Nightshade: The Fourth Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thriller jn-4

by Stephen Leather

  ‘Maybe your dad mentioned it sometime?’

  ‘Why would he?’

  ‘I don’t know, Will. He spends a lot of time with her. Maybe they talked about him.’

  ‘I don’t see why. Dad was just a kid when his dad passed away. And how do you explain the Eadie thing? Grandpa Arthur and Auntie Eadie, that’s what Bella said.’

  ‘What are you saying, Will? That she went to Heaven and met dead relatives that we didn’t know about?’ She laughed and shook her head. ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Will. ‘You believe in Heaven, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course. But Bella didn’t die. She might have been unconscious for a few minutes but that’s not the same as dead, is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m just trying to understand what happened.’

  ‘Does it matter?’ said Sandra. ‘We’ve got her back. That’s all I care about. Nothing else matters.’

  Will smiled and nodded. ‘No arguments from me there,’ he said.

  Sandra reached over and held his hand. ‘We should just count our blessings.’

  47

  Nightingale was wondering whether to light a cigarette or head down to the pub for a lunchtime drink when Jenny opened the door to his office. He looked up from his copy of the Sun. ‘Don’t you ever knock?’

  ‘Why would I knock? You’ve got no secrets from me.’

  ‘I could be in an embarrassing situation.’

  ‘I don’t consider struggling with the Sun’s Sudoku to be that embarrassing,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I knew you’d want to see this.’ She handed him a computer printout. ‘The lab’s just got back to me. The only fingerprints on the knife and the crucible were yours and James McBride’s.’

  Nightingale looked at the lab’s report. ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘Well, it means that as you sure as hell didn’t set up the altar, it can only have been McBride.’ She dropped down onto the chair opposite him. ‘What do you think?’

  Nightingale ran a hand through his hair. ‘I think that Jimmy McBride framed himself as a Satanist. Or at least was party to it. But why would he do that?’

  ‘Maybe he was disturbed. Schizophrenic, maybe. Perhaps he believed he was doing the work of the Devil.’

  ‘But nothing else about him points to that, does it? And while he might have set up the altar, he couldn’t have downloaded the Satanic stuff onto his computer. He didn’t have wi-fi.’

  ‘He could have taken the computer to somewhere that did have an internet connection.’

  Nightingale shook his head. ‘It wasn’t a laptop,’ he said. ‘Someone else must have loaded the stuff onto his hard drive.’

  ‘But it was the cops who took it from his farmhouse.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So the cops helped frame him as a devil-worshipper? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘The cops. Or a cop. But here’s the thing, Jenny. He went out and killed eight kids and a teacher. Why does him being a Satanist make it more acceptable?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The whole world will know that he’s a child killer. Why bother to make it look like his motivation was tied in to devil-worship?’

  Jenny shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘There’s only one reason to do that, and that’s to distract from his real motivation. The Satanism thing is a distraction. He wanted us to think that’s why he killed those children.’

  ‘So you think he had another reason?’

  ‘I do. And I think that it all comes down to the children that he killed. There has to be some connection, some reason that he chose them. And whatever that reason was, he wanted to hide it. He didn’t want anyone to know the real reason he was killing them.’

  ‘This is pretty heavy stuff, Jack.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘To be honest, I don’t know. I really don’t know.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Maybe a drink will help me think.’

  ‘Yeah, because alcohol is known to increase your IQ exponentially, right?’

  Nightingale’s eyes narrowed. ‘Sarcasm?’

  ‘Barely concealed contempt, actually.’

  ‘So you don’t want to come to the pub with me?’

  Jenny grinned. ‘I didn’t say that.’

  48

  Nightingale paid the barman and raised his bottle of Corona. Jenny clinked her glass of white wine against his bottle. ‘Here’s to a clear head,’ she said.

  Nightingale chuckled and drank. ‘So here’s what I’m thinking,’ he said. ‘It started out looking as if McBride was a lone madman who was involved in black magic and Satanism. A nutter who just went crazy with a shotgun. But it’s clear that he wasn’t mad and he wasn’t a Satanist. But he wanted people to think that he was. It wasn’t that someone set him up; his fingerprints were on that fake altar, which means that he must have put it together. But a real Satanist would have had books on the occult in his house. And he would have fixed up an internet connection so that he could visit Satanic websites.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ said Jenny.

  ‘So if he wasn’t crazy and he wasn’t a Satanist, we need to understand the logic of what he did. And that’s what’s making my head hurt.’

  ‘You’re not alone there. But why couldn’t he just be crazy? And faking the altar was part of his craziness?’

  ‘Because the shooting wasn’t the work of a madman. He chose his victims, moving from classroom to classroom. He shot one teacher and eight pupils and then he blew his head off. A madman would have just gone into one classroom and blasted away and not cared who he killed. And probably shot it out with the cops, too.’ He shook his head. ‘McBride wasn’t mad, which means there was a logic to everything that he did.’

  ‘So we need to work out why he killed the kids that he did.’

  ‘And the deputy headmaster. I think he might be a clue to solving this.’ He sipped his lager. ‘Like I said before, he could have killed more teachers but didn’t. We need to look at Mister … what was his name?’

