‘That’s nothing to do with the police,’ said the inspector flatly, and he looked at his watch again.
‘No, but when you put that together with the Satanic altar in the barn, it gives the impression that McBride was some sort of devil-worshipping nutter, doesn’t it?’
The inspector put up his hands. ‘I couldn’t possibly comment,’ he said.
‘Here’s the thing,’ said Nightingale. ‘McBride didn’t have an internet connection. He wasn’t visiting any websites. He didn’t even have access to email.’
The inspector’s eyes narrowed. ‘There’s a router in the farmhouse. I saw it myself.’
‘There is indeed. But it’s never been connected. His brother bought it for him last year but McBride never got around to having it connected.’
The colour seemed to have drained from the policeman’s face.
‘So you can see why my client’s a tad confused,’ said Nightingale. ‘There’s no internet connection at the farm but you’re telling the Press that he was prowling through the web and Googling “human sacrifice” and downloading all sorts of crap onto his computer, but I think you know as well as I do that didn’t happen.’ Nightingale stood up. ‘Anyway, I’ve taken up more than enough of your valuable time.’
‘I’d be careful, if I were you,’ said Stevenson.
‘Yeah? In what way?’
‘Making accusations like you have been, that could come back and bite you in the arse.’ Nightingale took his cigarettes and slid one between his lips. ‘You can’t smoke in here,’ said Stevenson.
Nightingale ignored him and walked out of the office. He waited until he was outside the building before lighting a cigarette. As he blew smoke up at the leaden sky, he saw Stevenson looking down at him, a contemptuous sneer on his face. Nightingale smiled up at the detective. ‘Oh well, can’t win them all,’ Nightingale muttered to himself.
12
Jenny had booked Nightingale a room at the Sly Fox, a pub overlooking the North Sea on the outskirts of Berwick. It was a cosy place, with thick walls and small windows to cut down the chill factor of the freezing wind that blew in from the sea. Nightingale’s room was comfortably furnished with a large brass bed, a heavy scuffed leather armchair and a massive oak wardrobe with a fox hunt carved into the doors. He tossed his overnight bag onto the bed and phoned Robbie. ‘Any joy with a Berwick contact?’ he asked.
‘I’m working on it, mate.’
‘I’m heading back tomorrow afternoon, be great to see the guy before I go,’ said Nightingale.
‘Seriously, I’m on it,’ said Robbie. ‘How’s it going?’
‘I met a DI today but he’s less than helpful.’
‘What do you expect? No one appreciates strangers on their patch. Especially ones less than forthcoming in the winning friends and influencing people department.’
‘I’ve been all sweetness and light,’ said Nightingale. ‘He took a computer from McBride’s and won’t let me have a look at it.’
‘He won’t hand over evidence in a criminal investigation?’ said Robbie, his voice loaded with sarcasm. ‘Well, shame on him.’
‘There is no investigation, that’s the point.’
‘I’m only winding you up, mate,’ said Robbie. ‘Soon as I get a name I’ll get back to you.’
Nightingale ended the call and went downstairs to the bar. It was an L-shaped room with a roaring fire, the walls dotted with polished horse-brasses and framed paintings of fox hunts. They didn’t stock Corona so he ordered a Budweiser. The landlord was the man who’d checked him in, a big bearded Geordie with a tattoo of a mermaid on his right forearm that suggested a previous career in the merchant navy. He gave Nightingale a menu and he ordered fish and chips. The landlord grimaced and he leant across the bar, lowering his voice to a gruff whisper. ‘I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but the chef’s off tonight and the missus is cooking. If I were you I’d go for the shepherd’s pie or the chicken pasta bake because the chef did them and all she has to do is warm them up.’ He winked conspiratorially.
Nightingale toasted the landlord with his Budweiser and ordered the shepherd’s pie. ‘So is this England or Scotland?’ he asked as he waited to his food to appear from the kitchen.
‘You’re joking, right?’ said the landlord.
‘What can I say, I’m from London.’
