There were times when Nightingale asked himself whether his dislike of elevators didn’t provide him with too many problems, and the trip up and down to the twelfth floor of the Peabody was definitely one of them. On the other hand, it did provide him with a little extra thinking time. The result of that was deciding that he would get nowhere trying to track down the remaining children who had been marked down for death. The names were too common, and, even if he did find the right one, he couldn’t hope to get near enough to protect any of them without the parents calling the cops on him. He’d have to try another angle.
The late Kim Jarvis.
He headed for the offices of the Memphis Herald again, but this time he had no name to give the girl on reception.
‘I’d like to speak to someone about Kim Jarvis,’ he told her. ‘Is there anyone here who knew her well, had worked with her a lot, maybe a friend?’
The receptionist looked extremely suspicious. ‘I’ll try, I’m not sure I’ll be able to find anyone to discuss her with you,’ she said. ‘It all came as a shock. What’s your name?’
‘Jack Nightingale. I’d been helping her with a story. I was with her when she died.’
The girl opened her eyes wide, then picked up a phone and pressed a number. ‘Peter Mulholland? There’s a guy down here says he was working with Kim and was with her when she...when she died. Name’s Nightingale. Uh-huh. Okay. Fine.’ She hung up, and gave Nightingale a smile. ‘Peter Mulholland will be right down. Please take a seat.’
Nightingale returned the smile. ‘Thanks for your help,’ he said.
Nightingale walked away from the desk and took a cursory look at one of the framed, historical Herald front pages, which hung around the walls, above the black leather sofas which he could have chosen to sit on. At the moment he was the only visitor. He hadn’t read more than a couple of headlines from 1972 when the elevator doors to his left opened, and a short, fat man who looked about forty stepped out. He was wearing a dark blue suit, with the coat unbuttoned to show a large expanse of blue shirt that strained to cover his stomach. The knot of his blue and yellow striped tie was hanging around the second button of the shirt, with the collar undone. The sandy hairline seemed to start nearer the back than the front of his head now, and he seemed to be compensating by growing it as long as possible, so it fluffed upwards and outwards in loose curls. He’d grown a matching walrus moustache, which could have used a trim. He smiled at Nightingale, exhibiting some no doubt costly shining white crowns, and held out a chubby hand to Nightingale as he approached. ‘Peter Mulholland,’ he said. ‘You knew Kim?’
‘I was with her when she died, at the cemetery,’ said Nightingale. ‘The name’s Nightingale. Jack Nightingale.’
He held out his hand and Mulholland shook it. There was very little firmness to Mulholland’s grip, and Nightingale guessed he spent far more time in bars and restaurants than in gyms.
‘Australian, huh?’
‘English,’ said Nightingale. ‘Manchester, originally.’
‘Sure. You know, we been trying to find you, maybe see if we could set up an interview, but the cops wouldn’t even give us a name so far. And now you walk in...’ He grinned, flashing his too white teeth again. ‘Must be my lucky day.’
‘I’m not really here to give you a story, I was just wondering if I could get some background information about Kim Jarvis.’
Mullholland pulled his lips in and frowned. ‘What? Why? Are you a reporter?’
‘No, I’m an investigator. There’s been some strange things happening here the last few days, and Kim had been helping me to look into them, until...’
‘Until she became part of the strangeness, I guess,’ said Mulholland.
Nightingale nodded. ‘That about sums it up.’
Mulholland rubbed the back of his neck as if trying to ease the tension there. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘How about we head across the street to the Three Kings, have us a drink then you can ask your questions and I’ll ask mine, and we’ll see who’s best at getting answers.’
‘Works for me,’ said Nightingale, holding the door open.
The Three Kings hadn’t changed since Nightingale had been in there with Kim Jarvis three days before, and the two men took a booth near the rear. Peter Mulholland ordered a Wiseacre beer and some nachos, Nightingale settled for coffee and a muffin. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but the events of the morning had left him without much appetite. He hadn’t lost his taste for nicotine, so lit a Marlboro, but Mulholland shook his head at the proffered packet.
‘No thanks, I quit five months ago.’
