Nightshade: The Fourth Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thriller

by Stephen Leather

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘It was something a cop said to me. A uniform who was standing outside the school. He said McBride was shooting kids but not teachers. And he didn’t shoot at the cops. That doesn’t make sense, does it?’

  ‘It does if McBride hated kids.’

  ‘But there’s no evidence of that. The opposite in fact. Shooters like McBride usually end up being shot by the police, but he didn’t make a move against them. I want to take a closer look at what happened at the school.’

  ‘And the Sunday papers will help with that?’

  ‘It’s a start,’ he said.

  24

  The incident room for the hunt for Bella Harper was on the fifth floor of Southampton Police’s Operational Command Unit, on the western approach to the city. The eight-storey limestone and glass building with its double-height canopy and public plaza was starkly modern, as were the thirty-six custody suites that were full to capacity most weekends. More than a hundred officers and another hundred civilian staff had been assigned to the case, and while the majority were out on the streets there were still more than fifty men and women answering phones and tapping away on computer terminals. It was just after eight o’clock in the morning and a lot of the people in the room had worked through the night.

  The blinds were drawn and there was a line of whiteboards in front of the windows. There were photographs of Bella and a hand-drawn timeline and on one board a list of all the men on the Violent and Sex Offender Register who lived within fifty miles of the city. All the names on the list were being visited and their homes inspected.

  On the opposite side of the corridor six offices had been taken over by the senior officers on the case. Word had come down from the Chief Constable that overtime wasn’t an issue and that no expense was to be spared in the hunt for the missing girl.

  One of the civilian staff, a man in his fifties with a greasy comb-over and sweat stains in the armpits of his shirt, was sipping coffee as he looked at the largest photograph of Bella. It was the one they were using on posters and on the TV appeals, a blow-up of her school photograph. Standing next to him was a young Asian police community service officer in a high-visibility fluorescent jacket that was a couple of sizes too big for her.

  ‘It’s true what they say, you know,’ said the man, gesturing at the photograph.

  ‘Yeah, what’s that?’ said the PCSO.

  ‘It’s the ugly ones that come back,’ said the man. ‘Paedos keep the pretty ones.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a fact.’

  A massive hand grabbed the man by the back of the neck. ‘My office, now!’ hissed Superintendent Rory Wilkinson. The superintendent frogmarched the man out of the room, across the corridor and into his office. He threw him inside and kicked the door shut.

  The man put up his hands as if he feared the superintendent was going to assault him. ‘You can’t do …’

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’ shouted the superintendent. ‘How fucking dare you make a cheap crack like that! A girl has been abducted and you think it’s fucking funny?’

  ‘I … I … I …’ stammered the man.

  The superintendent pointed a finger at the man. ‘You’re a fucking civilian so I can’t sack you but I want you out of this office now. Tell your fucking boss that you’re off this investigation and if you’ve got anything like a brain behind that pig-ugly face you’ll get transferred to another station because I am going to make your life a living fucking hell every time I see you. Now fuck off out of my sight.’

  The man turned, fumbled for the door handle and rushed out. The superintendent took a deep breath. His blood pressure had been borderline high at his last medical and dealing with civilian idiots wasn’t helping. He closed his eyes and took another deep breath. He was fifty-four years old and hoped to retire in another year. His three children were all married with families of their own, and he and his wife had their retirement all mapped out – they had already bought a canal boat big enough to live aboard and they planned to spend six months of the year cruising the canal system and six months in their villa in southern Spain. Thinking of the canal boat always calmed him down – there was nothing more relaxing than pottering along at four miles an hour, the tiller in one hand and a mug of tea in the other.

  ‘Sir?’

  The superintendent opened his eyes. It was Aaron Fisher, a young detective who had only recently joined CID. ‘Yes, lad?’

  ‘I’ve just had a call that sounded like the real thing.’ He mimed putting a phone to his head as if the superintendent might not understand what he meant. ‘Old couple out in Lyndhurst.’

