Paul Johnson - The Death List

“Good man,” said the Devil. “Do you know what they are?”

I swallowed the bitter liquid that had rushed up my throat. “Hair,” I said faintly.

“That’s right, Matt. Pubic hair.”

My fingers sprang apart before I could control myself and the hairs tumbled to the floor.

“A mixture of Bugger O’Connell’s and the cow Merton’s. Dear me, Matt. What are they doing in your flat? How suspicious. You’d better get rid of them. Of course, there’s plenty more where they came from. I can sprinkle them outside your place, I can hide them anywhere I like inside. What do you think of that?”

“Screw you,” I said in a defeated voice.

“I look forward to it. Oh, by the way, I thought it was pretty funny that your mother was the first to connect the killings to your books. Wow, you really are getting yourself exposed. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and visit an old enemy.” He grunted-a revolting, degenerate sound. “It’s time to bury the hatchet, or something along those lines. No rest for the wicked. You’ll be getting my notes tomorrow morning. Sorry if they mess up your day with Lucy, but I’m sure Caroline will be happy to have extra time with her. Hey, Matt, she really has got a temper on her, hasn’t she?” He laughed one last time and hung up.

I let the phone drop to the floor. Jesus Christ Almighty. The Devil was all over me like the Black Death. He must have hacked into my e-mail program to have read my mother’s message. I looked around my sitting room suspiciously. Had he installed a camera? If so, what were the chances of me finding it? Even assuming I did, if I put it out of action that might provoke him to even worse horrors. He probably had my landline tapped and a scanner on my mobile, too. Why not go the whole hog? Had he put a transmitter on the Volvo? In my shoes?

Then I remembered what he’d said about Caroline. Did that prove he’d been Mr. White after all, or had he just been observing? Maybe an accomplice had told him about Caroline’s screaming fit.

I put my head between my knees. None of that was important now. The bastard was on his way to kill someone else, that much was obvious. What I had no way of knowing was who that person was. Even if I’d taken Lucy, Caroline, Fran and Sara to the police for protection and admitted everything I knew, there would be no way they could stop the murder of someone else.

For too long I’d luxuriated in the power of life and death over the characters in my novels. I’d never thought how it would feel to have such power over real people. But the White Devil had. If I was to stand any chance of playing his game, I needed to understand his callousness.

I didn’t know if my imagination could reach such depths of depravity.

“Thanks for being so flexible,” Karen Oaten said to the auburn-haired woman sitting opposite her-although she was of average height, her thinness made her seem taller than she was. They were in the cafe in the basement of a large bookshop on Gower Street. “I didn’t expect you’d be able to see me on a Saturday.”

“That’s all right. I work seven days a week. My partner, Shaz, is forever pestering me to take more breaks.” Lizzie Everhead smiled. “She’ll be pleased to know I’ve given in at last, Chief Inspector.”

That was a direct-enough statement of the academic’s sexuality to someone she’d only just met, Oaten thought. She’d been going to ask her to call her by her first name, but now she decided against it. Too much informality was never a good idea in a murder case, even if this angle was unlikely to pay off. What did she really imagine she was going to find out from this literally blue-stockinged lecturer?

“It’s pretty much a working break, isn’t it, Doctor?” she said, stirring sugar into her coffee. The literature expert was drinking hot water with a slice of lemon.

“Please, call me Lizzie.” The woman laughed. “I love what I do. This isn’t what I call work. Sitting on exam boards and the like is torture, but not this.” She tied her legs in knots, contriving to wrap her foot around her calf as well as crossing her knees. “So, how can I help…” She looked at Oaten’s card. “Karen?”

Oaten felt spots of red on her cheeks. She’d never felt completely at ease with lesbians, even though her own sex life had never been better than deeply average. There had been no shortage of opportunities for same-sex relationships at college, but she’d thrown herself into a series of hopeless affairs with married men and gormless students. For some years, her vibrator had been her only source of release. If only she had the time to find herself a decent man-even a half-decent one would do.

“Er, yes,” she said, coming back to herself. “I gather you’re an expert in Jacobean tragedy.”

“That’s right,” Lizzie Everhead said, inclining her head. She had unusually large eyes, the irises a deep blue shade. “Among other things. What do you need to know?”

Karen straightened her back. “I must warn you that the information I’m about to impart is highly confidential.”

“Ooh, how exciting!” said the doctor, rubbing her hands. She took in the look on the chief inspector’s face. “Sorry. Of course. I understand. I won’t tell anyone.” She smiled. “Not even Shaz.”

“I’ll be the one in trouble if the press gets wind of this, not you,” Oaten said. “As long as you understand that.”

The academic nodded and leaned closer. “Fire away.”

“Right.” The chief inspector lowered her voice. “I imagine you’ll have heard about the murders of the priest in Kilburn and the old lady in Chelmsford.”

Lizzie Everhead looked blank. “No, I don’t read the papers or listen to the news. Radio 3 is my cup of…” She glanced down at the table. “…hot water.” She saw how serious Oaten’s expression was. “Sorry. Tell me.”

So the D.C.I. did, leaving out only one detail. There was a strange kind of gratification in seeing the face of the distinguished scholar of violent tragedy go paler than a sheet when confronted with real-life violence.

“How utterly awful,” Lizzie said, taking an ironed handkerchief from her bag and dabbing her lips. “Unbelievable.”

“There’s more,” Karen said, and told her about the quotations that had been found in the bodies.

The academic sat back and fanned her face with the tissue. “I’m…I’m speechless. A very…a very unusual condition for me, I can tell you.” She drank from her cup and dabbed her lips again. “Lines from Webster’s White Devil? Hidden in the mouth and the…” She left the sentence unfinished. “I’m…I’m at a loss.”

Karen Oaten leaned even closer, her face more composed than it had been when she’d described the bodies. “Lizzie, you have to think. Is there any reason why the murderer would have left those particular lines from that particular play?”

Lizzie Everhead sat perfectly still for several minutes before she spoke. “Are you familiar with the concept of revenge, Karen?”

“I have run into it occasionally in my line of work,” Oaten replied dryly.

“No, I’m talking about revenge as in revenge tragedy. For the playwrights and audiences of the early seventeenth century, revenge wasn’t just a personal motivation or a way of restoring family honor. It was much more than that. It was a recasting of the traditional concept of justice, the Old Testament dictum of an eye for an eye and-”

“A tooth for a tooth,” Karen completed. “I remember that from religious studies at school.”

“Mmm,” Lizzie Everhead acknowledged. “You see, it was a time when people were beginning to doubt the old certainties. Bear in mind that a Catholic king, the Scottish James VI, had been foisted on England after the death of the Protestant Good Queen Bess. And James’s son Charles drove the country to division and ended up by paying with his head. So we can see in revenge tragedy the first shoots of revolutionary thinking-that the King is not all-powerful and that a different kind of justice, one more attuned to free-thinking human beings, might apply.”