He looked as if he were expecting Nightingale to offer congratulations, but that didn’t happen. Nightingale did wonder if quitting had triggered the weight gain, but asking that didn’t seem a great idea. Instead he got straight to the point. ‘Had you known Kim Jarvis long?’
‘I guess around three years, that’s when she started here. She came in from a smaller paper in Mississippi somewhere, I think.’
Nightingale noticed he had his hand in his coat pocket quite a lot. ‘Peter, it would probably be a lot easier if you just put the recorder on the table. We can always switch it off if I need to.’
Mulholland shrugged his shoulders and blushed a little, then put his digital recorder on the table between them. ‘No offence,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got a living to make.’
Nightingale nodded. He could hardly expect the reporter to spend his time giving out information with nothing in it for him. ‘I’m happy enough for you to have the story, just don’t use my name,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you everything I know, but treat it as off the record.’
The reporter nodded.
‘So you were on local news, same as Kim?’ asked Nightingale.
‘At first,’ said Mulholland, and we weren’t a bad team on one or two of the bigger stories, but the last year or so, I’ve been more desk-bound, moving into opinion pieces. But we always got on well, so I used to see quite a lot of her in and out of the office.’
Nightingale said nothing, but raised an eyebrow. Mulholland raised his hands and shook his head. ‘No, no. Nothing like that. We just got on well. Had some interests in common.’
‘Like what?’ asked Nightingale, trying not to sound too interested.
‘Well, craft beer,’ said Mulholland, holding up his glass. ‘Smoking, before I quit, heavy Metal music...’
Nightingale must have looked surprised. ‘Yeah, I know, I don’t really fit the image these days, but I still like the music, even if I don’t fit into leather and denim so well. And we were both big Titans fans, saw a few games together.’
Nightingale nodded. ‘That’s the Memphis football team, right?’
Mulholland looked at him in mock horror. ‘Wow, you really are not from around these parts. Memphis is pretty badly served for major league sports, no football or baseball teams, just the Grizzlies in the NBA. Titans are based in Nashville, which is where I’m from way back. I took her a few times when we got tickets.’
‘And did you share an interest in tattoos?’
‘You saw those? Nah, not my scene. I’m not big on pain, and it’s kinda like wearing the same shirt every day of your life. Not that I have that many. But Kim just lived for hers. She’d have grown another couple of arms if she could, just to have more of them done.’
Nightingale forced a laugh. ‘Yeah, I saw most of them. You heard she was in sports gear when...it happened?’
‘Yeah, I heard that. Christ, Jack, that was the damnedest thing. She always seemed a happy enough person. What the hell would make her do that, and in the Memphis Cemetery for Christ’s sake? It makes no sense.’
‘Not to me either, even though I’d only known her a day or so.’
‘Seriously, she wasn’t the suicidal type. And the dead kid too. What’s been happening with kids lately? That’s about the third or fourth youngster killed themselves in the past few days. And today half the office is up on Beale, some little girl pulled a gun and started firing, till a cop shot her.’
‘Yeah, I heard,’ said Nightingale. He thought it best not to say that he was there when the little girl was killed.
Mulholland shook his head. ‘Going to be Hell to pay for that, little black kid getting shot.’
Nightingale tried to pull the conversation back on track. ‘From what I saw, a lot of Kim’s tattoos were Occult themed, witches, dragons, mystic symbols. Did she take a lot of interest in that kind of thing?’
‘Not that she ever talked about to me. Mostly they were kept under wraps, she wore long sleeves almost all the time. I only saw the arms now and then. Don’t remember ever seeing the legs, she wasn’t one for skirts. I just heard from a cop contact that they were pretty much everywhere on her.’
‘Did she ever talk about a favourite one, or one with a special meaning?’
‘Not that I ever heard. I know she must have had a complicated one done on her shoulder a couple of years back, because she always seemed to be rubbing it. She laughed it off when I asked though. But that was a while back.’
‘Did she have family? Close friends?’
‘I think her folks were dead. She never mentioned friends from outside work, maybe she liked to keep things separate. I’m pretty sure she went through a few room-mates, but I never met any.’
‘Would you have a home address for her?’
