The Death List (22 page)

“A vicious piece of shit who ruins people’s lives,” the masked man completed.

Drys watched as he opened a large leather bag and took out two things. The first was a blue cardboard folder, which he laid on the table. The second caused his armpits to be drenched with sweat. It was a large, stainless-steel chef’s knife.

“Wha—”

The man raised his hand.

Drys noticed that it was sheathed in latex. That made his heart beat even faster.

“Now, Mr. Renowned Literary Critic, I’m going to read some of your deathless prose out to you.” The man’s voice was curiously accentless, as if he’d been to too many elocution lessons. He gave another mirthless laugh. “This is a game, you see. The rules are simple. I read you three pieces. Then you tell me who the author in question is. All the pieces concern the same person. If you get it right, we’ll walk away. If you get it wrong, well—” he picked up the knife and angled it against the light “—you could do with losing some weight.”

Drys tried to speak, but found he couldn’t. This was madness. They couldn’t be serious. This sort of thing didn’t happen to people in his position. He felt a sudden need to empty his bladder. He managed to hold its contents in, but only just.

“Extract one,” said the man in the mask, opening the folder. “‘This novel is a farrago of unlikely plot twists, superficial characters and a completely unbelievable social milieu. The protagonist is one of the most unsympathetic, if not downright obnoxious, investigators to have appeared in recent times.’”

His breathing shallow, Drys tried to think. Over the years he’d written so many reviews, both stand-alones and shorter ones in the roundups, that he couldn’t possibly remember whose book these words applied to. He panicked and tried to wrench his hands out of their bonds. He saw the man in front of him nod to his companion. A rope came round his neck and was tightened. He felt his eyes spring wide open and his tongue swell in his mouth.

“Bad critic,” the man with the file said, the brown eyes behind the mask steady. “Don’t try that again. Let him breathe, Watson.”

The pressure loosened on Drys’s throat. He panted air into his lungs.

“Extract two. ‘The crime genre is replete with superbly realized private eyes and policemen. Who would willingly part with their money to grind through a tediously recounted investigation carried out by this grubby and bungling detective?’”

Another surge of panic gripped Drys. He struggled to think who that could have applied to. So many third-rate writers of crime fiction had been published, some of them unaccountably winning prizes and being feted by critics with less discrimination than he had. The words were vaguely familiar—he couldn’t have referred to too many heroes as “grubby”—but still he couldn’t place them. He stared beseechingly at his captor.

“Please, I—”

“Memory not up to scratch?” the masked man said mockingly. “Never mind. You’ve got one more chance.” He laid his fingers on the knife. “Before it’s time for me to start chopping.”

This time Drys couldn’t control himself. He sat with his face burning as warm liquid soaked his trousers.

“Bad, bad critic,” scolded his tormentor, shaking his head. “That’s an expensive piece of furniture, isn’t it?” He turned to the next page and started to read aloud. “‘This book is enough to make any right-thinking reader despair. The supposed hero is a dissolute rake who extracts sexual favors from his female clients in lieu of payment. The violence is crude and unjustified, and the historical references defective. Why do people write books like this?’”

Drys sat back in the rapidly cooling puddle he had made and tried to restrain a smile. He had remembered; he knew who the writer was. Thank God, he would soon be seeing the last of these imbeciles. Then a frightening thought struck him. What if the man behind the mask was the author himself? He kept his expression as composed as he could.

“Well, Mr. Esteemed Literary Arbiter?” asked the man, leaning forward.

“Matt Stone,” Drys said, his tone patronizing. “Now, will you kindly get out of my house?”

“Matt Stone,” mused the man in front of him, picking up the knife. “Very good, Mr. Drys.” He gave a disturbing laugh. “But not good enough. You see, Matt Stone is a pen name. I need the author’s real name. Sorry, didn’t I make that clear?”

Alexander Drys tried to scream, but a rag was stuffed into his mouth before any sound came out. He had no idea what Matt Stone’s real name was. He’d never concerned himself with the mainly talentless fools whose books he read. His eyes opened wide as he saw the man with the knife bend over his right hand. The other man was pulling hard on the rope round Drys’s neck, keeping his body upright. He felt unjustly done by. Was he really going to suffer for such an insignificant writer? There were others whose careers he had completely ruined, even one who had committed suicide.

