Stephen Leather - Nightshade - The Fourth Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thriller

‘Who?’

‘Little girl was abducted in Southampton. Some paedo snatched her in a shopping centre.’

On the screen a man and a woman were sitting together at a long table. She was in her thirties, hollow-eyed and her blonde hair messy. The man was equally haggard and he was holding the woman’s hand tightly.

‘That’s her parents,’ said the landlord. ‘Can you imagine what they’re going through?’

‘How old’s the girl?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Nine. Mum took her eyes off her for a minute and she was gone.’

A uniformed police officer took the seat next to the mother. An assistant chief constable. At the other end of the table was a large man in a dark blue suit with the world-weary eyes of a senior detective.

On a board behind the table were posters featuring the missing girl. In the middle of the poster was a blow-up of her school photograph. She was a little angel with long, curly blonde hair, blue eyes and porcelain skin.

‘They should hang them,’ said the landlord. ‘Anyone who messes with a kid, hanging’s too good for them.’

‘No arguments here,’ said Nightingale.

‘You got kids?’ Nightingale shook his head. ‘Well, I’ve got three, two of them are girls. If anyone laid a finger on them I’d swing for them, no question.’

The uniformed officer gave a short prepared speech, basically laying out the facts. That nine-year-old Bella Harper had been abducted from a shopping centre in Southampton, possibly by a man and a woman. Witnesses had seen a man and a woman getting into a white van with a girl who might have been Bella. They didn’t have a description of the couple or the registration of the van. Then he asked the parents to say a few words. The woman spoke first, or at least tried to. She barely managed a dozen words before she broke down in a flood of tears. Her husband put his arm around her and in a trembling voice appealed for whoever had taken Bella to send her home safe and well. ‘She’s our angel, she’s never done a bad thing in her life, she doesn’t deserve this. Please, send her home. Please don’t hurt her.’

‘He should use her name,’ said Nightingale.

‘What?’

‘He needs to personalise her. He should use her name in every sentence, and he should give more personal information about her. Her pets, her school, what she likes to do. If the guy that has her starts to think of her as a human being and not an object then he’s more likely not to kill her.’ Nightingale realised that heads were starting to turn in his direction and he stopped talking and drank his beer.

‘How do you know so much about it?’ asked the landlord, putting down his glass.

‘I used to be a cop, in another life,’ said Nightingale. ‘Down in London.’

‘And you dealt with stuff like this?’

‘Abductions? Yeah, a few.’

‘How do they normally end?’

‘Depends who the abductor is. If it’s a family member then there’s a good chance they’ll find her, but if it’s a stranger and they don’t find her within twenty-four hours then it’s usually bad news.’ He shrugged and sipped his lager.

The father finished speaking. Tears were running down his face. A telephone number appeared at the bottom of the screen. Nightingale hoped that someone, somewhere, was reaching for a phone with information that would help them find the little girl. But the rational part of his brain knew that such television appeals rarely worked. The police were going through the motions, knowing that they would be criticised if they didn’t mount an appeal but knowing that virtually all the calls they received would be false alarms that would tie up valuable police resources.

‘I hope to God they find her,’ said the landlord.

‘Amen to that,’ agreed Nightingale.

‘You know it’s Friday the thirteenth today?’

‘I’d forgotten that,’ said Nightingale.

‘Nothing good happens on Friday the thirteenth. What’s the world coming to? Why would anyone take a child?’

‘Paedophiles are sick,’ said Nightingale. ‘It’s their nature. You can’t change them, all you can do is keep them away from children. The only safe paedophile is a paedophile behind bars.’

‘Or dead. They should just put them down, like dogs.’

Nightingale nodded but didn’t say anything.

‘So why are you up here, then?’ asked the landlord.

‘I’m looking at that school shooting. The farmer who killed the kids.’

The landlord frowned. ‘I thought you weren’t a cop any more?’

‘I’m a private detective now,’ said Nightingale.

‘And someone is paying you to come up here and investigate?’

Nightingale realised that it probably wouldn’t be the smartest move to broadcast who his client was. ‘Department for Education,’ he lied. ‘They want to know if school security was at fault.’ He held up his empty bottle. ‘Another, please, and another whisky for yourself.’

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said the landlord. He fetched a fresh Budweiser for Nightingale and poured himself another whisky.

‘So did you ever run into Jimmy McBride?’ asked Nightingale.

‘He came in now and then,’ said the landlord. ‘Wasn’t overly social, you know?’ He nodded at a table by the window. ‘Sat over there on his own when he did come in. He’d drink a couple of pints and read his paper.’

‘Always on his own?’

The landlord nodded. ‘I don’t remember him ever being with anyone. Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t a bad sort – he’d say hello and maybe mention the weather but you’d never find him at the bar chatting with the locals.’

‘And no sense that he was the sort of guy who’d do what he did?’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said the landlord. ‘But they always say it’s the quiet ones, don’t they?’

‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ said Nightingale. ‘Usually there are signs. Especially when there’s that degree of violence involved. The guy is either a brooder, bottling it all up until he explodes, or he has a temper and has a habit of lashing out.’

‘McBride wasn’t either of those,’ said the landlord. ‘He was just a regular guy.’

‘A regular guy with a shotgun.’

‘He was a farmer. Every farmer around here has a shotgun or two.’

‘So when you heard what he’d done, what did you think?’

The landlord scratched his ear. ‘To be honest, I thought he’d been possessed.’

‘Possessed?’

‘By the Devil. Something made him do it, and the Devil seems like the obvious candidate.’

Nightingale couldn’t work out if the man was serious or not. Before he could say anything, a stick-thin woman with sharp features appeared with a tray. ‘Shepherd’s pie?’ she called, and Nightingale raised his hand.

The woman gave him the tray, scowled at her husband, and went back to the kitchen.

‘We’ve had a bit of a row,’ explained the landlord. He shrugged. ‘Women, can’t live with them, can’t throw them under a bus.’

13

‘You know we had witches around here, more witches than almost anywhere in the UK?’ said the old man sitting opposite Nightingale. His name was Willie Holiday and he was a retired farmworker, well into his seventies. He was sitting at a corner table, next to the roaring fire, with Nightingale and another of the pub’s regulars, a fifty-year-old former miner who gave his name only as Tommo. Nightingale had bought them several pints and had knocked back four Budweisers himself.

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Nightingale.

Willie nodded. ‘Loads of them. We were awash with witches in the sixteen hundreds. They had their own way of proving it. They’d stick needles in them and if they were innocent they bled and if they didn’t bleed they were witches.’