Nightfall

10

Nightingale wanted a drink and time to think. He drove back to London, left the MGB in the multi-storey car park close to his office, then slipped into one of his favourite local pubs. It was a gloomy place that had yet to be given a corporate makeover – no fruit machine, no olde-worlde menu with microwaved lamb shanks and chilli con carne, just a long bar and a few tables and a grizzled old barman who didn’t look at him or try to start a conversation. As he walked to the bar he called Jenny on his mobile. ‘I’m in the Nag’s Head,’ he said. ‘I need some thinking time.’

‘Yeah, alcohol is renowned for helping the thought process,’ she said acidly.

‘Come and join me.’

‘I’m trying to sort out our accounts due,’ said Jenny. ‘If we don’t get the cash-flow sorted we won’t be able to pay our VAT.’

‘Now you’re making me feel guilty,’ said Nightingale.

‘I doubt that,’ she said. ‘Keep your mobile on. If anything crops up I’ll give you a call.’

Nightingale ordered a bottle of Corona and sat at the bar. If what Gosling had said was true, his parents had lied to him virtually from the day he was born. There had never been so much as a hint from them that he wasn’t their child. Two boys in his class at primary school had been adopted, and he had talked to his mother about it, but she had never given any indication that she wasn’t his biological mother. Nightingale couldn’t understand why they hadn’t told him he was adopted. There was no shame in it, and he wouldn’t have loved them any the less, but now the truth had come out and he wasn’t able to ask them why they had lied because they were dead and gone. Or was it all a massive confidence trick? Was Turtledove part of it? Was the idea to convince Nightingale that the house was his, then ask him to put money up front? He smiled to himself. If it was a con, it would be a waste of time because Nightingale had little in the way of cash to be parted from.

He sipped his Corona. He was drinking it from the bottle with a slice of lime shoved down the neck. Someone had told him once that the lime was there to keep away the flies, but Nightingale liked the bite it gave the beer.

A hand fell on his shoulder and he jumped. Beer sloshed over his hand and he cursed. He turned to see Robbie Hoyle grinning at him. ‘Bloody hell, Robbie, do you have to creep up on me like that?’

Hoyle slid onto the stool next to him. ‘Jumpy,’ he said.

‘I’m not jumpy. I just don’t like being crept up on that’s all. How did you know I was here?’

‘The lovely Jenny said you were drowning your sorrows.’ He took a manila envelope from his inside pocket and waved it in front of Nightingale’s face. ‘I was going to drop off the stuff you wanted but then I figured I could do with a drink myself. I didn’t realise you were so skittish.’

‘What do you want, Robbie?’ asked Nightingale.

‘A Porsche, a villa in Malaga, a mistress with huge tits and a dad who owns a brewery, all the normal sort of crap.’

‘To drink, you soft bastard. What do you want to drink?’

Hoyle nodded at the barman. ‘I’ll have a red wine, preferably from a bottle with a cork.’ He slid the envelope across the bar to Nightingale. ‘Here’s the info about the Gosling suicide,’ he said. ‘It was a strange one and no mistake. You were right about the magic circle. It’s called a pentagram and it’s supposed to offer you protection against things that go bump in the night. That’s what the report says, anyway. They ran it by an occult expert. Apparently quite a few people who dabble in the occult end up topping themselves.’

Nightingale opened the envelope and slid out four large photographs. It was the bedroom in Gosling Manor, but not as he’d seen it when he went to the house. The bed was there, and the chair, but sprawled between the two was the bloated body of the man in the DVD, his head a bloody mess, a shotgun across his legs. The bed, the chair and the body were surrounded by a five-pointed white star that had been drawn on the floor, and at the points of the star there were large church candles. Wax had dripped down them and solidified in pools around their brass holders. Inside the pentagram, brass bowls contained what looked like ashes.

One photograph was of the wall near the window, showing a spray of blood. There was dried blood on the windows, too, and on the ceiling. A lot of it.

‘None of that spooky stuff is there now, I take it?’ said Hoyle.

‘The cops said a crime-scene clean-up crew had been in,’ said Nightingale, ‘and they’d done a hell of a job. I didn’t see any blood spatter or anything.’

‘So what’s the story, morning glory?’

‘You won’t believe it,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’m not sure I believe it myself.’

The barman gave Hoyle a glass of red wine. He sniffed it and nodded his thanks. ‘So tell me.’

Nightingale told him about the meeting with Turtledove, about Gosling Manor, the safe-deposit box and the DVD. ‘What I can’t work out is why my parents lied,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t they just tell me?’

‘If you were adopted at birth, and your biological parents didn’t want to see you again, then what would be the point?’

Nightingale frowned at his friend. ‘What?’

‘If your real parents, your biological parents, weren’t going to see you, there’d be no point in telling you.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Nightingale. ‘There’s all sorts of reasons you need to know you’re adopted.’

‘For instance?’

