Paul Johnson - The Death List

Sara relaxed slightly. “Oh, I get you. She was a primary schoolteacher.”

“In Chelmsford?” I asked hopefully.

“No, somewhere in the East End.” Her eyes were on me. “Are you all right?”

“Um…yes.” I picked up my mug of tea and emptied it. What game was the Devil playing with me? Or was there more than one of his kind out there?

Sara got up. “I think we must have missed it,” she said, turning off the television. “You can be sure it’ll be on the ten o’clock news.” She headed for the bathroom.

I booted up my computer and logged on to my e-mail program. There was a message from WDChelm. I opened it, my heart pounding.

Matt! I read. You must be pretty pissed off with me, giving you that out-of-date stuff this morning. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. You’re not the only one who can mislead his readers. Means you’ll have to rewrite the chapter using the latest facts. No doubt your girlfriend Sara will be able to help you with them. Ha! I bought myself an extra day. Don’t have to pay you the next advance yet! See if you can catch me when I do. Greetings from hell, your very own (White) Devil.

This was getting worse and worse. Now I’d have to pick Sara’s brains about the murder. I’d try to disguise my interest by claiming it was that of a professional crime writer.

I quickly put together a bowl of pasta with bacon and onion, and managed to spend the first half of the meal talking about other things. Then, after she’d sunk a couple of glasses of Sicilian red, I made my move.

“So, your murder case,” I said, filling her glass. “Want to talk about it?”

Sara gave me a suspicious look. “You want to incorporate it in your next book, do you?” She lit a cigarette. “Bloody scavenger.” She smiled wearily.

I shrugged. “It’s a job like any other.”

She laughed, blowing out smoke. “Not many jobs give you the luxury of taking your kid to school, then sitting around at home all day.”

“A perfect description of my life,” I said, handing her an ashtray. “Are you going to tell me or not? I can tell you’re dying to.”

“Wait for the TV news,” she said, playing hardball.

I moved into flattery mode. “You know much more than the BBC’s going to come out with.”

She looked away. “I wish I didn’t, Matt. I really wish I didn’t.”

I hadn’t ever seen her so reluctant to talk. Like most journalists, she was a great one for regaling people with her latest scoops.

“All right,” she said, reaching for her laptop and turning it on. “Evelyn Louise Merton, age seventy-five. At least, that’s the police’s assumption.” She looked at me ruefully. “They’re having to wait for her dental records to be sure of the ID as there’s no next of kin and her face is too battered for the neighbors to recognize. Lived at 35 Summerhill Drive, Chelmsford. Worked in East London schools from 1958 until 1990. Last place of work, St. Pius’s School, Roman Road, Bethnal-”

“She was a Catholic?”

Sara stared at me. “Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, I suppose she was if she taught at a place with that name.” She hit the keys for a few moments and nodded. “Good spot, Mr. Detective.”

I tried to smile, without much success.

“Lived on her own, with her cat, which-by the way-was also slaughtered by the murderer.” She shook her head.

I tried to pull her close, but she resisted, her eyes flaring.

“Leave me alone!” she shouted. “How can you write about this sort of thing for fun?”

I felt my cheeks redden. Sara occasionally lost her grip, but not like this. The murder of the old woman had obviously got to her. “Hey…” I said, reaching out my arms.

“Tell me,” she insisted, leaning away. “Tell me why you do it, Matt.”

“I suppose…I suppose crime novels are a way of coming to terms with the violence of the world, a way of mediating between the reader and the abyss.”

“Bullshit,” she said, gulping down wine. “They’re a way of making a quick buck by pandering to people’s worst instincts.”

“And what you do is any better?”

“At least it’s true,” she retorted.

I bit my tongue. Having a discussion with a journalist about the nature of truth wasn’t a particularly enticing prospect. Anyway, the last person I wanted to piss off right now was the woman I loved.

“What are the police saying?” I asked after a long silence.

“Not much. The crime hacks reckon there’s more evidence, but the Met is keeping quiet about it.”

“The Met? What are they doing out in Essex?”

“Apparently the Violent Crime Coordination Team was called in.” She caught my gaze. “Because of some similarities with that priest murder in West Kilburn.”

Jesus. Was the Devil getting careless, or was he playing games with the police as well as me?

“Here it is,” Sara said. She’d turned the TV back on and was increasing the volume.

We listened as a woman reporter of Asian descent ran through the story. She had less to say than Sara, but at the end of her piece there was an excerpt from the police statement. The tough but attractive face of D.C.I. Karen Oaten, whom I’d seen filmed outside St. Bartholomew’s, came up on the screen.

“…and anyone who can pass on any information about this truly awful crime should not hesitate to contact us or any police station,” she said.

Sara had picked up her phone. She rang her colleague who was on duty and asked if anything was breaking. She listened, her eyes wide, and I tried to pick up what was being said.

“What is it?” I asked when she finished.

“I can’t believe this,” Sara said, taking another pull of wine. “During the autopsy, they found a small plastic bag in the victim’s…in her vagina. There was a piece of paper in it, with some words printed. The police aren’t saying what they were.”

I slumped down on the sofa. I didn’t know what the message was, but I was pretty sure where it came from.

John Webster’s The White Devil, unless I was very much mistaken.

Sara left in a cab for the paper. Her editor wanted the story updated before it went to press. Although I’d have preferred that she stayed, now I had the chance to think through what had happened. It wasn’t just the way the Devil had screwed with me. It wasn’t even the horrific death suffered by the former schoolteacher. No, what was really getting to me was the modus operandi. The cunning bastard. He’d suckered me again. Now I was potentially in even deeper shit. Because in the third Sir Tertius novel, The Revenger’s Comedy, I had described how a character had his right arm severed before his throat was cut.

I hadn’t meant the book to be the last of the series-in fact, I still had faint hopes of resurrecting my “dashing, desperately attractive detective” (as a female critic on the Internet had described him)-but I’d gradually lost interest in him and the period. Perhaps it was because of the levels of violence in the 1620s, or at least in my 1620s. I’d never exactly been a shrinking violet in that field. After The Silence of the Lambs and Patricia Cornwell’s lurid tales, the bar for fictional excess was raised high and that didn’t bother me. But Sir Tertius’s last adventure was worse than the others. It had taken him to Oxford, where he’d got caught up in a grotesque game of “kill the yokel” between the students of two colleges. The lead villain ended up being killed by a butcher, whose son had been torn apart by a specially trained pack of hunting hounds. Not only had the evil huntmaster’s arm been removed, horn still clasped in the fingers, but his private parts had been hacked off and a page from the Old Testament inserted in the cavity. The verses about “an eye for an eye” were on the page. I’d subsequently been verbally abused by a female crime writer at a conference who thought, like Sara, that I was using violence without justification.