Nightfall: The First Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thriller (13 page)

‘Terrific,’ said Nightingale.

‘Is that good news or bad?’

‘I’d put it at about fifty-fifty,’ said Nightingale. ‘Why would my uncle kill himself, Robbie? And why would he batter his wife to death? He loved her. They were peas in a pod, joined at the hip. Same as my parents.’ He grimaced. ‘I suppose I should start saying “adoptive parents” now that I know Gosling was my real father.’

‘What did the Manchester cops say?’

‘Murder-suicide, which is obviously what it was. The doors were locked, her blood was on the axe, along with his fingerprints, and there was blood spatter all over him. Open and shut.’

‘Except no motive.’

‘They reckon he just snapped. It happens.’

‘And what about what he wrote?’

Nightingale ran his hands through his hair. ‘I don’t know, Robbie. I just don’t know.’

‘He must have written it for a reason,’ said Hoyle. ‘I understand why you didn’t want the cops to see it, but you can’t pretend it wasn’t there.’

‘I don’t know why he would have written it. He was fine when I last spoke to him.’

‘And why are you here? Jenny said you’ve a couple of cases that need work.’

‘Nothing that can’t wait a day or two,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’m trying to find my mother. My real mother – my birth mother. I wanted to talk to my uncle about the adoption but that avenue’s been closed so I thought I’d try to track her down. If Ainsley Gosling was my genetic father, he must have known who my she was. Is.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t even know if she’s alive.’ He sat down on one of the chesterfields. ‘In a way, she might be the only family I’ve got left. And maybe she can tell me what’s going on.’

Hoyle looked around. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a coffee machine down here?’

‘Everything but,’ said Nightingale.

‘There must be adoption records, right? If your parents adopted you there’d have to be paperwork.’

‘My birth certificate has Bill and Irene Nightingale down as my parents. There’s nothing to say I was adopted. And, according to the DVD Gosling left me, I was given to them at birth. I don’t think any agency was involved.’

‘That’s illegal.’

‘It was thirty-three years ago. I don’t think everything was computerised as it is now. And I get the feeling that Gosling wasn’t too concerned about the legality of what he was doing. I think he just got the baby, his baby – me – gave him to the Nightingales and they passed him off as their own.’ He waved his arm around the basement. ‘I think the answer’s somewhere here. Gosling must have kept records and this is his hidey-hole so I want to see what I can find.’ He pointed to the middle of the basement. ‘I’m going to start with those filing cabinets but I’ll go through every book in the place if I have to.’

‘Looking for what, exactly?’

‘I don’t know, Robbie. But he was a rich man so he must have kept a track of what he was spending. Everyone does, right? You keep receipts and bank statements and bills.’

‘Anna looks after the finances,’ said Hoyle. ‘But, yeah, I know what you mean.’

‘So, I think Gosling must have paid someone to help him with the adoption. He couldn’t have done the whole thing himself. If I can find his records for the year I was born, I might turn up a clue as to who my real mother was.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I keep saying that. “Real mum”. As if Irene Nightingale was some sort of fake. She wasn’t. She was my mum and she’ll always be my mum, no matter how this pans out.’ He flicked ash onto the floor. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’

‘Late shift,’ said Hoyle.

‘Do you want to make yourself useful?’

‘That’s why I’m here.’

26

N
ightingale found Ainsley Gosling’s financial records in six beechwood filing cabinets between a display case of ivory carvings and a seaman’s chest with a lock that had rusted with age and defied his attempts to open it. Gosling had been methodical with his record-keeping and there were separate files for each quarter going back to 1956. Nightingale pulled out the three most recent ones and took them to a desk where Hoyle was poring over a huge leather-bound book filled with newspaper clippings. He looked up. ‘He was interested in serial killers – Fred West, the Yorkshire Ripper, Harold Shipman. He followed all the cases.’

‘Everyone should have a hobby,’ said Nightingale, dropping the files onto the desk. ‘These are his most recent financial records. Can you see what he was up to in the months before he died?’ He went back to the filing cabinets. The records for the year he was born were in the third. He pulled out the four files.

‘He was buying books, big-time,’ said Hoyle, holding up a receipt from a Hamburg bookstore. ‘He paid a million and a half euros for something called
The Formicarius
in January.’

‘A million and a half euros for a book? It’s no wonder all his money went.’

‘Published in 1435, according to this. But that’s just one. There’s a receipt here for six hundred thousand dollars, another for a quarter of a million pounds. A stack of receipts from China that I can’t read. And, from the look of it, they were all about witchcraft or demonology. Occult stuff.’ Hoyle gestured at the bookshelves. ‘That’s where all his money went. He spent millions putting this library together.’

