As I walked back to the main road, I wished I had Dave with me. He’d been in the SAS. He could kill a man with his bare hands, as he’d frequently told us. Even the Devil would be scared of him. Then I remembered that my adversary had already dealt with two hundred and thirty pounds of American beef. Christ, Andy. Where was he?
I looked at my list. The next property was on Leadenhall Street in the City. I headed there.
The White Devil looked in the mirror. The two bound bodies in the back of the van were motionless and silent now. The big man had been groaning, but he’d stopped when Corky belted him about the head again. The other shrouded form had been motionless for more than two hours. The injection wouldn’t wear off for at least another one. By that time the Devil would be close to his goal-and Matt Wells would be facing the ultimate test.
His accomplice squeezed between the seats. Corky’s breath was rank, a mixture of roll-ups and dirty teeth. The Devil could remember the stink, not quite as strong, from when they were kids. But now Nicholas Cork’s face was covered in a salt-and-pepper beard. He’d traced him a year back, then found a down-and-out with the same build and smashed his head in before leaving the body on the rocks in Cornwall with ID suggesting he was Corky. That would have kept the cops guessing-or rather, fumbling around without a clue.
They both leaned forward as the van coasted to a stop. The Devil owned a shop in Brondesbury Road with a flat above it. He rented the place to a Pakistani family via an agency. There were lights on upstairs and he knew that would attract Wells’s friend. They could have taken him in East Finchley, but it had been more fun to get Matt himself up there. Seeing his mother like that would have put the shits up him, as would their daring escape.
The Devil looked down at the portable screen beneath the glove compartment. Someone was using a mobile phone across the road from his property.
“Got him,” Corky said. “He’s behind that tree on the opposite side of the road.”
The Devil drove past and then took the first right turn. He circled round until they were approaching the main road from the rear. The hunched form of Matt Wells’s friend was just ahead of them. He slowed and then stopped, checking they were alone.
“Oy, mate?” Corky shouted. “Any idea how to get to Belsize Road?”
The man watching the shop turned and walked toward the van. He was a lot shorter than the American, though he was solid enough-like all the rugby-playing fools.
He leaned in the open window. “You need to turn-”
The sentence was never finished. Corky slammed his head into the roof, and then, when it dropped, the Devil brought his short steel bar down on the top of the cranium. Roger van Zandt slumped unconscious as Corky held on to him. In a few seconds, the Devil had gone round, grabbed their victim and dragged him to the back of the van. Under a minute later, he was driving toward the city center, while Corky tied up captive number three next to the motorbike.
“Turn off his phone,” the Devil ordered. He was tempted to call Matt Wells on it, but he didn’t want to risk that. There was always the possibility that he’d invested in a scanner and was monitoring his friends’ mobiles. Besides, they were about to move to the next stage. It had been easy nailing the first three, as he’d known where to find them. For the rest, they’d be using a different strategy. Matt Wells was smarter than he’d thought. By getting himself a new phone, he’d put himself temporarily out of the Devil’s reach. But not for long. He wouldn’t be able to resist the bait that was being prepared for him.
He’d be seeking revenge. That made the Devil smile. What would mankind be without the lust for vengeance? Nothing better than the animals. No animal was driven by the desire for revenge, whatever Herman Melville thought about the great white whale. Revenge was what distinguished man from lower beasts. Revenge was mankind’s most salient feature.
The Devil laughed as he turned on to the Marylebone Road.
He was pleased to see that Corky jerked backward apprehensively.
I’d been watching the building in Leadenhall Street for ten minutes. It was a small foreign bank a hundred yards away from the Lloyd’s of London Building. There were lights on all the way up to the fourth and top floor, but I found it unlikely that the Devil was there. There were cleaners moving around on all the floors, and a few eager-to-please employees were still at their desks. It was pretty clear that he’d rented the place out.
My phone vibrated in my pocket.
“Matt, thank God I got you.”
“What is it, Boney?” I asked, concerned by his fraught tone.
“It’s Rog. Now he’s not answering his phone.”
“Shit.” I lashed out at the base of the streetlamp with my foot and felt a sharp pain. “The mad bastard.” The net was closing around us. I tried to think clearly. How many accomplices did the Devil have? Had he set people on all of us, or did he have some kind of top-of-the-range tracking equipment? He was certainly wealthy enough.
“Matt?”
“Yeah, hang on, I’m thinking.” Peter Satterthwaite should have been outside my tormentor’s loop since he was a late arrival at our party. As for Dave, he had a new phone. Maybe the three of us were still undetected. But what about Ginny? Christ, that was the thought that had eluded me earlier. What if the bastard had put a bug on Dave’s four by four? “Boney, how many properties have we still to check? Leadenhall Street’s a no go.”
There was a brief silence. “That leaves seven. There’s one on Dave’s list, one on mine and one on yours. The last I heard from Rog, he was outside a shop in Brondesbury Road. He didn’t think it was interesting, but he was going to hang on a bit to be sure. He had two more. And there were two more on Andy’s list.”
“Seven? Bloody hell. Okay, I’ll do my last one, that converted brewery near Tower Bridge. You do yours, and then get over there to pick me up.”
“What about Dave?”
“I’ll get him to drive there, too. Assuming those three are all clear, we’ll check out the ones Andy and Rog didn’t manage.”
I broke the connection and called Dave.
“Matt, thank Christ. There’s something funny going on with Ginny. No one’s answering their phones-not her or either of my kids.”
My stomach twisted like an oyster suddenly drenched in lemon juice. Lucy. She didn’t have a mobile. Had the bastard caught up with them?
“Wellsy?” Dave said desperately. “We’ve got to tell the police. The children…”
“Tell them what?” I countered. “You said they were in an out-of-the-way place. Did you always get a phone signal there?”
“No,” he admitted with a rush of breath. “No, you’re right. But she should be on her way by now. There’s no answer on the landline and she should be back in the network.”
“Let’s give it a bit more time,” I said, struggling to beat back the onrush of panic. I told him where to meet me when he’d done his last place.
After I rang off, I drove to the Royal Brewery in Bermondsey. On my earlier abandoned visit, it had looked a much more impressive property than any of the others apart from the bank. Did that mean it was more likely to have been used as a base by the Devil?
I tried not to envisage the horrors that might be waiting for me there.
Karen Oaten stood outside a semidetached house in Neasden. A team of uniformed officers was searching the place, overseen by John Turner. The elderly residents were less than impressed. It wasn’t long before her subordinate reported to her.
“This is a waste of time, guv,” he said, shaking his head. “They don’t have any idea what we’re on about and there’s no sign of any criminal activity. They rent the place through an estate agent and they’ve never met the owner.”
“The place is on that list Pavlou got from the council’s database,” she said lamely. “We have to check all the places that Lawrence Montgomery owns.”
“How many have you got on that list now?”