  Lyndhurst was a small town close to the New Forest, half an hour’s drive from Southampton. ‘Spit it out, lad.’

  ‘They say their neighbours turned up with a kid a couple of days ago. They didn’t get a good look but they’re pretty sure it was a young girl.’

  ‘A couple of days ago?’ It was Tuesday morning. Bella Harper had been snatched on Friday.

  ‘Sorry, sir. On Friday.’

  ‘They’ve seen the appeal pictures?’

  ‘They know what Bella looks like, but they say the girl taken into the house was being carried so they didn’t get a good look. They’ve not seen the girl since, so they think she might be in the house.’

  ‘Who lives there?’

  ‘According to the electoral roll a guy called Eric Lucas. The caller doesn’t know anything about them.’

  ‘Checked the Sex Offenders Register?’

  Fisher nodded. ‘No Eric Lucas.’

  The superintendent rubbed his chin thoughtfully. The unit was getting several hundred calls a day, and the bulk of them were false sightings of Bella Harper. ‘What makes you think this is the real thing?’

  ‘The timing, sir.’ Fisher looked at his notebook. ‘Mrs Pullman, she’s the lady who rang in, said she’s pretty sure she saw the girl at three o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday. She went missing at just before two-thirty.’

  ‘And this Eric Lucas doesn’t have kids?’

  ‘There’s no wife on the electoral roll and Mrs Pullman says she’s never seen a child there before, there are no toys in the garden.’

  ‘Today’s a school day. She’s sure the kid didn’t leave for school today?’

  ‘I asked that. Mrs Pullman was in her front garden all morning. She’s not a great sleeper, she said, and she was doing some weeding. No one has come in or gone out.’

  ‘So this Eric Lucas doesn’t work?’

  ‘That’s another thing that made me think she might have something. He usually leaves for work at seven-thirty in the morning. Today his car is still in the drive.’

  ‘Car? So no white van?’

  Fisher shook his head. ‘Blue Mondeo,’ he said.

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘Mrs Pullman doesn’t know.’

  ‘Do they know who the woman is? Girlfriend? Sister?’

  ‘She’s been living there for the past year or so. But they keep themselves to themselves.’ He tapped his notebook against his leg. ‘Mrs Pullman isn’t a timewaster. She kept saying she hoped she wasn’t being a bother, but she had seen the TV appeals and she felt she had to let us know what she’d seen. Do you think I should go and check the Lucas house?’

  The superintendent looked at his watch. It was just after mid-day.

  ‘I keep getting this tingle on the back of my neck,’ said Fisher. ‘I know that sounds crazy.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound crazy at all,’ said the superintendent. ‘A copper’s hunch has helped me out more times than I can remember. You’re right, the timing is bang on and the car still being there is a red flag. Get Dave Hopkins in here and we’ll get something sorted.’

  25

  Jenny McLean frowned when she opened the door and found Nightingale studying a large whiteboard on which he’d stuck photographs cut from the Sunday papers. She looked at her watch. It was ten to nine. ‘Early bird catching the worm?’ she said as she took off her coat.

  ‘
Up with the lark indeed,’ said Nightingale. ‘Late rising is for the birds. Are we about done with the ornithological references?’

  ‘I just mean it’s not like you to beat me into the office.’ She walked over to him and looked at the information on the whiteboard. He’d drawn a map of the school and marked where the children had been killed with black crosses. He’d drawn red lines from the crosses to the relevant photographs. Eight of the crosses were of children. The ninth, in the playground, had a red line linking it to a balding man in his forties.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Trying to work out why McBride did what he did.’

  ‘He killed kids, we know that.’

  ‘Yeah, but if he just wanted to kill kids he could have just walked into one classroom and started blasting away. He had plenty of cartridges.’

  Jenny stared at the hand-drawn map of the school. ‘He walked down the corridor and into several classrooms?’

  Nightingale nodded. ‘And then into the gym. That’s where he shot his last two victims and where he killed himself.’

  ‘So the question is, why go to all that trouble?’

