Nightmare

14

Jenny brought her Audi to a stop in front of Gosling Manor. It was a sunny day but bitterly cold and Nightingale turned up the collar of his raincoat after he climbed out of the car to open the gates. Jenny drove through and he pulled them closed, then realised that the builder would be arriving shortly so he left them open and got back into the passenger seat.

‘You still haven’t done anything about a gardener, have you?’ said Jenny as she drove slowly along the driveway to the house.

‘It’s winter. You don’t cut grass in the winter,’ said Nightingale.

‘There’re always things need doing in a garden, and you’ve got acres here.’

‘I’ll get it sorted once the builders are out,’ said Nightingale.

Jenny parked next to a massive stone fountain where a tousle-haired stone mermaid was surrounded by leaping fish and dolphins. They got out of the car and looked up at the two-storey mansion. The lower floor was built of stone, the upper floor of weathered bricks, and the roof was tiled, with four massive chimney stacks that gave it the look of an ocean-going liner. ‘Every time I look at this house, it seems to cry out for a family. You know what I mean?’ said Jenny. ‘It just seems so wrong that your father lived here alone. And now it’s yours and.?.?.’ She shrugged.

‘And I’m a sad lonely bastard too — is that what you were going to say?’

Jenny laughed. ‘That’s not what I meant at all,’ she said. ‘But this is a family home, Jack. No offence, but it’s wasted on you.’

They walked together towards the ivy-covered entrance. Nightingale had been the owner of Gosling Manor for almost three months but it didn’t feel like it was his house. He’d inherited it from his father, Ainsley Gosling. Gosling was Nightingale’s biological father, who’d given him away at birth, and Nightingale felt as little attachment to the man as he did to the house. He pulled his keys from his pocket. The oak door was massive but it moved easily on well-oiled hinges and opened onto the wood-panelled hall.

Jenny wrinkled her nose at the smell of smoke and then groaned when she saw the state of the hall. The marble floor was half an inch deep in mud and the wooden staircase was scorched. The massive multi-layered chandelier that looked like an upside-down crystal wedding cake was now caked in a thick layer of ash. ‘Oh Jack,’ she said.

‘It’s worse upstairs,’ said Nightingale. ‘The arsonist spread petrol all along the upstairs hall so the fire did far more damage up there. I don’t want to go up until the builder’s here. I don’t know if there’s been any structural damage or not.’

‘And you were upstairs when it happened?’

Nightingale nodded. ‘Yeah, it was pretty hairy. But the fire brigade got here quickly.’ He walked carefully across the mud to the section of the wooden panelling that concealed the entrance to the basement library. The wood was still damp from where the firemen had been spraying water, and as he pulled the panel open it pushed back a layer of thick black mud. There was a light switch just inside the panel and he flicked it, half expecting the electricity to be off but the fluorescent lights below flickered into life. Jenny tiptoed through the mud towards him, her face screwed up in disgust.

‘It’s not that bad, kid,’ said Nightingale.

‘You’re a smoker,’ she said, putting her hand over her mouth. ‘Trust me, it’s bad.’

Nightingale went down the stairs and Jenny followed him, holding on to the brass banister with her left hand as she kept her right cupped over her mouth.

The basement ran the full length of the house and was lined with laden bookshelves. Down the centre of the basement were two parallel lines of tall display cases which were packed with items that Ainsley Gosling had collected during a lifetime of devil-worship. At the bottom of the stairway were two overstuffed red leather Chesterfield sofas, one on either side of a claw-footed teak coffee table that was piled high with books.

A smile spread across Nightingale’s face as he realised that there was no major water damage. The ceiling was stained in places and water had trickled down the wall by the stairs but other than that the basement was in exactly the same condition as when he’d last been there. ‘Finally, some good news,’ he said. ‘I half expected it to be flooded.’

Jenny took her hand away from her mouth and sniffed the air cautiously. ‘No smoke down here either. The panel must be a tight fit.’

Nightingale took off his raincoat and tossed it on the back of one of the sofas. He looked at his watch. ‘Shouldn’t be long. I’d offer you coffee but I haven’t got anything in the fridge.’

‘Well, it’s not like you live here, is it?’ said Jenny, sitting on one of the sofas. ‘Seriously, what are you going to do with this place?’

‘I haven’t decided,’ said Nightingale, sitting on the other sofa.

‘You can’t live here, can you? What would you do if you needed milk? Or bread?’

‘Or duck noodles?’

‘You know what I mean. Where’s the nearest shop? How do you get a newspaper? It’d take a paperboy half an hour just to get down the drive.’