‘You don’t sound like a southerner.’
‘I was brought up in Manchester.’
‘Red or Blue?’
Nightingale chuckled. ‘United, what else? So joking apart, did we cross the border?’
‘The England–Scotland border is a moveable feast,’ said the landlord. ‘It’s switched back and forth thirteen times over the years. But at the moment you’re in Northumberland. Here’s hoping it moves back at some point, because between you and me, I’d rather be in Scotland. My kids wouldn’t be paying their own university tuition, for a start – that wouldn’t be happening if we were counted as Scotland.’
‘And free prescriptions,’ said Nightingale. He raised his bottle of Budweiser. ‘To bonnie old Scotland.’ He drank and then motioned at the beer pumps. ‘Get yourself one. Keep me company.’
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said the landlord. ‘I’ll take a whisky, if that’s okay with you.’
‘All good,’ said Nightingale.
The landlord picked up a glass and held it under one of the optics. ‘You know, this is the Devil’s town, truth be told,’ he said as the whisky sloshed into his glass.
‘Say what?’
The landlord grinned. He used his fingers to drop a couple of ice cubes into his whisky. ‘It’s in the Bible. When the Devil was tempting Jesus, trying to get him over to the dark side, he held out a map of the world and told Jesus he could have dominion over everything he could see. But as he held out the map, the Devil had his thumb over Berwick because he wanted to keep it for himself.’
‘Nice story,’ said Nightingale.
‘There are those around here who say it’s more than a story,’ said the landlord. He raised his glass. ‘Cheers, anyway.’
‘Cheers,’ said Nightingale, and he clinked the neck of his bottle against the landlord’s glass.
As the landlord drank he caught sight of the television on the wall. It was tuned to Sky News and a police press conference was about to start. He grabbed the remote and turned up the sound. ‘Looks like she’s still missing,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘Little girl was abducted in Southampton. Some paedo snatched her in a shopping centre.’
On the screen a man and a woman were sitting together at a long table. She was in her thirties, hollow-eyed and her blonde hair messy. The man was equally haggard and he was holding the woman’s hand tightly.
‘That’s her parents,’ said the landlord. ‘Can you imagine what they’re going through?’
‘How old’s the girl?’ asked Nightingale.
‘Nine. Mum took her eyes off her for a minute and she was gone.’
A uniformed police officer took the seat next to the mother. An assistant chief constable. At the other end of the table was a large man in a dark blue suit with the world-weary eyes of a senior detective.
On a board behind the table were posters featuring the missing girl. In the middle of the poster was a blow-up of her school photograph. She was a little angel with long, curly blonde hair, blue eyes and porcelain skin.
‘They should hang them,’ said the landlord. ‘Anyone who messes with a kid, hanging’s too good for them.’
‘No arguments here,’ said Nightingale.
‘You got kids?’ Nightingale shook his head. ‘Well, I’ve got three, two of them are girls. If anyone laid a finger on them I’d swing for them, no question.’
The uniformed officer gave a short prepared speech, basically laying out the facts. That nine-year-old Bella Harper had been abducted from a shopping centre in Southampton, possibly by a man and a woman. Witnesses had seen a man and a woman getting into a white van wi
th a girl who might have been Bella. They didn’t have a description of the couple or the registration of the van. Then he asked the parents to say a few words. The woman spoke first, or at least tried to. She barely managed a dozen words before she broke down in a flood of tears. Her husband put his arm around her and in a trembling voice appealed for whoever had taken Bella to send her home safe and well. ‘She’s our angel, she’s never done a bad thing in her life, she doesn’t deserve this. Please, send her home. Please don’t hurt her.’
‘He should use her name,’ said Nightingale.
‘What?’
‘He needs to personalise her. He should use her name in every sentence, and he should give more personal information about her. Her pets, her school, what she likes to do. If the guy that has her starts to think of her as a human being and not an object then he’s more likely not to kill her.’ Nightingale realised that heads were starting to turn in his direction and he stopped talking and drank his beer.
