The superintendent looked at his watch. It was just after mid-day.
‘I keep getting this tingle on the back of my neck,’ said Fisher. ‘I know that sounds crazy.’
‘It doesn’t sound crazy at all,’ said the superintendent. ‘A copper’s hunch has helped me out more times than I can remember. You’re right, the timing is bang on and the car still being there is a red flag. Get Dave Hopkins in here and we’ll get something sorted.’
25
Jenny McLean frowned when she opened the door and found Nightingale studying a large whiteboard on which he’d stuck photographs cut from the Sunday papers. She looked at her watch. It was ten to nine. ‘Early bird catching the worm?’ she said as she took off her coat.
‘Up with the lark indeed,’ said Nightingale. ‘Late rising is for the birds. Are we about done with the ornithological references?’
‘I just mean it’s not like you to beat me into the office.’ She walked over to him and looked at the information on the whiteboard. He’d drawn a map of the school and marked where the children had been killed with black crosses. He’d drawn red lines from the crosses to the relevant photographs. Eight of the crosses were of children. The ninth, in the playground, had a red line linking it to a balding man in his forties.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Trying to work out why McBride did what he did.’
‘He killed kids, we know that.’
‘Yeah, but if he just wanted to kill kids he could have just walked into one classroom and started blasting away. He had plenty of cartridges.’
Jenny stared at the hand-drawn map of the school. ‘He walked down the corridor and into several classrooms?’
Nightingale nodded. ‘And then into the gym. That’s where he shot his last two victims and where he killed himself.’
‘So the question is, why go to all that trouble?’
‘Exactly. If the aim was just to kill kids then he’d have been a lot more productive if he’d just gone into one classroom and blasted away.’
‘Productive? That’s a sick way of putting it.’
‘What I mean is if it was a body count he was after, he went about it in a bloody funny way. And if it wasn’t about a body count, what was he doing?’
‘Do you think the police are asking the same question?’
Nightingale grimaced. ‘Probably not,’ he said. ‘When the cops are on a murder investigation, they’re looking at motive, means and opportunity. They construct a timeline and they investigate everyone who came into contact with the victim. But in this case they’re not looking for a suspect. They know who the killer was, they caught him in the act. So they’re not going to be worrying about a motive. So far as they’re concerned, the case was closed when McBride killed himself. There’ll be an inquest, but the verdict will be murder and suicide. It’s not the coroner’s job to say why McBride did what he did, though he might say something along the lines of the balance of his mind was disturbed.’
‘I don’t think there’s much doubt about that,’ said Jenny. ‘Well balanced people don’t usually run amok with shotguns, do they?’
‘No, but from the accounts in the papers, he didn’t run amok. He was as cold as ice. Dead calm. And if you look at how he moved through the school, it was purposeful. It wasn’t random.’
‘You think he was choosing his victims?’
She looked at the photographs one by one. They were all children aged between eight and ten, and most of the pictures had been taken at school. They were wearing uniforms and smiling happily at the camera, bright-eyed children with their lives ahead of them. Jenny pointed at one of the photographs, a dark-haired girl with a snub nose. ‘Manka?’
‘Polish,’ said Nightingale. ‘Mum arrived in the UK ten years ago, the girl was born here. Mum’s a single parent.’ He tapped another photograph. ‘Paul Tomkins. His mum’s also a single parent.’
‘Coincidence?’ asked Jenny.
Nightingale pointed at a third photograph. ‘Zach Atkins. His parents split up five years ago and he’s being brought up by his dad.’
Jenny frowned. ‘Are you serious?’
Nightingale moved his finger along the whiteboard to a photograph of a girl with curly red hair. ‘Ruth Glazebrook. Parents divorced. Lives with her mum.’ He looked at Jenny and shrugged. ‘Of the eight, those four are described by the papers as being in one-parent families. The parental status of the other three isn’t mentioned. Can you run checks on the rest? I figure the best way is to look at the electoral roll.’
‘Easily done,’ said Jenny. ‘But you can’t seriously think he was killing kids from single-parent families.’
‘I don’t know what to think at the moment. But if it wasn’t random, we need to know why he killed the ones he did. If we can answer that question, we’ll have a better idea of what was going on. But the more I look at it, the more I’m sure he wasn’t a crazy devil-worshipper.’
‘What about the religious connection?’
‘What religious connection?’
‘The names. Paul. Ruth. Zach. And there’s a Noah. All biblical.’
‘Zach? Since when is Zach biblical?’
‘Zacharias. He was a prophet. Manka doesn’t fit but maybe that’s the exception that proves the rule.’
‘Manka is a Polish variant of Mary,’ said Nightingale.
‘Is it now? But one of the girls was called Brianna. I’m pretty sure that’s not in the Bible either. The point I’m making is you’ve got to be careful when you start looking for connections. Just because a few of them are from single-parent families doesn’t mean that’s why he killed them. You might just as well say they all have blue eyes or played the piano.’
‘How do you know they played the piano?’
Jenny sighed. ‘I didn’t. I plucked that from the air.’
‘You noticed the date, by the way? And the time?’
Jenny frowned. ‘September the ninth, right? A couple of days after the kids went back to school.’
‘And the time?’
Jenny shrugged. ‘It was at the start of school.’
‘It was nine o’clock when he started shooting. On the dot.’
‘Am I missing something here, Jack?’
‘Nine o’clock on September the ninth. The ninth month. Nine, nine, nine.’
She frowned and shrugged again. ‘And?’
‘Jenny, three nines. Nine, nine, nine. That’s a Satanic number.’
‘It’s also the emergency services number. Anyway, I thought six six six was the number of the Devil.’
‘The number of the beast,’ said Nightingale. ‘But Satan’s number is nine nine nine. You can blame Hollywood for the whole six six six thing. And then there’s the number of victims. Eight kids and one teacher. Nine.’
‘So what are you saying, now you think it was some devil-worship thing?’
‘He picked up the shotgun and got to the school at nine o’clock,’ said Nightingale. ‘If he’d got there at ten we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?’
‘But his brother was definite, wasn’t he? James McBride wasn’t a Satanist.’
‘Yeah, but Satanists don’t tend to advertise themselves, do they? If James was in league with the Devil there’s a pretty good chance he wouldn’t tell his brother.’
‘What do you want to do, Jack? He wants you to prove his brother wasn’t a Satanist but everything in the papers says he was. And if you’re right and the nine nine nine thing is significant …’ She shrugged.
‘He wants to know why his brother did what he did,’ said Nightingale. ‘I get paid whatever I find out. The altar was definitely wrong and I think the computer stuff is a definite red herring but the nine nine nine can’t be a coincidence.’