‘Now you’re exaggerating.’

‘And could you put up with a commute like that every day?’

‘We could work from here. There’s plenty of room.’

‘So I’d be the one commuting? Every day from Chelsea?’

‘That’s the beauty of having an Audi A4.’

‘You’re not seriously considering it, are you? How would clients get here?’

Nightingale grinned. ‘I’m joking,’ he said. ‘Of course we can’t work from here. But there’s something about the place that pulls me here, you know. It’s like I belong.’

‘That’s a freaky thing to say, Jack, considering that it’s where your father killed himself. Doesn’t that worry you?’

‘Why should it?’

Jenny shrugged. ‘It sort of taints it, don’t you think?’

‘Are you worried about ghosts? Is that it?’

‘It’s not about ghosts. It’s just knowing that in that room upstairs he put a shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger. Doesn’t that give you the willies?’

‘I hadn’t thought about it,’ he said.

‘Could you sleep in that room, knowing that happened?’ She shuddered. ‘I couldn’t.’

The doorbell rang and she jumped, then sighed and patted her chest. ‘I nearly gave myself a heart attack then.’

‘That’ll be the builder,’ said Nightingale. ‘Do you want stay down here or do you want to come upstairs with me?’

‘I’m okay here,’ she said. ‘I’ll keep looking for titles on the list of books that your pal Wainwright wants.’

‘He’s hardly a pal. But yeah, he’s keen to buy and it’s not as if I need a Satanic library, is it?’ He grinned over at her. ‘Not scared, being here on your own?’ He made a ghostly moaning sound and waggled his fingers at her.

‘Behave, Jack.’

‘I’m just saying.?.?. Satanic library, things that go bump in the night.?.?.’

‘Me being a girl and all?’ Jenny picked up a leather-bound book and threw it at him, missing his head by inches.

‘That’s no way to treat an antique,’ he said. ‘And before you say anything, I meant the book.’

Jenny picked up a second book to throw at him but he ran up the stairs and back into the hall. The doorbell rang again as he closed the panel and carefully walked across the muddy floor.

He opened the front door. There was a man in his thirties standing on the steps. He had short blond hair and an impish smile and was wearing dusty blue overalls. He was holding a clipboard and he looked at it and then grinned up at Nightingale. ‘You Mr Nightingale?’

‘Jack,’ said Nightingale. ‘Domino’s Pizza? You’re an hour late so we get them free, right?’

The man looked confused and then realised that he was joking. ‘Chris Garner. I’m here to give you a quote.’ He stuck out his hand and Nightingale shook it. ‘Nice place you’ve got here,’ he said.

‘Yeah, well, wait until you see inside,’ said Nightingale, holding the door open. ‘It’s a bit of a mess.’

Garner walked across the threshold and whistled softly. ‘You’re not joking,’ he said, taking a pen from the pocket of his overalls. ‘What happened? Leak?’

‘Firemen,’ said Nightingale. ‘There was a fire. The firemen were enthusiastic.’

‘Yeah, that’s the way they are,’ said Garner. ‘They do love their hoses.’ He looked down at the floor. ‘That’s marble, though. Should clean up okay.’

‘What about the clean-up? Can you handle that as well?’ said Nightingale.

Garner nodded. ‘Can do,’ he said. He looked up at the chandelier and pointed his pen at it. ‘That’s a professional job, though. You don’t want amateurs messing around with that. It needs to be taken down and done properly.’

‘Do you know somebody?’

‘Let me ask around. So where was the fire?’

‘Upstairs,’ said Nightingale. ‘Most of the damage on the ground floor is from the smoke and water.’

Garner walked over to the panelling by the stairs and ran his finger along it, then tapped it. He was only a few feet from the panel that led down to the basement. He rapped the wood with his knuckles. ‘The wood’s basically sound,’ he said. ‘But you’d be best sanding it all down and revarnishing.’ He made a note on his clipboard.

Nightingale headed up the stairs and the builder followed him, still scribbling on his clipboard. They stopped at the hallway, where the fire had started. The smell of smoke and burned wood was much stronger here. There were darker burn marks running down the centre of the hallway and scorch marks up the walls.

‘How did this start?’ asked Garner, kneeling down to examine the burned floorboards.

‘About a gallon of petrol and a match.’

‘It was deliberate?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘That’s funny. If someone wanted to burn the house down, why pour the petrol up here? They’d have been better off setting the fire downstairs.’

