The Devil in Disguise (32 page)

He tried the transistor radio. The Meteorological Office was issuing another warning of severe gales.
Tell me something I don't know
. He retuned to Radio 3 for a bit of background Beethoven whilst he pulled the paperwork for tomorrow's meeting out of his briefcase. Perhaps if the power didn't come back on, he would only work for an hour or so. He'd already done the hard graft. It wouldn't do any harm to turn in early and make sure he was fresh and ready for the meeting. If all went well, he could hope for another promotion marking at his next performance appraisal. His sights were set high. A move to another office wasn't impossible if no vacancy cropped up in Liverpool. He wasn't prepared to waste his life away, waiting to step into dead men's shoes.

A knock at the front door. For an instant he confused the noise with the rage of the storm. After all, no-one in their right mind would be out on a night like this. But it came again, the sound of the heavy brass knocker hammering against oak.

It must be one of the Blackwells. Either the mother who lived at the cottage up the slope, the only person he could possibly describe as a neighbour, or her drink-sodden son if he happened to be around. Perhaps they weren't equipped to deal with a power cut. He toyed for a moment with the idea of driving a ruthless bargain for a candle and a couple of vestas. The mother looked as if she had a decent body, considering her age. She hadn't let herself go, he liked that in a woman. The thought made him smile as, carrying the candle in its holder, he unlocked the door.

It was freezing outside and so dark that it took him a moment to focus. Then he saw the light glinting on the blade of the axe in his visitor's hand.

The cottage belonged to Linda Blackwell, personal assistant to Juliet in her public relations business. Harry couldn't face the prospect of sleeping in Casper's bed and his own flat was out of bounds because one of his neighbours was a client of Juliet's and they couldn't run the risk that she'd be recognised. In the past, their trysts had taken place in anonymous hotels in places like Runcorn and Frodsham, where they could be confident they wouldn't bump into anyone they knew. Tonight was supposed to be different. Special. She had given him directions, detailed and specific, warning him that the place would be difficult to find in the dark.

‘It's called the Customs House, but it's only tiny and you could easily miss it. She bought it after her husband died. Once you've branched off the main road, ignore the signs to the country park. Carry on for half a mile past the nursery and the tumbledown cottage until you come to the end of the lane. Tucked away underneath the trees are a couple of lock-up garages. The one on the left is Linda's. She's let me have the key, so I'll park my Alfa inside there. You leave your car in front of the door. For God's sake don't block her neighbour's access. She can't bear him. I don't know why, but I can guess.' A laugh. ‘He's a lawyer and you know how difficult they can be.'

Harry wished now that he'd asked the neighbour's name. The last thing he wanted was to bump into someone he knew. What could he say? ‘Can't stop, I'm just off for a tryst with the wife of a gangster'? In theory, it might do wonders for his image - as long as Casper May never got to hear of it. He checked again to make sure that even the most pedantic conveyancer could not complain that his right of way had been obstructed and set off down the path which led into the spinney which bordered the lane.

‘For God's sake, don't forget to bring a torch,' she'd instructed him. ‘There are no lights and the path twists and turns on its way through the wood.'

Good advice, he reflected, as he shone the pencil beam through the darkness. Without the help of a light, he would soon be hopelessly lost amongst the trees. Juliet obviously knew her way here of old. Had she explained this route before, to a previous lover he'd heard nothing about? If so, was it any of his business?

The path was muddy underfoot and he found himself wondering why anyone would want to live here, in the back of beyond. The city he had left behind twenty minutes earlier seemed already to belong to a different world. He could imagine that in the height of summer this wooded walk might be idyllic, but only a fool would trade the warmth of home on the wildest night of winter for the rain drenching his hair and the wind stinging his cheeks.

The gale dropped for a moment and he heard a rustling amongst the trees. He shone his torch and could dimly perceive dark shapes above his head. What sound did bats make? He was a townie; natural history had never been a strongpoint. To think he might have been in his flat this evening, watching a vampire film on the box, rather than experiencing the Grand Guignol of a date with a murderer's wife. If ever there was a night for the un-dead to rise, this was it.

