‘Who’d do that? You have enemies, people out to get you?’
‘A few months ago, I’d have said no. I’m a good way down the left-hand path, but I’ve kept a pretty low profile. My business dealings are done through offshore companies, no personal grudges that I know of, and I was no threat to anyone. Until that business in San Francisco.’
‘San Francisco?’ asked Nightingale.
‘Yeah. I kind of stuck my neck out on that one, my name got known, and there are a lot of people connected with that who might not wish me well.’
‘But you seemed pretty sure none of them would be around to do much harm. You told me most of them would die in prison.’
‘Yeah, well I figured without American law, and maybe the pull they had, in a lot of areas. I spread a lot of money around, pulled plenty of strings, but it seemed they had money and strings too. Their influence went a long way up, and I mean a long way. Even higher than mine. Their cases dragging on, arguments about whether the cops even had probable cause to break in, the whole thing’s a mess.’
‘But we caught the whole bunch of them, red-handed.’
‘You may remember that you personally didn’t stick around long enough to give a witness statement. Which makes it hard to bring charges. So far not one of them’s come near to doing any jail time, or even been brought to court. Maybe they never will be.’
‘Well I wasn’t there, but that policewoman Amy Chen knew the full story.’
‘Well, that’s another thing. I checked, and nobody seems to have seen or heard from her for a few months. Not showed up for work, and without her to give evidence, there’s hardly any case at all.’
Nightingale’s eye’s widened. ‘So you think...’
‘What do you think, Jack? I doubt she’s gone to Disneyworld and forgotten to tell the SFPD. Meantime a lot of very powerful adepts are walking round on bail, pissed at me, and probably you.’
‘But most of them were minor-league, except for their leader, and she’s dead.’
Wainwright sighed. ‘Maybe.’
‘There’s no maybe, Joshua. Amy Chen shot Abaddon. Shot her dead. Two bullets to the chest.’
Abaddon was a woman by the name of Margaret Romanos, the leader of a Satanic coven who had been causing mayhem in San Francisco until Wainwright had put Nightingale on the case. But she was dead, Nightingale was certain of that. Though he was equally certain that in the world he lived in, the dead didn’t always stay dead.
‘I’m sure you did, but here’s the funny thing, her body never showed up at the morgue.’
‘What?’
‘That’s right. As you might expect there was all kinds of confusion going on there, and it seems nobody can remember who took the body away, Maybe that was incompetence on somebody’s part, but you know Abaddon had contacts all the way up in the SFPD. Anyway, no ambulance was ever traced, and nobody knows what happened to Abaddon’s body.’
‘Do you think she could still be alive?’
Nightingale shuddered at the thought of the woman who’d been responsible for more than a dozen obscene ritual murders in San Francisco, as part of her attempt to free the demon Bimoleth and potentially bring about the End of Days. Nightingale himself, the SFPD policewoman Amy Chen, and two young children had narrowly escaped being the final victims of her powerful coven of highly-placed Satanists.
‘I have no idea,’ said Wainwright, ‘all I know is there’s no body, and she had some pretty powerful friends, inside and outside the coven, human and ...maybe not so human. Who knows what they might have done?’
‘You mean raise her from the dead?’
‘You’ve probably read about it being done. Guy called Lazarus, chapter eleven of John’s Gospel, if you’re into that kind of thing. That’s assuming she even was dead in the first place.’
‘Come on, Joshua, you can’t believe that. She looked pretty dead to me.’
Wainwright shrugged his shoulders. ‘She was a very powerful adept, Jack. Once someone gets to one of the top three levels, there’s almost no limit to the power they can channel.’
‘Maybe, but immortality is never up for grabs, no matter what level you reach, and who you make a pact with. You and I both know that.’
‘Okay, it’s pretty far out there, I’ll admit,’ said Wainwright. ‘At the moment I’m just guessing, and the only guess I have is that it’s someone from the San Francisco mess making this happen. And whatever is happening, Naomi is in the firing line.’
