Nightshade: The Fourth Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thriller jn-4

by Stephen Leather

  The coroner’s officer who agreed to see him was a police sergeant by the name of Bernard Connolly. He gave him a business card and sat back and studied Nightingale with unblinking grey eyes. ‘Can I ask what your interest is in the case, Mr Nightingale?’ he said.

  ‘I’m representing a client who wants to know the background to the shootings.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d tell me who that client is?’

  Nightingale smiled thinly. ‘That would be covered by client confidentiality,’ he said.

  ‘It would if you were a doctor or a lawyer, but gumshoes don’t have that sort of protection.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been called that before,’ said Nightingale.

  The policeman smiled. ‘Gumshoe? I’m a big fan of Elmore Leonard. But I can assure you, Mr Nightingale, there’s no mystery here. It’s as open and shut a case as I’ve ever seen. Mr McBride took his shotgun, for which he had a licence, and used it to kill a teacher and eight children. Then he took his own life.’

  ‘There’ll be an inquest, of course?’

  ‘Of course. But there won’t be any surprises, I can assure you of that.’ He tapped a gold fountain pen on an open notepad. ‘So assuming that client confidentiality doesn’t apply, who are you working for?’

  ‘I’d rather not say.’

  ‘I’m guessing a family member,’ said the policeman. ‘Probably someone who stands to gain from the will.’ He sat back in his chair and fixed Nightingale with a deceptively bored gaze. ‘Suicide, you see. That would negate any life insurance McBride had taken out.’

  ‘Only if it was a recent policy,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘So it is a family member? The brother, I suppose.’

  Nightingale tried to keep his face impassive. ‘I really can’t say.’

  ‘You’re not a poker player, are you, Mr Nightingale?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because you’ve got a tell, that’s why.’

  ‘A tell?’

  ‘A tell. It shows when you’re bluffing.’

  Nightingale smiled amiably. The policeman was pulling one of the oldest tricks in the interrogator’s handbook, trying to unsettle him. ‘I just need some information on the post mortems that have been carried out on the victims of the school shootings.’

  ‘Those details will be revealed at the inquest.’

  ‘I understand that,’ said Nightingale. ‘But can you at least tell me if there are any signs of sexual abuse?’

  The policeman’s eyes narrowed. ‘Sexual abuse?’

  ‘It would be apparent enough in the post mortem. Did the pathologist mention it?’

  The policeman tapped his pen on his notepad as he continued to stare at Nightingale.

  ‘It’s a reasonable question to ask,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘I’m not sure that it is,’ said the policeman. ‘It’s bad enough that eight children have died, why would you want to start a rumour like that? How do you think the parents would feel?’

  ‘I think the parents deserve to know the truth,’ said Nightingale. ‘And really, isn’t that the purpose of an inquest? To get the truth out there?’

  ‘The purpose of an inquest is to determine the cause of death,’ said the policeman. ‘And that’s pretty much a foregone conclusion.’

  ‘But what about motive? Why did McBride kill those children?’

  ‘Because the balance of his mind was disturbed. Or as the tabloids will no doubt put it, he was as mad as a hatter. But again that’s a matter for the inquest.’

  ‘He didn’t behave like a madman,’ said Nightingale. ‘He seemed organised. Restrained even. He only killed eight when he could have killed a lot more.’

  ‘What are you saying, Mr Nightingale? Are you saying that you wish he’d killed more?’

  ‘Of course not. But I’m not convinced he was mad.’

  ‘And if you were to prove that the children were abused, that would make him less of a madman?’

  ‘It would help explain why he did what he did.’

  ‘And what has put this idea in your head, Mr Nightingale?’

  ‘It’s just a line of inquiry,’ said Nightingale. ‘You remember the Dunblane massacre back in 1996?’

  ‘Of course. But what does that have to do with us here in Berwick?’

