Paul Johnson - The Death List
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- Название:The Death List
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As usual she crossed Southwark Bridge, looking toward the preposterous shape of Tower Bridge and feeling completely at ease with the world. She was at the hub of world business, her expertise giving her power and influence that very few people had. No wonder Matt hadn’t been able to understand her after she went into the City. What did he know about power and influence? He’d once claimed that he had the power of life and death over the characters in his novels, but Caroline knew that was nothing compared to daily meetings with international financiers who wanted to hear your point of view. Fiction was a waste of time. She only ever read books on economics and history.
And yet, she thought as she walked along the riverbank past Shakespeare’s Globe, there had always been something different about Matt. She had fallen head over heels in love with him at university. She could scarcely believe it when the hero of the rugby league team paid attention to a bluestocking virgin. And she’d continued to love him when Lucy, beautiful Lucy, was born and his books began to make him relatively well known.
Caroline watched as a balloon floated away high above the river. Their relationship had begun to change when Matt got himself so involved with that ridiculous Albanian series. Everyone he knew told him it would end in tears, but he wouldn’t listen. Her mother told her that you had to allow the people you loved to make their own mistakes, that was part of life. Maybe, but the problem was that, by then, she had begun to fall out of love with Matt. There was no other man. She had neither the time nor the inclination for that. All she felt was boredom with his ranting and his deluded self-importance-as if anyone really cared what a crime novelist thought about anything.
Ah, Matt, she thought, approaching a bench. There was a man in overalls and a baseball cap pulled low sitting at the far end. It was still good to see her former husband with Lucy every day, even though she found it hard to give him more than a few civil words. And he had appeared to be happier. The woman, Sara, seemed to be good for him, even if she did have a curious glint in her eyes-the typical grasping look of the newshound. But in the past few days he’d been strange, nervous, as if he was hiding something. He’d have to get a grip on himself if he didn’t want what remained of his writing career to disappear downstream like the empty soft drink cans in the Thames.
She moved into the center of the bench as another man came to sit down. He was wearing a puffer jacket that was surely far too hot for the day, the hood of a gray sweatshirt over his head. If it hadn’t been for the wispy mustache, she’d have taken him for a girl.
Caroline started to eat one of her organic cheddar sandwiches. She watched tourists laughing as they took photos of one another and found herself thinking about her life. How happy was she really? She had a job she loved, a child she adored, and yet, there was something missing. She’d been thinking about it a lot recently. Perhaps the neighbors’ dog disappearing and the effect that was having on Shami and Jack was the reason. She knew the absence of a man wasn’t the problem. She could bed any of the young lions in the company without doing more than winking at them, but the fact was, she didn’t miss sex. It had been good with Matt. Apart from Lucy, that was one of the main reasons she had stuck with him as long as she had. No, what she had realized was missing was adventure, the unexpected, a sudden break from the rhythms of everyday life.
She shook her head and told herself not to be so flighty. She had work to do and her lunch break was almost over. It was when she was crumpling up her sandwich bag that she saw the man on her right lean forward and look intensely at the other guy to her left.
It was almost as if he was giving the hooded man some kind of signal.
The White Devil took a step back from the blindfolded and gagged captive tied to the chair. He smiled at the masked figure behind, who gave him a blank look in return. He would have to be careful with his partner. He hadn’t expected such devotion to violence and the act of killing so suddenly. That could lead to a dangerous lack of caution.
The Devil glanced around the lock-up garage. It was in Deptford, in a lane that was overlooked by the high rear wall of a Victorian factory-that property was listed for demolition and no one except junkies and half-blind drunks had set foot in it for years. It was good for privacy, as was the fact that the people who used the other garages shared his studied lack of concern about what went on in the vicinity.
It had been easy enough to snatch their latest victim. No one had noticed the transfer to the battered white van that now took up half of the space-the garage was a double one, the wall having been knocked through. There was plenty of room for the upcoming fun and games.
The person on the chair let out a high-pitched moan. The Devil moved over quickly and delivered a hard slap to the left cheek.
“Be quiet, you piece of shit,” he said, bending closer. “Noise means pain, you understand?”
The trembling captive nodded slowly.
“That’s all it needs,” the Devil said to his partner. “Now you try.” He watched as the masked figure gave the prisoner a full-blooded punch that almost knocked the chair over. “Good,” he said, smiling. “Looks like you aren’t fond of this one.”
“No, I’m not.”
The Devil stepped back and started laying out his tools on the workbench. Maybe he’d made the right decision in locating his partner after all. Being confronted by the realities of murder had seemed initially to knock the stomach from the figure in the mask. He hoped that the procedure they were about to undertake-his most ambitious yet-would be the making of his Dr. Watson. It had better be. After all, he wasn’t in this purely for himself.
As he fingered the glinting steel instruments, he thought of what he’d achieved so far. The murder of that bastard Newton from the bank in Hackney had been a trial run. At that stage, he wasn’t sure himself that he could carry out what he wanted to. He hadn’t taken his partner on that excursion, nor on those of the priest or the old bitch who used to teach him. But when the Devil saw that all was going to plan, it had been safe to appear as a double act at the doctor’s and the fat critic’s.
He scowled and put the scalpel down carefully on the table. Everything had been fine until this morning, when the writer had started to fight back and the body parts had been found outside the Hereward. Could there be a connection? The Devil originally hadn’t been sure that Matt Wells had it in him, for all the macho posturing he showed at bookshop events and literary festivals. Most writers were nothing more than drunks who propped up the nearest bar they could find and boasted about their sales, always inflating them, and their film deals, which hardly ever made it to any screen. They were liars and hypocrites, every last one of them.
But Matt Wells had actually had the nerve to stand up to him. He’d sent that American muscleman to protect Christian Fels. The Devil had been so enraged about being deflected from his plan for the agent that he had taken it out on the innocent gardener. His partner hadn’t turned away at the sound of the neck cracking. It was the first time the Devil had killed in that way. Jimmy Tanner had trained him well. It was a pity the former SAS guy had become so unreliable from the booze. He lay in the foundations of a bridge outside Bromley, silenced forever after the insertion of a combat knife between his fifth and sixth ribs. That had been as good an end to the Devil’s apprenticeship as he could have thought of, as well as being an appropriate death for a man who had been a state-sponsored assassin. Was it possible that someone-Matt Wells? — had found out about his meetings with Tanner? Even if he had, the Devil and his partner would kill everyone on the expanded death list before he could locate them.
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