‘You want me to protect her?’
‘I don’t know what I want yet, Jack. I can hardly send you up there without explaining to Sarah and Matthew, and they’re not going to understand. And then I don’t know what it is she needs protection against. I’m working blind here.’
Nightingale blew smoke up at the ceiling. ‘If they just wanted to get at you, they could have killed Naomi without any kind of a warning. The list was sent because they want you to do something about it. Maybe expose yourself, so they can get at you more easily. I’m guessing that whatever the plan is, they’ll be making it clearer soon.’
‘You think it’s some kind of serial killer thing? You must have seen a few when you were a cop?’
‘Actually none. Outside of books and movies, serial killers don’t really exist. You get the odd twisted guy who kills kids, maybe prostitutes, but as for the evil genius sending cryptic clues to his next ritual murder, forget about it. Whoever’s doing this is probably using the other names just to prolong your agony.’
‘So far he’s doing a great job.’ He looked down at the parchment and his eyes widened and his jaw dropped.
Nightingale followed Wainwright’s gaze and he too stared at the parchment. As they watched, a black line appeared, moving slowly from left to right until it had crossed through the name of Olivia Taylor. Neither man spoke, as red letters began slowly to appear at the foot of the list, until a thirteenth name burned there.
Sophie Underwood.
Nightingale stared in horror at the two words at the bottom of the parchment and Wainwright picked up on it straight away. ‘That name means something to you,’ he said.
Nightingale nodded, as the memories of the day that had changed his life forever came flooding back. Finally he found some words. ‘Yes, my last ever job as a police negotiator. Little blonde girl, nine years old. She’ll be a teenager now. She’d been raped and abused by her father, her mother looked the other way and the kid finally decided she couldn’t take any more of it. She took her doll, went and sat on the balcony of her thirteenth floor flat. I was sent to try to talk her down.’
‘I remember you telling me. And did you talk her down?’
Nightingale paused. It was a simple enough question, but it was a difficult one to answer. On the day, the little girl had indeed jumped to her death. But Nightingale had done a deal with a devil, and that deal had given Sophie a second chance at life. But there was no way he could tell Wainwright or anyone what he had done. ‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘She jumped, and I managed to catch her. She lives with her mother now.’
Wainwright stared at him, and the soft brown eyes suddenly hardened, as if they were trying to look inside Nightingale and burn the truth out from him. ‘You know, Jack, if I were a betting man, I’d put money on there being a whole lot more to that story. It’s kind of tied up with there being a whole lot more to you than I managed to figure out yet. Like how you seem to know stuff you’ve never been through, how sometimes you have a direct line to powers I can’t begin to understand, yet you still seem to know almost nothing about the left-hand path.’
‘Allegedly,’ said Nightingale. He wasn’t ready to let Wainwright in on his full history, and doubted he ever would be, not that he was even sure himself how much of it had ever really happened. Sophie Underwood and her evil bastard father were real enough, though.
Wainwright was talking again. ‘So this Underwood kid means a lot to you?’
Nightingale gave that one some thought, and lit another cigare
tte before answering. ‘I don’t know how to explain it.. My life changed that day, and it never would have if I’d been called to another situation. I’d probably still be a cop in London now. But after Sophie, I knew I could never go back to the Job. For a while she was the first thing I used to think of every morning, and the last thing every night. So yes, I guess she does mean something.’
‘Whoever sent that parchment must think so. And must know something about your past. Any ideas who that could be?’
Nightingale had one idea, possibly two, but he wasn’t ready to share either of them with Wainwright until he knew a lot more about this situation.
‘Not at the moment,’ he said. ‘But the Underwood case is a matter of public record, as was my part in it. Wouldn’t be hard to find out.’
‘Not for anyone who knew you were still alive, which is meant to be nobody in Britain.’
