There was more static. Nightingale leaned towards the speakerphone. ‘Tell him my father was Ainsley Gosling.’ The static ended and there was only the sound of birdsong from the trees on the far side of the road. The lock buzzed and the gates swung open. He turned and looked up at the CCTV, threw it a mock salute, then climbed back into the MGB and drove through the gates. The drive curved to the right in front of a three-storey concrete and glass cube. A flight of white marble steps led up to a white double-height door that was already opening as he got out of the car. Two men in black suits, wearing impenetrable sunglasses, walked down the steps towards him.
Nightingale knew instinctively that they were going to pat him down so he smiled amiably and raised his arms. One of the men, burly with a shaved head, slowly and methodically squeezed his legs and arms, then worked his way down from his neck to his groin. He found Nightingale’s phone and examined it carefully before handing it back. ‘Photo ID,’ he said. He wasn’t English, Nightingale realised. Serbian, maybe, or Bosnian.
Nightingale gave the man his driving licence.
‘Business card.’ The man held out his other hand. Nightingale took out his wallet and gave him one.
The second man was walking slowly around the car, checking it inside and out. Nightingale smiled and nodded but was ignored.
The heavy with his ID went back up the steps to where a woman had emerged from the house. She was wearing a black suit, the skirt ending just above her knees, a crisp white shirt and black high heels. Her blonde hair was tied back with a black ribbon.
As the man gave the driving licence and business card to her, a gust lifted the back of his jacket and Nightingale caught a glimpse of a black automatic in a leather and nylon holster. It looked like a Glock. The woman studied the licence and card and then waved at Nightingale to come up the stairs. He held out his hand to shake hers but she just gave him his licence and card. ‘My name is Sylvia, Mr Nightingale. There are certain house rules that must be followed to the letter if you are to meet with Mr Mitchell.’
‘I understand.’
‘No, you don’t,’ she said. ‘You will do everything I ask or you will not be permitted to speak with him.’ She turned and walked back inside the house. Two more men in black suits and dark glasses were standing in the large white-marble hallway, their hands clasped over their groins. Two stainless-steel CCTV cameras covered the area.
A marble spiral staircase, also covered by a CCTV camera, led to the upper floors, and a glass-feature light, which looked like a waterfall that had frozen mid-flow, hung from the centre of the ceiling. Half a dozen jet black doors with glossy white handles led off the hall. Sylvia walked to the middle, her heels clicking on the marble, and stopped under the glass waterfall. She turned to him and pointed to a door. ‘In there is a bathroom. You will remove all your clothing and you will shower, using the gel provided. You will use the same gel to wash your hair twice. You will use the brush provided to clean under your toe- and fingernails. There are no towels but there is an electric dryer in which you stand. When you are dry you will put on the robe provided and come back here. Do not touch your clothes once you have showered. Do you have any questions?’
‘Just one,’ said Nightingale. ‘I said I was the son of Ainsley Gosling, but my name is Nightingale. Yet you showed no surprise at the different names.’
‘Apparently Mr Mitchell was expecting you,’ said Sylvia. She motioned at the door to the bathroom. ‘Please, if you will.’
53
There were two stainless-steel CCTV cameras in the bathroom, which Nightingale thought overkill, considering the men with guns in the hallway. He was sure that the cameras were being monitored but didn’t bother trying to protect his modesty. There were white plastic hangers on a set of stainless-steel hooks. He stripped off his clothes and placed them on the hangers. A pristine white cotton robe was hanging on one of the hooks. He rolled up his socks and put them into his shoes, took off his watch and stood facing one of the cameras, his arms held out from his sides. ‘Happy?’ he said.
The camera stared back at him. He walked into the glass-sided shower. There were multiple jets all around it and when he turned the control dial water squirted at him from every direction. There was a soap dispenser full of a bright green gel. Nightingale rubbed it into his hair and lathered it over his body. It smelled of mint and tingled on his skin. There was a brand new plastic nailbrush on a wire tray under the soap dispenser with which he methodically cleaned his nails. Then he rinsed off the lather and repeated the process.
