Paul Johnson - The Death List

“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?”

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.

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.