‘I was at a funeral, Chalmers.’

  ‘Anyone close?’ said Chalmers, his eyes fixed on the screen in front of him.

  ‘Not really. Marcus Fairchild, as it happens.’ He dropped down on to a chair facing the superintendent.

  ‘He was your lawyer, wasn’t he?’

  Nightingale shook his head. ‘I only knew him through Jenny. He was her godfather.’

  Chalmers took his eyes off the screen and sat back in his chair. ‘Funny the way he died, wasn’t it?’

  Nightingale frowned. ‘Funny? He was shot in the back of his car by a hit man on a motorbike. Where’s the humour in that?’

  ‘I meant funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha,’ said the superintendent. ‘Lawyers usually settle their differences in court. I can’t remember the last time a lawyer was murdered like that. And with a MAC-10 and all. Anyway, what was the turnout like?’

  ‘Pretty good,’ said Nightingale. ‘He had a lot of friends.’

  ‘But you weren’t one, right?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Just a feeling, Nightingale.’ The superintendent smiled. ‘I have to say you wouldn’t find me shedding a tear over a dead lawyer.’

  ‘Can we get the small talk out of the way, Chalmers? Why did you bring me here?’

  Chalmers pushed his chair away from his desk. ‘As crazy as it might sound, I need your help.’

  ‘The Goths?’

  Chalmers wagged a finger at Nightingale. ‘You’re a sharp one, Nightingale, and that’s the truth. Just be careful you don’t cut yourself. I’m not happy about having to ask you for help, but I don’t seem to have a choice.’

  Nightingale’s eyebrows headed skyward. ‘I’m not a cop any more, remember?’

  ‘I’m not over the moon about this either, but conventional investigating is getting us nowhere,’ said the superintendent.

  ‘I’m not a cop,’ Nightingale repeated.

  ‘At least hear me out,’ said Chalmers, pushing himself up out of his seat and walking around the desk. ‘You’re not a cop but last time I checked you were still a citizen and that comes with responsibilities.’

  ‘I pay my council tax,’ said Nightingale. ‘And my television licence.’

  ‘Well done you,’ said the superintendent. ‘Come and have a look at what I’m dealing with.’

  He opened the door and headed out. Nightingale sighed and followed him. They walked down a corridor to a set of double doors. There were meshed windows on each door and over one of the windows someone had stuck a sheet of paper on which the letters MIT were printed. Murder Investigation Team.

  The room was about fifty feet long and twelve feet wide. A dozen tables had been set up in the middle of the room, each with its own computer terminal. There were half a dozen civilian workers sitting at terminals. Nightingale assumed they were inputting information into the HOLMES system, a vital part of any murder investigation. Strictly speaking it was HOLMES 2 as the first Home Office Large Major Enquiry System had been substantially improved. By inputting every single piece of information into HOLMES, the detectives could spot patterns and links that they would otherwise miss.

  Another four tables had been pushed against the wall furthest from the door and four detectives in suits were on the phone. There were files and stacks of paper everywhere and a row of metal filing cabinets on top of which were tea- and coffee-making equipment. It was, like most incident rooms, organised chaos.

  Five whiteboards had been fixed to one wall and even before they walked up to them Nightingale knew there was one per victim. ‘Five Goths all killed in the past two weeks,’ said Chalmers. ‘Three male, two female. Ages between eighteen and thirty-nine. Two from North London, one from West London, two from South London. Two were gay and three were straight, so far as we know. Two students, one long-term unemployed, one website designer, one shop assistant. The one thing that they have in common is that they were Goths. Strike that – it’s the only thing they have in common.’

  ‘So they’re hate crimes?’ said Nightingale.

  ‘That’s the theory we’re working on,’ said Chalmers. ‘But that’s our problem. If the victims are being singled out because they’re Goths, that doesn’t give us a profile of the killers.’

  ‘Killers, plural?’

  Nightingale walked over to the first of the boards. Written across the top, in felt tip capital letters, was the name of the victim – STELLA WALSH. To the left of the name was a head-and-shoulders shot of a pretty teenage girl with spiky black hair and heavy mascara. Below the head-and-shoulders photograph were five crime-scene pictures. Stella had been stripped naked and her flesh cut to ribbons. Nightingale grimaced as he looked from photograph to photograph.