The dryer was a stainless-steel box of the same size as the shower with a rubber floor. As soon as he stepped inside, warm air blew all over his body, caressing him like a soft summer wind. Nightingale raised his arms and let it play over his skin. In less than three minutes he was dry. He put on the robe, which reached almost to his ankles. There was no comb or brush so he stood in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror and tidied his hair as best he could with his fingers.
Sylvia was waiting for him in the hall, flanked by two of the men in dark suits. ‘Show me your hands,’ she said. He held them out and she scrutinised his nails, then nodded. ‘There are procedures that must be followed at all times,’ she said. ‘If at any time you break any of the rules I will give you, the meeting will end.’
‘I’ll be a good boy,’ said Nightingale.
She ignored his attempt at levity. ‘You will see that Mr Mitchell is inside a pentagram. You must not get within six feet of the perimeter.’
‘Because?’
‘There is no because, Mr Nightingale. There are only rules that have to be followed. If you make any attempt to get closer than six feet, my associates here will stop you.’
‘Stop me how?’
‘By whatever means necessary.’
‘They’ll shoot me if I try to get inside the circle?’
‘By whatever means necessary,’ repeated Sylvia. ‘You must make no move to touch Mr Mitchell or to give him anything.’
‘So, no kissing, then?’
‘This is not a laughing matter, Mr Nightingale,’ said Sylvia, disdainfully. ‘If you refuse to take this seriously I will have to ask you to leave.’
Nightingale’s face hardened. ‘I don’t think that’s going to happen, Sylvia darling,’ he said. ‘Because the way I see it, you’re the hired help here. You dance for Mr Mitchell and Mr Mitchell has decided that he wants to see me. When I was outside you were all for calling the cops and having me hauled away, but you changed your tune when Mr Mitchell learned who I was. He told you to get me in here, which means he wants to see me, which means you’re not going to ask me to leave. So, do your job and let me in to see him and stop playing the hard arse with me, because I’ve dealt with some very hard people over the years and, believe me, you don’t even come close.’
Sylva’s jaw tightened and if looks could kill Nightingale would have burst into flames on the spot, but he could see in her eyes that he was right. She didn’t have the authority to keep him from the man he’d come to see. She walked past him, so close that he caught the delicate scent of her perfume. ‘Follow me,’ she said.
54
Sebastian Mitchell was in a ground-floor room overlooking the gardens at the rear of the house. The floor was of the same white marble that had been used in the entrance hall and the walls were painted white. He was sitting in a winged green leather armchair, an oxygen mask covering the lower part of his face and connected by a thin clear tube to a tall cylinder behind him to his left. To his right a heart monitor was connected to a sensor on his chest. He was an old man, at least ninety, with wisps of white hair and skin that was greying and speckled with liver spots. He was wearing a robe similar to the one that Nightingale had on, open at the front, and white cotton boxer shorts. There were pale blue slippers on his feet.
The room was large, almost as big as the main room in Gosling Manor. There were french windows leading out to a stone-flagged patio, which in turn led to lawns as smooth as a billiard t
able. A bodyguard stood at each corner of the room. Unlike the men outside they had taken off their jackets but kept on their sunglasses. Two had nylon shoulder holsters with Glock automatics, one an Ingram submachine pistol in a sling and the fourth was holding a shotgun across his chest. They were staring impassively into the middle distance.
Nightingale walked towards Mitchell, his bare feet slapping on the marble floor. Sylvia followed him, her high heels clicking like an overwound metronome. ‘Not too close, remember, Mr Nightingale,’ she warned.
A black circle had been etched into the floor, its edge bordering a five-pointed star. At first Nightingale thought that the design had been painted onto the marble but as he got closer he realised it was actually set into the white marble. There were other designs within the circle, strange markings and letters from an alphabet he didn’t recognise. At each point of the star a large white candle burned, but there was no smoke, just a pure yellow flame. The only other furniture in the room was a hospital bed, in the centre of the circle next to the armchair.
