Midnight

by Stephen Leather

  ‘I have everything you need in stock,’ said Mrs Steadman. ‘I have a supplier who runs a riding stable in Wimbledon. Now, you need a piece of virgin parchment, a quill made from a swan’s feather and black ink that has been prepared in the Persian way.’ She smiled at him. ‘And yes, before you ask, I have the ink. And the parchment. And the feather.’

  ‘You’re a godsend, Mrs Steadman.’

  ‘Now, you write down what you want on the parchment while you chant these words: “What I want I write here, please take my dream and bring it near, what I want is what I should get, let all my dreams now be met.” Then you fold the parchment in half and in half again and hold it over the flame of the candle and let it burn. It must burn completely while it’s in your fingers – the more of the parchment that remains, the less likely it is that you’ll get the wish granted. Ideally you want it to turn to ashes in your hand. Then you rub the ash between your hands until there is nothing left. And this is important: you mustn’t wash your hands until the following night. Until after midnight. If you wash your hands before then, you negate the spell.’

  ‘And that’ll work?’

  ‘Of course it’ll work, young man. Provided you do exactly as I’ve said.’

  Nightingale sipped his tea. ‘If it’s as easy as that, why doesn’t everyone do it?’

  ‘A lot do,’ she said. ‘There’s more interest than ever in Wicca.’

  ‘But it’s not as if it’s generally known, is it? That magic can get you off a drunk-driving charge?’

  Mrs Steadman chuckled. ‘We tend not to advertise,’ she said. ‘And I doubt that many solicitors would be prepared to suggest magic as an alternative to legal advice.’

  ‘But it will work, right?’

  ‘I would hope so, yes. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.’

  33

  Jenny was signing for a letter when Nightingale arrived back at the office. A cycle courier in skin-tight black Lycra leggings and a fluorescent green top nodded at him.

  ‘Aren’t you cold out there?’ asked Nightingale. ‘It’s brass monkeys.’

  ‘It’s fine so long as you keep moving,’ said the man. He had a New Zealand accent and sun-bleached hair that suggested he was more at home on a surfboard than pedalling around the streets of London. Jenny handed him back his receipt pad and thanked him.

  ‘It’s the DNA results, I had them do a rush job,’ said Jenny as the courier headed out. She smiled brightly at him and held up the envelope. ‘Do you want to open this or should I as part of my secretarial duties?’

  ‘You go ahead,’ he said.

  She opened the envelope and took out a sheet of paper. ‘And the winner is . . .’ She frowned as she read the letter, then looked up. ‘I’m sorry, Jack. She’s not related to you.’

  Nightingale shrugged. ‘Nothing to be sorry about, kid,’ he said. ‘She killed herself, remember. If she’s not related to me then my sister’s still out there somewhere.’

  Jenny reread the letter and then gave it to Nightingale. ‘I don’t understand this,’ she said. ‘Why did the Ouija board tell you to go to Abersoch in the first place? What was to be gained by sending you to see a girl who’d just killed herself?’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ said Nightingale. ‘But I think that pretty much proves it wasn’t Robbie talking to us.’ He read the letter from the lab. It confirmed that there were no matching sequences in the two DNA samples.

  ‘Well, if it wasn’t Robbie, who was it? And who would want to tell you that your sister is going to Hell? Do you think it might be Proserpine?’

  Nightingale didn’t say anything.

  ‘You look like a kid who’s just been caught stealing sweets,’ said Jenny.

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘You’ve been up to something.’

  Nightingale held up his hands. ‘Guilty as charged,’ he said. ‘You should have been a cop.’

  ‘What did you do, Jack?’

  He sighed. ‘I called up Proserpine.’

  Jenny’s eyes widened. ‘You did not!’

  ‘Why ask if you don’t believe me? I summoned her, and it isn’t her behind the messages. And it wasn’t her down in the basement. She said that my sister’s soul was nothing to do with her.’ He took off his raincoat and hung it on the rack by the door.

  ‘And you believe her?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any reason for her to lie. Maybe it’s like Barbara said and it’s our subconscious at work.’

  ‘You mean we were pushing the planchette? Because I wasn’t. Were you?’

