Nightfall

12

Nightingale followed Hoyle down to the basement. The stairs were wooden and there was a brass banister on the left. He kept his hand on it and felt for each stair with his foot before trusting his weight on it. Their torches picked out books, shelves and shelves of them, mostly leather-bound.

‘Why did he put his library here?’ said Nightingale.

‘Because he was a nutter,’ said Hoyle. ‘Nutters do nutty things.’

They stopped halfway down and shone their torches around. The basement appeared to run the full length of one wing of the house. The bookshelves continued and, running down the centre of the space, there were two lines of display cabinets. There was a sitting area with two large red leather chesterfields and a coffee-table piled with more books. A huge desk was covered with newspapers. There was an antique globe that was almost four feet high and a vast oak table with more than a dozen candles on it. Molten wax had dripped down it and pooled on the floor.

‘This is just weird,’ said Nightingale.

‘It looks like he spent a lot of time down here,’ said Hoyle. ‘Come on, let’s have a look around.’

Hoyle headed down the stairs. Nightingale wrinkled his nose. There was a musty smell in the air that left a nasty taste in his mouth. It wasn’t just the smell of old books or soot from the candles, it was bitter and acrid. When he swallowed, his stomach lurched and he had to fight to stop himself throwing up.

Hoyle reached the bottom and walked between the two rows of cabinets. ‘Jack, you’ve got to see this,’ he called.

Nightingale joined him beside a glass-sided cabinet, whose shelves were filled with human skulls of different sizes, some so small they could have come only from infants, others adult-sized, yellowed with age, the teeth stained brown and ground down from years of wear and tear.

‘How sick is this?’ said Hoyle. ‘He collected skulls.’

Nightingale bent down to peer at them. Most of the skulls had small irregular holes in the back as if they had been pierced with a chisel or smashed with a hammer. ‘They didn’t die of natural causes,’ he said.

‘Could have been done post-mortem,’ said Hoyle.

‘I hope so,’ said Nightingale.

They walked along to the next cabinet. It was filled with knives – knives with curved blades, knives with handles carved in the form of exotic creatures, knives with twin blades, knives made of wood, ivory, every sort of metal. Some had what appeared to be dried blood on their blades, others were chipped and scratched. A few were decorated with strange writing. ‘Most of these are illegal, antiques or not,’ said Nightingale.

Hoyle went to the next cabinet, which held crystal balls. He shone his torch over them and the light refracted into a dozen rainbows. Nightingale moved to the wall and ran his light across some books. Only a few had titles on their spines. He pulled one out at random. A title was etched into the front cover: Sacrifice and Self-Mutilation. He opened it. It had been printed in 1816 in Edinburgh. He flicked through. There were illustration plates that made his stomach turn – black-and-white drawings of people being tortured and butchered. He put the book back and took out the one next to it. It was in Spanish, and bound in what looked like lizard skin. He couldn’t make sense of what it was about but the illustrations inside were of strange and mythical creatures, winged dragons and twin-headed snakes. He pulled out a few more volumes. All were old, their pages well thumbed and creased, and many bore handwritten notes in the margins. Most were concerned with witchcraft or black magic.

Nightingale flinched as something crashed behind him. He whirled around, dropping the book he’d been holding. Hoyle was gazing down at dozens of glass fragments. ‘Bloody hell, Robbie, what are you playing at?’ Hoyle didn’t reply. Nightingale picked up the book and put it back on the shelf. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘It was one of the crystal balls,’ said Hoyle. ‘I dropped it.’

‘I can see that,’ said Nightingale. He picked up one of the smaller balls and weighed it in the palm of his hand. ‘But these are solid crystal,’ he said. ‘They shouldn’t shatter.’

‘That one was different,’ he said. ‘It was full of smoke or mist, like it was moving all the time.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘I saw something,’ said Hoyle, quietly, ‘in the mist.’

‘What? What did you see?’

Hoyle prodded one of the curved splinters with his shoe.

‘Robbie, what did you see?’

‘It’s stupid. Nothing.’

‘Robbie?’

Hoyle swallowed. ‘I saw myself.’

‘Your reflection?’

‘No, like I was inside the glass. In the mist. I was standing in the middle of a road…’

‘Come on, Robbie, you’re winding me up.’

Hoyle shook his head. ‘I was standing in the middle of the road and a taxi hit me. A black cab.’

‘Robbie…’

Hoyle looked at him. ‘I’m serious, Jack. The cab went right over me.’

‘It’s dark down here, Robbie. You were shining the torch on it – the light must have played tricks on you.’