  ‘Etchells. Simon Etchells.’

  ‘We need to run a full check on him. And the kids.’

  ‘You still think that the kids are connected in some way?’

  ‘They were all in single-parent families, which means they might have been more vulnerable.’

  ‘Vulnerable to what? Abuse?’

  ‘Maybe. I didn’t get anywhere with the coroner’s officer, but I could talk to the parents.’

  ‘That’s your plan? Walk up to complete strangers and ask if their children were being assaulted?’

  Nightingale grimaced. ‘It doesn’t sound too good when you put it like that.’

  ‘You have to be careful,’ she said. ‘They’ve already lost a child and you start asking questions like that. Your feet won’t touch the ground.’

  ‘If this is about kids being abused, there has to be a reason why McBride decided to do what he did. Something must have happened to kick him off.’ He took a long pull on his lager. ‘I need to talk to that cop that Robbie put me in touch with. He might have an idea what’s going on up in Berwick.’

  ‘If he knew, surely he’d have done something already?’

  ‘That depends on what it is. Maybe it’s not common knowledge.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this, Jack?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We don’t have a client, remember. And we’re coming up on two grand’s worth already.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’

  ‘We know what happened. You want to know why. There’s a difference.’

  ‘I want to know why McBride killed those kids, yes. It’s not about the money. If someone forced McBride to do what he did, I want to know.’

  ‘You think someone forced him to kill the children and then kill himself?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think. That’s why I want to keep on the case, for a while longer at lea
st.’

  Jenny looked at her watch. ‘Speaking of cases, you haven’t forgotten you’ve got a job this evening?’

  ‘Of course not.’ He grinned. ‘But remind me again what it is.’

  Jenny sighed. ‘Mrs Holiday. Her husband’s knocking off his secretary at the Premier Inn every Thursday night.’

  ‘Ah yes, the old romantic.’

  ‘And she wants photographs to give to her lawyer.’

  ‘I’m on it,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘The camera’s in the office,’ she said. ‘I’ve charged it and there’s a fresh memory card in it. Some video would be nice.’

  Nightingale saluted her sarcastically. ‘Aye, aye, ma’am.’

  49

  Jeremy Barker checked himself in the mirror and smoothed down his hair. The white coat and the stethoscope draped casually around the neck gave him the look of a doctor, and providing he kept walking purposefully he doubted he would be challenged. People were used to deferring to men in white coats, and providing he didn’t actually claim to be a doctor he didn’t see he was breaking the law. He took a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles he’d borrowed from his aunt and put them on. Barker had just turned twenty-five but with his receding hairline and drinker’s paunch he looked a few years older. He turned left and right, then nodded at his reflection. ‘Twenty milligrams of epinephrine and get the crash cart in here, stat!’ he said, then he laughed. It would probably be best if he didn’t say anything.

  He took off the coat and glasses and put them into a backpack with a small digital voice recorder and a Casio digital camera. His car was parked a few yards from the building that housed his cramped rented flat and it took him just over an hour to drive from Clapham in south London to the hospital in Brighton. He parked some distance away, because the car park was covered by CCTV. He climbed out of the car, put on the white coat, and shoved the stethoscope into one pocket and the recorder and camera into the other.

  It was nine o’clock in the evening. Barker had thought long and hard about the best time to visit the hospital. There would be more staff around during the day, so less chance of him being spotted, but in the evening more of the patients would be asleep and it was more likely the girl would be alone.

  She was out of the ICU, which meant she would be on the children’s ward. That was on the third floor and consisted of two dozen individual rooms. He’d been to the children’s ward before and he knew there were windows looking into each of the rooms so that the nursing staff could check on the patients from the corridor.

  As he reached the main entrance, he took the stethoscope out of his pocket and put it around his neck. The lifts were across the main reception area but there were stairs just beyond them. He put his mobile phone to his ear and kept saying yes, yes, and no until he was past the reception desk. He took the steps two at a time, keeping his phone in his hand.

  He stopped when he reached the third floor and took a couple of minutes to steady his breathing. He knew there was almost nothing to worry about – the hospital was huge and doctors came and went, and on the off-chance anyone questioned him he planned to say he was a GP, there to check up on one of his own patients. He even had a fake business card in his wallet he could show if necessary.

  He stepped into the corridor. To his right was a nursing station. For a moment he thought it was unoccupied, but then he spotted a nurse at a computer. He put the phone to his ear and began to walk. ‘Yes, I’ll be here for an hour or so. Can you ask Derek if he can do it for me. I know, but he’s on call.’ Barker kept the imaginary conversation going as he walked by the station, then slowed as he reached the patient rooms. There was a slot in each door containing a card with the name of the patient and any instructions for the nursing staff. The first room had a boy called Jake. The curtain to his room was closed. On the other side of the corridor the curtain was open and he could see a nurse talking to a girl swathed in bandages. Barker looked at the name on the card. Alison Cooper. Different girl.