  ‘The nature of the crime scenes suggests that there are more than one,’ said Chalmers. ‘But the only thing we know is that they hate Goths. That’s not enough to go on. The Senior Investigating Officer is Detective Chief Inspector Rawlings but he’s getting nowhere. Not from want of trying, it has to be said, he’s done everything by the book but with zero results. Now we’ve got a tweeting campaign saying that if two of the victims hadn’t been gay, we’d be doing more to solve the case.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ asked Nightingale, turning to look at him.

  Chalmers nodded. ‘The Met is now being described as institutionally homophobic and the commissioner is looking for heads to roll.’

  ‘The powers that be care that much about Twitter?’

  ‘About public perception, sure. We’ve now got celebs tweeting about the investigation, everyone from Stephen Fry to One Direction. I had my own daughter asking me yesterday why we hadn’t solved the case. That’s all down to her favourite One Direction singer tweeting about it.’

  ‘Seems to me that it’s the tail wagging the dog these days.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter what’s wagging what, what matters is that the commissioner wants this case breaking and he’s dumped it on my desk like a huge steaming turd.’

  ‘And you think you can dump it on me?’ Nightingale laughed. ‘I know in the job shit rolls downhill, but I’m not even on the hill any more.’

  ‘Rawlings hasn’t put a foot wrong,’ said Chalmers. ‘It’s not his first murder enquiry and he hasn’t done anything differently to the way I’d’ve handled it. There’s no link between the victims other than they’re Goths. We’re looking at it as a hate crime but there are no obvious suspects. They’ve been trawling through social media and anti-Goth and anti-gay websites but there’s no one who stands out.’

  Nightingale looked back at the crime scene photographs. ‘And you’re sure it’s not a lone psychopath?’

  Chalmers shrugged. ‘These aren’t simple killings,’ he said. ‘What’s being done to them takes time. It seems a lot of work for one person.’

  ‘And what’s the cause of death? Please don’t tell me she was alive when they cut her up?’

  ‘The coroner says that she was alive but almost certainly unconscious; she’d been hit on the back of her head. But the cause of death was blood loss.’

  Nightingale shuddered. ‘Were they all killed the same way?’

  ‘Rendered unconscious and then mutilated,’ said Chalmers.

  ‘When was the last killing?’

  ‘Four days ago, at least that was when the body was found.’ Chalmers walked over to the whiteboard furthest to the right. He pointed at a head-and-shoulders photograph of a man with a double chin and thinning hair that had been dyed black and gelled. He had mascara and eyeliner and what looked like black lipstick. ‘Daryl Heaton, thirty-nine and unemployed. He was found in his flat in Kilburn after the neighbours had complained about the smell. His was the last body found but the coroner puts the TOD at about a week earlier.’

  Chalmers moved to the next whiteboard along. ‘Assuming she’s right about the time of death, that would make Abbie Greene the last victim. She was found six days ago.’

  Nightingale looked at the head-and-shoulders photograph at the top of the whiteboard. Abbie Greene was barely out of her teens. She was blonde and blue-eyed and had a cute smile that suggested either good genes or expensive orthodontics.

  ‘That was taken from her university application,’ said Chalmers. ‘She went Goth about six months ago. Dyed her hair black.’

  Below the photograph were half a dozen gory crime scene pictures. Abbie was lying across a blood-soaked bed with barely an intact scrap of flesh on her, except for her face. ‘He doesn’t slash the face,’ said Nightingale. ‘Just the bodies.’

  ‘Maybe it’s sexual,’ said Chalmers. ‘The face turns him on, he can look at them as he butchers them.’

  ‘It’s not butchering though, is it?’ said Nightingale. ‘He doesn’t sever the hands or the feet, or rip out organs or cut off their ears. It’s not Jack The Ripper stuff, is it? More like he’s skinning them. Skinning them bit by bit.’

