Paul Johnson - The Death List

Terence Smail, alcoholic, small-time drug dealer and pimp, looked like he was about to throw up. When he failed to do that, he fainted.

Sara was working late at the paper, so I was on my own that evening. I sent the chapter I’d written to the Devil’s last e-mail address and waited for a reply. None came. Jesus, was he in the middle of slaughtering someone else who had done him harm? I went on to the Internet and did a search for “changing your identity.” There were dozens of sites offering new names and documents for fees ranging from paltry (for photocopied fake documents) to very expensive (supposedly for “the real thing”-these people had no sense of irony). I wondered if he’d used one of them. I doubted it. He’d have gone for a more secure way. He wouldn’t have been able to trust that his changed identity was safe on the Web. I was sure he’d have found another method. Maybe he had criminal connections. East End gangsters? I didn’t want to get involved with them, and, anyway, he’d find out soon enough if someone was snooping around. I couldn’t risk it.

But what was the alternative? Wait for the next victim to appear on the news?

I couldn’t come up with anything else, so I drank half a bottle of single malt and passed out in front of the television.

Karen Oaten stormed down the corridor to the VCCT office, her cheeks red and her heart pounding. She had just spent a very uncomfortable half hour with the assistant commissioner. He had set the team up as his personal fiefdom, dispensing with the normal chain of command. He wanted to know how it was that the newspapers had found out about Father Prendegast’s previous identity before the Met. It was a good question, one to which she would also like an answer.

“Simmons!” she shouted as she banged open the door. “Pavlou! My office.” She glanced round at John Turner, who was trying to hide behind his computer. “You, too, Taff.”

The chief inspector slammed the door when her three subordinates were inside. She didn’t bother dropping the blind. She wanted the rest of the team to see what was about to happen.

“Right, you useless tossers,” she said, glaring at Simmons and Pavlou. “I’ve just had my arse chewed up and spat out by the AC. That means I’m now looking for arses for my own lunch.”

“Excuse me, guv,” D.S. Paul Pavlou said politely. He was half-Cypriot, his face permanently covered by a thick layer of black stubble. “We-”

“Shut it, you piece of shit!” Oaten yelled. “I’ll tell you when you can open your kebab-stinking mouth.” Her eyes moved on to Morry Simmons. He was pasty-faced and in his forties, a permanent detective sergeant who was only on the team because one of the other chief inspectors owed him a favor. “Try me, Simmons, just try me.”

He showed no sign of wanting to speak.

“Right,” Oaten said, glancing at Turner. “The last I heard, you two were investigating the victim’s past. You now have permission to explain to me why you screwed up.”

Neither Simmons nor Pavlou was inclined to answer.

“Open it!” Oaten shouted.

Pavlou glanced at his colleague. “Well, guv, we got as far as the bishop who had responsibility for St Bartholomew’s. He told us about the monastery in Ireland. I called, but no one there knew anything about Father Prendegast.”

The chief inspector was shaking her head. “It didn’t occur to you to ask me if you could go over there and ask in person?”

Simmons’s eyes opened wide. “What, you would have signed off on that?”

“This is the Violent Crime Coordination Team, not some local nick. Of course I’d have signed off on it.” She looked at each of them. “Or at least, I’d have sent someone with more than half a dozen brain cells over there.” She picked up one of the tabloids that was lying on her desk. “Now I don’t have to. The press has done your job for you. ‘In an astonishing twist,’” she read, “‘we can reveal that murder victim Father Norman Prendegast was a pederast given a new identity by the Catholic Church. Blah blah real name Father Patrick O’Connell, blah blah St. Peter’s, Bonner Street, Bethnal Green, blah blah former choirboys Harry Winder and Andrew Lough, blah blah subjected to repulsive sexual practices.’” Oaten glared at Simmons and Pavlou. “And how do you think the papers got hold of this?”

“Oh, that’s obvious, guv,” Simmons said, a grin splitting his sallow face. “They chucked money at anyone they could find.”

“Wrong!” the chief inspector shouted, crumpling the newspaper up and throwing it accurately at his chest. “They did what you wankers are supposed to do. They asked questions, and when people stonewalled them, they kept on asking.”

“But they went to Ireland,” Pavlou said, pointing at a picture of the monastery where the dead man had been hidden away.

Oaten groaned. “We’ve already been over that, you pillock. This isn’t about who goes where, it’s about so-called detectives who don’t know their arse from their armpit.” She shot a glance at Turner. “Help us out here, Taff. What do we do next?”

“Um, interview Winder and Lough. Find out who else might have been abused by the victim. Talk to other people who attended St. Peter’s back in the late seventies and early eighties.”

The chief inspector was nodding. “Thank God someone around here knows his job.”

Pavlou stepped forward, his expression keen. “I’d be happy to go up to the northeast to interview Lough.”

“I bet you would,” Karen Oaten replied mordantly. “The question is, am I happy to risk another cock-up by letting you go?” She rubbed her forehead. “All right, contact the locals and get them to bring Lough in for questioning. At least that should keep the press off him till you get there.” She turned to Simmons. “You get down to Bethnal Green and talk to this Harry Winder. Remind him that, even if he’s sold his story to some rag, he has to come clean with us. Think you can manage that?”

The two sergeants nodded unhappily.

“Get going then!” She raised a hand at Turner. “Not you, Taff.” She waited till the door closed behind the others. “Morons. So, what are you working on?”

“Right now Chief Inspector Hardy’s got me-”

“Never mind Hardy, you’re reporting only to me from now on. There are too many people busy building their own little empires in this team.” She gave a hollow laugh. “If you can’t beat them…Okay, let’s have it.”

Turner nodded. “Right, guv. I was looking at the modus operandi.”

Oaten sat back in her chair. “And?”

“Well, it seems to me there’s some kind of message in it.” He flipped open his notebook. “Candlestick up him, sprawled over the altar, eyes removed, the quotation in the mouth…”

“Go on.”

“The wound to the backside suggests sexual abuse, doesn’t it?”

“Mmm.”

“And the naked body over the altar makes it pretty obvious that the killer doesn’t think much of the Catholic Church.”

“What about the eyes?”

“Well, could the priest have seen things that the killer is ashamed of or that he regards as his own?”

“Possibly linked to the abuse carried out on him by the dead man?”

Turner nodded. “It seems reasonable to assume that the killer knew Prendegast, or rather O’Connell. And, yeah, that he was abused by him.”

“So we need to start collecting alibis for the night of the murder from all the choirboys and such like that we find.” Oaten smiled at him. “Good, Taff. What about the quotation in his mouth, though? How did it go again? ‘What a-’”

“‘-mockery hath death made of thee.’ I was hoping you weren’t going to ask me about that.” Turner looked at his notes again. “Maybe the killer was just making a general point about how the priest has got his comeuppance.”