The Death List (7 page)

The intruder let go of his chin and laughed. “And my name is?”

The priest licked his lips and reached for the bottle. It was knocked off the table in a swift movement, smashing on the flagstones. The smell rose up to taunt him.

“What did you do that for?”

The hand was on him again, this time tightening on his throat. “What’s my name, pederast?”

“Les…Leslie Dunn.”

The grip loosened.

“Is the correct answer, Father. You win tonight’s star prize.” His attacker’s face was close to his. “Ask me what it is, you pig.”

“Please, I’ll do anything…” He broke off as the pressure increased again. “Money…I’ve got…money.”

“Is that right, Father Bugger of Boys?” There was another empty laugh. “Well, that’s the one thing I don’t need. Ask me what you’ve won.”

“Ah…can’t…can’t breath…What…what have I won?”

He was pushed down onto the chair. Before the priest could resist, thick rope was being passed around his arms and upper body.

The face was up against his. He could smell mint on the breath of the altar boy he’d abused.

“You’ve won a first-class ticket on the midnight express to hell.”

The last thing Father Norman Prendegast saw was a shining silver knife moving to and fro in front of his eyes.

The last thing he felt was a lancing agony from behind.

Detective Chief Inspector Karen Oaten, promoted to the Metropolitan Police’s recently formed Violent Crimes Coordination Team in February, was standing in front of the altar of St. Bartholomew’s. She was in white coveralls and bootees, the SOCOs crawling around her like a pack of hounds.

“Come on, Taff,” she said, looking over her shoulder.

John Turner, wearing the same garb, came up the aisle slowly. His face was the same color as his protective suit. He had passed the inspector’s exams and moved with his boss.

“I’ll let you off,” Oaten said in a low voice. “This is a bad one, right enough.” The assistant commissioner responsible for the VCCT had made sure they got the case rather than the local division, and she’d arrived at the church just after one a.m. Even she had taken a deep breath when she saw what was on the altar.

The pathologist was still by the naked body. It was that of a flabby man in his fifties. He was lying on his chest over the altar, his legs and arms dangling down. A tall gold candlestick was on the ground, its top inserted between his buttocks.

“Who called it in?” the chief inspector asked.

“A Mrs. Brenda O’Grady,” Turner replied, looking at his notebook. “She lives in a tower block down the road. She was in here doing the cleaning earlier tonight. Before she went to bed, she saw that the lights were still on and came to check. That’s about all the sense I could get out of her. She saw the body.”

“Does she know who it is?”

“She reckons it’s the priest, Father Norman Prendegast, though she didn’t look at him for long.”

Karen Oaten nodded. “I’m not surprised.” She turned to the front. “Let’s go and see what the medic’s got.” She gave Turner a tight smile. “If you can handle it.”

He returned the smile slackly. “I can handle it, guv.” He owed Wild Oats plenty. She had insisted that he come with her to the Yard when she was singled out to join the new team. He still wasn’t sure why he was there. Maybe it was because he never questioned her authority. The other blokes in the Eastern Homicide Division had never come to terms with being told what to do by a woman.

They picked their way past the SOCOs.

“Anything interesting?” Oaten asked.

One of the technicians, a bearded man, looked up and shrugged. “There are plenty of different fibers. It’s too early to say if they’ll give you any help. No bloody footprints or anything else obvious, I’m afraid.”

They walked on up the steps to the altar. Other members of the team had already filmed and photographed the scene. The pathologist crouching down at the rear of the marble plinth was a short man with a protruding stomach whom they’d worked with before.

“Dr. Redrose,” the chief inspector said. “What have you got for us?”

“Cause of death, a single, nonserrated blade wound to the heart,” he said without looking up. “Delivered after the other wounds. I would hazard, none self-inflicted.”

“Time of death?”

“Provisionally, between nine and eleven p.m.”

“And the rest?”

“You know, Chief Inspector,” the pathologist said, “this is a first.”

“In what way?”

“In several ways. That’s why it’s so interesting.” Redrose got to his feet. “First of all, you’ve got the ornate candlestick in his rectal passage.” He inclined his head to the left. “If, as I suspect, that’s its twin, then around thirty centimeters of gold is up there.”

