Stephen Leather - Nightfall

‘Coffee, please,’ said Jenny.

‘Me too,’ said Nightingale.

‘I’ll put a drop of something in yours, Jack, shall I? Brandy, maybe? Or whisky?’

‘You read my mind, Marie, thanks. Whisky would be great.’

‘It’s not mind-reading,’ she said. ‘Every cop in the room has got brandy or whisky in their coffee. Even the superintendent over there.’

Jenny smiled at Nightingale as Marie went off to the kitchen. ‘See, Jack? He’s human after all.’

‘When did you eat last?’ asked Jenny, as they walked towards Nightingale’s MGB. It had stopped raining but there were still pools of water on the road. They had stayed at Anna’s house for almost two hours, during which time more than a hundred police officers had called to pay their respects. Robbie Hoyle had been well liked, but even if he had been the most unpopular man on the Met, they would still have come. Police officers were a tight family and always closed ranks when one of their own died.

‘Does whisky count as one of the major food groups?’ asked Nightingale.

‘No, it doesn’t,’ said Jenny.

‘Yesterday then.’

‘You didn’t have breakfast?’

‘Who has breakfast these days?’ said Nightingale. ‘No one has the time.’

Jenny put her arm through his. ‘Come on, we’re going to eat,’ she said. ‘My treat.’

‘Your treat? Am I paying you too much?’

‘You haven’t paid me at all this month.’ She laughed. ‘How does Chinese sound?’

‘If you’re paying, we’ll eat whatever you want,’ he said.

They reached the MGB and climbed in. Nightingale headed north to London. Jenny knew a Chinese restaurant around the corner from her home in Chelsea where she was greeted like a long-lost cousin. Nightingale asked her to order and she did so in what sounded like fairly fluent Cantonese, much to his surprise. ‘I didn’t know you spoke Chinese,’ he said.

‘I sometimes wonder if you even looked at my CV,’ she said. ‘It did say that I spent four years in Hong Kong when I was a kid.’

‘Yeah, I probably didn’t get that far down it,’ said Nightingale. ‘You had shorthand and typing and a good phone voice.’

Two Tsingtao beers arrived. ‘I’m serious, Jack. Sometimes you’re a bit on the self-centred side.’

‘I’m all I’ve got,’ said Nightingale. ‘I guess that comes from having my parents die when I was a teenager.’

‘Maybe, but you should try opening up more.’

He raised his glass to her. ‘Okay, I will.’

‘No, you won’t,’ she said. She clinked her glass against his.

‘I’ll try,’ he said.

Their food arrived. Half a Peking duck, scallops fried with celery, chicken with cashew nuts, pak choi in oyster sauce, and rice. An old Chinese lady, her hair held up in a bun with two scarlet chopsticks, came over, spoke to Jenny in Chinese and walked away cackling.

‘What’s the joke?’ asked Nightingale, struggling with his chopsticks.

‘She wanted to know if you were my husband.’

Rice fell onto his lap. ‘And what did you say?’

‘I told her you were my father.’

‘What? I’m only… How much older than you am I?’

‘You didn’t read my CV, did you? I’m twenty-five. And you’ll be thirty-three next week. So…?’

‘I’m eight years older. Which hardly makes me father material, does it?’

‘Jack, I was joking. And would you like a knife and fork?’

‘I can manage, thanks,’ said Nightingale. He picked up a piece of chicken and got it halfway to his mouth before it slipped from his chopsticks and fell onto the tablecloth.

‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of in not being able to handle chopsticks,’ she said, deftly picking up a cashew nut with hers and popping it into her mouth.

‘Yeah, well, you’re half Chinese, apparently,’ said Nightingale.

‘I said I lived in Hong Kong for a few years. I wasn’t born there,’ she said. ‘Daddy was working for one of the trading hongs.’

A scallop fell into the pak choi. ‘So, my question to the Chinese expert is, now that they know how great knives and forks are, why don’t they stop using these bloody things?’

‘Tradition,’ she said.

‘Well, they’ve changed other traditions, haven’t they? They stopped using rickshaws and wearing those Mao outfits, and they replaced donkeys with cars easily enough, so why not do the sensible thing and replace chopsticks with more user-friendly tools?’ He waved for the waitress to bring them two more beers. They laughed and argued and ate and discussed everything but the one thing they were both thinking about: Robbie Hoyle.

When they had finished their meal a waitress placed a saucer on the table. On it was the bill and two fortune cookies. Nightingale picked one up and held it between his finger and thumb. ‘This had better be good luck,’ he said.

‘Lottery numbers would be nice,’ said Jenny.

Nightingale grinned. He crushed the cookie and let the pieces fall to the tablecloth. He unrolled the slip of paper and looked at the typewritten sentence. The smile froze on his face. It was as if time had stopped dead and his whole world was focused on the seven words in front of him. ‘YOU ARE GOING TO HELL, JACK NIGHTINGALE.’

‘Jack, what’s wrong?’ asked Jenny, leaning across the table towards him.

Nightingale couldn’t take his eyes from the printed fortune. He was holding it so tightly that his finger and thumb had gone white.

‘Jack?’ said Jenny. She reached over and pulled the slip away from him. Nightingale sagged in his seat, his arms folded across his chest. She read it, and smiled. ‘It’s not so bad,’ she said. ‘“Never take a stranger at his word, but remember that friends can also lie.” Good advice, if you ask me.’

Nightingale snatched the piece of paper from her. ‘NEVER TAKE A

Nightingale wiped his face with his left hand, blinked several times and read it again.

‘Jack, what is it?’

Nightingale turned the slip of paper over. The back was blank.

‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

He tossed the fortune onto the table. ‘I’m just tired,’ he said. ‘My eyes are playing tricks on me.’

‘What did you think it said?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Don’t lie to me, Jack.’

Nightingale massaged the bridge of his nose. ‘I’m just tired, kid.’

‘Don’t “kid” me,’ she said. She picked up the scrap of paper. ‘This is the normal sort of fortune rubbish you find in every cookie, but when you looked at it, it was as if you were reading your death warrant.’

‘It was nothing,’ said Nightingale.

‘I’m serious, Jack. Don’t you dare lie to me.’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

Nightingale sighed. ‘Okay. I thought it said I was going to hell. That’s what it said the first time I read it.’

‘That you were going to hell?’

‘That’s right. That I, Jack Nightingale, was going to hell.’

‘So you misread it. No big deal.’ She frowned. ‘Those words mean something, don’t they?’

‘My uncle wrote them before he died. In blood. In his bathroom.’

Jenny gasped. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’

‘Because… I don’t know, Jenny. I thought maybe I’d imagined it. Like I imagined it just now, when I read the fortune.’

‘Why would your uncle tell you that you were going to hell?’

‘I’ve no idea. But those words keep cropping up.’

‘Since when?’

‘Like I said, it’s a long story.’

‘Jack…’

‘Okay, okay,’ said Nightingale. He sighed and put his head in his hands. He had never told Jenny about Sophie Underwood, or what had happened to her father. It wasn’t something he wanted to talk about, but as he sat in the Chinese restaurant and stared at the tablecloth stained with the food that had slipped from his chopsticks he told her everything that had happened on that chilly November morning. Or, at least, as much as he could remember.