‘So you know about Dudák then?’
‘Yes, I recognised what was happening. I have encountered it before.’
Nightingale frowned. That was surely not possible, if Dudák had been trapped in a cave in Hamlin for eight hundred years. Mrs. Steadman couldn’t be more than seventy. Could she? Conversations with her always seemed to raise more questions than they answered.
‘But, as I say, there is far more to it than just Dudák’s foul habits, and a desire for revenge. Far more and far worse, and you must stop it.’
‘But you’re not telling me what it is.’
She clenched her tiny fists on her knitting needles. ‘That’s the worst thing about it. I cannot explain to you what is happening. It is not permitted. But you must stop it.’
Nightingale opened his hands and spread the palms. ‘I’m lost, Mrs. Steadman. How can I stop whatever it is, if I don’t know what or how?’
She pressed her lips together, and closed her eyes. Whether she was just thinking, or communicating with someone, Nightingale couldn’t tell. Eventually her bright green eyes flew open, and were staring at him again. ‘You must find Dudák and destroy it,’ she said.
‘How?’
‘You have killed demons in human form before. Destroy the host.’
‘But I can’t find it. My crystal was shattered when I tried.’
‘The pink one?’
Nightingale nodded.
‘Oh dear. I wonder how that could have happened...unless...yes, yes, of course. A shame, that crystal was perfectly in tune with you. It will be a long time before you find another as good. But you can find Dudák by simpler means. Look within yourself, and you will already know where to find it.’
Nightingale paused and thought. ‘I think I may know who, but where is harder. The last time, I was given a sign.’
‘Oh, of course,’ said Mrs. Steadman, her green eyes flashing. ‘How stupid of me to forget. Hold out your hand.’
Nightingale did as he was told, Mrs. Steadman turned his left hand palm downwards and picked up one of her knitting needles. She drew it across the back of his hand, and where it touched, the flesh opened into cuts that oozed blood. It was the shape of a pan pipe. ‘Dudák’s sigil,’ she said. ‘As you get close, it will burn.’
Nightingale winced.
‘It hurts?’ asked Mrs. Steadman.
‘A bit,’ he said. Actually it hurt a lot. A hell of a lot.
‘The pain will intensify the closer you get to your quarry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about that, but you may well find that it is the least of your worries. But there is more.’
‘Destroying Dudák isn’t enough for me to have to worry about?’
‘It would be, but it is not the most important thing at all. It is absolutely vital that you save the girl, Naomi Fisher. At all costs, literally at all costs, she must not be allowed to kill herself on June 26. The consequences are unthinkable.’
‘But you’re not allowed to tell me what they are?’
She bowed her head, but said nothing.
‘You’re not making this easy for me, Mrs. Steadman,’ said Nightingale.
‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘But I have done all I can. Good luck, Mr. Nightingale. And do be careful,’
She waved her hand at him, and Nightingale watched as the mist round his feet rose up to hide her from view, then covered everything, so he couldn’t see at all. Then, slowly, a blinding light burnt the mist away and shone straight into his eyes.
He woke up, the morning sun streaming through the opened curtains. He lifted his left arm and stared at the back of his left hand. The flesh was still singed and the sigil was red now and raised and it hurt like Hell.
CHAPTER 56
Bonnie Parker sighed in frustration. There were over a hundred people named Ann Davies in the greater Memphis area, and Bonnie Parker had no hope at all of tracing them, much less trying to get a list of all the ones aged around ten inside a day. Tracing adults was usually a simple matter because they had bank accounts and driving licences and social security numbers, but children were more often than not invisible online, at least in official databases. She had tried social media and again there were dozens of possibilities. Even if she had been able to track down every one of them, what was Parker meant to do? Take them all into protective custody on the say-so of some English ex-cop who claimed to have a mysterious list of potential suicide victims? An Englishman who had now conveniently disappeared from his hotel, after his hire car had been spotted by a witness near the scene of a horrific murder-suicide. The Commissioner and the Mayor would have her badge inside ten minutes and her pension in twenty. They didn’t have anywhere near enough men available to detail one to watch every kid called Ann Davies. And what would they be watching for anyway? There were so many ways someone could kill themselves, in or out of the home, and how could a patrolman be expected to stop them.
She stood outside headquarters at 9am smoking her seventh cigarette of the morning, trying to make sense of what was happening. She had still been a little drunk when she’d packed her daughter’s bag and shipped her off to Emma’s grandmother’s in Las Vegas. Maybe she was acting like a fool. But then if her daughter had wound up dead, and she’d done nothing, how could she ever have lived with it? The mysterious list had called it right on Kaitlyn Jones and Julia Smith. So what was happening here? Were the police missing something, had all the suicides been murders, and was this Nightingale character just working through a list of victims?
She shook her head and muttered ‘Nah, can’t be,’ much to the surprise of a mail-carrier walking past her.
No, she knew exactly how Julia Smith had died, and there were solid witnesses for lots of the other suicides. So could there be anything in this idea of someone hypnotising kids into killing themselves. But how? And why? At the moment, they’re wasn’t even a case here, nobody had put her in charge of investigating a bunch of highly public suicides of Junior School kids, or even suggested how they could be connected.
