Paul Johnson - The Death List

“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.