Stephen Leather - Nightshade

‘So what are you saying? Someone killed him and made it look like suicide?’

‘When McBride took me to the farm, he unlocked the gate and we drove down to the farm, leaving the gate open. When I found McBride his car was parked by the farmhouse but the gate was padlocked.’

‘So someone else padlocked the gate afterwards?’

Nightingale nodded. ‘Exactly.’

‘But who? Who would have done that?’

‘That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn’t it? I’m guessing someone who realised that he had hired me, someone who wants to hide the truth about McBride’s brother and what he did at the school.’

‘But that means it must be someone who knew you were on the case.’

Nightingale rubbed his chin. ‘That thought had occurred to me,’ he said. ‘It could be the cop I spoke to, or the coroner’s officer. Who was also a cop. Or the detective that Robbie put in touch.’

Jenny’s jaw dropped. ‘Are you saying the police are behind this?’

‘I don’t know, not for sure anyway. But I don’t want to be sitting in a police cell waiting to find out.’ He shrugged. ‘But it might not be a cop. I chatted to the locals in the pub and we don’t know who the cops spoke to.’

Jenny ran her hands through her hair. ‘What are you going to do, Jack?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘But we don’t have a client any more. That’s it, right?’

‘I don’t see why. He paid us two grand in advance. What are we supposed to do? Give it back? We at least owe him two grand’s worth of work. Besides, I want to know what’s going on, because something is clearly rotten in the state of Berwick.’

‘Now you’re misquoting Shakespeare?’

‘I’m under a lot of stress,’ he said. He pulled an evidence bag from his pocket. Inside were a plastic-handled screwdriver and two spanners. Like the knife, they’d had to travel in the hold on the flight from Edinburgh to London. ‘I got these in the barn — it looked like he used them when he was working on his tractor.’

Jenny took the bag from him. ‘What about your prints?’

Nightingale took a sheet of paper from her printer and pressed the fingers of both hands down onto it. He folded it and put it into another evidence bag. ‘There you go.’

‘You’re such a professional.’

‘That’s what they say. Coffee?’

‘Are you asking or making?’

‘I’m making.’

‘Then I’d love one.’

‘Well, this is a nice surprise,’ said Sandra’s mother, as Sandra kissed her on the cheek. ‘Dad’ll be so sad to have missed you. He’s fishing down at the canal.’

‘I’ll be back, Mum. But I wanted a chat with you.’

‘Tea,’ said her mother. ‘The kettle’s on. Come on through.’ She took Sandra down the hall and fussed around the tea things as Sandra sat down at the table and looked out over the back garden. It wasn’t the house that she’d been brought up in; her parents had downsized ten years earlier when the last of her brothers had finally moved out. They’d sold their five-bedroom house, bought a small bungalow with a manageable garden and put the rest of the money into shares, providing them with a comfortable retirement.

‘How’s my lovely granddaughter?’ asked Sandra’s mother.

‘She’s fine. It’s almost as if it never happened. She doesn’t talk about it, and we don’t ask her.’

‘When is she coming home?’

‘Hopefully tomorrow. Friday at the latest. She wants to go now, but the doctors say they want to keep her in a while longer. But they have promised she’ll be back home by the weekend.’

‘How is she … inside?’ She rubbed her own stomach and winced as if she was in pain.

‘The doctors say she’s fine. They did all sorts of tests and she’s all clear, you know, for HIV and things. And there’s no damage, just bruising. They gave her a shot so that she won’t get pregnant.’ Tears sprang to her eyes and she blinked them away. ‘Nine years old and they’re worried she might be pregnant. How awful is that?’ She took a deep breath. ‘She’ll be fine. It’s best we don’t talk about it. It needs to be forgotten so that we can all move on with our lives.’

‘There isn’t a day goes by when I don’t say a prayer of thanks to God, you know that?’ She poured boiling water into a earthenware teapot, complete with a red knitted tea cosy. Sandra had made the tea cosy at school almost twenty years ago and presented it to her mother on Mother’s Day. ‘It was a miracle, a true miracle.’

‘It was,’ agreed Sandra.

‘And Will? How is he?’

Sandra nodded. ‘He’s okay. He’s taken time off work, he doesn’t want to let Bella out of his sight. He’s in the hospital with her now. I get the feeling that he blames me. He doesn’t say anything, of course, but I can see it in his eyes.’

‘I’m sure he doesn’t. It wasn’t your fault, it was those …’ She shuddered. ‘Those animals. How could they do that to a little girl?’

Sandra shook her head. ‘The police say they think he’s done it before. They’re talking to the girl to see if she’ll give evidence against him. Will gets so angry when he sees anything about them on television. He wants them dead. Says hanging’s too good for them.’

‘Well, he’d be right about that,’ said her mother. ‘Killing’s too good for them, though. They need to be made to suffer for every day they have left. They won’t of course. It’ll be Sky TV and PlayStations and probably conjugal visits. Prison today isn’t really prison. They’re like holiday camps.’

‘I don’t think I can face a trial, Mum. The police say they hope that they will just plead guilty and then Bella won’t have to give evidence. I couldn’t bear the thought of her having to talk about what they did to her.’ She shook her head fiercely. ‘I don’t want her going through that.’ She took a couple of deep breaths to calm herself down and then forced a smile. ‘Mum, I’ve got to ask you something and I know it’s going to sound silly, but …’ She threw up her hands. ‘I should just spit it out, shouldn’t I? Did I ever have a sister? A sister called Eadie?’

Sandra could see from the look of horror on her mother’s face that she’d struck a nerve. ‘Did your father say something?’

‘No, Mum. I just need to know, did I have a sister?’

Tears filled her mother’s eyes and she dabbed at them with a teacloth. ‘Why are you asking now?’ she sniffed.

Sandra got up and walked over to her mother and hugged her. ‘It just came up, Mum. I need to know.’

Sandra’s mother trembled and Sandra found herself patting her on the back to reassure her. ‘It’s okay, Mum.’ She flashed back to when she’d been a teenager and she’d been dumped by her first boyfriend. Her mum had hugged her and patted her back in exactly the same way and told her that everything was going to be all right, that there were plenty of fish in the sea and that one day she’d meet the man of her dreams. She’d been right. Will was the love of her life. ‘Come on, sit down, I’ll make the tea.’

Her mother sat down and kept dabbing at her eyes as Sandra poured tea into two mugs. She sat down and waited until her mum had sipped her tea before asking her again about Eadie.

‘She lived for about an hour,’ said her mother. ‘Barely that.’ She sighed. ‘She was eight weeks premature and didn’t stand a chance, really. I knew that as soon as I saw her.’ She held out her right hand. ‘The doctor held her like that, with one hand. She was so tiny. And she didn’t even open her eyes. They put her in one of those incubator things, but I could see from the looks on the faces of the nurses that she wasn’t long for the world. We’d already decided on the name. Eadie. Your dad’s grandmum was Eadie. I know it’s old-fashioned, but that’s what he wanted and what your dad wants he usually gets.’ She dabbed at her eyes again. ‘She would have been our first.’ She shook her head. ‘No, she WAS our first. She was my first baby but I only got to hold her after she’d died. They wrapped her in a white cloth and said that I could hold her as long as I wanted. They meant it, too. I held her for hours and no one said a word.’