Paul Johnson - The Death List

I didn’t know what to do.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder when I was in the playground waiting for Lucy. I whipped my head round, my eyes wide.

“Christ, Matt, what’s up?”

“Sorry, mate.” I slapped my friend Dave Cummings on the arm. “Don’t go creeping up on people.” I nodded to Ginny, who was hanging back as if she didn’t want to intrude. Her face was pale, but her eyes were fixed on her husband with a mixture of boredom and dislike. I’d begun to wonder how their marriage survived.

He eyed me dubiously. “Are you all right? You don’t look too good.”

“Not enough sleep,” I said, yawning.

Dave grinned. He was a Yorkshireman, of medium height but heavily built. His nose had been broken so many times that the surgeons could do nothing but shape it into a ragged slalom. He used to be a useful scrum-half with a turn of speed that brought us a lot of scores. “New book on the go?”

“Yeah,” I replied listlessly.

“Got a contract?”

“Not yet.”

“You should get a real job, mate.” He ran his hand over his thick brown hair.

All the time I’d known him, he’d worn it short at the front and long at the back in the much-mocked mullet style-he said he’d missed his chance when he was young.

“What, like yours?” Dave was an ex-paratrooper. He had a reputation for barely restrained ferocity on the field and his club nickname was Psycho. He was equally forceful in his business. He ran a demolition company and took great pleasure in operating the machines himself whenever he could.

“What’s wrong with my line of work?” he said, squaring up to me with mock aggression. “At least I don’t sit around making things up all day.”

I wished that was what I was engaged in at present. “What are you doing here, anyway? Have you knocked down every old building south of the river?”

He gave me another manic grin. “No. I gave myself the afternoon off. I’m taking Tom go-karting.”

“Don’t get behind the controls yourself, you lunatic.”

He laughed and slapped his gut. He’d given up playing around the same time I had. “I wish I could.”

The bell rang and the sound of children’s voices started to rise to a crescendo.

“Are you sure you’re all right, Matt?” Dave said, looking at me with concern.

I nodded and concentrated on finding Lucy. “Of course I am.”

“Here, Tom!” he shouted, waving to his crew-cut eight-year-old. He nudged me in the ribs. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” he said, smiling at Lucy. “I mean it.”

I bent down to kiss my daughter. Over her head I watched Dave wait for Ginny and their daughter, Annie, with ill-concealed impatience. I felt my eyes sting. That was the problem. I couldn’t tell Psycho or anyone else about the bastard who was haunting me in case he turned on them and theirs.

Lucy chattered away as we walked back to Ferndene Road, but I found it difficult to follow what she was saying. I was thinking about the Devil and how to get to him before he killed again. He’d made it clear that he’d changed his name. Of course, that could have been a lie to put me off his trail, but I didn’t think so. He’d shown how careful he was at planning and carrying out his crimes. It wasn’t hard to believe that he had covered himself by assuming another identity. How did you go about doing that? I wasn’t sure. The old crime-novel staple was obtaining a replacement birth certificate for someone of similar age who had died young. But I had the feeling that was less secure than it used to be now that records were computerized. In which case, it came down to the standard solution to all problems. Money. The Devil didn’t seem to work, or he could afford to hire sidekicks. Was he rich? If so, how had he got there from being a fatherless teenager in Bethnal Green? People who had wealth were often in the public eye, one way or another.

“-and then I fainted.”

“What, sweetie?”

Lucy was smiling at me. “I said, and then I fainted.”

“What?” I stopped walking and squatted down beside her. “When?”

“Silly daddy,” she said, squealing with laughter. “I got you, I got you. I could see you weren’t listening.”

I grabbed her round the waist, feeling how delicate and vulnerable her body was. “Very funny. What do you want for tea?”

She stared at me. “We already talked about that. You said I could have sausages.”

I nodded, trying to hide my confusion. “Ha, got you back,” I said, tickling her.

She pushed me off, giggling, and we completed the walk.

Jesus. I was even starting to lose it in front of my daughter. There was going to be a reckoning for the bastard who was doing this to me.

The Hereward in Greenwich was one of the roughest pubs in the area. Its regulars wanted it that way. They were never disturbed by tourists who’d been to the Cutty Sark or the Maritime Museum, by the rich kids who’d bought flats in the Georgian houses or even by slumming students from Goldsmith’s. The Hereward had a seriously bad reputation and the police hardly ever organized raids. It was frequented by the local lowlife, encouraged by an ex-con landlord who had his fingers in numerous illegal pies.

The three men watching the pub knew all that. One of them had been inside a few times, dressed in raggedyarsed jeans and a porkpie hat. He’d been taken for a hardman and left alone with his drink. The regulars weren’t stupid. He was indeed as hard as they came.

“Target has exited,” Rommel said from the corner opposite. Now he was dressed in a leather bomber jacket, a woolen cap over his short hair and dark glasses shading his eyes. He spoke into a hands-free microphone and watched as a thirty-year-old man with dirty shoulder-length dreadlocks stumbled down the steps.

His two colleagues were in a pale blue Orion with a hundred-and-thirty-thousand miles on the clock. They’d picked it up from a dealer in Neasden, who asked no questions when they paid cash and gave what he was sure were a false name and address.

“Okay,” said the man in the passenger seat. “We’ve got him.” He pulled on gloves and nodded to the driver. Both of them were wearing black woolen hats and sunglasses. “Let’s go, Geronimo.”

The car moved forward smoothly, then ground to a halt five yards in front of the skinny man in dirty jeans and denim jacket. He was clearly the worse for several drinks, his gait unsteady.

“Oy-” he gasped, as he was grabbed from behind by the Orion’s passenger. That was all he managed. A hand tightened over his mouth and he was thrown into the backseat.

Meanwhile Rommel had crossed the road quickly. He went up to the double doors of the Hereward, taking from inside his jacket a half-meter steel bar which he slid through the handles in case anyone had seen what had happened. He smiled when he felt the door shudder. As they’d suspected, their man had friends who watched his back.

He ran to the car and got in beside the driver, who pulled out in front of a bus and drove rapidly away.

From the rear seat, Wolfe looked back for several minutes. “Okay, we’re clear. Take channel one.” They’d worked out several escape routes in case of pursuit, but it seemed his team had been too good for the opposition, as he’d suspected it would be. He turned to the quivering figure beside him. His hands had been cuffed behind his back and a strip of duct tape stuck over his mouth.

“Easy as nicking ice cream from a kid,” said Rommel, grinning.

“You’ll be wondering what’s going on, Terry,” Wolfe said, his voice low. “Here’s a clue. Jimmy Tanner.”

The captive’s acne-scarred face turned even paler.

“You’re going to tell us everything you know about him and all the people he spoke to in that shithole.” His tone was menacing now. “Or I’ll rip your balls off one by one and one and put them in a toad-in-the-hole.” He smiled. “Which you’ll eat for your tea.”