Dulwich Park.

  The consensus was that the Catholic Church had spirited Father Prendegast away from his church in the East End of London in May 1979, when complaints were made about his conduct by some altar and choirboys. He’d been sent to a remote monastery in western Ireland and given a new identity. The Church had taken out injunctions against all the papers, threatening to sue if the dead man’s former name was published. Its line was that the boys and their families needed to be protected from “unwanted intrusion into their privacy.” The tabloids weren’t cowed any longer. They’d gone ahead and printed the priest’s real name of Patrick O’Connell and the name of his church-St. Peter’s in Bonner Street. They also had interviews, no doubt paid for, with two boys, now in their late thirties, who claimed that Father Pat, as he’d encouraged them to call him, had fondled them, taken off their clothes and submitted them to repeated sexual abuse. They expressed horror that he’d been given a new identity and another job by the Church. The archbishop wasn’t commenting, and neither were the police. They were the only ones who’d shut up shop. Everyone from MPs to Anglican bishops had got in on the act, condemning the Catholic Church and demanding that it put its house in order. Lawyers, no doubt in private rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of juicy compensation cases, were also to the fore.

  I looked up at the sky, pale blue dotted with cotton-wool clouds, and worked through what this meant for me. I now knew where the priest had worked, and the names of two of his victims. It wouldn’t be difficult to find out the names of other boys who had attended St. Peter’s. In fact, it would be very easy. I wondered if the White Devil was indirectly challenging me to discover who he was. He must have known that the priest’s background would come out. Was he relying on the fact that I would be too frightened for Lucy and Sara to take any steps? I lowered my eyes and looked around. Apart from some women with buggies and toddlers, there was no one in the vicinity. But the Devil-or someone working for him-could be watching from the bushes, waiting for me to make a wrong move. I wasn’t prepared to do that, especially now that I was about to have Lucy with me.