Nightingale put the files on the desk. ‘He wasn’t building a library. He was buying information.’

‘I don’t follow,’ said Hoyle.

‘He didn’t care about the books, he wanted the information in them.’ Nightingale sat down in a leather winged chair. ‘Here’s what I think. He did a deal with the devil when I was born. Or, at least, he thought he did a deal.’

‘Jack . . .’

Nightingale held up a hand to silence his friend. ‘Whether he did or he didn’t do isn’t the issue. What matters is what was going through his mind. And so far as he was concerned he’d sold my soul. Then, as he said on the DVD, he had a change of heart. He wanted out of the deal, but for that he needed information.’ He pointed at the bookshelves. ‘He thought the answer lay somewhere in those.’

‘You’re not starting to believe this mumbo-jumbo, are you?’

‘I’m trying to empathise with Gosling,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’m trying to think the way he was thinking. If I can get inside his head, maybe I can make sense of this. Maybe I can work out why he killed himself.’

‘Why does it matter?’

‘He was my father.’

‘In name only,’ said Hoyle. ‘You never knew him. So why does it matter? And why are you looking for your genetic mother?’

Nightingale didn’t reply.

‘You think this all might be true, don’t you?’ asked Hoyle, quietly.

‘Don’t be soppy,’ said Nightingale.

‘You want to ask her if Ainsley Gosling sold your soul to the devil.’

Nightingale shook his head and opened a file. It was full of bank statements, used cheque books and receipts. ‘I don’t think he sold my soul. But I think he believed he did. There’s a difference. Besides, I haven’t got a mark.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Nightingale sighed. ‘They say that if your soul belongs to the devil, you carry a mark. Like a tattoo.’

‘“They”?’

‘The people who believe in this crap,’ said Nightingale. ‘It was in that book I took with me last time. It was written by some top Satanist. In it he says that if the devil has your soul, you have a pentagram tattoo somewhere on your body. And I haven’t. You’ve seen me in the changing rooms enough times.’

‘That’s true. Not a pretty sight, it has to be said.’

‘But no pentagram. So, it’s all bollocks.’ He flicked through a cheque book. The dates in it were from the year that he had been born.

‘Damn right, it’s bollocks,’ said Hoyle. He held up another receipt. ‘He bought a dozen books from a shop in New Orleans for a total of half a million dollars – all about voodoo. You know, you should be able to sell them – you’d make a fortune.’

‘Assuming I can find someone crazy enough to buy them,’ said Nightingale. He handed the cheque book across the desk to Hoyle. ‘Thirty-three years ago, Ainsley Gosling paid twenty thousand pounds to a woman called Rebecca Keeley.’

Hoyle studied a cheque. ‘That was a lot of money back then.’

‘It’s a lot of money now,’ said Nightingale.

‘What do you think the going rate for a baby was?’

‘Twenty grand sounds about right to me. I’ll see if I can track her down.’

Hoyle tapped the file he’d been working through. ‘What I don’t see in these files are his household accounts. Utility bills and payments to staff. It’s all big payments. He must have left the small stuff to a manager.’

‘His driver, maybe,’ said Nightingale. ‘He only had three people working for him towards the end.’

Hoyle pulled out a piece of paper. ‘You know he had a Bentley?’

Nightingale shook his head.

‘An Arnage,’ said Hoyle. ‘Nice motor.’

‘But nothing here for the driver?’

‘No pay slips, no national insurance, no tax details.’

‘He probably didn’t want his staff down here so the household accounts must be somewhere else.’

Hoyle checked his watch. ‘I’m going to head off,’ he said. ‘Gotta be in the factory by six. You sure you’re okay?’

‘I keep flashing back to my uncle’s house. And I keep thinking that maybe if I’d gone straight around to see them . . . Yeah, I’m fine. I’m leaving now myself. I’m on a case this evening.’

Hoyle stood up. ‘Anything interesting?’

‘Divorce. Wife playing offside. Makes a change – usually I’m following the husband.’ Hoyle was still holding a file. ‘Are you going to take that with you?’

‘Thought I might, yeah. If I find anything interesting I can run the names through the PNC.’

‘Go ahead, knock yourself out,’ said Nightingale.

They went up the stairs together and Nightingale switched off the lights, then shut the panel behind them. He locked the front door and they stood looking up at the building.

‘It’s an awesome house, Jack,’ said Hoyle. ‘Be a great place to raise a family.’