‘Who knows what was going through his mind?’ said Nightingale. Actually he knew exactly what the arsonist had been thinking. Nightingale had been in the master bedroom and if all had gone to plan he would have died in the fire.

‘What about the bedrooms?’

‘Smoke damage, mainly. And water. The water went everywhere.’

Garner opened the nearest door and looked into the bedroom beyond it. ‘What happened to all the furniture?’

‘The place was empty.’

‘That’s lucky,’ said the builder, making a note on his clipboard. He went back to the hall and stamped down on the boards in several places. ‘All the boards are going to have to be replaced,’ he said. ‘Until we’ve taken them up we won’t be able to see how much damage has been done to the joists. But the wood is so old that it’s as hard as metal, so you should be all right. All the panelling’s going to need replacing.’ He gestured at the ceiling. ‘All the plaster’s going to have to come down. It’s been soaked and even if you let it dry out it’s never going to be right.’

He took out an electronic tape measure and measured up the hallway, then nodded at Nightingale. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Mr Nightingale. I’ll give you two estimates. I’ll give you a basic one where I’ll put it back in as-new condition. New panelling, new floorboards, new joists, whatever needs doing, but using new materials. And I’ll give you a proper restoration estimate, where it’ll be put back to the condition it was before the fire. As if the fire never happened, if you get my drift.’

‘Okay,’ said Nightingale. ‘But do you have a ballpark figure?’

The builder looked pained and scratched his ear with his pen. ‘Difficult to say off the cuff,’ he said. ‘There’re a lot of materials to price. But for a basic repair job you won’t be getting much change from twenty-five thousand pounds. That’s assuming there’s no major damage to the joists. And that we don’t uncover anything else when we start pulling panels off.’

‘Like what?’

‘Dry rot, wet rot, insect infestation. Panelling can hide a multitude of sins. But if we do find anything then we’re best dealing with it there and then.’

‘And the restoration budget?’

Garner exhaled through pursed lips in the same way the mechanics did when they were about to give an estimate for work on Nightingale’s MGB. ‘A hundred grand. More maybe. We need craftsmen carpenters and they’re not cheap.’ He put away his pen. ‘You’re insured, yeah?’

‘I hope so.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I’m assuming I am. I’ll check.’ He handed the builder a business card. ‘Send the estimates to me at the office.’

They walked together down the stairs, across the muddy hall and outside. The builder looked up at the house. ‘They don’t build them like this any more,’ he said. ‘Did you just buy it?’

‘My father left it to me.’

‘Are you going to live here? Or are you planning to sell it?’

Nightingale shrugged. ‘I’ve not decided.’

‘Let me know if you want to sell. I’m doing some work for a Russian who lives a few miles away who’s always complaining about his place being too small. He keeps putting in plans to extend but the local council don’t like him so he’s not getting anywhere. He’d love this place.’

‘Let me think about it,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’ll let you know once I’ve seen your estimates.’

They shook hands, then Garner climbed into his van and drove off. Nightingale lit a cigarette and was just about to go inside when Jenny came out.

She shook her head when she saw that he was smoking. ‘How many do you smoke a day?’ she asked.

‘A pack. Two, sometimes.’

‘Even though you know the dangers?’

‘Of smoking?’

‘Of course of smoking. Is everything a joke to you, Jack?’

Nightingale blew smoke up at the sky. ‘Everybody dies,’ he said. ‘Life is a zero sum game. The best you can do is to enjoy yourself as you go along.’

‘But smoking shortens your life.’

‘Maybe. But it only takes the years from the end of your life. Not the beginning or the middle.’

Jenny looked at him, confused. ‘I have absolutely no idea what you mean.’

Nightingale took another drag on his cigarette before continuing. ‘Say I live until I’m seventy-five without smoking. And say I die at seventy if I do smoke. I lose five years. But really, Jenny, what am I going to be doing during those five years? Sitting in a bedsit somewhere watching the football, assuming I’ve enough of a pension to be able to afford Sky Sport?’

‘That’s how you envisage your final years, is it? What about grandchildren? What about family?’

Nightingale laughed. ‘To have grandkids I’d need kids and to have kids I’d need a wife or at least a steady girlfriend, and that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen any time soon. Here’s the thing, Jenny. It’s not about how long you live, it’s about enjoying the life you have. And I’m happy smoking.’

‘You’re mad.’

‘Maybe. It’s like my car. My MGB.’

‘The car that you can’t use because the battery’s flat again?’

‘It’s a classic,’ said Nightingale.

‘You keep saying that. But it’s not. It’s an old banger.’