  There were boys in the next two rooms, and no nurses. The lights were off but there was always enough of a green glow from the monitoring equipment to see by. Double doors at the end of the corridor opened and a black doctor walked towards Barker, his long white coat flapping behind him. Barker took out his phone and began talking, but made eye contact with the black doctor and nodded as he walked by. He had to walk the full length of the corridor before he found Bella Harper’s room. The curtain was half drawn and he checked the girl was alone before opening the door. As he stepped into the room he put his hand into the pocket of his coat and switched on the digital recorder. Bella was lying on her back, her blonde curls spread out over the pillow, giving her the look of a sleeping angel.

  Barker closed the door softly and went over to the window to close the curtain. As he turned around his breath caught in his throat as he realised her eyes were open and she was staring at him. He swallowed. ‘Hello Bella, how are you this evening?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said.

  ‘I’m just going to put the light on,’ he said.

  ‘Okay.’

  Barker flicked the light switch and two fluorescent tubes flicked on. ‘There we are.’ She brushed a lock of blonde hair away from her eyes. Her eyes were pale blue, Barker realised. He hadn’t read that anywhere. Details like that helped to flesh out a story. ‘Have they told you when you’ll be going home?’

  ‘The day after tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘I bet you’re looking forward to it.’ He sat down on the end of her bed, careful not to put any of his weight on the recorder.

  Bella nodded. ‘I don’t like hospitals,’ she said.

  ‘Nobody does,’ said Barker. ‘I’ll let you into a secret. Doctors don’t really like hospitals either.’

  Bella giggled. ‘That’s funny,’ she said.

  ‘Bella, I need to take a photograph of you for our file, is that okay?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Can I comb my hair?’

  Barker smiled reassuringly. ‘It’s only for our file, no one will see it,’ he lied. He took out his camera and took a couple of shots. No photographs of Bella had been released, and while the UK papers would probably not publish them he was sure he’d be able to sell them overseas. ‘How do you feel? Do you feel better?’ He put the camera away.

  ‘I feel a bit sore, still. The medicine helps me.’

  ‘Do you sleep okay? Do you have nightmares?’ That would be a great storyline. Kidnapped girl plagued by nightmares.

  ‘Not really nightmares,’ said Bella. ‘I don’t really dream at all.’

  ‘What about when you get home? Is there something there you really miss? A pet?’ Kidnapped girl reunited with her puppy. That would make a terrific picture.

  ‘I miss my rabbit. Floppy. He has really long ears.’

  A rabbit wasn’t such a great picture, but it would do. ‘And have Mum and Dad said they’ll take you somewhere special? The seaside or Eurodisney or somewhere like that?’

  Bella shook her head. ‘They just want me at home.’

  ‘I can understand that. They must have missed you so much when they were away.’

  Bella brushed hair away from her eyes again. ‘I think so.’

  ‘Can I ask you something, Bella?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘When you were with the man and the woman who kept you prisoner. Can you tell me what they did to you?’

  Bella swallowed but didn’t say anything as she studied him with her pale blue eyes.

  ‘We need to know so we can help other little girls that get taken away from their families.’ He nodded encouragingly. ‘You’ll be helping us to help them.’

  Bella stared at him in silence and for a moment he was worried she was about to burst into tears. Then she slowly smiled. ‘You’re not a doctor, are you?’

  ‘Of course I am, sweetie.’ He took off his stethoscope and swung it around. ‘Why else would I have this?’

  Bella smiled at him. ‘So people wouldn’t realise you’re a
reporter,’ she said.

  Barker’s stomach lurched. ‘A reporter?’

  ‘A freelance. You want to write a story about me that you can sell, but what you really want is a job on one of the big newspapers.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  Bella giggled. ‘I know everything, Jeremy.’

  Barker stared at her, his mind racing. How did she know his name? ‘Did somebody tell you I was coming to see you?’

  Bella nodded.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jesus.’

  Barker screwed up his face. ‘Jesus?’

  ‘I spoke to Jesus. An angel took me to see him.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘When the bad man and the bad woman had me. But Jesus said everything would be all right. And he had a message for you, Jeremy.’

  ‘A message?’

  ‘A message for you. Come closer, Jeremy, I have to whisper it to you.’ Barker stood up and looked down at her. She crooked her finger and beckoned him. ‘Come on. Before the nurse comes back. She’ll be here soon.’

  Barker’s left foot moved forward as if it had a life of his own.

  ‘Closer, Jeremy.’ She smiled at him, showing perfect white teeth.

  Barker took another step forward. The stethoscope slipped from his fingers and clattered to the floor.

  ‘Good boy, Jeremy,’ said Bella.

  50

  Nightingale got back to Bayswater just before eleven with several dozen photographs of the errant husband and his secretary in his camera, along with several minutes of video of them sitting in a bar, drinking champagne and getting in the mood. When he saw that Mrs Chan’s Chinese restaurant on the ground floor was still open, he decided to pop in for a bowl of his favourite duck noodles. Mrs Chan served him herself and persuaded him to down another two Coronas, and after he’d finished eating she sat at his table and chatted about her son, who was running a very successful property company in Hong Kong. He had just had his second child, making Mrs Chan a grandmother six times over.

  ‘When you marry, Mister Jack?’ she asked him. She had been in London for almost thirty years but still spoke English as if it was her first day in the country.