Mulholland nodded. ‘Guess I could give you it,’ he said. ‘Couple of things might persuade me. First of all, another one of these.’ He held up his empty glass, and Nightingale waved at the barman and pointed at it. Mulholland smiled as the fresh drink arrived, and took a good swig. ‘Second of all, how about a story for me?’ He pointed at the recorder. ‘Come on, Jack, let’s have the full story of last night.’
‘Was it only last night?’ said Nightingale. ‘Seems like a lifetime ago.’
He talked Mulholland through a careful selection of the events leading up to Kim Jarvis’s suicide. Mulholland was silent throughout the story, but then had plenty of questions, to most of which Nightingale pled ignorance.
‘So that’s it? She just says “Bye, Dude” and puts the gun in her mouth?’
‘That was pretty much it,’ said Nightingale. ‘Did you know that she owned a gun?’
‘Never talked about it if she did. Fact is, I’m surprised, every time there was a big shooting on the news, she’d talk about needing to get guns off the street. Never figured she’d own one. The cops know it was hers, do they?’
‘The cops didn’t seem to want to share too much with me, once they accepted I hadn’t killed anyone, I was out of there.’
Of course, it hadn’t been quite that easy, but Nightingale figured that Mulholland had enough for a reasonable few columns, and he doubted that the reporter could tell him much more.
‘So, about that address,’ said Nightingale.
Mulholland took a business card from his wallet and scribbled an address on the back before handing it to Nightingale. ‘I was planning on going myself,’ said Mulholland. ‘I’m following up the story.’
‘Why don’t we go together?’ asked Nightingale.
Mulholland finished the last inch of his beer in one swallow, then nodded. ‘Well, it looks like I’ll be needing someone else to drive.’
They went out to Nightingale’s car and climbed in. Nightingale put the address into the SatNav and they headed off.
‘So what is it you do, Jack?’ asked Mulholland, as Nightingale drove through the city.
‘I guess you could just call me an investigator,’ said Nightingale. ‘ I get called in whenever my organisation comes across something that doesn’t seem right.’
‘And who might they be? The FBI? CIA? The X-Men? The X-files?’
‘None of the above,’ said Nightingale. ‘Just some people with a lot of money and a social conscience.’
Mulholland grunted, clearly not convinced, but fell silent since they had just pulled up in front of Kim Jarvis’s home.
The house was bigger than Nightingale was expecting, built of brown brick and set behind a lawn that had evidently been mowed comparatively recently. It was all on one floor, and in Britain Nightingale would have called it a bungalow, but he had no idea if Americans would understand the term. The roof was high pitched and constructed in an arrangement of sideways and forward-facing triangles in grey slate. The biggest triangle, over on the left, covered a built-in double garage. The whole building looked to be relatively modern and in good repair.
‘Nice place,’ said Mulholland as he heaved himself onto the sidewalk. ‘Maybe she had more money than just a reporter’s salary.’
‘You’ve never been to her place before?’ asked Nightingale.
‘I was never invited,’ said the reporter.
‘She ever say anything about another job, or maybe an inheritance?’
‘Nope,’ said Mulholland. ‘She was pretty tight-lipped when it came to personal stuff.’
They walked down the path and Mulholland pressed the doorbell.
A few seconds later, they heard a female voice. ‘Who is it?’
Nightingale nodded to Mulholland. ‘Name’s Peter Mulholland, I worked with Kim Jarvis at the Herald. Wondered if I could come in and talk for a few minutes.’
Mulholland moved towards the door and held his press-card up to the peep-hole. They heard the sound of bolts and deadlocks being unfastened.
The door opened, and the owner of the voice proved to be a slim but athletic-looking young blonde woman. Nightingale guessed she would be over twenty-five, but probably not yet thirty. Her straw-coloured hair hung in slightly messy waves down to her shoulders, and her dark blue eyes were a little red around the lids. She was wearing a long, blue UCLA sweater over some black footless leggings, and no shoes. A pretty girl, thought Nightingale, and with an air of innocence and inexperience of life about her. It looked like her room-mate’s sudden death had upset her quite a bit.
Mulholland introduced himself and asked who the woman was.
‘My name’s Carol Goldman,’ she said. ‘I shared the house with Kim.’