  ‘Not deliberately, of course. That’s the whole point of the subconscious, isn’t it? It works without you knowing why or how.’

  ‘But at one point it was moving on its own, Jack. And the spinning globe? The books? I didn’t tell Barbara about that, but we saw what we saw. Something was down in the basement with us, and it wasn’t Robbie. And if it wasn’t Robbie last time, maybe it wasn’t Robbie before. Which means that someone or something wanted you to go to Abersoch.’ She flashed a smile. ‘But at least now we know for sure that Connie Miller wasn’t your sister.’

  ‘Yeah, Thomas was telling the truth after all,’ agreed Nightingale.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ asked Jenny.

  ‘I’m going to find her,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘How, exactly?’

  Nightingale grinned. ‘I’ve got a plan,’ he said. ‘I’m a private detective, remember? Finding missing people is what I do.’

  ‘By the way, I looked at the DVD with the files from Connie Miller’s computer.’

  Nightingale shrugged dismissively. ‘You can leave that now. There’s no connection to me.’

  ‘Jack, there could be a serial killer out there.’

  ‘That’s the police’s job.’

  ‘I’m serious, Jack. She spent a lot of time on sites about depression and suicide. And she was getting a lot of email from a guy in Caernarfon. He wanted to meet her. His name’s Craig. Caernarfon Craig he calls himself.’

  Nightingale frowned. ‘The cops should have followed that up.’

  ‘I don’t think so. She was using a separate email account that she’d set up just to log on to some of the darker sites.’

  ‘How did you find that out?’

  ‘One of the files you downloaded had her passwords.’

  ‘The cops would have found that, surely?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It was tucked away in one of her correspondence files. She was pretty good at covering her tracks. I think she wanted to talk to people without them knowing who she was. There’re a lot of weirdos on the internet.’

  ‘Send it to the cops, Jenny. Let them follow it up.’

  ‘And how exactly would I explain away the fact that I’ve got copies of her personal emails?’

  ‘Okay, what do you want to do?’

  She smiled. ‘Like you, I’ve got a plan.’

  34

  The barista was a Ukrainian teenager with bad acne and he had trouble understanding the girl so it was a full ten minutes after entering the coffee shop that Nightingale finally had his two coffees. He took them to the table where Colin Duggan was whispering into his mobile phone. Duggan pocketed the phone as Nightingale put the coffee mugs on the table and sat down.

  ‘One low-fat latte,’ said Nightingale. ‘Are you off pubs, then? In the old days it would have been a pint of best in the Rose and Crown.’

  Duggan picked up his coffee and sipped it. He was an inspector, the same rank as Nightingale had been when he left the Metropolitan Police. He was completely bald with elf-like ears and a mischievous smile. He was wearing a beige raincoat over a dark suit and had a Burberry scarf around his neck. ‘I keep out of them these days,’ said Duggan. ‘No point in rubbing my nose in it.’

  ‘On the wagon?’

  Duggan patted his expanding waistline. ‘Diabetes,’ he said. ‘I can keep it under control by watching what I eat and drink but the doctor says that if I don’t get a grip on it now I’ll
be on medication for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Colin, you’re not even fifty. How can you have diabetes?’

  ‘Forty-six,’ said Duggan. ‘But it’s nothing to do with age. It’s the booze and the fish suppers. And the cigarettes. I’ve given them up too.’

  ‘Smoking doesn’t give you diabetes,’ said Nightingale. ‘Zero calories and they reduce stress. If anything, you’d be better off smoking more.’

  Duggan grinned and scratched his fleshy neck. ‘Yeah, if it wasn’t for lung cancer they’d be the perfect food.’

  ‘I’m not sure how true that cancer thing is,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’ve known people who’ve smoked all their lives and never had so much as a cough. And there are non-smokers who’ve never even tried a single cigarette who’ve died of lung cancer.’ He patted his chest. ‘My lungs are fine. I reckon your genes have a lot to do with it. You either get cancer or you don’t; smoking is just one of lots of factors.’

  ‘So you’ve got good genes, have you?’ chuckled Duggan.

