Nightshade: The Fourth Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thriller
Read Nightshade: The Fourth Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thriller Online
Authors: Stephen Leather
Table of Contents
Pay Off
The Fireman
Hungry Ghost
The Chinaman
The Vets
The Long Shot
The Birthday Girl
The Double Tap
The Solitary Man
The Tunnel Rats
The Bombmaker
The Stretch
Tango One
The Eyewitness
Hard Landing
Soft Target
Cold Kill
Hot Blood
Dead Men
Live Fire
Rough Justice
Fair Game
False Friends
True Colours
Nightfall
Midnight
Nightmare
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Stephen Leather is one of the UK’s most successful thriller writers and a
Sunday Times
and ebook bestseller. Stephen is also the author of the critically-acclaimed Spider Shepherd all action thriller series. Before becoming a novelist he was a journalist for more than ten years on newspapers such as
The Times
, the
Daily Mail
and the
South China
Morning Post
in Hong Kong. He began writing full time in 1992. His bestsellers have been translated into more than ten languages. He has also written for television shows such as
London’s Burning
,
The Knock
and the BBC’s
Murder in Mind
series and two of his books,
The Stretch
and
The Bombmaker
, were filmed for TV.
You can find out more from Stephen’s website
www.stephenleather.com
, his blog
www.stephenleather.blogspot.co.uk
and can follow him on Twitter at
twitter.com/stephenleather
.
Stephen Leather
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Stephen Leather 2013
The right of Stephen Leather to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 444 74069 1
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
Nightingale shivered as he stared at the house. It was a neat semi-detached with a low wall around the garden and a wrought iron gate that opened onto a path leading to the front door. There was no garage, but half of the front lawn had been paved over as a parking space for a five-year-old Hyundai. Beyond the car was a path leading to the rear garden, which was how he planned to get into the house. It was after midnight and the streets were deserted. It was a cloudy night with only occasional glimpses of the moon overhead and the lights were off in pretty much all the houses in the street.
Nightingale eased open the gate, slipped inside and closed it behind him, then walked carefully down the path and around the side of the house. He stopped and peered through the kitchen window until he was sure that there was no one there, then walked to the kitchen door. He tried the handle and wasn’t surprised to find that it was locked. He’d brought a makeshift burglary kit with him including tape, a glass cutter and a screwdriver but he didn’t want to start breaking glass unless he had no choice.
There was a large glass sliding door that led into the sitting room. The curtains were drawn but there was enough of a gap to see that the room was in darkness. He pulled on a pair of grey surgical gloves, checked the lock at the side of the door and smiled to himself as he took out the screwdriver. It took him only seconds to force the screwdriver into the gap between the door and the wall and pop the lock.
He gently slid the door open, pushed the curtain aside and stepped into the room. He stopped and listened for a full minute, then slowly slid the door closed. There was a sofa and an armchair and a glass and chrome coffee table facing a 42-inch LCD television. He went over to the TV and pressed the back of his hand against the screen. It was cold, so the family had been in bed for some time. In his pocket was a small can of starting fluid that he’d bought from a garage in south London. He’d turned up in his MGB and the mechanic who’d sold him the fluid had assumed that Nightingale was having trouble getting the old car started on the cold mornings and suggested he bring it in for a service. Nightingale said he would have a go himself but that if the problem continued he’d book it in. It was premium starting fluid, which meant that it was sixty per cent diethyl ether, perfect for giving a boost to a reluctant engine, but also a very efficient way of putting someone into a deep sleep.
He tiptoed across the sitting room and into the hallway, listened again and then headed up the stairs, keeping close to the wall to minimise any squeaking boards. When he reached the landing he stopped and listened again. There were four doors. There was one to the rear of the house that he assumed was the little girl’s bedroom. The door immediately to his left was open. The bathroom. He guessed that the bedroom facing the street would be the master bedroom where her parents were sleeping. The door was open slightly and Nightingale tiptoed over to it, breathing shallowly.
He pushed it open. The woman was closest to him, sleeping on her side. Her husband was on his back, snoring softly. Nightingale took a handkerchief from his pocket, twisted the top off the can and soaked the material with the fluid. He tiptoed across the carpet and held the ether-soaked handkerchief under the woman’s nose for the best part of a minute, then draped it over her face.
He prepared a second handkerchief and did the same to the husband.
When he was satisfied that they were both unconscious, he tiptoed out of the room and pulled the door closed behind him. His heart was racing and he stood where he was for a full minute, composing himself, before soaking a third handkerchief with ether and pushing open the door to the little girl’s bedroom.
She was lying on her back, her blonde hair spreading out across the pillow like a golden halo, breathing slowly and evenly. Nightingale closed the door quietly, wincing as the wood brushed against the carpet. When he turned back to the bed, her eyes were open and she was staring right at him.
‘You’re Jack Nightingale, aren’t you?’ she said.
Nightingale said nothing.
‘You’ve come to kill me, haven’t you?’
THREE WEEKS EARLIER
J
ack Nightingale woke up, stretched, and lit a Marlboro. As he lay on his back and blew smoke rings up at his ceiling, he ran through what lay ahead of him that day. He had to explain to a middle-aged woman that the father of her two children had a second family up in Birmingham and that on the nights he told her he was away on business he was actually with them. He had to spend the afternoon in a pub, watching a barmaid who a brewery was convinced was ripping them off to the tune of a grand a week by serving sandwiches she had made herself and not the ones the brewery provided, and in the evening he had to follow an unfaithful wife. Nightingale knew the woman was being unfaithful because he’d already followed her to a hotel where she’d spent two hours in a room with a co-worker. The cuckolded husband had read Nightingale’s report but now he wanted photographs. So far as Nightingale was concerned photographs would just be rubbing salt into the wound, but if that’s what the client wanted Nightingale was happy enough to provide them – at a price.
He finished the cigarette, stubbed it out in a crystal ashtray on his bedside table and looked at his watch. It was just after eight o’clock. He had set his mobile to silent, so he checked the screen to see if he’d received any calls. He hadn’t. He put down the phone and considered lighting another cigarette, but he decided to shave and shower instead. He padded to the bathroom. So far as Nightingale was concerned it was going to be a typical day, business as usual. It was only in the movies that private detectives got involved in car chases and shoot-outs or met steely-eyed blondes packing heat. Most of Nightingale’s work involved following sad, lonely and embittered people on behalf of sad, lonely and embittered clients. But it paid the bills and kept him off the streets. Actually that wasn’t true – much of what he did involved being in the street, which is why he favoured comfortable Hush Puppies as his footwear and generally wore a raincoat.
He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror as he shaved. He bared his teeth and wondered how much teeth-whitening would cost. Nightingale was a smoker and coffee-drinker and both addictions played havoc with his enamel.
As he climbed into the shower he had no idea that eight children were going to die that day, nor that their deaths were going to change his life for ever. The man who would kill the children was sitting at his kitchen table cleaning his shotgun as Nightingale rinsed the shampoo from his hair. His name was Jimmy McBride and he was a farmer with a smallholding near Berwick-upon-Tweed, the most northern town in England.