  ‘The killer up in Dunblane was Thomas Hamilton. There were reports that he’d been involved in inappropriate behaviour with children. He was a Scout leader and worked in youth clubs and he lost his job after complaints that he had been taking semi-naked photographs of some of the boys. He made boys sleep with him in tents on camping trips, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I don’t see where this is heading, frankly.’

  ‘The shootings came shortly after he failed to set up a new youth club. I was wondering if there was something similar driving Mr McBride.’

  The policeman frowned. ‘You have evidence that he was abusing children?’

  ‘That’s why I’ve come to see you. If any of the children had been abused, it would show up in the post mortem.’

  The policeman put down his pen and linked his fingers. ‘Well, I can assure you that the children were not sexually abused in any way.’

  ‘Can I see the pathologist’s reports?’

  The policeman stared at Nightingale for several seconds. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘I would be in breach of the Data Protection Act if I were to do that. The reports will be made public at the inquest and not before. But I can tell you, off the record and on a totally non-attributable basis, that none of the children had been abused.’

  Nightingale nodded slowly. ‘Okay,’ he said. He wondered if the coroner’s officer was also a poker player and if the pulsing vein in his forehead was a sign that he was lying. Nightingale would have been prepared to bet that it was. But he didn’t say anything, he just thanked the man, shook his hand and left the office.

  He waited until he was outside before he called Jenny on her mobile and filled her in on what happened. ‘Now what?’ she said.

  ‘I’m going to go to the farm to get a sample of McBride’s prints. I’ve arranged to meet the brother there.’

  ‘When you do see him, you might think about running some expenses by him,’ said Jenny. ‘Be nice if we could get some money for your travelling and the lab.’

  ‘Will do,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘You’ll still make the afternoon flight?’

  ‘That’s the plan,’ said Nightingale.

  41

  Nightingale went back to his rental car and phoned McBride, but he didn’t pick up and the call went through to his answer service. Nightingale left a brief message saying that he was heading out to the farm, but then he realised he hadn’t eaten all day so he popped into a local café for a coffee and a sandwich. He called again as he drove to the farm, but McBride still wasn’t picking up.

  When he arrived at the farm the five-bar gate was padlocked, so he left the car in the road. He climbed over the gate and walked down the dirt track. He made a final unsuccessful attempt to call McBride and then shoved his phone into the pocket of his raincoat.

  As the track bent to the right he was able to see the farmyard and realised that McBride’s car was parked there, its nose up against the side of the house. It began to rain as he got closer to the farmhouse, and he turned up the collar of his coat and jogged the last fifty yards. He rang the doorbell but there was no response. He rang again. The rain was getting heavier and he stood closer to the door to avoid the worst of it.

  The front door remained resolutely closed. From where he was standing he could see that the barn door was ajar. He jogged over, his Hush Puppies splashing through puddles, and squeezed through the gap. Rain was beating a tattoo on the corrugated iron roof. ‘Mr McBride, are you in here?’ he called.

  Water dripped down the back of his neck and he shivered. As he looked to the left his breath caught in his throat. Danny McBride was hanging from the upper level, a thick rope around his neck.
/>   Nightingale took a step back, his eyes open in horror. It didn’t make any sense. McBride wasn’t the type to kill himself. He was a husband and a father and there had been nothing about his behaviour that suggested he was depressed. He was upset about what his brother had done, but that was no reason for him to take his own life.

  He’d been hanging there for a while, Nightingale realised. Hours, probably. His trousers were wet and there was a small pool of urine on the floor. The bladder always emptied itself on death. And so did the colon. Nightingale had attended several suicides when he was a police officer and the smell of death was always the same. Urine and faeces. The intestinal gases as they expanded and escaped, and finally rotting flesh. Nightingale shuddered. ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ he muttered under his breath. He took out a cigarette and lit it as he considered his options. He could get back into his car and drive to the airport without telling anyone about the body. Or he could be the dutiful citizen and phone the police. But if he did that he’d have to face Stevenson again and have to explain what he was doing on the farm. And he guessed that Stevenson would relish any excuse to have Nightingale in a cell wearing a paper suit for a day or two.