“Matt
Wells
is his name,” the man said, looking at him with empty eyes. “Think about how hurtful your words were while I’m cutting.”

The critic felt the blade slice into his skin and prayed for mercy to the God he’d ignored all his life.

It didn’t come.

18

I didn’t have to wait for the evening news to find out what had happened to Alexander Drys. My mobile rang a quarter of an hour before I left to pick up Lucy.

“Matt.”

“What have you done, you bastard?” I yelled.

The Devil paused. “A little more caution, my friend.” His voice still friendly. “I know the police have been to see you. How do you know they haven’t got you under surveillance?”

I went to the front window. I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. “Look, you murdering maniac,” I said, lowering my voice. “Tell me what you did to Drys.”

“All right. First I cut off his hands—the ones that typed those nasty, unfair reviews of your books. Then I sliced out his tongue and inserted it in his rectum. After all, he’d been licking his rich friends’ arses for years. He was wriggling and squirming a lot then, so his head was beaten to a pulp with a ball-peen hammer. No more vicious thoughts from that perverted brain, eh, Matt?”

I’d collapsed onto the sofa as he recounted the horrors like a schoolboy proudly reciting a poem.

“Matt? Are you there? Don’t tell me you’re unhappy about that shitbag’s less-than-pleasant death. I know how much you hated him.”

How did he know? How long had he been bugging me? I’d ranted about Drys to Sara, but not recently. The poor bastard hadn’t even bothered to review my last novel.

“Matt? At least congratulate me on ridding the world of a literary bloodsucker.”

“You’re out of your mind,” I finally managed to say. “Why did you pick on him? He couldn’t have done anything to you.” Then I remembered what he’d said—hands, tongue, hammer to skull—and my stomach constricted even tighter. “Christ, that was what happened to one of the villains in the first Sir Tertius novel.”

“
The Italian Tragedy,
that’s right.” The Devil gave an easy laugh. “Hey, Matt, we’re friends, aren’t we? I’ve got to the end of my own death list, so now I’ve started on yours.”

My blood ran cold. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t play dumb. And don’t worry. You’ve got the perfect alibi. The police were round at your place when Drys got his.” He sniggered. “Of course, you could have hired someone to kill him.” He gave an even nastier laugh. “You could have hired me.” The line went dead.

I threw the phone down in despair. What did he mean by
my
death list? Jesus, was he going to wipe out everyone I’d ever expressed a negative feeling about? If that was the case, there were going to be a lot of dead people in the publishing business—editors, agents, publicity girls, marketing people, fellow novelists whose success I resented, booksellers who hadn’t chosen my books for their three-for-two promotions…

The Devil couldn’t be serious.

D.C.I. Karen Oaten and D.I. John Turner were standing in Alexander Drys’s drawing room. They were kitted out in white coveralls and bootees.

“Hell’s teeth,” the inspector said, looking away from the abomination on the chaise longue.

“Steady, Taff,” said his superior, bending over the naked dead man’s blood-spattered face. She glanced at the pathologist. “You say his tongue’s been removed. Has anything been inserted into the mouth?”

Redrose shook his head. “I expected that question. No, there’s no plastic bag with a line of poetry or whatever in it.”

“Nowhere about his person?”

“Nowhere. The only thing that’s been inserted is his tongue into his—”

“Yes, you mentioned that.” Oaten glanced at the white-faced Turner. “Any idea why?”

“I just collect the severed body parts,” the pathologist said, inclining his head toward the table where the critic’s severed hands lay in clear plastic bags. They were like grotesque ornaments, the palms downward and the fingers tensed like a piano player’s. “It’s for you people to work out what goes on in the monster’s mind.”

“Thanks a lot,” the chief inspector said ironically.

Redrose looked up at her. “All right, if you want my provisional opinion, it’s the same killer as in the previous three murders. The hands were removed with a modicum of expertise, but nothing to suggest that the perpetrator had medical or even butcher’s training. The tongue was pulled outward with what the marks on top and bottom suggest was a pair of pliers and cut off with a very sharp, nonserrated blade.” He turned to the smashed remains of the head. “As for the skull, it was shattered with a large number of blows from a relatively compact, rounded instrument—my guess is one of those hammers, what are they called?”