He tripped over a tree stump but somehow managed to keep his grip upon the holdall which contained the champagne and a few overnight things. The torch slipped from his other hand and rolled away. He scrabbled around in the darkness and when he picked it up, found that the bulb was smashed. In a fit of temper, he hurled the thing away into the undergrowth before squatting on his haunches and cradling the bag with the bottle whilst he told himself to calm down. Pity it wasn't full of whisky; he'd have brought a hip flask if he'd realised the scale of this endurance test. Perhaps Juliet had dreamed up the assignation as a challenge, a measure of the scale of his obsession with her. When he arrived at the Customs House, he'd probably find that there was a dual carriageway running straight past the front door. He inched forward and realised that the path was beginning to fall away beneath his feet.

‘When you reach the edge of the cliff, the track starts to wind down. There's a hand-rail and you'd better cling on. It will be slippery with all this rain.'

She was a mistress of understatement, he decided. Unable to see where he was going, he clamped his left hand around the wet wooden railing and put one foot gingerly in front of another. He knew that, ahead and below, flowed the river that divided England from Wales, but he could see nothing of it. On either side of him, trees swayed like monstrous exotic dancers mocking his timidity.

‘Soon the path forks. Make sure you follow the left branch. Steps lead down to the Customs House. The other way takes you to the lawyer's cottage.'

He missed his footing and almost fell again. These must be the steps. He told himself that he was almost there. Inching down the pathway, he saw the dark outlines of a house loom in front of him: it must be the place. Yet why were there no lights? He felt suddenly sick and wondered if, for some unknowable reason, she had betrayed him. If he walked in, would he find himself greeted by Casper May, rather than his wife?

‘I'll leave the door ajar. You won't need to ring the bell.'

He found himself on a cinder path running up to a small porch. As he moved forward, he saw the front door open, framing the slender figure he couldn't stop thinking about.

‘Come in, quick,' she urged. ‘You'll catch your death out there.'

As consciousness returned, Carl Symons became fuzzily aware that his head was hurting. Hurting as it had never hurt before. The haft of the axe must have struck him on the temple, a blow so sudden that he'd not even had time to raise his hands in an attempt at self-defence. He forced his eyes open, trying to blink away the tears of pain. The skin of his cheeks and hands was grazed and sore. He'd been dragged inside and laid out on the floor of the kitchen. The stone was cold against his flesh. By the flickering light of the candle, he could see a pool of blood. It had leaked from the wound in his temple and on to the ground.

The candle wavered. With a desperate effort, Carl tried to shift his head so that he could follow the pool of light. Even the slight movement made him want to squeal.

A face emerged from the shadows and bent down towards him, as if to judge the extent of his suffering. Carl could see two hands as well. One held the axe, the other a sharpened stave.

The face was familiar to Carl but there was a strange light in the eyes that he had never seen before. The face came closer still but did not answer. Hypnotised, he watched as a tongue appeared and began to lick the pale lips. The axe was held aloft. White teeth bared in a savage smile.

Carl tried to form a single word and heard his own voice, croaky and pleading.

‘
Please
.'

But even as he spoke, the axe began to move towards him. Carl knew it was too late to beg for mercy. His bowels loosened.

The Making of
The Devil in Disguise

My first five books, set in Liverpool and featuring Harry Devlin, were often described by reviewers as “gritty urban thrillers”. However, that phrase did not quite capture the type of books I set out to write. My aim was to create entertaining mysteries which updated the traditions of the classic detective novel in the context of a modern city background, while offering (for those readers who wanted something more than just entertainment, important though entertainment is in genre fiction) some exploration of aspects of character and society.