  Nightingale blew smoke up at the roof of the barn. If he drove away without reporting the death and the cops discovered that he’d been in the barn, he’d be in trouble. Not prison trouble, but helping the police with their enquiries trouble. And he’d probably need a lawyer.

  But there’d be no evidence that he’d been in the barn and seen the body. There were the phone calls, of course. The call he’d made at Heathrow and the message on McBride’s phone. He could get around that, though, and phone again saying that he wouldn’t be able to meet McBride that afternoon. That might work. But he’d have to make the call well away from the farm.

  Then there was his family. They deserved to be told. Somewhere there was a wife carrying on as normal, totally unaware that her husband was dead. And two boys who had to be told that their father was gone for ever.

  He looked around the barn. Everything seemed exactly as it had been the last time he had been there. Except for the body, of course. He took a long drag on the cigarette and held the smoke for a good ten seconds before letting it out in a tight plume. He’d made up his mind.

  42

  John Fraser looked at his watch. It was six o’clock in the morning, which meant he had two hours to go before his shift ended and he could go home. The graveyard shift they called it, but that was actually a misnomer. It was quite rare for a patient to die in the ICU at night. Most died in the daytime, and the joke among the nursing staff was that the number of deaths rose in line with the number of doctors in attendance. Fraser knew that was a fallacy, too. Patients in the ICU were at their most stable when they slept, because then the body was able to get on with healing, or least keeping itself stable. During the daytime, with all the lights and the noise, stress levels increased and with stress came an increased risk of death.

  Fraser had asked for the transfer to the ICU but was starting to have second thoughts. He had assumed the medical staff there would be making life and death decisions and that those decisions would save lives, that they would make a difference. But in the six months he had been there, he had realised the medical care actually had very little to do with whether the patients lived or died. They came in, they were hooked up to machines that measured all their life signs, and they were monitored. Some patients got better and lived. Others got worse and died. But the medical staff tried equally hard with all the patients; they weren’t the ones choosing who lived and who died. It wasn’t a case of doing the right thing or the wrong thing – sometimes patients died no matter what the doctors did, and Fraser was finding it hard to come to terms with that. In almost any other job, the harder you worked the better the results. But not in the ICU. It didn’t matter how hard they tried, patients still died.

  The money was good, and the work was challenging, but Fraser was already thinking about asking for a transfer back to a general ward.

  Fraser was doing a walk-around of the various units, checking that the equipment was functioning properly, drips hadn’t been compromised and patients were as comfortable as they could be. He opened the door to Mrs Dawson’s room. She was in her sixties and had been involved in a bad car accident that had burst her spleen, broken her back in three places and punctured her lung. She’d been lucky, she’d been wearing a seatbelt, and an airbag had cushioned her against the worst of the impact. Her husband hadn’t been wearing his belt and the airbag in front of him had malfunctioned and he’d ended up under the rear wheels of the truck that had smashed into them. Her face was a black and blue mass of bruised tissue but she was breathing on her own, which was a good sign. Fraser checked her drip, then dabbed a paper towel at the dribble of saliva that was running from her open mouth to her pillow. She swallowed and then moaned softly. ‘Ron?’

  Ron was her husband. Fraser tossed the paper towel into the bin and left the room. One of the unit’s doctors was walking slowly down the corridor, texting on a BlackBerry. He looked up and smiled when he saw Fraser. His name was Joe MacDonald and he was newly qualified and still eager to please. ‘Fraser, how’s everything?’

  That was always the sign of a newly qualified doctor or an intern. They bothered to remember the names of the nurses because more often than not it was the nursing staff who pulled their nuts out of the fire. ‘All good, Doctor MacDonald.’

  ‘I’m going to have a lie-down. Give me a shout if you need me.’

