Midnight: The Second Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thriller by Stephen Leather Read Free Book Online Page A

with wood-panelled walls, a glistening marble floor and a large multi-tiered chandelier that looked like an upside-down crystal wedding cake.
    There were three oak doors leading off the hallway, but the entrance to the basement library was concealed within the wooden panelling. Nightingale pulled open the hinged panel and reached inside to flick the light switch. He stepped aside and waved for Jenny to go ahead. ‘Ladies first,’ he said.
    ‘Age before beauty,’ she said. ‘I’ll follow you.’
    ‘Scaredy cat,’ he laughed, and went down the wooden stairs. Despite Nightingale’s levity he could understand Jenny’s reservations; there was something decidedly spooky about the basement. It ran the full length of the house and was lined with shelves laden with books. Running down the centre of the basement were two lines of display cases filled with all sorts of occult paraphernalia, from skulls to crystal balls. Nightingale had spent dozens of hours down there but had seen only a fraction of the contents.
    Jenny followed him down, keeping a tight grip on the brass banister. ‘I still don’t understand why he kept all this stuff hidden,’ she said. ‘There’s a perfectly good study and library upstairs.’
    ‘I don’t think he wanted his staff knowing what he was up to,’ said Nightingale. He walked along to a seating area with two overstuffed red leather Chesterfield sofas and a claw-footed teak coffee table that was piled high with books. He sat down into one of the sofas.
    Jenny ran her finger along the back of the other. ‘Looks like no one’s dusted in years,’ she said.
    ‘Are you offering?’ asked Nightingale.
    ‘No, I’m not.’ She sat down. ‘So what’s the plan?’
    Nightingale waved at the bookshelves behind him. ‘I guess we need to find books on devils, see if any of them refer to a Frimost. While we’re at it, we should start compiling a list of titles so that I can see which ones I can sell. We’ve got to sort the wheat from the chaff because some of them are really valuable. That’s where most of Gosling’s money went, remember?’
    ‘It’s going to take forever, Jack. There must be – what, two thousand books here?’
    Nightingale shrugged. ‘Yeah, give or take.’
    ‘And most of them don’t even have titles on their spines.’
    ‘The longest journey starts with a single step,’ said Nightingale.
    ‘Did you get that piece of wisdom from a Christmas cracker?’
    ‘From Mrs Ellis at my primary school, as it happens. We don’t have to do them all at once.’ He put his feet up onto the coffee table. ‘What do you think’s the best way of doing it?’
    ‘Not sitting on your backside would be a good start,’ she replied. ‘How about we take a shelf each and work along it? We can write the details down and if either of us spots a book on devils we can flick through it and see if Frimost is mentioned.’
    ‘Sounds like a plan,’ said Nightingale. He stood up and went over to a huge oak desk that was piled high with books. He pulled open a drawer and found a couple of unused notepads. There were a dozen or so ballpoint pens in an old pint pot and he took two. ‘There we go,’ he said, giving Jenny a pen and a pad. ‘Race you.’
    ‘You’re so competitive,’ she said.
    Nightingale pointed at the bookcase next to the stairs that led down from the hall. ‘Might as well be methodical and start there,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the top shelf, you take the one underneath.’
    ‘I’ve just had a thought,’ said Jenny. ‘Have you actually looked for a list yet?’
    ‘A list?’
    ‘With this many books, he must have had some sort of inventory. How else would he know if he already had a particular volume?’
    Nightingale nodded thoughtfully. ‘Okay, that makes sense. But where would he keep it?’
    ‘That’s the question, isn’t it?’ said Jenny. ‘He could have put it on a computer or his BlackBerry, if he had one. Or he could have written the list down in a