Stephen Leather - Nightshade

Nightingale shook his head. ‘It wasn’t a laptop,’ he said. ‘Someone else must have loaded the stuff onto his hard drive.’

‘But it was the cops who took it from his farmhouse.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So the cops helped frame him as a devil-worshipper? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘The cops. Or a cop. But here’s the thing, Jenny. He went out and killed eight kids and a teacher. Why does him being a Satanist make it more acceptable?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The whole world will know that he’s a child killer. Why bother to make it look like his motivation was tied in to devil-worship?’

Jenny shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘There’s only one reason to do that, and that’s to distract from his real motivation. The Satanism thing is a distraction. He wanted us to think that’s why he killed those children.’

‘So you think he had another reason?’

‘I do. And I think that it all comes down to the children that he killed. There has to be some connection, some reason that he chose them. And whatever that reason was, he wanted to hide it. He didn’t want anyone to know the real reason he was killing them.’

‘This is pretty heavy stuff, Jack.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘To be honest, I don’t know. I really don’t know.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Maybe a drink will help me think.’

‘Yeah, because alcohol is known to increase your IQ exponentially, right?’

Nightingale’s eyes narrowed. ‘Sarcasm?’

‘Barely concealed contempt, actually.’

‘So you don’t want to come to the pub with me?’

Jenny grinned. ‘I didn’t say that.’

Nightingale paid the barman and raised his bottle of Corona. Jenny clinked her glass of white wine against his bottle. ‘Here’s to a clear head,’ she said.

Nightingale chuckled and drank. ‘So here’s what I’m thinking,’ he said. ‘It started out looking as if McBride was a lone madman who was involved in black magic and Satanism. A nutter who just went crazy with a shotgun. But it’s clear that he wasn’t mad and he wasn’t a Satanist. But he wanted people to think that he was. It wasn’t that someone set him up; his fingerprints were on that fake altar, which means that he must have put it together. But a real Satanist would have had books on the occult in his house. And he would have fixed up an internet connection so that he could visit Satanic websites.’

‘That makes sense,’ said Jenny.

‘So if he wasn’t crazy and he wasn’t a Satanist, we need to understand the logic of what he did. And that’s what’s making my head hurt.’

‘You’re not alone there. But why couldn’t he just be crazy? And faking the altar was part of his craziness?’

‘Because the shooting wasn’t the work of a madman. He chose his victims, moving from classroom to classroom. He shot one teacher and eight pupils and then he blew his head off. A madman would have just gone into one classroom and blasted away and not cared who he killed. And probably shot it out with the cops, too.’ He shook his head. ‘McBride wasn’t mad, which means there was a logic to everything that he did.’

‘So we need to work out why he killed the kids that he did.’

‘And the deputy headmaster. I think he might be a clue to solving this.’ He sipped his lager. ‘Like I said before, he could have killed more teachers but didn’t. We need to look at Mister … what was his name?’

‘Etchells. Simon Etchells.’

‘We need to run a full check on him. And the kids.’

‘You still think that the kids are connected in some way?’

‘They were all in single-parent families, which means they might have been more vulnerable.’

‘Vulnerable to what? Abuse?’

‘Maybe. I didn’t get anywhere with the coroner’s officer, but I could talk to the parents.’

‘That’s your plan? Walk up to complete strangers and ask if their children were being assaulted?’

Nightingale grimaced. ‘It doesn’t sound too good when you put it like that.’

‘You have to be careful,’ she said. ‘They’ve already lost a child and you start asking questions like that. Your feet won’t touch the ground.’

‘If this is about kids being abused, there has to be a reason why McBride decided to do what he did. Something must have happened to kick him off.’ He took a long pull on his lager. ‘I need to talk to that cop that Robbie put me in touch with. He might have an idea what’s going on up in Berwick.’

‘If he knew, surely he’d have done something already?’

‘That depends on what it is. Maybe it’s not common knowledge.’

‘Are you sure you want to do this, Jack?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We don’t have a client, remember. And we’re coming up on two grand’s worth already.’

‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’

‘We know what happened. You want to know why. There’s a difference.’

‘I want to know why McBride killed those kids, yes. It’s not about the money. If someone forced McBride to do what he did, I want to know.’

‘You think someone forced him to kill the children and then kill himself?’

‘I don’t know what to think. That’s why I want to keep on the case, for a while longer at least.’

Jenny looked at her watch. ‘Speaking of cases, you haven’t forgotten you’ve got a job this evening?’

‘Of course not.’ He grinned. ‘But remind me again what it is.’

Jenny sighed. ‘Mrs Holiday. Her husband’s knocking off his secretary at the Premier Inn every Thursday night.’

‘Ah yes, the old romantic.’

‘And she wants photographs to give to her lawyer.’

‘I’m on it,’ said Nightingale.

‘The camera’s in the office,’ she said. ‘I’ve charged it and there’s a fresh memory card in it. Some video would be nice.’

Nightingale saluted her sarcastically. ‘Aye, aye, ma’am.’

Jeremy Barker checked himself in the mirror and smoothed down his hair. The white coat and the stethoscope draped casually around the neck gave him the look of a doctor, and providing he kept walking purposefully he doubted he would be challenged. People were used to deferring to men in white coats, and providing he didn’t actually claim to be a doctor he didn’t see he was breaking the law. He took a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles he’d borrowed from his aunt and put them on. Barker had just turned twenty-five but with his receding hairline and drinker’s paunch he looked a few years older. He turned left and right, then nodded at his reflection. ‘Twenty milligrams of epinephrine and get the crash cart in here, stat!’ he said, then he laughed. It would probably be best if he didn’t say anything.

He took off the coat and glasses and put them into a backpack with a small digital voice recorder and a Casio digital camera. His car was parked a few yards from the building that housed his cramped rented flat and it took him just over an hour to drive from Clapham in south London to the hospital in Brighton. He parked some distance away, because the car park was covered by CCTV. He climbed out of the car, put on the white coat, and shoved the stethoscope into one pocket and the recorder and camera into the other.

It was nine o’clock in the evening. Barker had thought long and hard about the best time to visit the hospital. There would be more staff around during the day, so less chance of him being spotted, but in the evening more of the patients would be asleep and it was more likely the girl would be alone.

She was out of the ICU, which meant she would be on the children’s ward. That was on the third floor and consisted of two dozen individual rooms. He’d been to the children’s ward before and he knew there were windows looking into each of the rooms so that the nursing staff could check on the patients from the corridor.