Nightshade: The Fourth Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thriller jn-4

by Stephen Leather

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because I didn’t save her life. The girl I dragged out of the bath was dead. I did everything I could but she was still dead. I’d given up, I was in bits, and that’s when they found out she was alive. Whatever happened, it was nothing to do with me.’ He drained his glass. ‘So what was the question?’ he asked. ‘What did you want to know?’

  ‘You’ve already answered it for me,’ said Nightingale. He drained his bottle and put it down on the trestle table. ‘I’m good.’ He turned up the collar of his raincoat and walked away. He took his phone out and called Jenny. ‘All done,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Back in London, I figured you could get the train back.’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘Of course I’m joking, you daft sod. Let me know where you are, I’ll come and get you.’

  79

  Malcolm Walton poured himself a glass of red wine and sipped it. ‘Can I have some?’ asked his wife. Walton nodded and sloshed some into a second glass on the kitchen counter, then walked into the dining room. The dining table was set for two. He sat down at the head of the table and took another sip of wine.

  His wife joined him, carrying two plates. Steak, mashed potatoes and asparagus. She put down the plates and then went back to the kitchen to retrieve her wine glass.

  ‘Where are the kids?’ he asked as she sat down.

  ‘They went to see a film. They had a pizza before they went.’ She smiled. ‘They won’t be back until ten. I thought it’d be nice to have the house to ourselves.’ She picked up her wine. ‘Anyway, cheers.’

  Walton looked at her glass and frowned. His wife waited expectantly but then realised he had no intention of clinking his glass against hers. She put her own glass down. ‘Malc, are you okay?’ asked his wife.

  Walton shrugged.

  ‘Bad day at the surgery?’

  He shrugged again. He couldn’t be bothered saying anything to her. She picked up her knife and fork and cut herself a small piece of steak. She was always a delicate eater, pecking at her food like a small bird. She popped the morsel into her mouth and chewed slowly.

  Walton picked up the knife with his right hand and ran his left thumb slowly down the serrated edge of the blade.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ asked his wife. She put down her knife and fork. ‘Are you not feeling well?’

  Walton stood up slowly.

  ‘Malc, what’s the matter?’ she asked, but then she seemed to sense what he was planning to do and stood up suddenly. Her chair fell back and hit the floor with a loud bang.

  Walton moved quickly around the table. She turned and ran for the door but he lashed out with the knife and cut her across the shoulder. She shrieked in pain and stumbled against the wall, but then regained her balance as Walton struck her again, this time a stabbing motion that thrust the knife several inches into her back. She screamed but Walton knew that no one would be coming to help her. Their house was detached and their nearest neighbour was in her seventies and virtually deaf. His wife scrambled through the door as blood soaked into her shirt. Walton ran after her and stabbed her in the back again. ‘Help me!’ screamed his wife and Walton grinned savagely. She could scream all she wanted, it wouldn’t help.

  She ran into the hall, towards the front door. He was hard on her heels and he knew that she wouldn’t have time to unlock the door, so he anticipated her move to the right to head up the stairs. He slashed out with the knife and cut her just below the knee, the serrated blade slicing through her flesh as if it were paper. Blood spurted down her leg.

  She fell and only just managed to get her hands up to break her fall, then scrabbled up the stairs on all fours. Walton changed the grip on the steak knife and brought it down into the calf of her right leg, burying it up to the handle. He felt the blade scrape the bone as it went in and again when he pulled it out savagely.

  His wife reached the top of the stairs, where she pushed herself to her feet and ran down the landing to their bedroom, blood pouring down her leg. She got there a fraction of a second before him and tried to slam the door in his face, but he hit the door hard and she staggered backwards and fell onto the bed. She tried to roll to the side, but Walton was too quick for her and he stabbed her four times in the chest, hard and fast, grunting with each blow. Blood blossomed over her breasts and Walton snarled and stabbed her again, this time closer to her throat. She finally stopped screaming as her windpipe filled with blood. He could see the panic in her eyes as bloody foam spewed between her lips. ‘Die, you stupid bitch!’ he hissed, and virtually on cue the life faded from her eyes and she went still.

