Stephen Leather - Nightfall

‘Which means that the monitors are somewhere downstairs, probably,’ said Hoyle. ‘Have you checked all the rooms?’

‘Not yet,’ said Nightingale.

‘Let’s have a look-see,’ said Hoyle. They went back to the drawing room, then along a corridor to a large room lined with teak bookshelves and cabinets. ‘The library?’ said Hoyle.

‘Looks like it,’ said Nightingale.

Beyond it there was another drawing room with a huge fireplace and then a smaller room that must have once contained a snooker table because the wooden scoreboard was still on one wall and a rectangular light fitting hung from the centre of the ceiling. There was a CCTV camera over the door.

Hoyle went back into the corridor. ‘The house is old, so the cameras must have gone in after the panelling, right?’

‘Obviously,’ said Nightingale.

Hoyle turned his torch on him, and he held up a hand to shield his eyes. ‘So they couldn’t have pulled the panelling away without damaging the wood, could they?’ He ran his torch along the pristine walnut panels. ‘This is all quality joinery,’ he said. ‘You can’t just pull them off and stick them back.’

‘So?’

‘So I don’t think they can have run the wires from the downstairs cameras along the hallway. They couldn’t have done it without damaging the panelling.’

Nightingale frowned. ‘Okay. So, wireless upstairs and wired down here. But the wires don’t run along the corridor.’ Realisation dawned. ‘There’s a basement,’ he said.

‘Exactly,’ said Hoyle. ‘They ran the wiring straight down.’

They went back to the main hallway. ‘If there were stairs to the basement, wouldn’t they be here?’ asked Nightingale.

Hoyle walked along the panelling, tapping it every few feet. Each tap produced the same dull thud.

‘Are you looking for a secret panel?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Have you got any better ideas?’ Hoyle carried on tapping.

‘Why would he need to hide the entrance to his own basement?’

‘Who knows what was going through his head? We’ve already decided he was a nutter, right?’ He carried on tapping the panelling.

‘We don’t even know if there is a basement,’ said Nightingale.

‘Old place like this is bound to have one,’ said Hoyle. ‘They used to build their foundations really deep.’ He moved along the hallway and tapped again. This time the sound was hollow. Hoyle grinned and tapped again. There was definitely a different timbre, almost an echo.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ said Nightingale. He tapped the wall near him. A dull thud. Hoyle tapped. The hollow echo.

Hoyle ran the tips of his fingers around the panelling, then pushed. Nothing moved.

‘Try pulling,’ said Nightingale.

Hoyle did so. There was a click and a section of the wall swung open. ‘Open, Sesame,’ he whispered. He grinned at Nightingale in triumph. ‘What would you do without me, Jack?’

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…’