She looked inquisitively at Nightingale. ‘Jack Nightingale,’ he said. ‘I was with Kim when she …..’ He smiled awkwardly, not wanting to finish the sentence,
She opened the door wider and invited them in. They walked by her into the entrance hall. She shut and bolted the door behind them, and showed them into a good-sized sitting room. There wasn’t a great deal of furniture, and what there was of it was black and white. Two black leather chairs and a matching sofa were placed around a black wooden coffee table, with black floor lamps by the side of each one. A black wide-screen television hung on one white wall, with black bookshelves to either side of it. These were about half filled with books and magazines. Nightingale took a quick glance, the books were mainly reference books on journalism and novel-writing, the magazines dealt with writing too, but there were also plenty focusing on football, baseball, motor-cycles and tattoos. Another wall was taken up with a run of black display cabinets, but these were pretty much empty, apart from a few ornamental bowls and vases. The whole place looked as if the occupants had recently moved in. There was no music system that he could see, and no DVD player to go with the television.
Nightingale agreed with Mulholland’s opinion that it looked rather more expensive than he would have expected for a junior reporter, but he supposed it could have been a rental. Carol waved them to the sofa, but remained standing herself, near the kitchen door. ‘Can I get you anything?’ she asked. ‘Coffee? Juice? Herbal tea? Maybe a beer?’
The two men shook their heads. ‘I’m good, thanks, don’t want to take up more of your time than we need to,’ said Mulholland.
Carol sat down on the edge of the armchair nearest them. ‘So how can I help?’ she asked.
‘Well, first of all, please accept my sincere sympathies,’ said Mulholland. ‘Kim was a good friend of mine, and I’m sure you’re going to miss her just as much as we all are.’
‘I guess you probably knew her better than I did,’ said the woman. ‘Fact is, I only met her a couple months ago when I answered her ad to share the house. I’d been travelling abroad, and needed a place, and this was the first one I saw. We hit it off, I guess, but I wouldn’t say I’d gotten to know her all that well. She was pretty private, and our work timetables meant we didn’t see all that much of each other.’
‘You’re not a reporter?’ asked Nightingale.
She smiled and shook her head. ‘Not me, at the moment I’m just scraping by as a substitute teacher and helping out in a bar downtown from time to time. Good thing I had some savings, as my income’s not what it ought to be.’
‘You can’t find a full-time teaching job?’
‘Not yet. Fact is, I have a bachelor’s degree, but not my teaching licence yet, so I can only fill in for the same vacancy for twenty days at a stretch. It’s a pain, but it’s the law here in Tennessee.’
Mulholland nodded, but was keen to move on. ‘Kim’s death came as an awful shock to us, as I said. Especially since she’d seemed perfectly normal in the days leading up to it. Had you noticed her being depressed?’
‘Not at all. From what I saw of her, she seemed pretty happy. The last few days she’d said she was working on a story that might turn out quite big, though she couldn’t say what it was, until it broke.’
Mulholland nodded. ‘So, no reason you could think of for her to kill herself?’
‘None that I saw.’
‘Did she own a gun?’ asked Nightingale.
‘A gun? No. I don’t think so. She never mentioned having one.’ Carol frowned. ‘Actually, I’m sure she didn’t. Couple of times she’d been pretty vociferous about how much she hated them, usually set off by some story on the TV. I have no idea what she might have been doing with one, or where she got it.’ She took a deep breath to steady herself. ‘Do you know what happened?’ she asked. ‘The police didn’t give me much in the way of detail.’
‘I was there, when it happened,’ said Nightingale.
‘Please tell me,’ she said, hugging a cushion to her chest.
It was about the fifth time inside twelve hours that Nightingale had needed to tell the story, so he had it off by heart now, though he again left out a detail or two, just as before. Carol Goldman listened in silence until he reached the end.
‘That’s awful,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe she’d kill herself.’
‘We’re all in shock,’ said Mulholland. ‘What about you? What will you do, stay here?’
‘No, I doubt if I could anyway, it’s Kim’s place, we just had a pretty informal arrangement where I paid rent and a share of the bills. I guess her family will own it now. There’s a couple places I can go until I get somewhere settled.’
