The Death List by Paul Johnston Page A

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