‘How do you know so much about it?’ asked the landlord, putting down his glass.
‘I used to be a cop, in another life,’ said Nightingale. ‘Down in London.’
‘And you dealt with stuff like this?’
‘Abductions? Yeah, a few.’
‘How do they normally end?’
‘Depends who the abductor is. If it’s a family member then there’s a good chance they’ll find her, but if it’s a stranger and they don’t find her within twenty-four hours then it’s usually bad news.’ He shrugged and sipped his lager.
The father finished speaking. Tears were running down his face. A telephone number appeared at the bottom of the screen. Nightingale hoped that someone, somewhere, was reaching for a phone with information that would help them find the little girl. But the rational part of his brain knew that such television appeals rarely worked. The police were going through the motions, knowing that they would be criticised if they didn’t mount an appeal but knowing that virtually all the calls they received would be false alarms that would tie up valuable police resources.
‘I hope to God they find her,’ said the landlord.
‘Amen to that,’ agreed Nightingale.
‘You know it’s Friday the thirteenth today?’
‘I’d forgotten that,’ said Nightingale.
‘Nothing good happens on Friday the thirteenth. What’s the world coming to? Why would anyone take a child?’
‘Paedophiles are sick,’ said Nightingale. ‘It’s their nature. You can’t change them, all you can do is keep them away from children. The only safe paedophile is a paedophile behind bars.’
‘Or dead. They should just put them down, like dogs.’
Nightingale nodded but didn’t say anything.
‘So why are you up here, then?’ asked the landlord.
‘I’m looking at that school shooting. The farmer who killed the kids.’
The landlord frowned. ‘I thought you weren’t a cop any more?’
‘I’m a private detective now,’ said Nightingale.
‘And someone is paying you to come up here and investigate?’
Nightingale realised that it probably wouldn’t be the smartest move to broadcast who his client was. ‘Department for Education,’ he lied. ‘They want to know if school security was at fault.’ He held up his empty bottle. ‘Another, please, and another whisky for yourself.’
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said the landlord. He fetched a fresh Budweiser for Nightingale and poured himself another whisky.
‘So did you ever run into Jimmy McBride?’ asked Nightingale.
‘He came in now and then,’ said the landlord. ‘Wasn’t overly social, you know?’ He nodded at a table by the window. ‘Sat over there on his own when he did come in. He’d drink a couple of pints and read his paper.’
‘Always on his own?’
The landlord nodded. ‘I don’t remember him ever being with anyone. Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t a bad sort – he’d say hello and maybe mention the weather but you’d never find him at the bar chatting with the locals.’
‘And no sense that he was the sort of guy who’d do what he did?’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said the landlord. ‘But they always say it’s the quiet ones, don’t they?’
‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ said Nightingale. ‘Usually there are signs. Especially when there’s that degree of violence involved. The guy is either a brooder, bottling it all up until he explodes, or he has a temper and has a habit of lashing out.’
‘McBride wasn’t either of those,’ said the landlord. ‘He was just a regular guy.’
‘A regular guy with a shotgun.’
‘He was a farmer. Every farmer around here has a shotgun or two.’
‘So when you heard what he’d done, what did you think?’
The landlord scratched his ear. ‘To be honest, I thought he’d been possessed.’
‘Possessed?’
‘By the Devil. Something made him do it, and the Devil seems like the obvious candidate.’
Nightingale couldn’t work out if the man was serious or not. Before he could say anything, a stick-thin woman with sharp features appeared with a tray. ‘Shepherd’s pie?’ she called, and Nightingale raised his hand.
The woman gave him the tray, scowled at her husband, and went back to the kitchen.
‘We’ve had a bit of a row,’ explained the landlord. He shrugged. ‘Women, can’t live with them, can’t throw them under a bus.’