Parker threw her cigarette butt on the sidewalk and walked back inside, fervently wishing two things. First, that Nightingale would show up, so she could force him to tell her what the hell was going on, and second that the day would pass without a kid called Ann Davies killing herself.
CHAPTER 57
It turned out that neither of Bonnie Parker’s wishes was to be granted. Nightingale had his own reasons for not showing up in Memphis at the moment, and Ann Davies was already on her way to her death.
The class of children had been taken in a hired bus down to Riverside Drive for their outing. They all had backpacks with sandwiches and wore baseball caps in their school colours for ease of identification by the two teachers who counted them all off the bus. There were twenty-two children, and the tall, grey-haired man and the shorter, younger, pretty blonde woman lined them up in twos to walk to the landing stage.
The Island Queen stood waiting for its passengers to board for the ninety-minute sight-seeing tour of a very small part of the Mississippi river and a look at Memphis from the water. A hundred feet long, its three decks and superstructure were painted gleaming white, in contrast to the two high black funnels which rose at either side of the wheelhouse, and the huge red paddle wheel at the rear. It looked as if it might have steamed straight from the pages of a Mark Twain novel, but was in fact less than forty years old and diesel powered. The excited group of children didn’t care too much about its history, a day out of class and a trip on the river had got them all buzzing.
The passengers walked up the gangplank, the teachers making sure that they counted all twenty-two hats onto the ship, then taking a last glance at the landing-stage to make doubly sure that nobody had been left behind. The passengers spread themselves around the three decks. The boat was nowhere near full, so there was no need to jockey for vantage points. The children split up into smaller groups, with the two teachers having told them where they could be found in case of the emergency they hoped would never occur. T
he older man had done this trip a dozen times with classes, but it was the first time for his young companion. Neither of them were worried, there was nowhere for the kids to go, and nothing more dangerous than the high-fat potato chips they’d probably all brought with them for lunch.
The boat whistle blew, the big paddle wheel started to turn, and the Island Queen eased its way out into the murky waters of the USA’s second-longest river. The two teachers settled down with a cup of coffee each, to enjoy a peaceful hour and a half.
The peace barely lasted ninety seconds.
The screaming started at the stern of the vessel, before it had travelled more that two hundred yards from the shore. Instantly terrified, the two teachers ran towards the stern, and then up onto the top deck, where the children’s screams were loudest. As they reached the stern, they were met by a group of girls, each still obediently wearing their school caps. The screaming was awful, but the male teacher took command, shouted for quiet, the screaming stopped, then the girls started talking at once.
‘Mr. Dillon, it’s Ann...’
‘Ann, she just jumped up on the rail...’
‘She jumped in, Mr. Dillon...’
‘We couldn’t stop her...’
‘Look...’
The teacher looked over the stern rail of the riverboat, to where the great wheel spun round, chewing up the distance along the river, but now chewing up something it was never meant to. Pieces of clothing followed in its trail, and, as the paddles rose from the water, they brought with them the broken remains of the girl who had been impaled on them when she jumped.
Dillon vomited over the side of the ship and into the water, his hands gripping the rail in horror. Around him was chaos, as the panic spread, the boat’s crew became aware of what had happened, and the captain gave the order to stop all engines. All far too late.
Unnoticed in the crowd that thronged to the stern of the boat, Dudák stood, eyes closed, against the rail and feasted on the child’s death agonies. Very soon now the task would be complete, and Dudák would be free to leave this city and feed elsewhere.
CHAPTER 58
‘So the plan is that we just cruise around Memphis until the scar on the back of your hand starts to sting?’ said Wainwright.
‘See now, that might take rather a long time,’ said Nightingale, ‘time we don’t really have.’ They were sitting on kitchen stools drinking coffee that Wainwright had prepared.
‘No shit. If you ask me we’ve waited way too long out here, when we could have been in Memphis looking for Naomi.’
‘Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted.’
‘Says who?’ asked Wainwright.
‘Sun Tsu. Or Field Marshal Rommel. Or Han Solo. I forget now.’
Wainwright frowned and stared at him. ‘Tell me, Jack, of all the people you ever met, any of them ever laugh at your jokes?’
Nightingale lit a cigarette, while he considered the point. ‘Not many,’ he said. ‘I’m just trying to lighten the moment.’
‘Time and a place, Jack. This is neither. So what is the plan?’
‘Something Mrs. Steadman said to me last night. That if I looked within myself, I could find Dudák.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means I’ve been trying to piece together a lot of the things that have happened, and how they could have been made to happen. And I think Mrs. Steadman is right, I can find Dudák. But I can’t afford to be wrong, so I need to talk to a few people and confirm a few things first.’
‘Anything I can do? I have a lot of contacts.’
‘I’m guessing not in the Memphis Department of Education.’
Wainwright shook his head. ‘Probably not.’
‘Well, I need to find some people who do. But I guess there are some things you can be getting on with.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like maybe you could open that mysterious metal box you talked about with Tyrone, and we’ll see if I guessed right about what’s in there.’
Wainwright grinned. ‘Maybe you did. Come on.’