  Below the crime scene photographs was a handwritten timeline that showed everything Abbie had done and everyone she’d met in the twenty-four hours before she died. According to the timeline, the last person who had seen Abbie alive, apart from her killers, was her girlfriend, Zoe. According to Zoe, Abbie had gone to see a film with a friend and had never returned. Her body was found the next day in a bedsit in North London, more than five miles away from where she lived. ‘The friend?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Chalmers. ‘We checked all the numbers on her mobile and they’re all accounted for. If it was a friend, they didn’t talk on the phone.’

  Nightingale walked from whiteboard to whiteboard, scratching his neck. ‘Two of them were found on Hampstead Heath?’

  ‘Luke Aitken. He lived in Hampstead with his parents. And Stella Walsh. She lived with her parents in Islington. Very little blood at the dump sites so they were killed elsewhere.’

  ‘Any attempt made to hide the bodies?’

  Chalmers shook his head. ‘Dumped not far from the road in both cases. Wrapped in polythene. No forensics at all. The bodies were probably dumped at night and were discovered the next day. Gabriel Patterson was also wrapped in plastic and dumped on a railway embankment. Also no attempt at concealment.’

  Nightingale waved a hand at the five boards. ‘And all these took place over a two-week period?’

  Chalmers nodded. He took out a pack of chewing gum and slid a piece between his lips. ‘You’re wondering why so many, so fast?’

  ‘I’m wondering how a killer like this comes from nowhere. Serial killers generally work their way up to it. They start with rape and assault and then they move on to killing. This guy seems to have hit the ground running, don’t you think?’

  ‘There have been no other killings of Goths in the UK since Sophie Lancaster in 2007 and Greater Manchester Police caught the gang responsible.’ He nodded at the whiteboards. ‘This is totally different to the Lancaster case. This is organised and well planned and whoever is responsible leaves no evidence behind. No hairs, no fibres, no nothing. We’re working on the theory that the killers use forensic suits and foot coverings and probably hair nets.’ He pointed at the Abbie Greene crime scene photographs. ‘There was a lot of blood on the floor and signs that someone had stood in it, but no prints. Just smudges.’

  Nightingale frowned and scratched his head. ‘So they know about forensics.’

  ‘So does anyone with a TV set these days,’ said Chalmers. ‘But the point isn’t that they know about forensics, it’s the fact that they go to all that trouble not to leave any evidence behind. There’s a lot of planning and forethought going into these killings and that’s not normally associated with hate crimes. With hate crimes you tend to get unplanned violence, someone gets angry and lashes out.’ He flashed Nightingale a tight smile. ‘Someone out there hates Goths enough to go to a great deal of trouble – we’ve tried to find them and drawn a blank. I’m hoping you might have more luck.’

  Nightingale walked over to the single window in the room and looked down at the street below. ‘Why are you asking me, Chalmers? You cut me off your Christmas card list a long time ago.’

  ‘This is your area of expertise, Nightingale. At least that’s what it says on your website.’

  ‘My assistant looks after my web presence,’ said Nightingale. He turned his back on the window and folded his arms.

  ‘Yeah, well, according to her you’re a world authority on supernatural matters.’

  ‘And that’s what you think these killings are? Supernatural?’

  ‘I think that whoever is killing these Goths is part of that crazy, mixed-up world that you move in and out of. Rawlings has been sending his people in and the shutters come down. But you.’ He shrugged. ‘You they might talk to.’

  ‘If you hadn’t noticed, I don’t wear mascara and tight black jeans.’

  ‘No, but you talk their language.’

  ‘And you’ve got a budget for this?’

  The superintendent frowned. ‘Budget?’

  ‘Payment. Money. I’m not a cop, Chalmers. Haven’t been for a while. I work for a living these days.’

  Chalmers shook his head. ‘There’s no budget. You can do it pro bono.’

  ‘I was never a fan of U2, to be honest. Mind you that “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was a good tune.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about, Nightingale?’

  ‘If you’re going to start talking Latin, how about quid pro quo. As in you give me quids and I work like a pro.’