  Walton climbed off the bed and stood grinning down at his dead wife for almost a minute as her blood soaked into the duvet. Then he looked at his watch and smiled to himself. There was plenty of time to finish his steak and drink some wine before his kids came home.

  80

  Nightingale pushed open the door to his office. Before he could take off his coat Jenny rushed over to him holding a newspaper. ‘Did you see the Express yesterday?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m more of a Sun man, as you know.’

  ‘Well, you need to take a look at the Express,’ she said, thrusting the paper at him.

  Nightingale went through to his office and sat down behind his desk, still wearing his raincoat as he scanned the Express. There was a news story on the front page and a feature article across the two centre pages of the paper, a couple of thousand words, with photographs of Bella Harper and her family. There were also photographs of the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Prince William. The headline read: ‘BELLA’S MESSAGES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE’.

  ‘It’s a world exclusive,’ said Jennie. ‘But it’ll be syndicated around the world tomorrow.’

  ‘This is bad,’ said Nightingale, gesturing at the newspaper.

  ‘Do you think?’

  ‘The Prime Minister? She wants to talk to the PM? And Prince William?’

  ‘Not so worried about the Archbishop then?’

  ‘I figure he can take care of himself,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘You think it’s a joke, Jack?’

  Nightingale threw up his hands. ‘I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘We can’t let the PM talk to her. We can’t let anyone talk to her.’

  ‘I know that. You think I don’t know that?’

  Jenny folded her arms. ‘So what are you going to do? What are WE going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m thinking.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right then. The great Jack Nightingale has his thinking cap on so it’s all going to turn out for the best.’

  ‘Sarcasm doesn’t suit you, Jenny.’

  Nightingale pointed at the headline. ‘She wants to see three of the most important people in the country. She wants to talk to them. And we know what happens to people that she talks to. That nurse killed himself and his family.

  ‘I don’t see any of them turning up at her front door.’

  ‘You don’t? Then you underestimate the power of public relations. They got the Queen to jump out of a helicopter at the Olympics opening ceremony. You think they wouldn’t persuade the Prince to pop around for a photo opportunity with a girl who came back from the dead? And you think the PM’s PR won’t be telling him that this would be a great way of connecting with voters?’

  Nightingale grinned. ‘You know that wasn’t actually the Queen that leapt out of the helicopter, right?’

  Jenny didn’t smile. ‘This isn’t funny, Jack. We have to do something.’

  ‘Let me talk to Robbie.’

  ‘Robbie? You think the police can help?’

  ‘I’ll ask Robbie to see if anyone else connected with Bella has …’ He shrugged. ‘Let me talk to Robbie, then we’ll work out what we should do.’

  Jenny nodded and walked out of the office. Nightingale reached for his phone. He’d call Robbie all right. But there was someone else he needed to talk to, and for that he’d need
more than a mobile phone.

  81

  Nightingale dropped the two black plastic rubbish bags on the ground and bent down to unlock the padlock that was what passed for security for his lock-up. He pulled up the metal shutter and flicked on the light switch. A fluorescent light flickered into life. The lock-up was empty – he’d already moved his MGB to a multi-storey car park close to his office. He opened one of the bags and took out a red plastic bucket and a scrubbing brush. At the end of the line of garages was a tap set into the wall and Nightingale used it to fill the bucket. He spent the next fifteen minutes scrubbing the concrete floor clean. When he was satisfied he used paper towels to pat the floor dry, then stood up and admired his handwork.

  He’d worked up a sweat, and he knew that he had to be spotlessly clean because any impurities would weaken the protective circle. He secured the lock-up and walked back to his flat. He showered twice, using a new bar of coal tar soap, taking care to use a plastic nail brush to clean under his fingernails and toenails. He shampooed his hair twice, then rinsed himself off and used a brand new towel to dry himself.