13
‘You know we had witches around here, more witches than almost anywhere in the UK?’ said the old man sitting opposite Nightingale. His name was Willie Holiday and he was a retired farmworker, well into his seventies. He was sitting at a corner table, next to the roaring fire, with Nightingale and another of the pub’s regulars, a fifty-year-old former miner who gave his name only as Tommo. Nightingale had bought them several pints and had knocked back four Budweisers himself.
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Nightingale.
Willie nodded. ‘Loads of them. We were awash with witches in the sixteen hundreds. They had their own way of proving it. They’d stick needles in them and if they were innocent they bled and if they didn’t bleed they were witches.’
‘That seems fair enough,’ said Nightingale.
Willie frowned. ‘Or was it the other way round?’
The three men laughed. ‘The thing is, though, witchcraft isn’t always a bad thing,’ said Tommo. ‘My wife swears by crystals and pyramids, we’ve got dozens in the house. We even sleep under one.’
‘How does that work?’ asked Nightingale.
‘It’s a paper lampshade, in the shape of a pyramid. And I have to say I’ve never had a bad night’s sleep since she put it up.’ He rubbed his left knee. ‘She uses a crystal on my knee when it gives me grief and that works too.’ He shrugged. ‘Did it when I was down the mines. It’s always worse in the winter but she rubs different crystals over it and the pain goes away.’
‘That’s not really witchcraft,’ said Nightingale.
‘If it works, it works,’ said Willie. ‘We’ve got haunted houses and spooky castles by the boat-load. You’ve heard about the Devil and Berwick, right?’
‘The thumb thing? Yeah. Funny story, that. Makes you wonder why the Devil wanted the town.’
‘Must have had his reasons,’ said Willie. He drained his glass and looked at Nightingale expectantly. Nightingale grinned and headed over to the bar. The bill would be going on McBride’s account, so he figured he might as well keep the locals happy.
He returned to the table with two pints and a bottle of Budweiser and sat down. ‘Speaking of the devil, did you ever come across Jimmy McBride?’
‘The guy that shot the kids?’ Willie sighed. ‘Aye that was a rum do, that was.’
‘You knew him?’
‘Used to,’ said Willie. ‘There was a time when I used to give him a hand on the farm when he was busy, but he uses Polish gangs now.’
�
��What was he like?’
‘Quiet. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Just got on with whatever needed doing.’
‘Never married?’
‘He didn’t seem to have much interest, if you ask me. But farming’s like that. You work all hours, you tend not to have much of a social life.’
Tommo chuckled. ‘How does that explain your six kids and fifteen grandkids, Willie?’
Willie smiled ruefully. ‘I met the right woman, early on,’ he said. ‘But it’s a real problem for a lot of farmers. Days can pass when you don’t leave the farm. Cows have to be milked, livestock has to be fed, there’s the EU paperwork. You don’t get much time for dating.’
‘And what was he like with kids?’
Willie frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘He shot eight kids. Why would he do that?’
Willie shook his head. ‘God knows,’ he said.
‘I wondered if kids had been vandalising the farm, giving him a hard time, something like that?’
‘This isn’t the big city,’ said Tommo. ‘We don’t have gangs or vandals or even much graffiti.’
‘So why did he do what he did?’ asked Nightingale.
The two men shook their heads. ‘Who knows?’ said Tommo. ‘We’ve never had anything like that happen before.’
‘Happened in Scotland,’ said Willie. ‘Remember? Back in 1996. Dunblane. What was that guy’s name now?’
‘Thomas Hamilton,’ said Nightingale. ‘He shot sixteen children in a primary school.’
‘They never found out why he did it, did they?’ said Willie. ‘Sometimes people just snap.’
‘Did he seem like the type who would snap?’ asked Nightingale.
Willie shook his head. ‘He was rock steady,’ he said. ‘Never lost his temper, never a cross word.’
‘Did you hear about the Satanic stuff?’
‘It was in the papers,’ said Tommo. ‘Didn’t he have a black magic thing in his barn?’
‘An altar,’ said Nightingale. ‘Yeah, that’s what they said. Do you hear much about devil-worship up this way?’
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