“Have you got a better one? He’s one person the Devil is unlikely to be watching.”
Rog grinned. “Plus he’s got a security system that Houdini couldn’t get past.”
“Exactly.” I sent Andy a message telling him to meet us there and to turn off his phone. “Let’s go.”
I paid the guy at the till, giving him a tenner tip and asking him to forget we’d ever been there. He nodded and smiled knowingly. Out on the street, I hailed a cab and told him the destination I wanted.
On the way to Blackheath, I thought about what I was doing. Was I out of my mind taking on the Devil? Reggie Hampton had already paid for the few words he’d exchanged with me. I told myself that Christian Fels would have died if I hadn’t sent Andy up to Highgate, but that didn’t make me feel much better. I’d taken all the steps I could to protect my people, but now the lunatic was selecting innocent victims.
The cabbie dropped us at the end of a gated street on the north side of the Heath. “Ponces,” he muttered as he drove off. I didn’t blame him. This was rich man’s alley in spades.
The uniformed guy in the sentry-box eyed us up. “Can I help you?” he asked, his tone unwelcoming in the extreme.
“Yes,” I said. “We’re visiting Peter Satterthwaite.”
“Wait a moment.” He picked up his phone.
I’d decided against calling Bonehead in advance. He’d probably have told me where to stick my head. I was relying on his well-known curiosity to get us inside.
“Your names?” the guard asked.
“Matt Wells and Roger van Zandt.”
He spoke them into the phone with painstaking care and no little distaste. No doubt most visitors to the place looked classier than we did. I was relieved to see disappointment in his expression.
“All right,” the gorilla said, pressing a button. “It’s the house at the end.”
“We know that, pillock,” Rog said under his breath. He might have spent his spare time making models like a geeky kid, but he had a hard streak. Now he wasn’t playing league anymore, I wondered how he was using that up.
We walked down the wide street. The houses on either side were large and detached, a range of this year’s BMWs and Mercedes in the driveways. The curtains were open in most rooms, the residents showing off their antique furniture and modern art works to one another. They didn’t just rely on the goon at the gate for protection. There were alarm boxes on every front wall. Except Bonehead’s. His system was on another level, in every sense.
The heavy black door opened as we walked up the drive.
“Well, blow my dick and send me to heaven,” said the tall, thin figure silhouetted in the light. “I never expected you guys would have the nerve to show up here again.”
“Hello, Boney,” Rog said, keeping his distance.
“Dodger, Wellsy.” Peter Satterthwaite was in his mid-forties. He’d made a fortune when he was young, selling cheap but reliable computers. He moved in exalted circles in the City, but he’d never lost his native Lancastrian accent. “What do you wankers want?”
I laughed. Bonehead had never been one for civility. He’d grown up on an estate in Skelmersdale, which had made him as tough as nails. He was also a homosexual at total ease with his sexuality. He’d shaved his head long before it became the fashion for every man embarrassed about losing his hair.
“I’ve managed to screw up massively,” I said. “I really need your help.”
He stared at me belligerently. “After what you guys did to me? You’ve got a bloody nerve.” One of the few things that had kept him going as a kid had been his love for rugby league. He’d spent most of the cash he nicked or made from stolen goods on attending games at Wigan. After he made his millions, he invested in the South London Bison. Unfortunately some of our teammates didn’t have it in them to take money from someone they referred to behind his back as “a nancy poof,” so he was voted off the board after a year.
I shrugged. “You know that wasn’t down to Rog and me.”
“Is that right?” he said, doubt written all over his face. Then he looked at me inquisitively. “What is this trouble you’ve got yourself into?” I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist asking.
“Can we come in?” I asked. “It’s a bit chilly out here.”
Bonehead thought about it and then led us inside. We’d been to the place before for a club dinner, but since then he’d added even more outrageous furniture and over-the-top paintings. In the spacious hall, there was a yellow velvet-covered chair with a back high enough to accommodate a giraffe. On the wall above was what I took to be a Lucien Freud original. No one else could have done the drooping breasts and floppy genitalia with such gusto.
“You on your own?” I said, as we followed him into a room furnished only with multicolored leather poufs.
“What’s it to you?”
“Just asking.”
“As a matter of fact, I am,” he said, throwing us bottles of lager from a fridge concealed in a wooden cabinet. “So, dickheads, tell me why you’re here.”
I did that, not giving him all the details about the Devil, but enough to get him interested.
“Jesus, Wellsy,” he said when I’d finished. “Are you sure this isn’t the plot of your latest novel?”
“I’m sure, all right. Dave Cummings has taken my kid and his family into hiding. The police are doing their best to protect everyone else I know, but the bastard’s way ahead of them.”
“I hope you didn’t tell them about me,” Bonehead said, suddenly anxious.
I shook my head. Actually, I’d forgotten him-he’d never been a particularly close friend and, since the rupture at the Bison, we hadn’t seen much of each other. Now I remembered that he kept a large stock of illegal substances in the house.
“Good,” he said, emptying his beer and opening another. “What do you need?”
I glanced at Rog. “A high-powered computer?”
“No problem.”
“A couple of beds for the night?”
Bonehead laughed. “I could put you both in a double.”
“Piss off,” said Rog, glaring at him.
“Oh, you’d rather share with me, would you, Dodger?”
“Thanks, Pete,” I said, draining my beer. “I don’t suppose you’ve got anything to eat?”
There was a buzz from a box on the wall by the door.
“That’ll probably be Andy Jackson,” I said as he walked over to it.
“Looks like you’ll be three in the bed, then,” Bonehead said with a wicked smile. “Let him in,” he said to the gorilla at the gate.
“The computer?” Rog asked.
“Upstairs, second door on the right. The password’s Arse69.”
Rog departed, shaking his head.
“Right, Wellsy,” Bonehead said, grinning wickedly as he tossed me another beer. “How are we going to catch this Devil of yours?”
I wasn’t sure whether Peter Satterthwaite was up to nailing a multiple murderer, but he scared the hell out of me.
The White Devil was sitting in front of the bank of screens. There had been no sign of Matt Wells since the morning. He’d checked the tapes. The camera he’d planted above the street door showed a couple of men-obviously police-slumped in a Rover outside. What had the writer been saying to the authorities? Was he hatching some scheme with that hard-faced blond bitch?
The Devil laughed. They could try their worst. He wasn’t frightened of them.
After all, he and his partner had managed to dump a naked body in a rubbish bin in full view of people during the evening rush hour. It was all down to observation. Corky had watched the Borough Market at the end of many days’ trading and he knew exactly when the cleaners came on duty. The white van looked no different from hundreds that the traders and their customers used every day for deliveries. They’d abandoned it in Streatham, after changing into ordinary casual clothes in the back and taking their overalls with them in holdalls. They’d split up immediately and he’d gone a roundabout route by bus to return home. His partner had done the same.
Picking up the fool from the publishers had been easy enough. He’d discovered who worked for Matt Wells’s ex-editor by watching the building in the early evening. Jeanie Young-Burke often left work late, and in recent weeks she’d usually been accompanied by a tall young man with no chin. Matt Wells had obviously warned Young-Burke off as there had been no sign of her that night-the writer would pay dearly for that-but he hadn’t thought to do the same for her assistant and current sex slave. When young Reginald had gone off for lunch with an author and some women from the publishers, the Devil had got him into the van by calling him, having obtained his mobile number from the helpful young woman on the switchboard, and telling him that Jeanie had a surprise for him in the street behind the restaurant. He fell for that immediately.