  ‘Yeah, that’s sort of why I wanted to see you.’

  ‘I knew there’d be something,’ said Duggan. ‘I haven’t seen you since the Sophie Underwood thing.’

  Nightingale nodded. ‘I know. Sorry.’

  ‘Hell of a thing, that.’

  That wasn’t how Nightingale thought of what had happened that cold November morning. It wasn’t a ‘thing’. It was a pivotal moment in his life and Sophie’s death had changed him forever. Duggan had been there and had seen the girl fall to her death. Nightingale had been on the balcony of the flat next door, trying to talk her back inside. ‘Yeah,’ said Nightingale. ‘It was.’

  ‘What happened to the father, who’d been fiddling with her – he deserved it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Nightingale.

  ‘Seems like a lifetime ago.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘I’m back in CID and you’re a gumshoe.’

  Nightingale chuckled. ‘Do they still say that? I thought that went out with Humphrey Bogart and Sam Spade.’

  ‘Guys I work with call you lot much worse than that,’ said Duggan. ‘The days of cops running checks for you private eyes for the price of a pint are well gone. These days, get caught and you lose your job, your pension, everything.’

  Nightingale grimaced. ‘That’s not good news, Colin.’

  Duggan raised his coffee in salute. ‘Don’t worry, Jack. You’ve got a lot of friends in the Job, me included. What do you need?’

  ‘I’m trying to track down my sister and I’ve drawn a blank through all the usual channels,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Never knew you had a sister.’

  ‘Neither did I until recently,’ said Nightingale. ‘Thing is, she’s my half-sister – same father, different mother. And she was adopted on the day she was born. So I don’t know her name or her date of birth.’

  ‘You’re not making this easy, are you?’ said Duggan.

  ‘I was hoping you could run a check on the National DNA database.’

  Duggan raised his eyebrows. ‘You think she’s in the system?’

  ‘I know it’s an outside chance but there are five million samples in the database and it’s growing at thirty thousand a month. She might have been arrested for something and had a sample taken.’ Nightingale sighed. ‘I know it’s a long shot, Colin, but I don’t have anything else.’

  ‘So you want me to run your DNA and see if there’s a sibling match?’

  Nightingale shook his head. ‘No need. Our father’s DNA is already in the system. A guy called Ainsley Gosling. He committed suicide last month. Robbie Hoyle checked my DNA against Gosling’s a few weeks ago.’

  ‘Why did he do that?’ asked Duggan.

  ‘I’d just been told that Gosling was my biological father. I wanted to make sure that he really was.’

  ‘What happened to Robbie was a damn shame,’ said Duggan.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Nightingale. ‘It was a bitch.’

  ‘I couldn’t get to the funeral. I was up in Liverpool interviewing a guy on remand.’ Duggan shook his head. ‘What a waste. Just goes to show, right? Enjoy life while you can because none of us knows how long we’ll be here.’ He sipped his latte. ‘Okay, so all I need to do is run Gosling’s DNA through the database to check for close matches. Shouldn’t be a problem.’

  ‘On the QT, obviously.’

  Duggan grinned. ‘Obviously,’ he said. ‘I’ve a couple of missing-person cases on the books – I’ll bury the search in one of those. Probably take me a day or two.’

  ‘You’re a star, Colin,’ said Nightingale, clinking his mug against Duggan’s.

  ‘So what’s the story? I didn’t know you were adopted.’

  Nightingale shrugged. ‘Until recently, neither did I.’

  ‘This sister, she was born after you?’

  ‘Yeah, two years after. She’ll be thirty-one now.’

  ‘So he gave up two kids for adoption one after the other. That’s bloody strange, isn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it, Colin.’

  Duggan sipped his coffee. ‘What about the birth mother?’

  ‘Different mothers,’ said Nightingale. ‘Mine’s dead; my sister’s I don’t know about.’

  ‘Must feel strange, suddenly finding out that you have a sister after thirty-odd years. If you do find her you’re going to have a hell of a lot to talk about.’

  Nightingale nodded but didn’t say anything. Duggan was right. Finding his sister would be hard enough, but if he did manage to track her down he was then going to have to explain to her that Ainsley Gosling had sold her soul to a demon from Hell. It wasn’t a conversation he was looking forward to.