Nightingale shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Blood groups, maybe. Inherited disorders. I don’t have DNA, Robbie. I deserved to know that.’ He sipped his beer. ‘He was bald.’

‘Who was bald?’

‘Gosling. My biological father. Bald as a coot. My dad – the man that I thought was my dad – had a great head of hair. I always thought I’d inherited my hair from him but now I find out that my dad was bald.’

Hoyle laughed. ‘Is that what’s got you all riled up? The fact that you might be bald one day?’

‘It’s not about baldness, it’s about me not being who I thought I was. Robbie, my biological father made a DVD saying he’d sold my soul to the devil and then he blew his head off with a shotgun, which suggests, if nothing else, that he might have had a few sanity issues. What if I take after him? Nature and nurture, right? We’re a combination of our genes and our environment, and now I’ve found out that my genes have come from a nutter.’

‘A bald nutter, to boot.’

‘Exactly,’ said Nightingale.

Hoyle sipped his wine. ‘It’s a joke, right? Some sort of sick practical joke?’

‘I’m just telling you what happened,’ said Nightingale.

‘I mean this Gosling character, he’s just playing with you.’

‘But he killed himself, Robbie. Blew his head off with a shotgun. Bit extreme for a jape, don’t you think?’ He pulled out some photocopied sheets from the envelope: the police report and a copy of the conclusions of the inquest that had been held a week after the death. The verdict was suicide. ‘Just a thought, there’s no doubt that it was Gosling who died, is there? Shotgun blasts don’t leave much to identify.’

‘It’s all in there,’ said Hoyle. ‘His fingerprints matched the ones in the house. Nothing useful dental-wise so they did a DNA match. It’s definitely him.’

‘Can you do me a favour?’

‘Within limits,’ said Hoyle, cautiously.

‘I want to know if I really am his son. Can you check my DNA against his?’

‘Shouldn’t be a problem,’ said Hoyle. ‘Do you want to give me a sample now?’

Nightingale took a small plastic bag from his jacket. Inside were half a dozen hairs that he’d plucked from his scalp, the roots intact.

Hoyle took it. ‘I was hoping for blood.’ He slid it into his jacket pocket. ‘It might take a day or two,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to wait until there’s a friendly face in the lab.’

‘I can’t believe the way my parents lied to me,’ said Nightingale. ‘And my uncle and aunt. My aunt and uncle must have known too.’

‘Have you spoken to them?’

‘My aunt was all jittery, and my uncle’s going to call me back.’

‘What about other family?’

‘That’s it, pretty much. Mum was an only child, all my grandparents died years ago, and Uncle Tommy and Auntie Linda never had kids. She has a few relatives but I hardly know them.’ He looked up from the papers he was reading. ‘What happened to the body?’

‘Cremated.’ Hoyle rubbed his finger around the rim of his wine glass. ‘You’re not taking this selling-your-soul-to-the-devil thing seriously, are you? People don’t sell their souls to the devil.’

‘He didn’t say he sold his soul. He said he sold my soul. And my sister’s.’

‘You don’t have a sister, Jack. You were an only child, remember? Which, incidentally, explains a lot.’

‘What?’

‘Only kids tend to be self-centred, used to getting their own way, have difficulty in forming lasting friendships.’

‘Screw you.’

‘See? That proves my point. Now me, one of four kids, you couldn’t wish for a more sociable fellow.’

‘I say again, screw you. And the rest of the Waltons.’

‘Easy enough to check if you had a sister,’ said Hoyle. ‘There’d be a birth certificate.’

‘Gosling’s not down on mine,’ said Nightingale. ‘Just my mum and dad. If Gosling did have a daughter, she’d be almost impossible to trace.’

‘It’s bollocks, the whole thing.’

‘Yeah, maybe,’ said Nightingale. He drained his bottle of Corona.

‘You know it’s bollocks, right?’ said Hoyle. ‘There’s no such thing as the devil.’

‘Not the devil, a devil. He was very clear on that.’

‘So now you believe in devils?’

‘I’m not saying that. If there was a devil there’d be a God, and I’ve seen nothing over the past thirty-two years that’s convinced me there is. No God, no devil, end of story.’

‘There you go, then. It’s bollocks.’

‘He’s left me a huge bloody house in the sticks, Robbie. A mansion.’

‘So you’re going up in the world.’

‘Why would he do that if I wasn’t his flesh and blood? It’s one hell of an expensive joke, don’t you think?’

‘Okay, show it to me.’

‘What?’

‘The house. Spooky Towers.’

‘At night?’

‘You are jumpy.’ Hoyle grinned and finished his wine.

‘The power’s off. Gosling stopped paying his bills a month before he died.’

‘I’ve got torches in the car. You scared?’

‘Don’t be stupid. And it’s not in the least bit spooky. It’s bloody gorgeous in fact.’

‘I double dare you,’ said Hoyle, grinning. He waggled his fingers and made a ghostly wailing sound.

‘Screw you,’ said Nightingale again.