Ten…nine…On three, he tossed one of the bricks he’d brought to the left. On one, he went round the right-hand side of the tree. Brady was on all fours, looking in the opposite direction.
Les clubbed him on the side of the head with the other brick. Brady lay moaning on the parched earth, blood coming from his ear. He wasn’t completely out, but Les wasn’t bothered. He unwound the rope and slung it over a sturdy branch about eight feet above ground level. Then he got Brady into a sitting position and fitted the noose he’d fashioned round his neck. Les had spent hours working on it, having found a diagram in a book of knots in the library. There was so much to learn in there.
When he had it tight, he started pulling. Richard Brady was a fat pig. It took Les a few minutes to get him into a standing position, but he’d been working hard on his fitness, building up his upper-body strength. By that time, the bully was coming round. Les kept hauling away, until Brady’s feet were well above the ground. The boy started to choke, his face redder than ever. His eyes opened. When he saw Les, they got wider. They were already bloodshot. The tip of his tongue was caught between his front teeth. As Les finished securing the other end of the rope, blood dribbled down Brady’s chin. He was biting through his tongue, making throaty noises that sounded like someone trying to be sick and not succeeding.
Les smiled up at him. He’d taken the precaution of tying his hands and legs, as he’d seen in The Big Book of Executions. He stepped close and brandished the smoldering cigarette he’d found in the dust.
“Smoking is very bad for you,” he said, taking a drag. “Sorry, I can’t hear you. Are you done choking? Not yet? That’s all right, I can wait.”
And he did. He waited the thirteen minutes and twenty seconds it took Richard Brady to die. Then he undid the ropes from his wrists and ankles and took them away, along with the two bricks-he dumped them in cleared ground near the station.
On the train back to Euston, Leslie Dunn couldn’t stop smiling.
There was a small piece in the evening paper the next day about a boy found in a wood on the outskirts of Watford. The police didn’t think it was suicide and their inquiries were continuing. But it never occurred to them to come down to the East End. A month later, Les was scanning the paper in the library. The coroner had pronounced an open verdict. He said he suspected that other boys may have been involved, but the police had been unable to make a breakthrough. Richard Brady’s family was said to be distraught.
Les looked that word up in the Oxford English Dictionary.
“Ha!” He snorted before he could 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 resume 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 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.
