Paul Johnson - The Death List

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.

The man was standing at the window 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.