Paul Johnson - The Death List

Caroline sat down on a bench near the water and studied her paper. I moved along the line of bushes behind her with my eyes on Lucy. She was crouching down and throwing bread to the birds. The park was quite busy with couples, children, dogs, buggies. It didn’t seem like a place where the Devil could get to Lucy.

I looked to my left and watched a skinny man in his thirties limping past. His clothes were ragged and dirty, his hair unkempt. Probably a junkie who’d spent the night in the undergrowth. Turning back, I couldn’t see Lucy. Shit. Caroline was still reading her paper on the bench. I ran behind her, resisting the urge to shout my daughter’s name. The ducks and seagulls that had gathered around the bread she’d scattered made noises of outrage and flapped their wings as I went through them. Where was she?

I couldn’t keep quiet any longer.

“Lucy!” I yelled. “Lucy, where are you?” I looked around frantically. Caroline had got up, alarm on her face. “Lucy, come to Daddy! Lucy!” I ran to the trees that were set back from the lake. A young couple with a Labrador were walking there. “Have you seen a little girl, pink anorak and skirt?” I demanded.

They stepped back at the fervor of my tone, and then looked at each other.

“Yes,” the woman said, raising an arm. “Over there.”

“Thanks,” I gasped.

“She was with a man, yeah?” the guy said.

“What?” I started to run in the direction the woman had indicated. “What did he look like?” I shouted over my shoulder. They both shrugged.

The last tree in the row was an ancient oak, its trunk thick and gnarled.

“Lucy!” I shouted desperately. “Lucy!”

“Matt!” Caroline screamed, about fifty yards to my rear. “Where is she?”

And then Lucy stepped out from behind the oak. I almost pissed myself as the tension left me. She was walking toward me, a baseball cap I’d never seen before on her head and a small leather bag in her right hand.

“Lucy!” So close to her, my voice was too loud. It scared her, tears springing up in her eyes. “Are you all right, darling?”

“Yes, Daddy, of course I’m all right,” she said in the painstaking tone she took when she thought she’d been unjustly accused.

“Where did you get that hat?” I asked, clutching her to me. It was red, with a cartoon character on the front. Jesus. It was the Tasmanian Devil, the cartoon one with the oversize jaws that arrived in a miniature whirlwind. The crazy bastard.

“This is for you, Daddy,” she said, wriggling out of my arms and handing me the black leather man’s handbag.

“What’s going on?” Caroline said, trying to catch her breath. “What are you doing here, Matt?”

I gave her a glare to shut her up. “Where did you get the hat and the bag, sweetie?”

“Mr. White gave them to me,” she said, no trace of fear in her voice or face.

“Mr. White?” my ex-wife said, staring at Lucy. “We don’t know any Mr. White.”

“Daddy does.” My daughter pointed to the bag. “Mr. White said I was to give Daddy the bag and I could keep the cap.”

I tried to get my pounding heart under control.

“Who is this Mr.-”

I held my hand up at Caroline. “What did Mr. White look like, Lucy?”

She laughed. “Silly daddy. Mr. White’s your friend. He said so. You must know what he looks like.”

I glanced at Caroline. Her face was suffused with crimson, a sure sign that anger was about to erupt. “Just tell me what he looked like,” I said, kneeling down in front of Lucy. “So I’m sure it’s the right person.”

My daughter gave me a curious look and then laughed again. “All right, silly daddy. Mr. White’s got long black hair.” She pouted. “And a mouse.”

“What?” Caroline and I said in unison.

“I said, he’s got a mouse.” Lucy burst out in peals of laughter. “Don’t you remember the story we used to read? About the boy who wouldn’t say ‘mustache’? So he said his daddy had a mouse under his nose.”

I stood up again, ignoring the tirade that Caroline had started. Long black hair and a mustache-it sounded like the kind of disguise you could buy in any joke shop. Still, I’d get Lucy to do a drawing of him tomorrow.

“Are you even listening to me, Matt?” my ex-wife said, pushing me in the chest. “What the hell’s going on? What’s in that bag?”

I looked down at the object in my hands. The money. It had to be the money. I couldn’t open it in front of Caroline and Lucy.

“Oh, it’s…it’s some CDs I lent the guy. I…I met him in the pub and we got talking. We both like Americana.” I felt my cheeks redden. I could tell that Caroline didn’t believe me, but she wasn’t prepared to make even more of a scene in front of Lucy.

“Yeah,” she said under her breath. “Like you have a friend called Mr. White. I suppose he’s a fan of that awful movie Reservoir Dogs like you.” She squatted down. “Lucy, you know you shouldn’t talk to people you don’t know, or take things from them.”

My daughter got tearful again. “But he knows Daddy,” she said, giving me a heartbreaking look. “He said so. And Daddy knows him.”

“It’s all right, sweetie,” I said, patting her head.

“What the hell are you doing down here, anyway, Matt?” Caroline said as she stood up. “You know the rules. Saturday is my day with Lucy.” Her eyes widened. “Were you following us?”

“No, of course not,” I said, glancing away. The couple I’d spoken to were watching us anxiously. I waved to show that things were okay, but they didn’t look convinced.

“You better not have been,” my ex-wife said, taking Lucy’s hand. “You don’t want that piece of rubbish, darling,” she added, flicking the cap onto the grass.

Lucy raised her head and put on the haughty look that she’d inherited from Caroline. I could tell that she wanted the Tasmanian Devil cap. I picked it up and watched them leave. I wasn’t planning on giving it back to her, though. I was planning on jamming it down the madman’s throat. I couldn’t believe he’d taken the risk of talking to Lucy. He must have seen how close I was.

If he’d wanted to ram home the message that I was totally powerless to resist him, he couldn’t have chosen a better way.

The three men were standing around Terry Smail. He was hanging upside down from a joist in an abandoned warehouse. His captors had all taken off their caps and sunglasses, revealing close-cropped hair and scarred faces.

“I don’t know,” jabbered their naked victim. “Aah! I didn’t know Jimmy well. I…I don’t know who he drank with.”

The man in charge shook his head. His lips were only a couple of inches from Terry’s inverted ear. “You know that isn’t true. Do you want us to take you down again?”

Smail squealed and jerked his head forward. The sight of the red patch that was his groin made him shake violently, but his wrists were behind his back and the movements did nothing but give him more pain from the chain round his ankles.

“What we did to you the last time was only the start,” Wolfe said, grabbing him by the shoulders. “After all, your wedding tackle’s still intact.”

Rommel and Geronimo laughed harshly.

“So far,” continued Wolfe. “Next time we won’t just be removing your pubes with this high-tech instrument.” He held up the rusty and blood-spattered painter’s scraper. “Sorry we couldn’t find anything cleaner.” His glance cut off the others’ guffaws. “It’s very simple, Terry.” His eyes, dark as coal, the pupils unnaturally black, met the hanging man’s. “Either you spill your guts or we spill them.” He paused, watching Smail’s mouth open and close. “Tell me who Jimmy Tanner drank with.”