“What are the police saying?” I asked after a long silence.
“Not much. The crime hacks reckon there’s more evidence, but the Met is keeping quiet about it.”
“The Met? What are they doing out in Essex?”
“Apparently the Violent Crime Coordination Team was called in.” She caught my gaze. “Because of some similarities with that priest murder in West Kilburn.”
Jesus. Was the Devil getting careless, or was he playing games with the police as well as me?
“Here it is,” Sara said. She’d turned the TV back on and was increasing the volume.
We listened as a woman reporter of Asian descent ran through the story. She had less to say than Sara, but at the end of her piece there was an excerpt from the police statement. The tough but attractive face of D.C.I. Karen Oaten, whom I’d seen filmed outside St. Bartholomew’s, came up on the screen.
“…and anyone who can pass on any information about this truly awful crime should not hesitate to contact us or any police station,” she said.
Sara had picked up her phone. She rang her colleague who was on duty and asked if anything was breaking. She listened, her eyes wide, and I tried to pick up what was being said.
“What is it?” I asked when she finished.
“I can’t believe this,” Sara said, taking another pull of wine. “During the autopsy, they found a small plastic bag in the victim’s…in her vagina. There was a piece of paper in it, with some words printed. The police aren’t saying what they were.”
I slumped down on the sofa. I didn’t know what the message was, but I was pretty sure where it came from.
John Webster’s The White Devil, unless I was very much mistaken.
Sara left in a cab for the paper. Her editor wanted the story updated before it went to press. Although I’d have preferred that she stayed, now I had the chance to think through what had happened. It wasn’t just the way the Devil had screwed with me. It wasn’t even the horrific death suffered by the former schoolteacher. No, what was really getting to me was the modus operandi. The cunning bastard. He’d suckered me again. Now I was potentially in even deeper shit. Because in the third Sir Tertius novel, The Revenger’s Comedy, I had described how a character had his right arm severed before his throat was cut.
I hadn’t meant the book to be the last of the series-in fact, I still had faint hopes of resurrecting my “dashing, desperately attractive detective” (as a female critic on the Internet had described him)-but I’d gradually lost interest in him and the period. Perhaps it was because of the levels of violence in the 1620s, or at least in my 1620s. I’d never exactly been a shrinking violet in that field. After The Silence of the Lambs and Patricia Cornwell’s lurid tales, the bar for fictional excess was raised high and that didn’t bother me. But Sir Tertius’s last adventure was worse than the others. It had taken him to Oxford, where he’d got caught up in a grotesque game of “kill the yokel” between the students of two colleges. The lead villain ended up being killed by a butcher, whose son had been torn apart by a specially trained pack of hunting hounds. Not only had the evil huntmaster’s arm been removed, horn still clasped in the fingers, but his private parts had been hacked off and a page from the Old Testament inserted in the cavity. The verses about “an eye for an eye” were on the page. I’d subsequently been verbally abused by a female crime writer at a conference who thought, like Sara, that I was using violence without justification.
My mobile rang. There was no number on the screen.
“What do you want?” I said tersely.
“Matt, Matt,” said the White Devil. “I’m ringing to satisfy your curiosity.”
“What about?” I asked, trying to disguise my interest.
“Did the good Sara fill you in on the murder?”
“Yes.”
“And has she heard about the calling card I left?”
I couldn’t hold myself back any longer. “You’re fucking sick,” I shouted. “Why did you kill the old woman, for Christ’s sake? No one deserves to die like that.”
“Oh, yes, they do,” he said, his voice steely. “People who sin have to pay the price, not only in the next world.”
I grabbed my notepad. “Did you know her, then?”
He gave a hollow laugh. “Don’t go on a fishing trip, Matt. I’ll tell you what I want you to know. The rest is for you to find out.”
I swallowed hard. “All right, what line of Webster’s did you use this time?”
“Very smart,” he said ironically. “Act 5, scene 6, lines 73 to 75."
I fumbled through my copy. “You sick bastard,” I said when I found the lines. “‘Gentle madam, Seem to consent, only persuade him teach the way to death; let him die first.’” I dropped the book. “The victim was one of your teachers, wasn’t she?”
“Bingo.”
I looked at the lines again. “But what’s the bit about letting him die first in aid of?”
“Didn’t you hear that the bitch had a brother?”
“No.”
“Well, she did. I discovered he’d been fucking her.” A cold, metallic laugh. “Not only that, he used to treat us kids like shit at the sports day every year. He paid for that. You see, her brother died in July 2003. He was electrocuted by a faulty plug when he switched on his lawn mower. Accidental death, according to the coroner.” He paused. “But it wasn’t an accident.”
“What?” I felt as if I’d just stepped off a cliff. “You mean…you mean you killed him?”
“I thank you, I thank you.” The humor left his voice. “Why are you surprised, Matt? You already know how seriously I take my work.”
“I can find you,” I said, forgetting the danger for a moment.
“Yes, you can go through the school registers and find out all the boys Miss One-Arm Merton taught. You can triangulate that list with the dates you work out from Father Bugger O’Connell, and you can start to track me down.” He gave what sounded like a hiss. “Go on, then, Matt. But you’d better hurry. The police are going to be after you soon, even if I don’t steer them toward your books.”
“I’m going to stop you.”
“Be my guest. But remember I can kill Lucy and Sara and your mother before you even get close. Have you got the balls?” He sniggered. “Good night, Mr. Fictional Crime Expert.”
He cut the connection.
I rammed the phone between the cushions of the sofa and let out a yell of frustration.
The blond-haired man was sitting in front of a bank of screens. Behind him, the lights from St. Katharine’s Dock across the river shone through the blinds he’d partially closed. He had a martini with a maraschino cherry floating in it on the desk beside him. Despite the air-conditioning, the smell of the Sobranie Black Russians that he’d been smoking since he came back from Chelmsford was strong. He sipped from the tall-stemmed glass, getting the familiar rush from the almost neat gin.
The White Devil touched the pad of the control panel and zoomed in on the scene in Matt Wells’s sitting room. Good. The writer was hammering away at the keyboard, no doubt writing up the chapter about the latest killing. Soon there would be a whole novel about his exploits, a veritable Book of Death. But Matt Wells wouldn’t get any profit from it.
He went over to the gold-plated stereo system and slotted in the CD he had shoplifted in the City after he’d got back from Chelmsford. The skills he’d acquired as a boy had never left him. Robert Johnson started singing “Me and the Devil Blues.” Humming along, he remembered what he’d done after he’d taken off the old bitch’s arm-the one that she’d used to slap him countless times, even though she wasn’t meant to. It was in his collection, along with the jar containing Father Bugger’s eyes.
The Devil laughed. He was death, he was hell, he was a demon far worse than any from the fervid imagination of Hieronymus Bosch. He was insuperable, Lucifer rising, the very breath of the Apocalypse-and Matt Wells was his minion.