‘I’ll be a good boy,’ said Nightingale.
She ignored his attempt at levity. ‘You will see that Mr Mitchell is inside a pentagram. You must not get within six feet of the perimeter.’
‘Because?’
‘There is no because, Mr Nightingale. There are only rules that have to be followed. If you make any attempt to get closer than six feet, my associates here will stop you.’
‘Stop me how?’
‘By whatever means necessary.’
‘They’ll shoot me if I try to get inside the circle?’
‘By whatever means necessary,’ repeated Sylvia. ‘You must make no move to touch Mr Mitchell or to give him anything.’
‘So, no kissing, then?’
‘This is not a laughing matter, Mr Nightingale,’ said Sylvia, disdainfully. ‘If you refuse to take this seriously I will have to ask you to leave.’
Nightingale’s face hardened. ‘I don’t think that’s going to happen, Sylvia darling,’ he said. ‘Because the way I see it, you’re the hired help here. You dance for Mr Mitchell and Mr Mitchell has decided that he wants to see me. When I was outside you were all for calling the cops and having me hauled away, but you changed your tune when Mr Mitchell learned who I was. He told you to get me in here, which means he wants to see me, which means you’re not going to ask me to leave. So, do your job and let me in to see him and stop playing the hard arse with me, because I’ve dealt with some very hard people over the years and, believe me, you don’t even come close.’
Sylva’s jaw tightened and if looks could kill Nightingale would have burst into flames on the spot, but he could see in her eyes that he was right. She didn’t have the authority to keep him from the man he’d come to see. She walked past him, so close that he caught the delicate scent of her perfume. ‘Follow me,’ she said.
54
Sebastian Mitchell was in a ground-floor room overlooking the gardens at the rear of the house. The floor was of the same white marble that had been used in the entrance hall and the walls were painted white. He was sitting in a winged green leather armchair, an oxygen mask covering the lower part of his face and connected by a thin clear tube to a tall cylinder behind him to his left. To his right a heart monitor was connected to a sensor on his chest. He was an old man, at least ninety, with wisps of white hair and skin that was greying and speckled with liver spots. He was wearing a robe similar to the one that Nightingale had on, open at the front, and white cotton boxer shorts. There were pale blue slippers on his feet.
The room was large, almost as big as the main room in Gosling Manor. There were french windows leading out to a stone-flagged patio, which in turn led to lawns as smooth as a billiard table. A bodyguard stood at each corner of the room. Unlike the men outside they had taken off their jackets but kept on their sunglasses. Two had nylon shoulder holsters with Glock automatics, one an Ingram submachine pistol in a sling and the fourth was holding a shotgun across his chest. They were staring impassively into the middle distance.
Nightingale walked towards Mitchell, his bare feet slapping on the marble floor. Sylvia followed him, her high heels clicking like an overwound metronome. ‘Not too close, remember, Mr Nightingale,’ she warned.
A black circle had been etched into the floor, its edge bordering a five-pointed star. At first Nightingale thought that the design had been painted onto the marble but as he got closer he realised it was actually set into the white marble. There were other designs within the circle, strange markings and letters from an alphabet he didn’t recognise. At each point of the star a large white candle burned, but there was no smoke, just a pure yellow flame. The only other furniture in the room was a hospital bed, in the centre of the circle next to the armchair.
‘Thanks for seeing me,’ said Nightingale.
Mitchell coughed, then pulled the oxygen mask away from his face. ‘You have your father’s eyes,’ he said, ‘and his jaw.’
‘I don’t think anyone else sees a family resemblance,’ said Nightingale.
‘He sent you?’ asked Mitchell.
‘He’s dead,’ said Nightingale.
Mitchell’s eyes narrowed and he put up a hand to adjust the oxygen mask. ‘How?’
‘Suicide.’
‘How?’
‘Shotgun to the head.’
‘When?’
‘Last week.’
Mitchell began to laugh, but the laugh quickly degenerated into a cough. When he had it under control he took a tissue from a box and dabbed his lips. It came away spotted with red. He screwed it up and dropped it into a steel wastebin. ‘How old are you?’ he asked.
‘I’ll be thirty-three next Friday.’
Mitchell nodded slowly, a cruel smile spreading across his face. ‘Today’s the Lord’s Day, so five days to go,’ he said. ‘He was trying to get out of the deal, you know that?’
‘He left me a video, telling me everything.’
Mitchell laughed sharply. ‘I hardly think he would have told you everything,’ he said. ‘But he was wasting his time. There was nothing he could do. And that’s why you have come to see me, of course. But you’re wasting your time, as your father wasted his.’
‘He asked for your help?’
‘I don’t think your father asked for anything in his life. He demanded. He threatened. He bargained. But even if he had gone down on his knees and begged, even if I had wanted to help him, there is nothing that can be done. A deal is a deal.’ He leaned over and adjusted the oxygen flow, took several deep breaths from the mask and settled back in his chair. ‘You read my book?’
‘Some of it.’
‘You read Latin?’
‘A friend helped me.’
‘So you know what lies ahead for you?’
‘I said I read it. I didn’t say I believed it.’
Mitchell coughed and removed his mask again to dab at his lips. The blood-spotted tissue followed the first into the wastebin. ‘It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not. A deal is a deal.’
‘Why my thirty-third birthday? Why didn’t the devil he did the deal with take my soul straight away, at birth?’
‘A soul that hasn’t lived is no prize,’ said Mitchell. ‘There are seven cycles each of eleven years. The start of the fourth cycle is the most precious, when the body is at its peak.’
‘And the deal would have been my soul for riches and power?’
‘I don’t know what your father asked for. But, whatever it was, he regretted it. Eventually.’
‘And that was when he came to see you?’
‘He kept coming. He was at my door every week. He knew I’d done a deal with Proserpine. He thought I could help him get out of the deal he’d done.’
‘Proserpine?’
Mitchell grinned. ‘You don’t know anything, do you?’
‘I’m on a pretty steep learning curve, yeah.’
‘Proserpine is the devil that your father did the deal with. A bitch of the first order.’
‘And you wouldn’t help?’
‘Wouldn’t help, couldn’t help, it amounts to the same thing. A deal is a deal and that’s the end of it.’ He chuckled. ‘The end of you.’
‘Why did you give him your diary if you didn’t want to help him?’
Mitchell chuckled drily. ‘Is that what you think? That I gave it to him? Your father stole it from me. He sent his people in at night. They killed two of my men and took it.’
‘Why? What was so important about your diary?’
‘He thought it would show him a way to get out of the contract. But he was wrong. The book contains many things, but getting out of a contract with Proserpine is not an option.’
‘What about if I gave you the diary back?’
Mitchell stared at Nightingale. ‘That would be the honourable thing to do,’ he said.
‘If I did,’ said Nightingale, ‘what could you do for me?’
‘What do you want?’
‘What I want, Mr Mitchell, is to forget about all this and get on with my life.’
‘I’m afraid that’s not an option,’ said Mitchell. He began to cough again and bent forward to adjust the oxygen flow. He took several deep breaths to steady himself. ‘Doing a deal with a devil, any devil, is easy enough. The information is out there. They want to be contacted, they want to deal. That’s what they live for – to harvest souls. Even someone who is just dabbling in the occult will soon find out how to summon a devil. It used to be books that people turned to but now it’s the Internet. Google will give you tens of thousands of sites that will tell you what to do. But once the deal is done, there is no going back. I told Gosling so, but he kept asking, kept pushing. He thought the answer lay in my diary, but it doesn’t. The diary tells you how to summon Proserpine and her ilk, but not how to rescind a deal.’