Because Harry was a rather down at heel individual, with a client base that was scarcely blue-chip, I'd found myself writing about the seamier side of life in Liverpool - especially in the first book,
All the Lonely People
, but to some extent in its successors as well. Prostitutes, gangsters and seedy nightclubs all featured from time to time. As I'd grown in confidence, I'd tried out different approaches in the way I plotted, and told my stories, and when I started thinking about the sixth novel in the series, it seemed perfectly natural to me to set it in a middle class milieu, with less focus on the mean streets than before.

I was also interested in writing a story that was a more explicit homage to Golden Age detective fiction than my earlier books. I've come to the genre as a child by reading the books of Agatha Christie, and although I also delight in the more sophisticated writing of crime novelists such as Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell and Frances Fyfield, I continue to enjoy the work of the Queen of Crime. The idea of producing a mystery that was a modern riff on a Christie theme was very appealing. But I didn't want simply to write a pastiche. I thought it should be possible to write a book that combined the ingenuity of Christie's best work with an interesting depiction of people and place that met the expectations and demands of a contemporary readership.

It is a truism that there is only a finite number of plot ideas, even though people disagree about what the precise number is. My first Harry Devlin short story, “The Boxer”, gave a fresh twist to the plot of the Sherlock Holmes story, and this experience prompted me to try to do something similar, but much more elaborate, with the plot of an Agatha Christie novel. The book I chose was one of the very first adult mysteries that I read, the Hercule Poirot classic,
After the Funeral
(also known by the less subtle title of
Funerals Are Fatal
). It's a story which has a simple yet brilliant deception at its heart; having admired the trick for so long, I wondered how to give it a fresh, and different, life, and finally came up with a variation on Christie's theme that I like to think she would have approved. I've never come across anyone who has spotted the connection without my drawing it to their attention, but I did give the Poirot story, as well as Christie herself, name checks in the novel.

I also seized the opportunity to create, as one of my key settings, a Liverpudlian bookshop specialising in crime fiction. How I wish The Speckled Band had really existed! Like Harry, I'd have loved to flip through the battered rarities, and I included mention of the work of some of my favourite Golden Age authors, such as John Dickson Carr, Philip MacDonald, and the largely forgotten Richard Hull, one of the few accountants to write mysteries. As usual in the Devlin books, there are also references to movies that appeal to me, notably
Night Moves
and
Vertigo
.

I also indulged myself by integrating into the story-line a performance in Liverpool of the Bacharach and David musical
Promises, Promises
, Neil Simon's book for which was based on the screenplay of another classic film,
The Apartment
. The show was a huge hit on Broadway and in the West End in the late 60s, but then disappeared from view. However, it enjoyed a revival at the Bridewell Theatre in London while I was writing the book, and my agent Mandy Little and I found that the music and the jokes had stood the test of time well, even though more than another decade was to pass before the show returned to Broadway for another successful run. The Bridewell Theatre was an intriguing and unusual venue which I reinvented and relocated to Merseyside as The Pool Theatre.

Writing a book that is part of a series of mysteries is - or, at least, can be - different in some ways writing a stand-alone novel. Undeniably, there are drawbacks. One snag is that the reader can be pretty confident that the series detective will survive to fight another day, so it is important to find creative ways of building up the tension. Another is that the main characters' backstories need to be explained to readers who are not familiar with them, without boring those readers who are. And there is always the risk of slipping into the formula of the tried-and-tested, potentially with damaging results.

Yet there are very real compensating advantages, which to my mind make writing a series a joy. For instance, minor characters can come and go as the needs of the individual story dictate. Here, I enjoyed bringing back Jonah Deegan, the grumpy old gumshoe, as well as introducing a new and contrasting character to support him. Stephanie Hall, his niece and business partner, was someone I thought of as possible future love interest for Harry, but in this book the fun lay in portraying her relationship with Jonah and in establishing her as someone Harry could trust. With this groundwork laid, who knows what might happen between them one of these days?