“Ball-peen,” Turner said, his eyes still averted.

“That’s the ticket,” the pathologist said approvingly. “Into DIY are we, Inspector? All right, here’s my psychological analysis, for what it’s worth. I’d say the hands being removed has an obvious link with the man’s job—he was a literary critic who wrote for a living, wasn’t he? The tongue in the rectal passage is a bit more obscure. Was he a sexual deviant?”

Oaten shrugged. “We haven’t got that far yet. The blows to the head that killed him interest me. The previous killings were carried out with what you described in your reports as ‘controlled brutality.’ So was this one, apart from the head. Why was it smashed up the way it was?”

“Maybe he was struggling with his assailant,” Turner suggested.

“No, the victim was restrained,” said the pathologist, pointing to rope burns on the stumps of the arms.

“So it was in cold blood,” the chief inspector said. She moved over to the lead SOCO. “Anything interesting?”

“Two people, like at the doctor’s. Looks like they changed their clothes on the landing after the murder. There are no traces, at least not so far, on the staircase or around the rear window where they gained access by cutting out a pane.”

“No sign of a plastic bag with a message?”

The man raised his shoulders and looked around the room. “Not yet. Then again, there are a lot of books in here.” The shelves that covered three of the walls rose to the ceiling and were all full.

Karen Oaten swung her gaze across the thousands of volumes. The SOCO team leader was smart. Even though there was no message in the body, it was possible, given the victim’s profession, that one had been left in a book. “Get one of your lot to run an eye over the books in here,” she said to the technician. “I’m particularly interested in anything by John Webster or Matt Stone.”

The SOCO nodded.

Oaten’s mobile rang. Her heart sank when she heard the commissioner’s less-than-dulcet tones. She brought him up to speed with the investigation.

“D.C.I. Oaten, I’ve been talking to the A.C.,” he said. “We feel you’re underresourced. D.C.I. Hardy’s team will be joining yours. You’ll retain operational command, but I don’t want any pissing about. Share what you know and cooperate with each other. This lunatic is making us look like incompetents. If there are more murders, it’ll be very hard to keep you in place.” The connection was cut.

The chief inspector stood staring at her phone. She had mixed feelings. Hardy’s people helping out would be useful, but she didn’t want that nicotine-stained tosser breathing down her neck. As for the threat of being kicked off the case, that only made her more determined to find the killers. Anyone who thought she was going to allow her career to be stalled by a pair of bloodthirsty savages—no doubt male—would find out how wrong they were. She was a woman in the Met. What she’d gone through to get where she was made catching these lunatics look like a pissing contest—and she’d won the last of those she’d undertaken by using a hand-operated pump to hit the ceiling during her leaving party from her previous job. There was something nagging her about her time in East London. Something—

“Guv?” John Turner was standing at the far end of the room. “The SOCOs are all snowed under. I’ll have a look for that wanker Wells’s, I mean, Stone’s, books myself.”

Oaten went over. “What have you got against him?” She’d found the novelist rather alluring, not that she’d let it show.

“I told you in the car,” he said, staring up at the rows of books. “There’s something wrong about him. He’s hiding things.”

The chief inspector laughed. “Everyone hides things from us, Taff. We’re coppers, remember?”

Turner wasn’t listening. “They’re in alphabetical order,” he said triumphantly. “This shouldn’t take long.” He went to the left-hand wall by the window. “Over here,” he said, beckoning to the photographer. “One of the books is sticking out.”

Oaten joined him and waited for the photos to be taken, blinking as the flash discharged. “
The Italian Tragedy.
That was his first book, as I remember.” She removed the hardback volume carefully and opened it. There was a press release inside proclaiming “the debut of an immense new talent in crimewriting.” She ran the pages past her latex-covered thumb. A flicker of red caught her eye. She went back to the page, her heart suddenly racing.

“Spot on, Taff,” she said in a low voice. “There’s a bit underlined in red. ‘Of all deaths, the violent death is best,’” she read. Then she took in the preceding passage. “Our friend Wells has his investigator Sir Tertius talking to an actor, who quotes that line from a Webster play.” She looked up at her subordinate. “Guess which one.
The White Devil.
”