Turner pursed his lips. “Painful.” Although he’d played rugby union until he left Wales ten years before, he still found the results of violence hard to take.

The medic glanced at him. “Painful doesn’t even come close to describing what the poor devil went through.”

“We think he was the priest,” Oaten said.

“Ah. Sorry. The poor man of the cloth, then.” He bent down. “Next, there’s the eyes.” He lifted up the head. “Take a look at that.”

Turner steeled himself and went closer.

“Both removed with a sharp instrument,” Redrose said. “You see here? Optic nerves cleanly severed.”

“Where are they?” Oaten asked.

“Good question. They appear to have been taken as trophies, though you’ll have to wait for the autopsy for confirmation. They might have been rammed down the throat.”

“I see what you mean about it being a first,” the chief inspector said. “I’ve seen bodies in churches before and I’ve seen mutilations, but not both together.”

The pathologist stood up and gave them a triumphant grin. “I haven’t finished.” He lifted up the head again and pointed to the mouth.

“What is it?” Turner asked. “I can’t see anything.”

Karen Oaten leaned closer. “There’s something projecting from the teeth.” She raised a latex-covered finger. “See, Taff? It looks like a piece of paper in a clear plastic bag.”

“Precisely,” confirmed the medic.

“Can you get it out?” Oaten asked.

“You’ll have to wait for the—”

“Let me rephrase that.” She gave him a stony glare. “This is a particularly vicious murder. Time is of the essence if we’re going to catch the killer. Please remove that piece of evidence.”

“Very well, Chief Inspector. On your head be it.” Redrose took a retractor from his bag and used it to open the dead man’s jaws. A neatly folded square of paper about three centimeters across in the small bag fell onto the palm of Karen Oaten’s hand. “Well caught, madam.”

She ignored him, going over to the SOCO leader. “I need this opened and bagged,” she said.

A few minutes later she and Turner were looking at an unfolded piece of white copy paper in a clear evidence bag. A line of words had been laser-printed on it.

“‘What a mockery hath death made of thee,’” Oaten read aloud. She glanced at her sergeant. “What is that? The Bible?”

“Don’t ask me,” Turner replied, raising his shoulders. “I skipped chapel every time I could.”

“We’ll run it through the computer,” the chief inspector said. “All that stuff’s in digital form now.”

“Sounds like someone really had it in for this Father Prendegast,” Turner said.

Karen Oaten looked back at the mutilated body on the altar. “I think we already knew that, Taff,” she said, shaking her head at him slowly.

“Yeah,” he said, feeling his face begin to glow, “I suppose we did.”

The two heavily built men came over the ridge in the gloom, five meters between them. The last of the sun had disappeared into the clouds over the Atlantic and it was chilly on the moor—chilly enough for the hardiest walker to have headed back to the warmth of civilization hours ago. A damp wind was coming off the sea. Upland Devon was as unforgiving as ever.

“Anything, Rommel?” the man on the left said in a low voice.

“Fuck all, Geronimo,” his companion grunted, checking the luminous compass on his right wrist. “According to the coordinates you worked out, we should have found him by now.”

The first man looked around stealthily. He was wearing muddy camouflage fatigues. “To hell with this,” he said, drawing his combat knife from the sheath on his belt. “I’m not having him do us again.” The honed blade glinted in the light of the full moon that was rising in the east.

“Wolfe’s never been caught, Geronimo.” Rommel wiped moisture from his crew-cut hair. “Not by anyone.”

“There’s always a first time.”

“And it’s not tonight,” came a voice from behind them.

The two men spun on their heels. Rommel’s arm was grabbed and the knife chopped from it in a practiced karate move. He was jerked round to face Geronimo, a blade at his throat.

“Game over,” said the assailant with a dry laugh. He released his captive and pushed him forward. “Christ, guys, I could hear you coming a mile off.”

“Bollocks,” Geronimo said, twisting his lips beneath a drooping mustache. “We took all the necessary precautions.” He shone a torch on the ground between them.

Wolfe shrugged. “Okay, from five hundred meters, then.” He glanced down at his victim. “You all right?”

Rommel nodded. “Take more than that to break any of my bones,” he said, glaring at the taller man.

“Good. The Special Air Service is proud of you.” Wolfe slipped his knife back into its sheath. “Well, slightly.”

