Hoyle walked into the hall. ‘Jack, you look like shit.’
‘Thanks.’ Nightingale shut the door behind them. ‘There was something weird, Robbie. Something I didn’t tell Jenny.’ Nightingale sighed. ‘My uncle wrote a message on the bathroom mirror. In blood.’
‘You’re serious?’
‘Do I look like I’m joking?’ He took a deep breath. ‘He wrote that I’d be going to hell.’
‘You specifically?’
‘“You are going to hell, Jack Nightingale.”’
‘In blood?’
‘In blood,’ repeated Nightingale. ‘In my aunt’s blood.’
‘He wrote that in blood and then hanged himself?’
Nightingale nodded.
‘That’s sick.’
‘The whole thing is sick.’
‘Why would he write that?’
‘I don’t know, Robbie. But…’
‘But what?’
Nightingale had been about to tell his friend about the dreams he’d been having and that the message written in blood had been Simon Underwood’s last words before he went through his office window, but he knew how crazy that would sound so he bit his tongue. ‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘And what did the police say about it?’
‘They didn’t see it. I cleaned the mirror before they got there.’
‘Bloody hell, Jack. Are you mad? Tampering with evidence in a murder case? They’ll throw away the key.’
‘Only if they find out. And you’re the only person I’ve told. No one else knows.’
‘Even so. You can’t do that. It’s evidence.’
‘He killed her, Robbie, there’s no doubt about it. The axe was on the stairs and there was blood spatter all over his chest. He was a big man so I don’t see that anyone else could have hanged him. The message on the mirror would have muddied the waters.’ He jerked a thumb at the entrance to the basement. ‘Come on.’ He headed for the basement and Hoyle followed.
They reached the bottom of the stairs where Hoyle stood with his hands on his hips. ‘It’s a lot less intimidating with the lights on, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, and the CCTV’s running, too, so you can check out every room without leaving your seat. You still haven’t said why you’re here, Robbie.’
‘Don’t get paranoid, mate. Jenny said you were coming out here so I said I’d swing by and see what you were up to. Check that you were all right. Oh, and the DNA results came back,’ said Hoyle. ‘Ainsley Gosling is definitely your father.’
‘Terrific,’ said Nightingale.
‘Is that good news or bad?’
‘I’d put it at about fifty-fifty,’ said Nightingale. ‘Why would my uncle kill himself, Robbie? And why would he batter his wife to death? He loved her. They were peas in a pod, joined at the hip. Same as my parents.’ He grimaced. ‘I suppose I should start saying “adoptive parents” now that I know Gosling was my real father.’
‘What did the Manchester cops say?’
‘Murder-suicide, which is obviously what it was. The doors were locked, her blood was on the axe, along with his fingerprints, and there was blood spatter all over him. Open and shut.’
‘Except no motive.’
‘They reckon he just snapped. It happens.’
‘And what about what he wrote?’
Nightingale ran his hands through his hair. ‘I don’t know, Robbie. I just don’t know.’
‘He must have written it for a reason,’ said Hoyle. ‘I understand why you didn’t want the cops to see it, but you can’t pretend it wasn’t there.’
‘I don’t know why he would have written it. He was fine when I last spoke to him.’
‘And why are you here? Jenny said you’ve a couple of cases that need work.’
‘Nothing that can’t wait a day or two,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’m trying to find my mother. My real mother – my birth mother. I wanted to talk to my uncle about the adoption but that avenue’s been closed so I thought I’d try to track her down. If Ainsley Gosling was my genetic father, he must have known who my she was. Is.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t even know if she’s alive.’ He sat down on one of the chesterfields. ‘In a way, she might be the only family I’ve got left. And maybe she can tell me what’s going on.’
Hoyle looked around. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a coffee machine down here?’
‘Everything but,’ said Nightingale.
‘There must be adoption records, right? If your parents adopted you there’d have to be paperwork.’
‘My birth certificate has Bill and Irene Nightingale down as my parents. There’s nothing to say I was adopted. And, according to the DVD Gosling left me, I was given to them at birth. I don’t think any agency was involved.’
‘That’s illegal.’
‘It was thirty-three years ago. I don’t think everything was computerised as it is now. And I get the feeling that Gosling wasn’t too concerned about the legality of what he was doing. I think he just got the baby, his baby – me – gave him to the Nightingales and they passed him off as their own.’ He waved his arm around the basement. ‘I think the answer’s somewhere here. Gosling must have kept records and this is his hidey-hole so I want to see what I can find.’ He pointed to the middle of the basement. ‘I’m going to start with those filing cabinets but I’ll go through every book in the place if I have to.’
‘Looking for what, exactly?’
‘I don’t know, Robbie. But he was a rich man so he must have kept a track of what he was spending. Everyone does, right? You keep receipts and bank statements and bills.’
‘Anna looks after the finances,’ said Hoyle. ‘But, yeah, I know what you mean.’
‘So, I think Gosling must have paid someone to help him with the adoption. He couldn’t have done the whole thing himself. If I can find his records for the year I was born, I might turn up a clue as to who my real mother was.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I keep saying that. “Real mum”. As if Irene Nightingale was some sort of fake. She wasn’t. She was my mum and she’ll always be my mum, no matter how this pans out.’ He flicked ash onto the floor. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’
‘Late shift,’ said Hoyle.
‘Do you want to make yourself useful?’
‘That’s why I’m here.’
26
Nightingale found Ainsley Gosling’s financial records in six beechwood filing cabinets between a display case of ivory carvings and a seaman’s chest with a lock that had rusted with age and defied his attempts to open it. Gosling had been methodical with his record-keeping and there were separate files for each quarter going back to 1956. Nightingale pulled out the three most recent ones and took them to a desk where Hoyle was poring over a huge leather-bound book filled with newspaper clippings. He looked up. ‘He was interested in serial killers – Fred West, the Yorkshire Ripper, Harold Shipman. He followed all the cases.’
‘Everyone should have a hobby,’ said Nightingale, dropping the files onto the desk. ‘These are his most recent financial records. Can you see what he was up to in the months before he died?’ He went back to the filing cabinets. The records for the year he was born were in the third. He pulled out the four files.
‘He was buying books, big-time,’ said Hoyle, holding up a receipt from a Hamburg bookstore. ‘He paid a million and a half euros for something called The Formicarius in January.’
‘A million and a half euros for a book? It’s no wonder all his money went.’
‘Published in 1435, according to this. But that’s just one. There’s a receipt here for six hundred thousand dollars, another for a quarter of a million pounds. A stack of receipts from China that I can’t read. And, from the look of it, they were all about witchcraft or demonology. Occult stuff.’ Hoyle gestured at the bookshelves. ‘That’s where all his money went. He spent millions putting this library together.’
Nightingale put the files on the desk. ‘He wasn’t building a library. He was buying information.’
‘I don’t follow,’ said Hoyle.
‘He didn’t care about the books, he wanted the information in them.’ Nightingale sat down in a leather winged chair. ‘Here’s what I think. He did a deal with the devil when I was born. Or, at least, he thought he did a deal.’