Nightingale nodded. He’d thought he’d covered his tracks pretty well, but not, it seemed, from anyone who really wanted to find him.
‘So where’s Sophie Underwood now?’ asked Wainwright.
‘Like I said, with her mum. But I’m not sure exactly where. I’d guess she’s still in the UK.’
‘And Naomi’s in Memphis. Makes it hard to know where to start.’
‘I can’t go back to London anyway. There are people who want me dead, and people who’d charge me with murder,’ he sighed. ‘What do you want me to do, Joshua?’
Wainwright had no immediate answer to that, but sat smoking quietly. He picked up the parchment again, and stared at it. ‘We need a lead on the rest of those names, Jack, try to see what they have in common. See what the threat is, and I’m damned sure there is a threat. Whoever sent this parchment is powerful, and they didn’t do it for kicks.’
‘I’m sure you’re...’
Wainwright’s mobile phone beeped to let him know he had received a message. He picked up his phone and frowned at the screen and his face went ashen.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Nightingale.
‘Message from a police contact,’ he said. Memphis PD and paramedics called to apparent suicide by hanging in the Hickory Ridge district. Victim deceased, African-American female, named as Olivia Taylor, aged ten.
Nightingale stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Looks like I’m headed to Memphis.’
‘Jack, I want you to make sure no harm comes to my niece. I guess you want to keep this kid Sophie safe, preferably without a trip to London. So if this is centered around Memphis, it means stopping it there.’
‘And the other people on that list?’
Wainwright gave a grim smile. ‘Well, I never heard of any of them, and people die all the time.’
Nightingale took a long drag on his cigarette before replying. ‘We’re missing the point though, aren’t we? This isn’t about Naomi and Sophie. They’re just a means to an end.’
‘What end?’
‘Whoever sent that list wants you to know they’re after Naomi, and they’ve put Sophie on the list as another sign. They want to hurt you, and they know you’ll send me in to try to stop whatever this is.’
‘True enough, so what?’
‘So it’s not about the people on that list, it’s about me. They want me to go after them, they want me out in the open.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m guessing I’m not due a medal. They know I’m coming, they know where I’ll be, and my guess is they want me dead. Or worse.’
‘So let’s get started,’ said Wainwright. He took a quick glance at the gold Patek Philippe watch on his left wrist. ‘It’s 8pm, you’ll be needing some sleep, but we can get you there by morning. Valerie will organise everything, go talk to her, second door on the left. Tell her I said top priority. Meanwhile I’m out of here, there are things I need to do that I can do better elsewhere. Stay in touch, Jack. Don’t let me down on this one.’
It was obviously a dismissal, so Nightingale nodded at him, got up and headed along the corridor to find Valerie.
CHAPTER 7
Bonnie Parker was getting nowhere with the Taylors, and she was pretty sure by now that there was nowhere to get. The mother, Janice, was holding up better than her husband, who hadn’t managed to get his head out of his hands often enough to contribute more than mono-syllabic answers to the detective’s questions.
‘Everything just seemed completely normal,’ said the woman, going over the same ground yet again. ‘Olivia went up to do her homework, she probably spent her half-hour on the computer and then when we went up to read to her we found her...just...just...’
‘Makes no sense,’ said Mr. Taylor. ‘No sense at all.’
Parker looked at them in turn. Rich and privileged, but good parents by all appearances. She was in corporate finance, but had said she was always home to walk Olivia to and from the school bus stop. Her husband worked in administration at the Gibson factory, and he made a point to be home by six to do his share of the parenting.
Parker tried again. ‘And you’re both sure she had no problems at school?’
‘Nothing we’d ever heard of,’ said Mrs. Taylor. ‘Her grades were fine, she seemed to have plenty of friends, she never mentioned any problems with other kids. She was happy, always happy. Her teachers were always pleased with her.’
‘I just can’t believe it,’ said her husband.
‘And she never mentioned any arguments, unpleasantness on the internet?’ asked Parker.