  35

  Jenny was at her desk peering at her computer screen when Nightingale walked into the office on Friday morning. She looked at her watch pointedly.

  ‘I know, it’s ten o’clock, but I had a late one last night,’ said Nightingale. He put a memory card on the desk. ‘Mr Walters was right – his child bride is fooling around behind his back.’

  ‘Child bride is a bit harsh,’ said Jenny. ‘She’s twenty-three.’

  ‘Yeah, and he’s fifty-one. That means he was almost thirty when she was born, which in my book makes him more than old enough to be her father.’

  ‘You are so judgemental,’ sighed Jenny, picking up the memory card.

  ‘Plus, she’s Latvian or Ukrainian, so he probably bought her off the internet at childbride dot com.’

  ‘Jack, you’re terrible.’

  ‘I’m a realist. You’ve seen the guy. Overweight, face like the back of a bus, IQ in single figures. She’s less than half his age and fit as a butcher’s dog. What did he think was going to happen?’ He looked over her shoulder. There was a Facebook page on her screen. ‘Busy, I see,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been posting on the sites that Connie Miller visited. My name is Bronwyn and I’m depressed because I don’t have any friends and I hate my job.’

  ‘Bless,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘You’d be surprised at how many depressed people there are out there.’

  ‘The phrase “get a life” comes to mind. Of course people are going to be depressed if they sit around on their computer every day.’

  ‘I’ve come across the guy that Connie was emailing but he hasn’t reacted to any of my postings yet.’

  ‘He’s probably just another sad bastard thinking about topping himself,’ he said. He nodded at the memory card in her hand. ‘Let’s have a look at what I’ve got. At least it might help pay the bills.’

  Jenny slotted the card into the reader attached to her computer.

  ‘The guy she’s with is Roger Pennington. Owns a car dealership in south London and a very nice house in Clapham.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Footloose and fancy-free and, if I know anything about Latvian mail-order brides, she’ll be divorcing Mr Walters and shacking up with Mr Car Dealership quicker than you can say “
serves you right”. Make sure you send the bill before she takes him for everything he’s got.’

  ‘How did you get so cynical?’ asked Jenny. Her fingers played over the keyboard and she called up the pictures and videos that had been stored on the card.

  ‘Ten years as a cop and two years doing this,’ said Nightingale. ‘It’s not as if I see people at their best, is it? Anyway, what are you doing over the weekend?’

  ‘I’m off to the country with Barbara to see Mummy and Daddy,’ she said.

  ‘Hunting, shooting and fishing?’ He peered at the pictures on the screen.

  ‘Not at the same time, obviously,’ she said. ‘And it’ll be a bit cold for fishing, anyway. You should come down with me one weekend. They’d love to meet you.’

  ‘Mutual,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘I’m serious, Jack. They keep asking about you.’

  ‘I’d like to meet them, too. I just think that I’d be a bit out of place, that’s all.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘You’d have no problem getting on with Daddy He’s a smoker, too. And he collects classic cars.’

  ‘How rich is your dad, exactly?’

  She grinned. ‘Very.’

  ‘And his house, it’s bigger than Gosling Manor, right?’

  ‘Size isn’t everything.’

  ‘How many bedrooms has it got?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ve ever counted,’ she laughed. ‘Are you telling me you won’t visit because their house is bigger than yours?’

  ‘I’m joking,’ he said, holding up his hands in surrender. ‘I’d love a weekend in the country. I’m not sure about the shooting bit, though.’

  ‘We’re slap bang in the middle of the pheasant season. It’s a great day out – you really should try it.’

  ‘The shooting, I’m fine with; it’s the killing birds bit that I’m not happy about.’

  ‘Daddy has a clay-pigeon shoot as well. You don’t have a thing about clay discs, do you?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘Daddy does have a rule that you have to eat anything you shoot and you might find them a bit chewy.’ She laughed at the look of surprise on his face, then noticed the dirt on his hands. ‘What have you been doing?’ she asked. ‘Your hands are filthy.’