Instead, Oaten put down the book he’d handed her and chewed her bottom lip. “Because I like discipline, Taff. That’s what I got from sport. I get it in the Met, too. Not the army-style rubbish that we did at the college in Hendon-marching up and down like a bunch of moronic squaddies. I mean the discipline of an investigation. Putting everything together in a logical fashion and catching the villain.”
“And you reckon that reading a seventeenth-century play will help us catch this lunatic?”
Oaten sighed. “I’ll take any help I can get.” She looked down at the files that covered her desk. “The SOCOs haven’t come up with anything that looks much good. No unusual clothing fibers, no blood apart from the victim’s, thousands of fingerprints in the church-but you can be pretty sure our killer’s aren’t among them since the candlestick was clean. He had gloves on throughout, obviously. The autopsy confirmed Redrose’s preliminary conclusions, and there was no sign of the eyes anywhere. The people who attended St. Bartholomew’s haven’t got a bad word to say about Father Prendegast. Now that he’s dead, at least. But we got the feeling some of them didn’t like him much, didn’t we? He doesn’t seem to have had any relatives or close friends. Devoted to the children of God, as Mrs. O’Grady said.” She glanced up at him. “Are we getting anywhere with his previous…what’s the word? Incumbency.”
Turner laughed. “You mean his last job?” The laugh died when he saw the look on her face. “Well, he was in Ireland, in some kind of monastery.”
“And before that?”
“Simmons and Pavlou are checking.”
“Put rockets up their arses, will you?” Oaten turned back to her papers.
“Guv?” the inspector said nervously. “Do you think we’ve got a serial?”
The chief inspector raised her head wearily. “Do I think we’ve got a serial? Applying the discipline of the investigation, no, I don’t. There isn’t any evidence suggesting that. The experts told me the MO doesn’t match any known pattern.” She pursed her lips. “Applying my gut feeling, I’ll put my pension on there being more killings, Taff. There will have been previous ones, too. No one carries out this kind of carefully planned and executed-excuse the pun-activity without having been there before.” She bent her head again.
John Turner walked out of her office with a heavy heart. He had the feeling he wasn’t going to be seeing Naomi and the kids much in the coming weeks. At least he didn’t have to read any more old plays. What was the line he’d copied down? “See the corrupted use some make of books.”
Dead right. He was glad he’d never made it past A levels.
9
I pushed my chair back from the desk. My armpits were drenched and my stomach was in turmoil. The lunatic. He’d murdered the boy who’d bullied him at primary school. Not only that. At the age of twelve, he’d planned and carried out the killing with what seemed like a total lack of emotion. This guy could have had a great career as a hit man. Jesus, maybe that’s what he was.
Thinking more about the text he’d sent me, I realized I could make it into a convincing narrative without too much difficulty. Not because it would be based on real life-I was convinced the murder had actually happened and didn’t see the need of wasting time searching newspaper archives, especially when I didn’t know the year it took place or whether the name Richard Brady was real-but because I found myself empathizing with the Devil. He’d suffered years of violence from his father, so he killed him. He’d been ridiculed and physically assaulted by the bully, so he hung him from a tree. He’d been abused by the priest, so he slaughtered him in his own church. And his adoption of the White Devil as an alias suggested that, like the Jacobean playwrights, he was obsessed with revenge. That was something I could relate to, not that it made me feel proud of myself.
Ever since I’d been cut loose by my publishers and my agent, resentment had been festering in me. In the early days after my double rejection, I’d come up with numerous schemes to get my own back-by pouring paint stripper over my agent Christian Fels’s beloved vintage Bugatti, by sending an envelope full of shit to my editor Jeanie Young-Burke, by bad-mouthing them to everyone I knew, by showing up at other authors’ launch parties and dousing with beer the critics like Alexander Drys and Lizzie Everhead, who’d knifed me. In the event, all I’d managed was the article in the newspaper bitching about the callousness of modern publishing. The following day, a crime writer who’d never liked me much sent an e-mail consisting of two words: Sad git.
Vengeance, retribution, the avenging angel-there was something attractive about those ideas, something that seemed right. Perhaps because the Old Testament concept of an eye for an eye underpinned our concepts of justice, of crime and punishment, but perhaps also because revenging yourself on someone was an ethical act. An injustice had been perpetrated and there was nothing inappropriate about exacting due recompense. Everyone had heard of the wronged wives who cut up their husband’s Savile Row suits, buried their CD collections or broadcast tapes in the local pub of the adulterers cavorting with their lovers. They became popular heroines, women who’d taken a deserved pound of flesh. The desire for vengeance was hardwired into the human psyche. The question was, how far did you take it? How many laws were you prepared to break? In my case, the answer to the second question was a pathetic none. The Devil was clearly situated at the opposite end of the scale.
But that didn’t mean the emotions I felt were any less strong. I didn’t want to kill Christian or Jeanie, but I’d happily have humiliated them or made them weep. How different was I from my tormentor? I thought of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-two sides of the same man, the evil “hidden” beneath the good. Or Joseph Conrad’s “secret sharer”-the doppelganger, a reflection of yourself that you struggle to come to terms with. Was that why the Devil had chosen me? Was he so smart? Nothing he’d done up till now contradicted such a conclusion. He’d read my books-Sir Tertius in the violent stew of a London enthused by revenge tragedy, Zog Hadzhi in the vendetta-stricken badlands of Albania. He’d also read my article. The bastard knew me better than I did myself. He may even have understood my fascination with revenge before I found myself in the position of wanting it.
Sickened by the realization that I was driven by the same urges as the murderer, I hammered out a couple of thousand words about the death of the bully. When I reread it, I saw that I’d given the narrator/murderer, Wayne Deakins, a psychological profile based as much on my own as on the one I’d inferred the Devil possessed. Bloody hell. He was pulling my strings as if I were a marionette.
By three o’clock in the afternoon, I’d had enough. I walked down to the village and went into the newsagent’s, planning to read the paper while I was waiting for Lucy. I couldn’t miss the tabloid headlines. Dead Priest Was Pedophile, Shame of Church Cover-Up, Murder Victim Was Pervert. I bought a selection of tabloids and broadsheets, and found a bench in Dulwich Park.
The consensus was that the Catholic Church had spirited Father Prendegast away from his church in the East End of London in May 1979, when complaints were made about his conduct by some altar and choirboys. He’d been sent to a remote monastery in western Ireland and given a new identity. The Church had taken out injunctions against all the papers, threatening to sue if the dead man’s former name was published. Its line was that the boys and their families needed to be protected from “unwanted intrusion into their privacy.” The tabloids weren’t cowed any longer. They’d gone ahead and printed the priest’s real name of Patrick O’Connell and the name of his church-St. Peter’s in Bonner Street. They also had interviews, no doubt paid for, with two boys, now in their late thirties, who claimed that Father Pat, as he’d encouraged them to call him, had fondled them, taken off their clothes and submitted them to repeated sexual abuse. They expressed horror that he’d been given a new identity and another job by the Church. The archbishop wasn’t commenting, and neither were the police. They were the only ones who’d shut up shop. Everyone from MPs to Anglican bishops had got in on the act, condemning the Catholic Church and demanding that it put its house in order. Lawyers, no doubt in private rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of juicy compensation cases, were also to the fore.