  He had already laid out clean clothes on his bed and he put them on. The shoes were a new pair of brown suede Hush Puppies that he’d bought a month earlier but hadn’t broken in yet. He pulled on his raincoat and walked back to the lock-up, his hair still damp.

  He took off his raincoat and hung it on a nail by the light switch, then pulled down the shutter. He stood for a while in the middle of the garage, steadying his breath, then got to work. He took a large cardboard box from one of the bags and opened it. Inside was a box of chalk. The lock-up was about fifteen feet long and ten feet wide. The protective circle had to be just that, a circle, so he carefully drew one six feet in diameter. In the second bag he had a birch branch that he’d ripped from a tree on Hampstead Heath, and he slowly ran it around the perimeter of the chalk circle. When he’d finished he put the branch back in the bag and with the chalk drew a pentagram inside the circle. He’d already worked out that the front of the garage faced north, so he drew two of the five points of the pentagram facing that direction.

  He carefully drew a triangle around the circle, with the apex pointing north, and then wrote the letters MI, CH and AEL at the three points of the triangle. Michael. The archangel.

  Nightingale placed the two rubbish bags close to the shutter and put the cardboard box in the centre of the circle. He put the chalk back in the cardboard box, took out a small bottle of consecrated salt water, removed the glass stopper and carefully sprinkled water around the circle. He took five large white church candles and placed them at the five points of the pentagram, then used his lighter to light them one at a time in a clockwise direction.

  He stood in the centre of the circle and checked that everything was as it should be, then he bent down over the cardboard box and retrieved a plastic bag full of herbs. He opened the bag, took out a handful of herbs and sprinkled them over the candles one by one, moving clockwise around the circle. The herbs sizzled as they burned, filling the air with cloying fumes, and for the first time Nightingale wondered if it had been such a smart move to be playing with fire in a garage with the door down.

  He bent down, fished a lead crucible from the cardboard box and poured the rest of the herbs into it. He used his fingers to form a neat pile and then set fire to it with his lighter. He straightened up, his eyes watering from the pungent fumes, and pulled a folded piece of paper from his back pocket. On it were the words that he needed to say, written in Latin.

  He took a deep breath but immediately began coughing. His eyes were watering and he wiped away the tears with the back of his hand. He managed to stop coughing and began to read the Latin words, slowly and precisely. When he reached the final three words he said them loudly, almost shouting. ‘Bagahi laca bacabe!’

  The fumes from the burning herbs began to swirl in a slow, lazy circle and then behind him was a flash of lightning and the smell of a burning electrical circuit. The concrete floor began to vibrate and the cloying fog grew thicker. He forced himself to breathe shallowly through his nose, trying to minimise the damage to his lungs.

  The fog swirled around him, faster and faster. It was now so thick that he could barely see the brick walls of the garage and the fluorescent light was just a dull bright patch above his head. There was another flash of lightning, then another, the cracks so loud that they hurt his ears.

  He stared ahead, tears streaming from his eyes. Then space folded in on itself and there were a series of bright flashes and she was there, dressed in black as usual, her black and white collie dog at her side. Proserpine. A devil from Hell. One of many, but one of the few that Nightingale knew by name. Her face was corpse-pale, her hair jet-black and cut short, her eyelashes loaded with mascara and her lipstick as black as coal, emphasising the whiteness of her small, even teeth. She was wearing a long black leather coat that almost brushed the floor over a black T-shirt cropped so short that it showed the small silver crucifix that pierced her navel. Her tight black jeans were ripped at the knees and she wore short black boots with stiletto heels.

  She stared at him with her cold black eyes, her upper lip curled back in a sneer. ‘Jack Nightingale,’ she said. The dog growled as its hackles rose. She had it on a steel chain and she pulled on it to get its attention. ‘Hush, we won’t be here long,’ she said. The dog sat down and stared at Nightingale with eyes as cold and black as those of its mistress. ‘I told you last time, I’m not to be summoned on a whim.’