‘Do you know anything about Kim’s family?’ asked Nightingale.
‘Not really,’ said Carol. ‘She never talked about them, but you just sort of assume there had to be someone. I guess I’ll find out soon enough.’
Nightingale got up from the sofa. ‘I was wondering if I could have a little look round the place,’ he said. ‘Just maybe get a feel for the kind of person she was?’
‘Sure,’ Carol said, ‘I can give you the grand tour, but I’m not sure what you’ll get from it. I think she’d only just moved in before she put the ad in.’
Nightingale would have preferred to have looked round on his own, but he couldn’t come up with a convincing reason why Carol should allow a stranger to wander round her home, so he followed her through the kitchen and bathroom first. Neither of them contained anything that struck him as unusual, though his experience of female bathrooms had been pretty limited recently. Everything was neatly put away, with both rooms having been very recently cleaned.
Carol indicated a closed door next to the bathroom. ‘That’s my room,’ she said. ‘I guess you don’t need to see in there? It’s a little messy, you know?’
Nightingale would have liked to see inside, but again couldn’t come up with a convincing reason. He wasn’t a cop, there hadn’t been a crime, and Carol Goldman wasn’t a suspect.
He smiled at her. ‘No, that’s fine. Maybe just Kim’s room now?’
She opened the door to Kim’s bedroom. The room was immaculately tidy and spotlessly clean. There was a king-size bed in the middle of the room, with a black and white striped counterpane and black pillows. A black wood drawer unit stood on either side of the plain black headboard. The bookshelves to the left and right of the window were also of black wood, looking slightly higher quality than flat pack units, but they were completely empty, no books, ornaments, magazines or CDs.
The wall opposite the bed was completely filled with black built-in wardrobes. Nightingale nodded at them. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked.
‘Go ahead,’ she said.
He opened the right-hand door, and was again surprised by how little was inside, and how immaculately organised it all was. There were half a dozen office-style suits in various dark shades, then a collection of jeans in black and denim blue, shirts and sweaters on shelves, all neatly folded, and boxes of shoes, each one with a photograph of the contents taped to the outside. The drawers at the bottom held underwear, which seemed functional rather than playful, but he didn’t feel like searching through it with Carol standing behind him.
The wardrobe on the left held more casual and dressy clothes, with an emphasis on black leather, lots of pants, jackets, skirts and boots. Plus a variety of sportswear, sweatpants, t-shirts and a few more shoe-boxes, with photos of sneakers on the outside. No guns, cartridges, church candles, inverted crucifixes, black and white chickens. If Kim Jarvis had any connection to the Occult and Satanism, she hadn’t brought it home with her.
Either that or someone had taken great care to remove it.
Carol showed them back into the sitting room. She looked at them, as if expecting more questions, but there were none. Nightingale looked at Mulholland and they both shrugged their shoulders. Nightingale handed the girl one of his cards, which just bore his name and a number that would be diverted to whatever mobile phone he was currently using. ‘We’re as puzzled by all this as you are, Carol. If you think of anything that might shed any light on it, please call me. Any time at all.’
‘I will. But look, what has this all to do with the dead little kid? Seems she had no reason to kill herself either. What happened, Mr. Nightingale? What caused all this? It makes no sense at all.’
Nightingale nodded. ‘It’s a complete mystery,’ he said. ‘I wish I had some ideas.’
Mulholland was already at the front door, so Nightingale followed him, and Carol let them out. Mulholland stopped at the sidewalk. ‘Not sure why we bothered,’ he said. ‘There was hardly anything of her in the place. No music, no movies, not a photo of her or anyone else.’
‘Well, seems like she hadn’t long moved in,’ said Nightingale.
Mulholland grunted and looked up the street. ‘I think I could be done for the day,’ he said. ‘I can e-mail my story in. Won’t be up on the site till tomorrow morning anyway. You can leave me here.’
Nightingale followed his gaze, saw Red’s Bar across the street and nodded. He felt like a beer but he had an appointment with the mysterious Professor. He shook Mulholland’s hand and walked away. He had no way of knowing that it would be the last time he would see the journalist alive.