  ‘No problem, Doctor MacDonald.’ MacDonald hurried down the corridor towards the windowless room that housed the camp bed where doctors could snatch a few hours’ sleep when they needed it. It was one of the inequalities of the medical hierarchy. Doctors could nap, but a nurse would be sacked for sleeping on duty. Not that Fraser wanted to be a doctor. He didn’t envy them their long hours, or the stress, or the decisions they had to make on an hourly basis. Fraser liked people, and he enjoyed helping them, and that’s what nurses did. He’d always wanted to be a nurse, ever since he’d been in hospital as a child to have his tonsils removed. His classmates had teased him and his parents hadn’t been keen on his choice of career, but Fraser had stuck with it and he couldn’t have been happier.

  He opened the door to Isabella Harper’s room. The little girl was lying in her bed, looking up at the ceiling. She smiled when she saw him. She put her finger to her lips and went ‘shhhh’, then pointed at the chair at the end of her bed where her father was sleeping, his head resting on a pillow jammed against the wall. Bella’s parents took it in turns to stay overnight in her room. It was against the rules, but Bella was nine years old and after all she had been through it was generally agreed the parents could come and go as they pleased.

  Fraser went over the bed. ‘Can’t sleep?’ he whispered.

  ‘I’m not tired,’ she said.

  ‘Are you okay? Do you need anything?’

  Bella shook her head. ‘I just want to go home.’

  ‘Soon,’ said Fraser. ‘You’re moving to a general ward tomorrow and I think you’ll be home in a few days.’

  ‘I saw Jesus,’ said Bella solemnly.

  ‘Really?’

  Bella nodded. ‘He was very kind. And I saw the Archangel Michael. He was nice too.’

  ‘Good,’ said Fraser.

  Bella’s father snored and moved his legs, then went quiet again.

  ‘Jesus gave me a message for you, John,’ said Bella.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s something he wants you to know.’

  ‘Bella, come on now, it’s time you were asleep.’

  Bella waved at him, urging him to move closer. ‘Come here, John, I’ll tell you what he said. It’s important.’

  Fraser frowned. He looked over at Mr Harper, but he was fast asleep.

  ‘Really, John, it’s important. But I have to whisper it, okay?’

  ‘If I let you whisper it, you’ll go to sleep?’

  Bella nodde
d. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Fraser. He bent over her and put his ear close to her mouth. He could smell her breath and he frowned. It was sour and he wrinkled his nose in disgust. Maybe the little girl hadn’t been cleaning her teeth, or perhaps it was something she’d eaten. ‘What is it you want to tell me?’ he asked.

  43

  Sally Fraser heard the front door open and she rolled over and squinted at the alarm clock on her bedside table. It was just after seven. She groaned. She had to be up at seven thirty and she doubted she’d be able to get back to sleep.

  She heard slow, steady footsteps as John walked upstairs. Sally hated it when John worked nights. She was a teacher and had to be at school by eight, which meant they hardly saw each other – the best they could manage was a couple of hours after they’d put the kids to bed and before he headed off to the hospital. The only plus point was that he was able to drop the boys off at the childminder’s in the morning.

  She curled up and closed her eyes, desperately wishing she could slip back into sleep, and hoping John wouldn’t slip into bed hoping for a quickie before she got up. She took a deep breath, and then frowned. It was just after seven, but John’s shift didn’t finish until eight. She opened her eyes again and blinked at the clock. Twenty past seven.

  She sat up, rubbing her eyes. ‘John?’ There was no answer. She got out of bed and padded across the carpet to the bedroom door. The first thing John usually did when he got in was shower, to get rid of the smell of the hospital. When he was on nights he used the guest bathroom, but there was no sound coming from it. ‘John?’ she called but again there was no answer.

  She walked down the hallway, past the bathroom towards the boys’ room. The door was open and a shaft of yellowish light ran across the carpet and up the opposite wall.

  ‘John, what’s going on?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing, honey, go back to bed,’ said her husband. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute.’