Free Nightfall: The First Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thriller by Stephen Leather Page A

great head of hair. I always thought I’d inherited my hair from him but now I find out that my dad was bald.’
    Hoyle laughed. ‘Is that what’s got you all riled up? The fact that you might be bald one day?’
    ‘It’s not about baldness, it’s about me not being who I thought I was. Robbie, my biological father made a DVD saying he’d sold my soul to the devil and then he blew his head off with a shotgun, which suggests, if nothing else, that he might have had a few sanity issues. What if I take after him? Nature and nurture, right? We’re a combination of our genes and our environment, and now I’ve found out that my genes have come from a nutter.’
    ‘A bald nutter, to boot.’
    ‘Exactly,’ said Nightingale.
    Hoyle sipped his wine. ‘It’s a joke, right? Some sort of sick practical joke?’
    ‘I’m just telling you what happened,’ said Nightingale.
    ‘I mean this Gosling character, he’s just playing with you.’
    ‘But he killed himself, Robbie. Blew his head off with a shotgun. Bit extreme for a jape, don’t you think?’ He pulled out some photocopied sheets from the envelope: the police report and a copy of the conclusions of the inquest that had been held a week after the death. The verdict was suicide. ‘Just a thought, there’s no doubt that it was Gosling who died, is there? Shotgun blasts don’t leave much to identify.’
    ‘It’s all in there,’ said Hoyle. ‘His fingerprints matched the ones in the house. Nothing useful dental-wise so they did a DNA match. It’s definitely him.’
    ‘Can you do me a favour?’
    ‘Within limits,’ said Hoyle, cautiously.
    ‘I want to know if I really am his son. Can you check my DNA against his?’
    ‘Shouldn’t be a problem,’ said Hoyle. ‘Do you want to give me a sample now?’
    Nightingale took a small plastic bag from his jacket. Inside were half a dozen hairs that he’d plucked from his scalp, the roots intact.
    Hoyle took it. ‘I was hoping for blood.’ He slid it into his jacket pocket. ‘It might take a day or two,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to wait until there’s a friendly face in the lab.’
    ‘I can’t believe the way my parents lied to me,’ said Nightingale. ‘And my uncle and aunt. My aunt and uncle must have known too.’
    ‘Have you spoken to them?’
    ‘My aunt was all jittery, and my uncle’s going to call me back.’
    ‘What about other family?’
    ‘That’s it, pretty much. Mum was an only child, all my grandparents died years ago, and Uncle Tommy and Auntie Linda never had kids. She has a few relatives but I hardly know them.’ He looked up from the papers he was reading. ‘What happened to the body?’
    ‘Cremated.’ Hoyle rubbed his finger around the rim of his wine glass. ‘You’re not taking this selling-your-soul-to-the-devil thing seriously, are you? People don’t sell their souls to the devil.’
    ‘He didn’t say he sold his soul. He said he sold my soul. And my sister’s.’
    ‘You don’t have a sister, Jack. You were an only child, remember? Which, incidentally, explains a lot.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Only kids tend to be self-centred, used to getting their own way, have difficulty in forming lasting friendships.’
    ‘Screw you.’
    ‘See? That proves my point. Now me, one of four kids, you couldn’t wish for a more sociable fellow.’
    ‘I say again, screw you. And the rest of the Waltons.’
    ‘Easy enough to check if you had a sister,’ said Hoyle. ‘There’d be a birth certificate.’
    ‘Gosling’s not down on mine,’ said Nightingale. ‘Just my mum and dad. If Gosling did have a daughter, she’d be almost impossible to trace.’
    ‘It’s bollocks, the whole thing.’
    ‘Yeah, maybe,’ said Nightingale. He drained his bottle of Corona.
    ‘You know it’s bollocks, right?’ said Hoyle. ‘There’s no such thing as the devil.’
    ‘Not the devil, a devil. He was very clear on that.’
    ‘So now you believe in devils?’
    ‘I’m not saying that. If there was