Free The Death List by Paul Johnston

the caller’s number was unavailable. Shit. Then I realized that he’d used my restricted landline. How had he found that number?
    I booted up my computer and checked my e-mails. As the Devil had said, there was a message from WD1578, with an attachment. 1578. I knew what he meant—1578 was taken as the date of John Webster’s birth by many scholars. I copied the attached text to my hard disk and opened it.
    Jesus. The guy—he didn’t name his family—had been beaten regularly by his father and sodomized by his local priest. By the time he was nine, he was an accomplished shoplifter, fencing his loot to fund his collection of model tanks and soldiers. But that was only the beginning. When I got to the end, I discovered that he’d killed his old man by pushing him off the third floor of a partially completed building. He’d been twelve when he did that.
    I felt the blood run cold in my veins.
     
    A strange thing happened as I got down to work on the Devil’s material. It was as if a curtain had been raised in my mind. For the past three months, I’d been clutching in the dark for a plot for my next novel. Suddenly it seemed that I could see things clearly, like at the beginning of a play. I could see the backdrop—Bethnal Green and its run-down tower blocks—and the characters had appeared on the stage: the pedophile priest, the bullying father, the quiet and loving mother. And in the center was the White Devil himself, small and devious, his spite and viciousness concealed.
    And then I understood why he’d chosen to call himself that. The White Devil was a play in which evil and guilt were hidden under the guise of courtly manners. White Devils were hypocrites, corrupt evildoers lurking beneath layers of apparent probity. That was how the bastard had got away with the murder of his father. No one had suspected that the quiet altar boy could have stood up to a drunken laborer, let alone push him to his death.
    I felt the quickening of breath I used to have when I hit on a plot that I knew I could turn into a decent book. It had been a couple of years since that had happened. Maybe Caroline was right. I’d constructed a comfort zone with my Albanian books, writing stuff that interested me and not much caring what readers might want. But this had the ring of credibility about it; this was cut from the rough fabric of life rather than the tissue of my imagination.
    As happened when things were going well, I made fast progress. In the past, I’d thought about books for months before I started writing—wrangling about who was going to tell the story, what the relationships between the characters would be, what theme I wanted to tackle. But in the last Sir Tertius book, that had all come together without much advance planning. I’d just sat down, scribbled a few notes and started writing. That was also what happened with the Devil’s story. By the time I went to pick up Lucy, I’d written the first chapter. It ended with the antihero I was calling Wayne Deakins (the initials WD being significant) knocking his father out in the living room. Before I left, I backed up what I’d written onto a diskette. Then it occurred to me that I should have copied all of the Devil’s messages, too. I’d do that later.
    Christ, was I really going to get a publishable novel out of the lunatic’s life? Then I remembered how deep the Devil had his claws in me. He was obviously as mad as the avenging killers in Webster’s play.
    What chance did I have of exiting the final scene upright?
     
    I had to think on my feet when I took Lucy back to Ferndene Road after school.
    Shami Rooney was sitting in the front room next door. I knew she’d taken the day off work because of Happy. She stood up as soon as we opened the gate and came out.
    “Matt?” she said, her voice taut. “Can I have a word?”
    Before I could reply, she was on her way round. I took Lucy into the dining room and sat her at the piano.
    “What’s up?” I said