  ‘Exactly. If the aim was just to kill kids then he’d have been a lot more productive if he’d just gone into one classroom and blasted away.’

  ‘Productive? That’s a sick way of putting it.’

  ‘What I mean is if it was a body count he was after, he went about it in a bloody funny way. And if it wasn’t about a body count, what was he doing?’

  ‘Do you think the police are asking the same question?’

  Nightingale grimaced. ‘Probably not,’ he said. ‘When the cops are on a murder investigation, they’re looking at motive, means and opportunity. They construct a timeline and they investigate everyone who came into contact with the victim. But in this case they’re not looking for a suspect. They know who the killer was, they caught him in the act. So they’re not going to be worrying about a motive. So far as they’re concerned, the case was closed when McBride killed himself. There’ll be an inquest, but the verdict will be murder and suicide. It’s not the coroner’s job to say why McBride did what he did, though he might say something along the lines of the balance of his mind was disturbed.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s much doubt about that,’ said Jenny. ‘Well balanced people don’t usually run amok with shotguns, do they?’

  ‘No, but from the accounts in the papers, he didn’t run amok. He was as cold as ice. Dead calm. And if you look at how he moved through the school, it was purposeful. It wasn’t random.’

  ‘You think he was choosing his victims?’

  She looked at the photographs one by one. They were all children aged between eight and ten, and most of the pictures had been taken at school. They were wearing uniforms and smiling happily at the camera, bright-eyed children with their lives ahead of them. Jenny pointed at one of the photographs, a dark-haired girl with a snub nose. ‘Manka?’

  ‘Polish,’ said Nightingale. ‘Mum arrived in the UK ten years ago, the girl was born here. Mum’s a single parent.’ He tapped another photograph. ‘Paul Tomkins. His mum’s also a single parent.’

  ‘Coincidence?’ asked Jenny.

  Nightingale pointed at a third photograph. ‘Zach Atkins. His parents split up five years ago and he’s being brought up by his dad.’

  Jenny frowned. ‘Are you serious?’

  Nightingale moved his finger along the whiteboard to a photograph of a girl with curly red hair. ‘Ruth Glazebrook. Parents divorced. Lives with her mum.’ He looked at Jenny and shrugged. ‘Of the eight, those four are described by the papers as being in one-parent families. The parental status of the other three isn’t mentioned. Can you run checks on the rest? I figure the best way is to look at the electoral roll.’

  ‘Easily done,’ said Jenny. ‘But you can’t seriously think he was killing kids from single-parent families.’

  ‘I don’t know what to think at the moment. But if it wasn’t random, we need to know why he killed the ones he did. If we can answer that question, we’ll have a better idea of what was going on. But the more I look at it, the more I’m sure he wasn’t a crazy devil-worshipper.’

  ‘What about the religious connection?’

  ‘What religious connection?’

  ‘The names. Paul. Ruth. Zach. And there’s a Noah. All biblical.’

  ‘Zach? Since when is Zach biblical?’

  ‘Zacharias. He was a prophet. Manka doesn’t fit but maybe that’s the exception that proves the rule.’

  ‘Manka is a Polish variant of Mary,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Is it now? But one of the girls was called Brianna. I’m pretty sure that’s not in the Bible either. The point I’m making is you’ve got to be careful when you start looking for connections. Just because a few of them are from single-parent families doesn’t mean that’s why he killed them. You might just as well say they all have blue eyes or played the piano.’

  ‘How do you know they played the piano?’

  Jenny sighed. ‘I didn’t. I plucked that from the air.’

  ‘You noticed the date, by the way? And the time?’

  Jenny frowned. ‘September the ninth, right? A couple of days after the kids went back to school.’

  ‘And the time?’

  Jenny shrugged. ‘It was at the start of school.’

  ‘It was nine o’clock when he started shooting. On the dot.’

  ‘Am I missing something here, Jack?’

  ‘Nine o’clock on September the ninth. The ninth month. Nine, nine, nine.’

  She frowned and shrugged again. ‘And?’