But in the short-term, I decided to switch Harry's personal focus from Kim Lawrence to Juliet May. My original plan with Kim has been to contrast her crisp feminism and crusading zeal with Harry's rather crumpled yet enduring passion for justice. I felt, however, that I'd taken their relationship as
far
as I could, but I want to match Harry with someone who spelt danger - the glamorous wife of a murderous villain. His risky affair with Juliet created the set-up for the next book I wrote,
First Cut Is the Deepest
, and even after a long gap in time, their relationship so continued to fascinate me that, a decade after it came into being, it again formed a significant element of the storyline in
Waterloo Sunset
. Of course, I had no way of foreseeing this when I created Juliet - it just illustrates the point about the benefits and pleasures of series writing.

The sub-plot about Davey Damnation that began in
Eve of Destruction
was resolved in this book. I like the idea of extending a sub-plot over more than one book in a series, and I returned to this way of writing later, in the first couple of Lake District Mysteries. My aim always, though, is to make sure that the books can be read in any order without any significant reduction in enjoyment.

In trying to give a perspective on areas of Liverpool life different from those in the first five books, I made use of a variety of settings. Not just obvious scenes, like the Albert Dock, but the tunnel lined with tombstones in the grounds of the Anglican Cathedral. To capture the atmosphere of the rooftop above Roy Milburn's studio, I went on to the roof of the seven-storey office building where I worked from 1980 until moving in 2011. Very windy up there it was, too. Like Harry, I wondered if a sudden gust from the river might pick me up and throw me on to the street far below. The Piquet Club was my own invention; over the years I've spent a bit of time in two of Liverpool's famous private members' clubs, the Lyceum (which now no longer exists) and the Racquets Club, but rather more as a proprietor (that is, member) of the Athenaeum, a delightful oasis in the midst of the city's shopping area, and possessing an impressive library. But as far as I know, none of those venerable institutions ever boasted a collection of erotica similar to that with which I endowed the Piquet.

Names of characters in a novel do matter, partly for artistic reasons and also because of the need to minimise the risk of accidental libel. Yet conjuring names up is quite a challenge. The names have to “feel right”. I use various methods for naming characters, but my favourite is to use the names of Derbyshire county cricketers, past and present. When I went to watch the team play a game at Derby not long before I started
The Devil in Disguise
, I was introduced by a friend to a number of the players, including the South African Test batsman Darryll Cullinan. He expressed enthusiasm for having a character named after him - hence Matthew Cullinan. Some time after the book was published, I received an email from one Anthony Dessaur, who was researching his family's unusual name. He'd come across the book and wanted to know what had prompted me to invent the name of Luke Dessaur. I explained how I used Derbyshire cricketers' names, and that Wayne Dessaur had had a spell as one of the county's batsmen. Wayne turned out to be Anthony's son, and duly acquired a copy of the book, suitably inscribed. A strangely unexpected but, to me, enjoyable contact.

When I was writing the book, I discussed the work in progress with my editor, Kate Callaghan. She was keen on the story, but felt it needed a dramatic opening, and on reflection, I agreed. So I introduced the prologue, which was not there in the first version. Unfortunately, to my extreme disappointment - and bafflement- Kate's boss Judy Piatkus, who had taken me on as an unpublished author, and given me much support, really did not care for the book. The less “gritty” style and story-line didn't appeal to her. I still keep a copy of a letter she wrote to Mandy expressing her concerns - a reminder to myself that opinions about literature are always subjective (and that publishers certainly don't always get their own judgments right!)

Of course, one has to take criticisms from sensible and experienced judges seriously, but I was convinced Judy was wrong about
The Devil in Disguise
. She wanted me to put it to one side and write a new Devlin, but I had faith in the book and so did Mandy. Happily, Hodder & Stoughton agreed that the story worked well, and offered to take on the whole Devlin series, starting with this book (they later reprinted the earlier books in paperback for good measure.) So it all worked out for the best in the end. And at least I'd gained experience of the ups and downs of a writer's career - an experience that has helped sustain me ever since. I still have a soft spot for
The Devil in Disguise
and it's a joy to see it enjoy a fresh lease of life.