Nightshade

47

Nightingale was wondering whether to light a cigarette or head down to the pub for a lunchtime drink when Jenny opened the door to his office. He looked up from his copy of the Sun. ‘Don’t you ever knock?’

‘Why would I knock? You’ve got no secrets from me.’

‘I could be in an embarrassing situation.’

‘I don’t consider struggling with the Sun’s Sudoku to be that embarrassing,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I knew you’d want to see this.’ She handed him a computer printout. ‘The lab’s just got back to me. The only fingerprints on the knife and the crucible were yours and James McBride’s.’

Nightingale looked at the lab’s report. ‘That’s interesting.’

‘Well, it means that as you sure as hell didn’t set up the altar, it can only have been McBride.’ She dropped down onto the chair opposite him. ‘What do you think?’

Nightingale ran a hand through his hair. ‘I think that Jimmy McBride framed himself as a Satanist. Or at least was party to it. But why would he do that?’

‘Maybe he was disturbed. Schizophrenic, maybe. Perhaps he believed he was doing the work of the Devil.’

‘But nothing else about him points to that, does it? And while he might have set up the altar, he couldn’t have downloaded the Satanic stuff onto his computer. He didn’t have wi-fi.’

‘He could have taken the computer to somewhere that did have an internet connection.’

Nightingale shook his head. ‘It wasn’t a laptop,’ he said. ‘Someone else must have loaded the stuff onto his hard drive.’

‘But it was the cops who took it from his farmhouse.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So the cops helped frame him as a devil-worshipper? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘The cops. Or a cop. But here’s the thing, Jenny. He went out and killed eight kids and a teacher. Why does him being a Satanist make it more acceptable?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The whole world will know that he’s a child killer. Why bother to make it look like his motivation was tied in to devil-worship?’

Jenny shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘There’s only one reason to do that, and that’s to distract from his real motivation. The Satanism thing is a distraction. He wanted us to think that’s why he killed those children.’

‘So you think he had another reason?’

‘I do. And I think that it all comes down to the children that he killed. There has to be some connection, some reason that he chose them. And whatever that reason was, he wanted to hide it. He didn’t want anyone to know the real reason he was killing them.’

‘This is pretty heavy stuff, Jack.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘To be honest, I don’t know. I really don’t know.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Maybe a drink will help me think.’

‘Yeah, because alcohol is known to increase your IQ exponentially, right?’

Nightingale’s eyes narrowed. ‘Sarcasm?’

‘Barely concealed contempt, actually.’

‘So you don’t want to come to the pub with me?’

Jenny grinned. ‘I didn’t say that.’