Wainwright led the way upstairs to the bedroom he’d been using, and opened the bathroom door. Next to the full length mirror was a shaver socket. Wainwright pressed the voltage selector switch on it, there was a click, and the mirror shot open an inch or two on concealed hinges. Wainwright pulled it fully open, to reveal a metal locker. He took a key from the pocket of his jeans and opened it.
‘Wow,’ said Nightingale. There were three shelves in the locker, with three or four guns on each. Nightingale saw Colt and Remington revolvers, Glock semi-automatics, an Uzi, Berettas and, standing upright at the side, two AK-47s. At the bottom were boxes of ammunition. ‘Planning to start a war?’
‘Tyrone likes to be prepared for all eventualities. Choose your weapon. None of them traceable, none of them ever been fired.’
‘I’ll take a Glock and a dozen shells.’
Wainwright took out two Glock pistols, a box of shells and holsters that could be clipped to their belts.
‘Anything else we gonna need?’ asked Wainwright.
‘More gas for the car, a priest, and an awful lot of good luck,’ said Nightingale. ‘Same as always.’
‘Gas and the priest I can organise,’ said Wainwright. ‘What you need him for?’
Nightingale told him.
CHAPTER 59
Bonnie Parker was watching the local Memphis News Channel on her laptop. It was a live feed from the riverside, where the Island Queen had been towed back to the landing stage, and the entire area cordoned off by white Police cruisers. There was also an ambulance and a water rescue unit, and the whole place was awash with people, as the cops tried to marshal the passengers ashore so they could take witness statements, at the same time trying to deal with shocked children, confused and angry adults and the Press, who had turned out in force.
The two Homicide Detectives at the scene had pretty quickly decided they weren’t going to be needed. Parker was talking to one of them now via radio, Detective Mary O’Brien. ‘Looks open and shut, Sarge,’ she said. ‘Any number of witnesses, mostly kids admittedly, but they all say the little girl just ran at the rail and vaulted straight over.’
‘The rail’s pretty low then?’ said Parker.
‘Not at all. Standard size, meant to prevent adults accidentally falling over. Kid would have had to put in a pretty good effort to vault it, but they all say she did. She vaulted straight down onto the rear paddle wheel. A pretty ghastly mess, apparently. Not sure they found all the pieces.’
Parker shuddered. ‘Any ID on the kid yet?’
Parker kept her voice casual, but her knuckles were white as she gripped the handset. She knew what she was going to hear, but was still terrified of it.
‘The teachers have all named her as Ann Davies, aged ten. It’ll be a while before they can get forensic confirmation, but she’s the only child not accounted for so there’s no doubt.’
‘My God,’ said Parker, more to the ceiling than the radio. A cold chill ran down her spine.
‘Yeah, ten, it’s a bad one, sure enough. Uniforms tried to contact the parents, but there was nobody home. They could be on their way down here though, lots of parents saw the news and have come down to collect kids.’
‘You talked to the teachers?’
‘Yeah, older guy who’s been at the school forever, and a young woman who’s pretty new. They were on the lower deck having coffee when it happened.’
‘Aren’t they meant to supervise the kids?’
‘There are always school trips on the boat, Sarge. It’s supposedly a safe environment.’
‘Until today.’
‘Yeah, but what’s safe if someone decides to kill themselves? That’s what it looks like, no question. The kid just took her own life.’
‘So what about this kid, she a loner? Being bullied?’
‘The teachers say not. She was very popular, she had lots of friends. Nobody has any idea why she did it. We’ll talk to th
e parents, obviously. But you know as well as I do, in cases like this the parents usually have no clue as to what their kids are thinking.’
‘You’re right, it doesn’t look like there’s anything there for Homicide on the face of it. You might as well head on back to the station..’
Parker put the radio down, sat back in her chair and cursed Jack Nightingale with every ounce of venom she could muster.
CHAPTER 60
If Jack Nightingale’s ears were burning he was too busy to notice as he cruised east along the I-40. Wainwright had lit one of his huge cigars as they left Tyrone’s place, and it looked like it would last him all the way to Memphis. Nightingale was still trying to figure the best way to approach Wainwright’s recent bereavement. On the one hand, he needed information, on the other, he had a certain liking for Wainwright, and had no wish to make things worse. In the end, he decided to stay away from it. ‘No more word on Abaddon, if she’s still alive?’ he asked.
‘Not a peep,’ said Wainwright. ‘She was never treated in any official US health facility, she never left the country by scheduled flight, boat or car. Could be she was dead in that chapel and one of her minions took the body away.’
‘You believe that?’
‘I’m not sure. I sometimes get a feeling when powerful adepts are carrying out important rituals, but nothing with her since the ‘Frisco thing. Of course, maybe I don’t have enough power.’
‘Power’s a pretty important thing in your world, isn’t it, Joshua?’
‘Maybe it’s everything, here on Earth, Jack. The power to shape life by your will.’
‘So you’re always looking to increase your power?’
Wainwright inhaled deeply on his cigar, then gave a smile. ‘Me, Jack? I’m just a guy who collects books, and got lucky.’
Tennessee Night (The 8th Jack Nightingale Novel) Page 22