‘Never. She was too young for the social media sites, and they were blocked on her computer anyway. She could email her friends, chat to them and she played a couple of games, but never for very long. She preferred sports, playing with the cat, practising piano.’
‘What games did she play?’ asked Parker.
The parents looked at each other, and this time it was Mr. Taylor who answered. ‘Minecraft, I think. And there was one about horses. Oh, and Farmville.’
‘Did she spend money on them?’
The woman shook her head. ‘No, she couldn’t have. We’re not the kind of people who leave our credit card numbers around and then never check the bills. Olivia wasn’t that interested anyway.’
Parker thought again. Her own kids played Minecraft and Farmville, and they were both harmless. No chance of cyber-bullying making anyone’s life a misery and driving them to desperation. It was sites like Facebook and Twitter where bullies thrived and most sensible parents kept their children well away from them. ‘I’m sorry I’ve had to ask these questions at such a difficult time, but we have to look into any sudden death. We’ll probably send an officer to ask a few questions at the school, and it’s up to the coroner to make the decision, but from what I’ve seen it’s not a homicide matter, it seems Olivia took her own life. All I can say is I’m sorry for your loss.’
‘Sorry?’ snapped the father. ‘What good is that? My daughter’s dead, and I want to know why.’
His wife put her hand on his arm, pressed gently, and he was quiet. ‘Thank you, Ms Parker,’ she said. ‘We appreciate what you’ve done. As I’m sure you’d expect, we’re looking for answers now. I’m sure you’ll let us know if you find anything.’
Parker nodded and got up to leave. She had the awful feeling that Olivia’s parents were never going to find their answers, and nor was she.
CHAPTER 8
At ten o’clock the following morning, Nightingale landed in the Gulfstream at the general aviation terminal of Memphis International Airport. Every other plane in sight seemed to bear a FedEx logo, and Nightingale assumed the delivery company must have some operational hub here. One of Wainwright’s fleet of limousines drove him, and his bag, to the terminal. He picked up the keys to his car from the VIP queue at the Hertz desk and drove out of the airport in a white Ford Escape. The SatNav guided him to the Peabody Hotel without any problem, where he let the valet take care of the parking.
The Peabody was a brown cube, right in the middle of Downtown Memphis, and Nightingale put his bag on the sidewalk and looked up at it, try
ing to count the floors. He made it thirteen, and hoped that Valerie had put him somewhere near the ground. He walked into the lobby and stopped again, looking round to take it all in. It was a much bigger space then he had been expecting, stretching the entire length and breadth of the building. The lobby also seemed to function as a lounge, bar, and general meeting area, and was very busy, with most of the tables occupied, waiters and waitresses striding around with trays, and, much to his surprise, quite a few people, including children, sitting on the floor, either side of a red carpet, which led from the side door to the octagonal fountain in the centre of the room. The fountain was topped with an enormous spray of flowers, and stood directly underneath a great crystal chandelier, which looked as if it had been there since the hotel was built.
The second floor was more of a mezzanine, with balconies overlooking the lobby, and there were people up there too, looking down expectantly. Nightingale wondered if there was someone famous due to arrive, though he had no idea who might rate their own personal red carpet. He glanced at his watch, which showed dead on eleven.
The side door opened, and a tall young man in a red jacket with gold epaulettes and piping, and black pants walked in. He was holding a long black cane, topped with gold. He held the door open, and five ducks waddled through, along the carpet, up the steps and into the fountain, where they started to swim contentedly, while their audience applauded politely. Despite his name, Nightingale was no ornithologist, but he recognised the one bright male with his white collar and oily-green head and his harem of plain brown hens.
‘Nice work if you can get it, son,’ he muttered to himself, and walked over to the check-in desk.
Michael was the receptionist who took Nightingale’s name and found his reservation.
‘Yes, Mr. Nightingale, we have you in 1215,’ he said, and Nightingale’s heart sank.
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