I said goodbye to Lucy and watched her get into line in the playground. When all the kids were inside, I headed back to Caroline’s to pick up my car. And to talk to Mrs. Stewart. I wasn’t looking forward to that, but I forced myself to come up with an approach that wouldn’t raise her suspicions.
I saw her sitting in her front window as I approached. She turned and gave me a disapproving look, her eyebrows rising in surprise as I opened her gate and went to her door. There was the sound of several locks turning and bolts being undone.
“Good morning, Mrs. Stewart,” I said cheerfully.
I could see she was struggling with how to address me. She knew only my first name and she obviously wasn’t keen on using that.
“Lucy’s father,” she said at last. “Can I help you?”
“Matt,” I said, unable to resist rubbing her nose in it.
She didn’t respond and she didn’t invite me in.
“Mrs. Stewart,” I said, “I hope you can help me. I was wondering if you’d noticed a man with a camera in Ruskin Park. He’d have been there several times over the past few weeks.”
She peered at me through thick, pink-rimmed glasses. “A man with a camera?” She thought about it, and then looked at me suspiciously. “Why do you want to know?”
I smiled in what I hoped was a suitably fatuous way. “Well, I’ve got this friend, Steve Jones is his name, and we had a bet.” I saw her lips tighten. Either she recognized the name of the Sex Pistols’ guitarist or she frowned on gambling. I guessed the latter. “He’s a keen birdwatcher, you see, and he’s been taking pictures of what Ruskin Park has to offer in the avian line. Anyway, I thought he was pulling my leg-I mean, why come here when there are so many larger parks in London? So he bet me that he was telling the truth and that he’s so good at standing behind trees that I would never even see him. And I haven’t.” I smiled at her ingratiatingly. “But I was thinking, if you had, I could still win the bet. I mean, if you could tell me, if you saw him, of course, which trees he was hiding behind…”
I could tell she wasn’t convinced by my story, but she wasn’t able to stop herself showing off how observant she was.
“As a matter of fact, I have seen a man.”
I felt my stomach clench.
“I don’t remember where he was exactly, but I saw him at least three times.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “In fact, I thought about calling the police in case he was a stalker or a child molester. But I watched him through my binoculars. He never stayed long, just a few minutes in the morning and a few more in the late afternoon.”
“Can you describe him?” I asked. “Just so I can be sure it’s my friend.”
“‘Nondescript’ is the best I can do,” the old woman said, nodding as if that was how she’d expect any friend of mine to look. “He always wore a black coat and a woolen cap pulled low over his forehead. And, yes, he did have a camera.”
“What kind of size was he?”
“Medium height, I would say. At best.”
“Yes, that sounds like Steve,” I said lamely. “Mrs. Stewart, you remember when I was round at our…at Caroline’s house in the middle of the day earlier this week?”
“The day Happy went missing,” she said, her eyes narrowing.
I nodded. “Did you happen to see him then?”
She shook her head. “No, I didn’t.” She started to close the door. “I was watching you and wondering what you were doing.”
I gave her my story about shifting books. It didn’t look like she was too convinced.
“Good day to you,” she said, closing the door in my face.
I stood outside the black wooden panels and wondered exactly what she’d seen. Did she think I’d loaded Happy into the Volvo?
I walked away. All I’d learned was that the Devil, or someone working for him, had been in the park-something I already knew from the photograph. And that he-or his sidekick-wasn’t very tall. Big deal. All I’d really done was make Mrs. Stewart suspicious, and perhaps draw her to the bastard’s attention.
Too bad, I thought as I went back to the Volvo. I had other things on my mind.
In particular, the contents of the next e-mail attachment that I was sure was waiting for me back home.
8
The man was standing at the window of his penthouse. Today the river looked even grayer than usual. It was amazing that salmon and other fish survived in that murk, he thought. In the past it had been much worse, though. He remembered the bodies floating downstream and being picked up by scavengers in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Back then, the Thames wasn’t grey-it was dark brown with the untreated sewage that poured into it twenty-four hours a day. But in John Webster’s time it had been better-there were millions fewer people living in London in the early seventeenth century. And yet, the filth that culminated in the Great Plague must have been disgusting. The river had always been a sewer, from the time the Romans built the first city. The river was an open drain and human beings were animals. He knew that better than anyone.
The White Devil thought about the notes he’d sent the writer that morning. He couldn’t have said that they’d disturbed him. Nothing disturbed him anymore. He was immune, driven, dedicated only to his purpose. But he’d felt stirrings of something as he put the facts down. Not remorse or anything as feeble as that. Not even hate, though there had been enough of that in the past. It took him some time to identify the emotion, but he finally got it. Pride. He was proud of what he’d done, just as he’d been proud of what he’d done to his father. People like that deserved to die, they deserved to die in agony. They had done, and soon others would be going the same way.
It was why he’d been put on the surface of the earth.
“Les Dunn, Les Dunn. Les ’as done it again! Les ’as done it again! Pissed ’is pants. Crapped ’isself.”
The words burned into him, even though they weren’t true. Richard Brady had always picked on him, from the first day in Primary One. He was big, red-faced, and he had a mouth on him. His father was a lorry driver who brought him sweets and other things he stole from his loads. Richard Brady didn’t even have to nick from the shops on the Roman Road like the rest of them. He came to school with his pockets full.
It was the last year of primary school now.
“Oy, Les! ’Ave you done doing it?”
The crowd of arse-lickers around Brady sniggered. When Les didn’t answer, the bully walked quickly over to him.
“I didn’t hear what you said,” Brady yelled, cupping his ear.
Les felt himself start shaking, but he kept his lips together.
“Gone all quiet, ’ave we?” Brady grinned, and then grabbed Les’s balls. “Still can’t hear you.” He squeezed harder.
Les’s eyes were bulging. He took a deep breath and whispered two words. “You’re…dead.”
Brady leaned closer. “What?” Suddenly he was less sure of himself.
“I’m…going to…fuckin’…kill you.”
The bully took a step back, his face less crimson than usual. He looked round the crowd that had gathered. “Yeah, I think ’e’s done doing it,” he said, taking his hand away.
His cronies stared at him as he walked off, then started shouting at Les again. But he didn’t care. He knew he’d won. He’d discovered the power of words and how to wield it.
For the rest of that final term, Richard Brady kept his distance. He still joined in when the other boys made fun of Les, but he didn’t instigate the bullying. It was as if he’d seen a small dog’s teeth and lost the will to taunt it. He even waved at Les on the last day in the playground. He was moving to Watford in the summer holidays and he wouldn’t be seeing any of his primary schoolmates again.