‘It makes me happy. I enjoy driving it. It’s got a history and I like the way it handles.’

‘On the few occasions that it’s actually on the road, you mean?’

‘I’m not saying that your Audi isn’t a great car. But driving your Audi is a totally different experience to being at the wheel of a classic car. You feel connected to the road. You really feel the speed when you’re in the MGB, even though the Audi is faster. Driving it could well shorten my life. There’re no airbags, the seatbelts are crap, the brakes aren’t smart like they are in the Audi, so if I get into a smash I’ll probably come off worst. But does knowing that stop me driving it? No. Because I enjoy it. The pleasure outweighs the risks.’ He held up the cigarette. ‘Smoking makes me feel good. It relaxes me, it helps me concentrate.?.?.’

‘It gives you something to do with your hands.’

‘What?’

‘Everyone knows that cigarettes help people get through awkward social situations.’

‘Jenny, really, I just enjoy smoking.’

Jenny threw her hands in the air. ‘I give up,’ she said. ‘So how did it go with Bob the Builder?’

‘His name’s Chris,’ said Nightingale. ‘He’s going to send me an estimate.’

‘You’re going to get more than one, right?’

‘We’ll see,’ said Nightingale. ‘First thing I’ve got to do is get some cash.’ He tossed his keys to her. ‘Can you lock up? I want to make a call.’

As Jenny went up the steps to the front door, Nightingale took out his mobile phone and called the number of Joshua Wainwright. The American had bought several volumes from the basement library and if Nightingale was going to have any hope of paying the builder he was going to have to sell him quite a few more.

‘Jack, my man, how the hell are you?’ said Wainwright. Nightingale could hear the hum of engines and figured that the American was probably on his Gulfstream jet.

‘All good,’ said Nightingale.

‘How was your Christmas?’

‘Quiet,’ lied Nightingale. He’d spent Christmas Day at Jenny’s parents’ house and the fact that one of the gamekeepers had blown his head off with a shotgun had taken the gloss off the festive season, somewhat.

‘Well, I hope you have one hell of a new year,’ said Wainwright.

‘You too,’ said Nightingale. ‘Where are you?’

‘Cruising at thirty-one thousand feet.’

‘Going anywhere nice?’

‘Private island in the Caribbean, as it happens. You should drop by if you get the chance. There’re some very interesting people on the guest list — a couple of former prime ministers, a vice-president, three Oscar winners. And a couple of Russian billionaires.’

‘I’ll have to take a rain check on that,’ said Nightingale. ‘Hey, the reason I’m calling is to see if I can send you another list of books. We’ve inventoried another couple of hundred.’

‘Sure thing,’ said Wainwright. ‘Look, Jack, how many books do you have in this library of yours?’

‘Thousands,’ said Nightingale. ‘I haven’t counted but there’re a lot.’

‘So why don’t I call in one day and have a look-see? Be easier that way.’

‘Sure,’ said Nightingale. ‘When are you in the UK again?’

‘I’ll be with Richard for two or three days, then I’m heading over to China. I could stop off on the way. I’ll call you and fix up a time.’

‘Perfect,’ said Nightingale. He ended the call as Jenny came back down the steps. ‘Wainwright’s going to come and look at the books for himself. Save us from doing the inventory.’

Jenny shuddered and looked back at the house.

‘Are you okay, kid?’

‘The house is beautiful,’ she said, looking up at the massive chimneys. ‘Like a picture from a box of chocolates. But down in the basement, on your own.?.?.’ She shuddered again. ‘It feels a bit.?.?.’

‘Spooky?’ He laughed. ‘There’s some pretty weird stuff down there, Jenny. The books. The artefacts. God knows what my father was involved with, or what he did down there.’ He put an arm around her. ‘But there’s nothing down there that can hurt you. Or me.’

She shivered. ‘Let’s go.’ She handed him the door keys.

‘I’ll buy you dinner.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ she said as she walked with him to the Audi. ‘I promised I’d go to the gym with Barbara.’

‘Pilates?’

She pointed a finger at him. ‘Don’t take the piss or you’ll be walking home.’

Nightingale mimed zipping his lips closed as she got into the car. He climbed in next to her. ‘You know, you’re right. I should sell the house. The builder says he might have a buyer. I’ll get him to put out some feelers.’

Jenny started the engine. ‘Probably best,’ she said.

‘Maybe I’ll move to Chelsea,’ he said. ‘I could be your neighbour.’

She flashed him a tight smile. ‘Please don’t,’ she said. ‘We’re having enough trouble with falling property prices as it is.’