Stephen Leather - Nightfall

Mitchell nodded. ‘A pentagram. Yes.’

‘I don’t have a mark anything like that.’

‘If your father sold your soul, then you do. You just haven’t found it yet.’

‘And what if there isn’t a mark?’

Mitchell chuckled. ‘Then you’ve got nothing to worry about, have you?’

Nightingale followed Sylvia through the hall, flanked by two of the men in black suits. ‘How long’s he been in the circle?’ asked Nightingale.

‘It’s a pentagram,’ said Sylvia, archly.

‘Fine,’ said Nightingale. ‘How long’s he been inside the pentagram?’

‘Two months.’

‘And he never leaves it?’

‘That’s the point of the pentagram,’ she said. ‘If you leave, you’re no longer protected.’

‘But I don’t understand why he has to stay there. What’s he frightened of?’

‘I’m sure there are a lot of things you don’t understand, Mr Nightingale,’ she said. She gestured at the bathroom. ‘Please get changed and we shall escort you off the premises.’

Nightingale pushed his way into the bathroom. He took off his robe and hung it on one of the hooks by the door. He caught sight of his reflection in the full-length mirror and instinctively sucked in his stomach. He stood facing it, his head cocked on one side, and grinned at himself. ‘Not bad for a thirty-two-year-old,’ he said. He wasn’t as fit as he had been when he was in CO19, the Met’s armed unit. The training was rigorous and never-ending and fitness was a must, so he’d worked out in the police gym three times a week and taken regular runs. He’d stopped exercising once he’d left the force but his body was still in good condition, considering the amount he drank and smoked. He patted his abdominals. Not quite a six-pack but it wasn’t a beer gut either. And he still had all his own hair and teeth. But the one thing he definitely didn’t have was a tattoo of a pentagram.

He turned to look over his left shoulder, then the right. No tattoo on his back. But he knew that. He knew every inch of his body and he had never seen a pentagram or anything like it. Neither had any of his girlfriends – a pentagram tattoo would have been mentioned. As he looked at his backside he had a thought that at first made him smile, then brought a frown to his face. There were some parts of your body you never looked at and nobody checked. He put a hand on each buttock and slowly pulled them apart. He couldn’t see much so he tried with his legs apart and his head between his knees, the pressure on his chest so tight that he had trouble breathing. There was nothing, but he hadn’t expected there would be. As he straightened he saw the small red light flashing on the side of the CCTV camera opposite him. He winked at the camera. ‘Just checking,’ he said.

Nightingale put on his clothes and shoes and walked out of the bathroom. Sylvia and the two bodyguards were waiting for him. They took him outside and down the steps to his MGB. He tried to engage Sylvia in conversation but she had given up all pretence of civility. There was a look of utter contempt on her face that left him in no doubt that she had been watching his contortionist’s act on her monitor.

Nightingale climbed into his car and started the engine. He gave Sylvia a friendly wave as he drove off but she stared at him impassively, her eyes as cold and impene-trable as the sunglasses her colleagues were wearing.

He headed for the road. The gates were already opening. He drove through, then turned right. In his rear-view mirror he watched them close behind him. His hands were shaking and he gripped the steering-wheel tightly but that didn’t stop the tremor. Two miles down the road he pulled into a pub car park, climbed out of the MGB and lit a cigarette. Beyond where he stood there was a stream and Nightingale walked down to it. He watched the water burble by as he smoked. The wind blew through the trees on the other side of the stream and they swayed like lovers slow-dancing. Then, for the first time, Nightingale understood that one day he would die, that the sun would still shine and the stream would still flow and the wind would still blow through the trees, but he wouldn’t be there to see or feel it.

He tried to blow smoke-rings but the wind whipped them away before they’d left his lips. The smoke-ring was a good analogy for life, he thought, or a metaphor. He was never sure what the difference was. Jenny would know – he’d ask her next time he saw her. Whether it was an analogy or a metaphor, the smoke-ring was like a human life. It came from nothing, existed for a short time and then was gone. Gone for ever.

Nightingale hadn’t thought much about his own death before he had met Sebastian Mitchell. Death was something that happened to every living thing. That much he knew. It was part of the process. You were born, you lived, and then you died. But even when his own parents had been killed in a senseless car accident, death had been something that happened to other people. He’d watched Sophie Underwood fall to her death from the apartment block in Chelsea Harbour, and he’d grieved for her but it hadn’t made him think about his own mortality. Robbie Hoyle’s death had been a shock but Nightingale hadn’t imagined himself in his friend’s place. During his years as an armed police officer, he’d been in situations where death was just a bullet away, but he’d never felt vulnerable. Mitchell had shown him what lay ahead for him even if he avoided bullets, looked both ways when he crossed the street, kept away from high places and wore his seatbelt every time he got into his car. If you lived long enough, you died anyway. That was the one simple fact about life. At some point it ended. Mitchell looked as if he didn’t have more than a few weeks to live. Then he would die and that would be it. And as Nightingale had looked at the old man, gasping and wheezing and coughing up blood, he had grasped that one day he, too, would die. It was a horrible feeling, like a cold hand gripping his heart and squeezing. He’d never see Jenny again. Never drink a bottle of Corona or a good malt whisky. Never enjoy feeling the wind in his hair as he drove the MGB with the top down.

He took a long drag on his cigarette and held the smoke deep in his lungs. He’d never smoke another cigarette, smile at a pretty girl, eat a bar of chocolate. The world would go on, nothing would change, but he wouldn’t be part of it. And he wouldn’t be dead for a week or a month or a year. It wasn’t like an illness when you went to bed and then you got better. Death was for ever. For ever and ever. Until the end of time, except that there was no end. You were dead for ever and Nightingale didn’t want to die and he didn’t want to be dead.

He shivered and gazed up at the clear afternoon sky, blue and cloudless. He didn’t want to die but that didn’t matter: it was going to happen, whether he liked it or not, sooner or later.

He flicked what was left of his cigarette into the stream. He shivered again and turned up the collar of his raincoat. There was no solution to what was troubling Nightingale. All he could do was accept the inevitable – that one day he would die. He looked up at the sky again. All the talk of his soul being sold to the devil didn’t really worry him. He didn’t believe in the devil and he didn’t believe in souls. But he did believe in death, and that was what truly scared him.

He walked back to the pub. It was just after three o’clock and the lunchtime trade had gone. Two pensioners in cloth caps were sitting in a corner, one with a terrier asleep at his feet. Nightingale nodded at them as he went up to the bar. The publican was a jovial fat man with slicked-back hair, wearing a collarless shirt and red braces. ‘Afternoon, squire, what can I get you?’ he asked.