  ‘This isn’t a whim,’ said Nightingale. ‘I need your help.’

  ‘We’re not friends, Nightingale. We never were and we never will be.’ She looked around the garage and smiled. ‘Salubrious,’ she said. ‘Looks like you’ve fallen on hard times.’

  ‘It’s private, that’s all that matters,’ said Nightingale. ‘It doesn’t matter where the pentagram is, all that matters is that you have to stay between the triangle and the circle until I say you can go.’

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ said Proserpine. ‘The other way is that so long as I’m here you’re trapped inside that puny little circle with nowhere to go. I could easily just stand here until you die of old age and your bones crumble to dust.’

  ‘So it’s a Mexican stand-off. Let’s keep it as short as we can, shall we?’

  ‘What do you want, Nightingale?’

  ‘I need some questions answering. About Shades.’

  ‘Try Wikipedia.’

  ‘I don’t believe anything I read in Wikipedia.’

  ‘But you believe me?’

  ‘Sounds crazy I know, but yes. So will you help me?’

  ‘No,’ she said flatly.

  ‘No?’

  Proserpine shrugged carelessly. ‘Why should I?’

  ‘What if I did a deal?’

  ‘You’re offering me your soul?’

  Nightingale laughed, but it sounded like a harsh bark and the dog pricked up its ears. ‘I only need information,’ he said. ‘My soul’s worth more than that. But I can offer you something else.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Help.’

  Proserpine tilted her head to the side. ‘Help?’

  ‘I’m starting to understand how things work,’ said Nightingale. ‘You and your kind move in and out of this world but there are things you can’t do yourselves.’

  ‘That’s your great insight, is it?’

  ‘I know, we’re ants compared to you, but we’re still here and you’re still dealing for souls and not just taking them. That’s always had me thinking. You’re all-powerful devils from Hell, why don’t you just take our souls, harvest them like a farmer culling cattle?’

  Proserpine said nothing.

  ‘I’ll tell you why. Because there are some things that you just can’t do. Either because there are rules that you have to follow, or because there are physical constraints on what you can do. Either way, sometimes you need help. You need us to do things that you can’t. So here’s
the deal. Answer my questions about Shades and I’ll owe you one. If you need something doing, something you can’t do yourself, you can ask me.’

  ‘That’s very open-ended.’

  ‘I’ll risk that,’ said Nightingale. ‘You’ve always played fair with me.’

  ‘Plus I’m assuming you’re reserving the right to refuse?’

  ‘Like I said, I think you’ll respect the deal.’

  ‘And not ask you to kill a child?’

  Nightingale stiffened, wondering if Proserpine was toying with him. Did she know about Bella Harper already? Did she know what Mrs Steadman had asked him to do?

  Proserpine laughed and the garage walls shook. ‘If I do a deal with you, how do I know you’ll stick to it?’

  ‘Because I always keep my word.’

  She laughed again and this time dust showered down from the ceiling and a jagged crack appeared in the concrete floor. ‘I’ll need more than that,’ she said. ‘I tell you what, if you refuse to do whatever I ask in return, then I get your soul.’ She watched him with unblinking black eyes.

  Nightingale took a long breath and exhaled slowly as he considered his options. He needed Proserpine’s help but he didn’t want to put his soul at risk, not after he’d gone to so much trouble to make it his own. ‘What will you ask me to do?’ he said.

  Proserpine smiled coyly. ‘Now if I told you that, it would spoil all the fun, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not prepared to kill for you.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Or to do something that would result in someone dying.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘And it’s a one-off deal. You ask me to do something for you and I do it. Then we’re good.’

  ‘And if you refuse to do what I ask, you forfeit your soul.’

  Nightingale nodded slowly. ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Okay, it’s a deal,’ she said. She held out her hand. ‘Let’s shake on it, shall we?’ Nightingale instinctively reached out to shake her hand, but pulled it back when he realised what he was doing. She laughed. ‘Almost got you.’