  ‘Jenny, three nines. Nine, nine, nine. That’s a Satanic number.’

  ‘It’s also the emergency services number. Anyway, I thought six six six was the number of the Devil.’

  ‘The number of the beast,’ said Nightingale. ‘But Satan’s number is nine nine nine. You can blame Hollywood for the whole six six six thing. And then there’s the number of victims. Eight kids and one teacher. Nine.’

  ‘So what are you saying, now you think it was some devil-worship thing?’

  ‘He picked up the shotgun and got to the school at nine o’clock,’ said Nightingale. ‘If he’d got there at ten we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?’

  ‘But his brother was definite, wasn’t he? James McBride wasn’t a Satanist.’

  ‘Yeah, but Satanists don’t tend to advertise themselves, do they? If James was in league with the Devil there’s a pretty good chance he wouldn’t tell his brother.’

  ‘What do you want to do, Jack? He wants you to prove his brother wasn’t a Satanist but everything in the papers says he was. And if you’re right and the nine nine nine thing is significant …’ She shrugged.

  ‘He wants to know why his brother did what he did,’ said Nightingale. ‘I get paid whatever I find out. The altar was definitely wrong and I think the computer stuff is a definite red herring but the nine nine nine can’t be a coincidence.’

  ‘Of course it can,’ she said. ‘Look at the conspiracy theories over the Twin Towers. September eleven. Nine one one. And that’s the American emergency services number.’

  ‘It’s not the same thing,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘You’ve got to be careful reading something into random numbers, that’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘What do you think then?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I think,’ said Jenny. ‘Mr McBride’s going to want proof at the end of the day. And at the moment all we have is supposition.’ She pointed at the photograph of the adult. ‘That’s the teacher who died, right?’

  ‘Deputy headmaster,’ said Nightingale. ‘Simon Etchells.’

  ‘Single parent?’

  ‘Married but no kids,’ said Nightingale. ‘You have to wonder why McBride shot this guy but none of the other teachers.’

  ‘Maybe he tried to stop him.’

  ‘Maybe. But I don’t see him getting aggressive with a man with a shotg
un. They tend to produce the opposite effect. That’s why the shotgun is the weapon of choice for bank robbers and the like. It’s all about intimidation and a shotgun is just about the most intimidating gun there is.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m not sure, yet,’ said Nightingale. ‘But he went into four classrooms and there was a teacher in each one. The teacher would have been the first person he saw. Yet he didn’t shoot them. He shot kids. The same in the gymnasium. There was a gym teacher there but McBride ignored him and shot two kids before the police arrived. According to the papers, the cops arrived when the shooting was going on. They heard a shot outside the school, and another when they went inside. Two shots. So that would be the two kids he killed in the gym.’ He tapped the photograph of Zach Atkins and another of a dark-haired boy with an impish grin. ‘Zach Atkins and Noah Woodhouse. But here’s the thing. It took the cops a good three or four minutes to move through the school to the gym. And as soon as they got there, McBride took his own life. Here’s the big question. Why did he stop shooting?’

  ‘Ran out of cartridges?’

  Nightingale shook his head. ‘There were several dozen in his knapsack. He could have shot more kids. And fired at the cops.’

  ‘What are you suggesting, Jack?’

  Nightingale shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But the way he behaved makes no sense to me. If he wanted to lash out at the world, why shoot kids? He could have gone into the council offices and shot dozens of people. Or the pub. Or the shops. He targeted the school.’

  ‘That happens,’ said Jenny. ‘Look at Dunblane. That bastard killed sixteen children. And that Norwegian right-wing nutter, Breivik, he massacred seventy-seven people and most of them were kids.’

  Nightingale walked over to the window and then turned to face the board. He folded his arms as he studied his handiwork. ‘Okay, so let’s suppose that for whatever reason McBride set out to kill children. Why shoot the deputy headmaster but then ignore the rest of the teachers? If he was just after kids he could just threaten to shoot the deputy and the guy would have shat himself.’