  ‘I don’t have money to pay private investigators, Nightingale.’ He walked over to a table on which he’d placed photographs of the five victims. ‘Look at them. Five innocent people, killed and butchered. You’re a citizen, right? Time to do your civic duty. Find out what the freaks are saying.’

  ‘The freaks?’

  ‘The devil worshippers, the Wicca mob, the people who think that things go bump in the night.’

  ‘You’re asking me to solve your case, is that it?’

  ‘Not solve. Just get me some leads. Someone out there is butchering Goths and somebody must know who and why. Conventional profiling gives us the usual serial killer crap – a middle-aged white male who wet his bed and tortured his pets. But you and I know, despite what you see on TV, profiles don’t lead to convictions. It’s police work that gets convictions, plain and simple.’

  Nightingale stared down at the five photographs. ‘And if I get you leads, what does that get me? What’s the quid pro quo?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘A bit of help now and then, maybe? Access to the odd database.’

  ‘Let you go prowling through the PNC whenever you feel like it?’ He shook his head. ‘That’s not going to happen. How about this? You help me with this case and I’ll make sure you don’t fall foul of the Private Security Industry Act of 2001.’

  ‘And why would that be a problem for me?’

  Chalmers flashed him a tight smile. ‘You can use your imagination, I’m sure. The word of a high-ranking police officer could smooth the way or …’ He shrugged. ‘Like I said, I’m sure you can use your imagination.’

  ‘That sounds like a threat.’

  Chalmers shrugged but didn’t say anything.

  ‘Fine,’ said Nightingale. He gathered up the photographs. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘I need to know why,’ said Chalmers. ‘Give me the why and I’ll probably be able to nail down the who.’

  ‘I said I’ll look into it,’ said Nightingale. He slid the photographs into his raincoat pocket. ‘I can’t promise anything.’

  ‘Well, I can make a promise, Nightingale. If you don’t help us crack this case I’ll make your life unbearable.’

  Nightingale smiled thinly. ‘Good to know you’ve got my back,’ he said. ‘I feel so much safer knowing that.’

  3

  Nightingale jumped as the office door opened but he smiled when he saw it was Jenny. He was making himself a coffee so he reached for a second mug. ‘You’re early,’ he said. She was wearing a long Gucci coat with a large floppy collar and carrying a mustard-coloured Dior handbag. She dropped the handbag on her desk and hung the coat by the door. ‘I’ve got to get our VAT returns done today,’ she said. ‘And knowing the state your receipts are in I figured I’d need an early start. What happened to you yesterday? I looked for you at the reception but you’d gone.’

  ‘I went after they’d done the grave thing,’ said Nightingale. ‘I saw you drop the flower in.’

  ‘You should have stayed.’

  ‘I wasn’t close and it’s not as if I knew a lot of people there. Though it was a hell of a turnout, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Uncle Marcus was well loved, that’s true,’ said Jenny. Nightingale handed her one of the coffee mugs. ‘You should get in early more often,’ she said.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ said Nightingale. He took his coffee through into his own office where he’d set up a whiteboard on an easel. Nightingale had used Blu-tack to stick up the photographs that Chalmers had given him around the edge of the whiteboard. In the centre he’d fixed a map of London and he’d used a red felt marker to link the photographs to the locations where the bodies had been found.

  Jenny frowned at the whiteboard as she sipped her coffee.

  ‘Chalmers needs help with a case,’ Nightingale explained. ‘Someone’s been butchering Goths.’

  ‘He’s paying you?’

  ‘He wants us to do it pro bono.’

  ‘See now, I think Bono’s a pretentious turd and U2’s music is very over-rated.’

  Nightingale grinned. ‘That’s what I said but Chalmers has no sense of humour.’ He sat down at his desk and swung his feet up.

  Jenny pulled up a chair and grimaced as she stared at the photographs

  ‘They were all hacked up pretty badly,’ said Nightingale. ‘Virtually skinned. I can get crime-scene pictures but trust me, you don’t want to see them. Three men, two women, so probably not sexual, despite what the gay activists are saying. But he leaves the faces alone, just mutilates the bodies. I say “he”, but we’re probably talking about multiple assailants.’