‘Thanks for seeing me,’ said Nightingale.
Mitchell coughed, then pulled the oxygen mask away from his face. ‘You have your father’s eyes,’ he said, ‘and his jaw.’
‘I don’t think anyone else sees a family resemblance,’ said Nightingale.
‘He sent you?’ asked Mitchell.
‘He’s dead,’ said Nightingale.
Mitchell’s eyes narrowed and he put up a hand to adjust the oxygen mask. ‘How?’
‘Suicide.’
‘How?’
‘Shotgun to the head.’
‘When?’
‘Last week.’
Mitchell began to laugh, but the laugh quickly degenerated into a cough. When he had it under control he took a tissue from a box and dabbed his lips. It came away spotted with red. He screwed it up and dropped it into a steel wastebin. ‘How old are you?’ he asked.
‘I’ll be thirty-three next Friday.’
Mitchell nodded slowly, a cruel smile spreading across his face. ‘Today’s the Lord’s Day, so five days to go,’ he said. ‘He was trying to get out of the deal, you know that?’
‘He left me a video, telling me everything.’
Mitchell laughed sharply. ‘I hardly think he would have told you everything,’ he said. ‘But he was wasting his time. There was nothing he could do. And that’s why you have come to see me, of course. But you’re wasting your time, as your father wasted his.’
‘He asked for your help?’
‘I don’t think your father asked for anything in his life. He demanded. He threatened. He bargained. But even if he had gone down on his knees and begged, even if I had wanted to help him, there is nothing that can be done. A deal is a deal.’ He leaned over and adjusted the oxygen flow, took several deep breaths from the mask and settled back in his chair. ‘You read my book?’
‘Some of it.’
‘You read Latin?’
‘A friend helped me.’
‘So you know what lies ahead for you?’
‘I said I read it. I didn’t say I believed it.’
Mitchell coughed and removed his mask again to dab at his lips. The blood-spotted tissue followed the first into the wastebin. ‘It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not. A deal is a deal.’
‘Why my thirty-third birthday? Why didn’t the devil he did the deal with take my soul straight away, at birth?’
‘A soul that hasn’t lived is no prize,’ said Mitchell. ‘There are seven cycles each of eleven years. The start of the fourth cycle is the most precious, when the body is at its peak.’
‘And the deal would have been my soul for riches and power?’
‘I don’t know what your father asked for. But, whatever it was, he regretted it. Eventually.’
‘And that was when he came to see you?’
‘He kept coming. He was at my door every week. He knew I’d done a deal with Proserpine. He thought I could help him get out of the deal he’d done.’
‘Proserpine?’
Mitchell grinned. ‘You don’t know anything, do you?’
‘I’m on a pretty steep learning curve, yeah.’
‘Proserpine is the devil that your father did the deal with. A bitch of the first order.’
‘And you wouldn’t help?’
‘Wouldn’t help, couldn’t help, it amounts to the same thing. A deal is a deal and that’s the end of it.’ He chuckled. ‘The end of you.’
‘Why did you give him your diary if you didn’t want to help him?’
Mitchell chuckled drily. ‘Is that what you think? That I gave it to him? Your father stole it from me. He sent his people in at night. They killed two of my men and took it.’
‘Why? What was so important about your diary?’
‘He thought it would show him a way to get out of the contract. But he was wrong. The book contains many things, but getting out of a contract with Proserpine is not an option.’
‘What about if I gave you the diary back?’
Mitchell stared at Nightingale. ‘That would be the honourable thing to do,’ he said.
‘If I did,’ said Nightingale, ‘what could you do for me?’
‘What do you want?’
‘What I want, Mr Mitchell, is to forget about all this and get on with my life.’
