The Death List by Paul Johnston

stop himself.
    “Shoosh!” said the elderly librarian, the one with her gray hair in a ponytail. She’d taken the boy under her wing and looked very disappointed by his outburst.
     
    “Who’s John Webster?” Karen Oaten asked. She was sitting at her desk in the glass-partitioned office on the eighth floor of New Scotland Yard.
    John Turner looked at his notebook. “He wrote plays, apparently. He was born around 1578 and he died around 1630. Here.”
    The chief inspector looked around. “What, in the Yard?”
    “In London,” Turner said, unamused. He’d spent the previous evening reading through the Penguin Classics volume of Jacobean tragedies. It was the first Penguin Classic he’d ever bought and he’d be charging it to expenses. “He was famous for two plays— The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil. ”
    “Tell me the line in the victim’s mouth was from the first one.”
    Turner shook his head. “Sorry, guv. ‘What a mockery hath death made of thee’ is line 125 from act 5, scene 4 of The White Devil. ”
    “Bollocks,” Oaten exclaimed. “That’s just what we need. A Satanist killing priests. The papers are already having a feeding frenzy.” She indicated the pile of newsprint that she’d dumped on the floor next to her desk.
    “Priests?” Turner said. “We’ve only got one.”
    “So far.” The chief inspector leaned back in her chair. She was wearing one of the well-cut gray trouser suits she’d taken to since her promotion. “All right, what’s the story of this play?”
    Turner sat down opposite her and gave her a résumé of the action.
    “So what you’re saying is that a bunch of aristocrats go around slaughtering one another to get their own back?”
    “Basically, yes, guv.”
    She ran her hand across her hair. “Is that what this is about? Revenge?”
    Turner looked dubious. “Could be, I suppose.”
    “And who’s the White Devil?”
    “I’m a bit confused about that. There isn’t a character with that name. According to the notes, White Devils are evil disguised, or hypocrites. So just about all the characters are White Devils.”
    Oaten gave him a frustrated look. “Is there a priest?”
    “Yes, there is, actually. Monticelso. Well, he’s a cardinal. And he ends up pope.”
    “Does he get murdered?” she asked hopefully.
    Turner shrugged. “Sorry, he doesn’t, guv.”
    The chief inspector held her hand out. “I’d better read the thing myself,” she said. “What did you do at college, Taff?”
    “What college?”
    “Ah, sorry. I did sports science, so this is all going to be over my head, too.”
    Turner was aware that Wild Oats had been a sportswoman. The word in the Eastern Homicide Division was that she’d played hockey for the England second team and that she’d been a useful high jumper. There had been plenty of belly laughs about that when she wasn’t around. “You were a sportswoman, guv. Why did you join the force?” He fully expected to be told where to stick his question.
    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