‘Bloody hell, Robbie! Can you imagine the upkeep? I’ll have to sell it, pay off whatever taxes they hit me with and the mortgage, and if I’m lucky I’ll have enough left to buy a packet of fags.’

‘I’m just saying, it must be nice to be rich.’

‘No argument there.’

‘How did old man Gosling make his money?’

‘No idea,’ Nightingale said. ‘Maybe we’ll find out somewhere in his records.’

‘I never said I was sorry, about your dad dying.’

‘No great loss,’ said Nightingale. ‘I didn’t know him. Never met him. He was nothing to me so there’s no grieving to be done. I did that when my parents died – for a long time. With Gosling it’s confusion rather than grief. I just don’t understand what was going through his mind, why he gave me up for adoption – why he did what he did.’

Hoyle held up the file he was holding. ‘Maybe we’ll find the answer in one of these.’

Nightingale nodded. ‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘I really hope so.’

27

T
he problem with divorce work, as Nightingale knew all too well, was that the deceived spouse always wanted proof. It wasn’t enough just to say that he’d seen a man and woman enter a hotel and that they’d stayed there for an hour. The client wanted photographs or a video, hard evidence that could be waved in the face of the guilty party. The problem with photographs was that good cameras were bulky, and you needed a telephoto lens for decent shots – hotels, even cheap ones, didn’t take kindly to men in raincoats skulking around their reception areas with them.

Nightingale’s green MGB was too conspicuous for surveillance work and the company credit card was close to its limit, so he had borrowed Jenny McLean’s Audi A4. He wasn’t sure how his assistant could afford such an expensive car, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask her directly in case she mistook his curiosity for jealousy. He’d parked outside the hotel and listened to a radio discussion programme while he waited for Mrs McBride to arrive for her assignation. She was as regular as clockwork, using the same hotel on the second and last Monday of each month. She always drove there with her lover and parked in a multi-storey a short distance away. She would check in and get the key to the room, then phone the man on his mobile. Nightingale had watched them two weeks earlier but Joel McBride wouldn’t take his word for it and was insisting on photographic evidence.

Nightingale saw Mrs McBride coming around the corner and switched off the radio. He climbed out of the Audi and locked it. He was holding a black-leather attaché case and pointed it at her as he pressed a hidden button in the handle. A lens in the side was connected to a digital video recorder inside the case.

Mrs McBride was smiling as she talked into her mobile phone, her high heels clicking on the pavement. She was an attractive blonde in her thirties, about five feet six with good legs. She was so engrossed in her call that she didn’t give Nightingale a second glance as she walked past him. The briefcase recorded sound and vision and he was close enough to hear her say ‘darling’ and tell whoever it was that she would see them soon.

She pushed through the double doors into Reception and Nightingale followed her. As she walked up to the desk, he moved to a sofa and sat down, keeping the lens pointed at her. She handed over her credit card and filled in the registration form, then took her room key and headed for the lifts. Nightingale got up and walked slowly after her, pretending to have a conversation into his mobile. He waited until the lift doors were about to close after her before he stepped in. ‘I’m just getting into the lift,’ he said into his phone. ‘I’ll call you back.’ He put it into his pocket and looked at the button she’d pressed. ‘Same floor,’ he said. He smiled but he didn’t feel like smiling. He hated lifts with a vengeance but there were times when he had no other choice than to trust his fate to the wires and pulleys that kept him suspended above the ground.

She flashed him an uninterested smile and watched the numbers as they winked on and off. When they reached the floor she walked quickly down the corridor. Nightingale followed, keeping well back. She had a room in the middle of the corridor so he walked past her, tilting the case to keep her in the camera’s view. He heard her unlock the door and close it. He walked to the end of the corridor, turned and stepped around the corner, keeping the briefcase aimed at the room where Mrs McBride was. He didn’t have to wait long. He heard the lift doors open and took out his phone, held it to his ear with his left hand and aimed the attaché case down the corridor with the right.

Mrs McBride’s lover walked briskly down the corridor, tapping a copy of the
Evening Standard
against his leg. He was wearing a dark blue pinstripe suit that had the look of Savile Row and carrying a cashmere coat over one arm.

Nightingale walked towards him slowly, muttering into his phone, keeping the case pointing towards the man as he knocked on Mrs McBride’s door. She opened it and kissed him, then dragged him inside just as Nightingale drew level with the door. His timing was perfect.

He went back outside and sat in the Audi. Two hours later he videoed the man leaving on his own and walking along the street towards the tube station. Five minutes after that he got a nice shot of Mrs McBride walking out of the hotel, looking like the cat that had got the cream.