‘I’m afraid that’s not an option,’ said Mitchell. He began to cough again and bent forward to adjust the oxygen flow. He took several deep breaths to steady himself. ‘Doing a deal with a devil, any devil, is easy enough. The information is out there. They want to be contacted, they want to deal. That’s what they live for – to harvest souls. Even someone who is just dabbling in the occult will soon find out how to summon a devil. It used to be books that people turned to but now it’s the Internet. Google will give you tens of thousands of sites that will tell you what to do. But once the deal is done, there is no going back. I told Gosling so, but he kept asking, kept pushing. He thought the answer lay in my diary, but it doesn’t. The diary tells you how to summon Proserpine and her ilk, but not how to rescind a deal.’
‘And what did you get? What did you bargain for?’
Mitchell sneered. ‘That’s between me and her,’ he said.
‘But you didn’t try to back out?’
‘I knew what I was getting into,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t like your father. He was too eager. He didn’t think through what he was doing. I knew exactly what I was doing and I did a deal I was happy with.’
‘You sold your soul?’
‘It’s complicated,’ said Mitchell. ‘My soul is promised to a higher deity than Proserpine, though she would like to get her hands on it, I’m sure.’
Nightingale gestured at the circle on the floor. ‘And what’s the idea of the circle?’
‘It’s protection, of course.’
‘I would have thought the CCTV and the men in black suits would have been protection enough.’
‘Then you know nothing of the occult,’ said Mitchell. ‘The circle is the only thing that keeps her from me.’
‘So you’re just as scared as my father was,’ said Nightingale.
‘Your father wasn’t scared of her – she had no interest in him. She already had what she wanted from him – the soul of his first-born son, promised to her at the moment of birth. The sweetest of souls. And the soul of his only daughter. Once she had them, he had nothing else to offer her.’
‘But she wants you, is that it?’
‘She wants my soul, yes.’
‘So what’s your plan? To hide in that circle for ever?’
Mitchell chuckled. ‘I’m not hiding, Nightingale. You can’t hide from a devil. She knows exactly where I am, I’m sure of that. And “for ever” isn’t an option.’ He coughed again, then moved his mask and spat bloody phlegm into a tissue. ‘Cancer. I’ve a few months at most. Then I walk into hell of my own accord.’
‘But either way you’re dead,’ said Nightingale.
‘It’s one thi
ng to be dragged kicking and screaming into the eternal fire,’ said Mitchell. ‘If I walk in under my own steam, I take my place among the princes of hell.’
Nightingale folded his arms. ‘So, what are my options?’ he asked.
‘You have none,’ said Mitchell. ‘Enjoy what little time you have left, and say your goodbyes.’
‘There are always alternatives,’ said Nightingale. ‘Options. Choices.’
‘Not in this case,’ said Mitchell. ‘Your soul is hers. Your father would have done the negotiation even before you were born. And at the moment of birth he would have carried out the ceremony. From that moment on, she owned your soul.’
‘What if I were to do what you’re doing? Make myself a protective circle and stay inside?’
‘She owns your soul,’ said Mitchell. ‘She wouldn’t have to enter the circle to take it.’
‘And if I did what my father did? What if I stayed within a circle and killed myself?’
‘You’re thinking of suicide, are you?’ Mitchell cleared his throat, slid his oxygen mask to the side and spat into a tissue. ‘That would be ironic, wouldn’t it? Father and son dying the same way. But you’d be wasting your time. Your soul is no longer yours. It has never been yours. It belonged to her before you were even born and there’s nothing you can do to stop her taking it.’
Nightingale rubbed his chin. ‘In your book, you say there should be a mark. A mark that shows that the soul has been sold.’
Mitchell nodded. ‘A pentagram. Yes.’
‘I don’t have a mark anything like that.’
‘If your father sold your soul, then you do. You just haven’t found it yet.’
‘And what if there isn’t a mark?’
Mitchell chuckled. ‘Then you’ve got nothing to worry about, have you?’
55
Nightingale followed Sylvia through the hall, flanked by two of the men in black suits. ‘How long’s he been in the circle?’ asked Nightingale.
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