‘I know what I saw,’ said Hoyle.

‘Crystal balls are mumbo-jumbo nonsense,’ said Nightingale. He stared at the one he was holding. ‘Show me the future, O Magic Ball,’ he moaned. ‘Tell me what lies ahead.’ He ran his torch across the ball and the light fractured into a rainbow. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should try another channel.’ He grinned at Hoyle. ‘Do you think I could get Sky Sports on this?’ Hoyle tried to smile, but Nightingale could see that his friend was unsettled. He put the crystal ball back into the display case. ‘How many books do you think there are? Thousands? Tens of thousands?’

‘A lot,’ said Hoyle.

‘He can’t have read them all, surely.’

‘Maybe he was a speed reader,’ said Hoyle. ‘Maybe they’re investments. Maybe he bought them by the yard and never read them.’

They walked along the display cases. ‘He was a collector, that’s for sure,’ said Nightingale. There was a case of what appeared to be shrunken heads, leathery fist-sized lumps with straggly hair and pig-like noses. In the next they found chunks of rock, which Nightingale realised were fossils. He peered closer. They looked like birds but had long claws and teeth.

‘Vampire bats?’ asked Hoyle, only half joking.

‘I don’t know what the hell they are,’ said Nightingale. ‘They’re fossils so they’ve got to be old. But I don’t think birds ever had teeth, did they?’

‘They look more like lizards than birds,’ said Hoyle. He played the beam of his torch down the basement to the end furthest from the stairs. ‘That looks like the security system,’ he said. There were half a dozen LCD screens on the wall in two banks of three.

The two men walked through the display cases towards them. As they got closer they saw a black wooden desk with a straight-backed chair and a large stainless-steel console dotted with labelled buttons. Nightingale ran his finger along it. ‘This picks up the feeds from the CCTV cameras,’ he said. ‘Look at this. There’s – what? Twenty-four cameras?’

‘Twenty-eight,’ said Hoyle. ‘Overkill, wouldn’t you say?’

‘He’d sit down here watching the screens. But watching for what?’

‘Scared that someone would rip off his collection?’

‘I don’t think he was scared,’ said Nightingale. ‘I think he just wanted to know what was going on in the house. He couldn’t have been alone. He’d have needed a staff – cleaners, gardeners, a driver, an estate manager. Maybe he didn’t trust them. Maybe he didn’t trust anybody.’

‘But when he died, he was alone in the house,’ said Hoyle. ‘That’s what it said in the file.’

‘He must have let the staff go,’ said Nightingale.

Hoyle waved a hand at the rows of display cases behind them. ‘And what is this place? What was Gosling doing down here? It’s not a display or an exhibition. He kept it all hidden away.’

‘You know what it is,’ said Nightingale. ‘It’s Witchcraft R Us, that’s what it is. A shrine to black magic. Ainsley Gosling was a Satanist and this was where he plied his trade.’

‘There’s no such thing as magic,’ said Hoyle. ‘Smoke and mirrors and superstition, that’s all there is. This is the twenty-first century, Jack, the third millennium. Magic belongs back in the Dark Ages.’

‘You got the heebie-jeebies over that crystal ball, didn’t you?’

‘That was different. That wasn’t magic – it was…’ He paused, lost for words. ‘I don’t know what it was. Maybe you were right, maybe the light was playing tricks with my reflection.’

‘Okay, but you got married in church, didn’t you?’

‘So?’

‘So that was a religious ceremony, before God.’

‘That’s different,’ said Hoyle, rubbing his wedding band.

‘No, it’s the same. What you did in church with Anna was a ceremony with all the paraphernalia of religion. And remember Sarah’s christening? I had to renounce Satan and all his works.’

‘They’re just words, Jack. Everyone says “until death us do part”, but most marriages end in divorce. They’re words, not spells.’ He waved his arm at the shelves of books. ‘This is bollocks. All of it. And you know it’s bollocks.’

‘I’m not saying it’s not bollocks,’ said Nightingale, ‘I’m just saying that Gosling obviously believed in it, that’s all. And maybe that belief is what drove him to kill himself.’ He moved towards the stairs. ‘Come on, let’s get the hell out of here. We can’t see properly with the torches – I’ll get the power switched on and we’ll come back.’

They walked past an oak desk on the way to the staircase. Unlike the others in the basement it wasn’t heaped with books or papers: there was just a single leather-bound volume open with a Mont Blanc fountain pen next to it. The pages were filled with a handwritten scrawl, but Nightingale couldn’t read it in the torchlight. He picked it up and took it with him.