“Can we get back to the Land Rover now?” Geronimo asked.

Wolfe’s expression grew more serious. “You must be joking. We’re staying on the moor for another night. Don’t worry. It’s only a six-mile hike to the bivouac.”

The other two exchanged glances and then grinned.

“Better get going, then,” Rommel said, picking up his blade.

Wolfe nodded. “Good. I reckon you two are just about ready for our little jaunt to the big city.”

They took a bearing and started walking northeast.

“How did you do it?” Geronimo asked after several minutes of rapid movement over the sparsely covered plateau. “How did you creep up on us?”

There was a long silence as their leader sniffed the wind. “I used all my experience and fieldcraft.” He looked down a long valley, apparently sensing something in the dark. “And I had a purpose. You know that training ops like this are useless without a purpose.”

“And the purpose is to track down the bastard who you reckon did for one of us,” Rommel said.

“Correct. No one, repeat no one, fucks with an SAS sergeant, even if he’s retired like Wellington was. Whoever it was is going to die in agony.” Wolfe cocked an ear and raised his right arm. “They’re down by the stream. Two of them. They must have got separated from their little friends.”

Rommel and Geronimo drew closer.

“Exmoor pony for dinner again?” the latter asked, his voice level.

“Unless you’ve got a better idea,” Wolfe replied.

The three men whose combat names had been chosen from warriors of old moved silently down the track in search of prey, their eyes reflecting the moon’s cold light.

6

I looked at Sara, my lower jaw dropping. The five grand. What the hell was I going to tell her?

“I’m waiting, Matt,” she said, her eyes locked on me. Sara had a disconcerting way of going from very loving to dead serious in a split second.

“Ah, right.” I went over to the bed. “It’s…it’s money.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Very funny. Is it yours?” She glanced down. “There must be thousands here.”

“Um, five,” I said, racking my brains for a credible explanation. “Five thousand.”

“Five thousand pounds in cash?” Sara picked up one of the bundles and sniffed it. “What did you do? Rob a bank?”

“No, of course not. It’s…it’s a down payment.”

“On what?”

I had it. “Actually,” I said, sitting down beside her, “it’s a bit embarrassing.”

“Don’t worry,” she said with a laugh. “I love embarrassment.”

“Bloody journalists,” I said, receiving an elbow in my ribs. “Ow. Bastard journalists.” I gave her a playful push.

“I’m waiting,” she said, her expression serious again.

I looked her in the eye. I’d read how FBI agents were trained to do that, how it put them in a position of strength. “Well, I’ve been asked to ghostwrite the autobiography of a gangland enforcer.” I’d also read somewhere that, if you’re going to lie, you should keep as close to the truth as you can.

Sara seemed to have bought it. “Who?”

“I can’t tell you that. I’ve been sworn to secrecy until the book’s finished.” I clenched my fists and raised them. “And you don’t want to mess with this guy, know ‘wot’ I mean?”

A smile spread across her lips. “I might be prepared to pay for the information,” she said, sliding a hand across my thigh. “Up front, know ‘wot’ I mean?”

“That is an atrocious attempt at Cockney.”

She slapped my leg. “And yours was better?”

I started to collect the bundles.

“He paid you in cash?” she said, looking dubious again. “Did you sign a contract?”

“No. His is a cash business, innit?”

“All right,” she said, after giving it some thought. “I won’t tell the Inland Revenue.” She grabbed my wrist. “But I want first option on any juicy bits, okay? The paper will pay well.”

“I’ll see,” I said noncommittally. “That’ll be up to the man himself.”

Sara watched as I put the money in a holdall. “You’d better bank that tomorrow,” she said, stretching her arms behind her head. “You know how unsafe this place is. You haven’t even got an alarm.”

I nodded. I knew only too well how unsafe my flat was. And how unsafe Lucy and Caroline were in our former family home. But the sight of the woman I loved waiting to be undressed on my bed drove away the fears. I brushed away the realization that my sparring with the lunatic and the disposal of Happy had aroused me, too. I didn’t know what that said about my psychological condition.

Afterward Sara fell asleep quickly—she’d been away on assignments a lot recently. That left me on my own and anxiety gripped me again. What was I going to do about the White Devil? I wrestled with the problem for a long time.