Midnight: The Second Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thriller by Stephen Leather Page B

Chalmers. If I wanted to kill someone I’d be a bit more creative than that.’
    ‘Maybe you lost your temper. Maybe he said something that set you off.’
    ‘We were talking on the balcony and he jumped.’
    ‘Why did he do that?’
    Nightingale shrugged. ‘I really don’t know. We were having a conversation and he jumped.’
    ‘Like Simon Underwood did?’
    ‘Am I helping you with your enquiries into the death of George Harrison or Simon Underwood?’ said Nightingale.
    ‘There seems to be a pattern here. You go to talk to people and they die. It happened in Canary Wharf with Simon Underwood, in Abersoch with Constance Miller and in Battersea with George Harrison.’
    ‘What do you want me to say?’ asked Nightingale.
    ‘I want the truth,’ said Chalmers, leaning forward and interlinking the fingers of both hands as if he was about to pray. ‘I want you to tell me what happened. I want you to tell me why George Harrison died. Did you kill him?’
    Nightingale’s jaw dropped. ‘Did I what?’
    ‘Did you push George Harrison off the balcony?’
    ‘Of course not.’
    ‘He just decided to commit suicide while you were there?’
    Nightingale nodded. ‘That’s what happened.’
    ‘And Miss McLean will back you up on that, will she?’
    ‘She was inside the flat. She wasn’t on the balcony.’
    ‘So you’re saying that she won’t be able to back you up?’
    ‘She didn’t see me push Harrison off the balcony because that’s not what happened.’ Nightingale stared scornfully at the superintendent. ‘You’ve got nothing,’ he said. ‘If you did you would have charged me by now. You know I was there and I’m not denying it, but there’ll be no forensic that suggests I did anything but talk to him. Jenny McLean was there and she’ll back me up.’
    ‘We’ll see about that,’ said Chalmers.
    ‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘We will.’ He looked at the clock on the wall. ‘Are we done?’
    ‘We’re done when I say that we’re done,’ said the superintendent. ‘We have CCTV footage of you arriving at the tower block where Mr Harrison lived. And we have video of you leaving thirty-eight minutes later. So you and Mr Harrison must have had quite a chat before he decided to throw himself off the balcony.’
    ‘He let us in, we went out onto the balcony, we talked for two minutes at most, and then he jumped.’
    ‘Why were you on the balcony?’
    Nightingale sighed. ‘He wanted some air. And I wanted a smoke. I was just about to light a cigarette when he jumped.’
    ‘Then explain to me why you were in the building for thirty-eight minutes.’
    Nightingale rubbed the back of his neck. ‘I don’t like lifts. We walked up nine flights and we walked down.’
    ‘Why don’t you like lifts?’
    Nightingale folded his arms. ‘I just don’t.’
    ‘Fear of heights?’
    ‘It’s nothing to do with heights. It’s being suspended in a box held up by wires that makes me nervous.’
    The superintendent tapped his pen against his clipboard. ‘So let’s say it takes – what, a minute per floor? Nine floors, nine minutes. Probably a bit faster going down. Let’s say a total of sixteen minutes up and down. That leaves twenty-two minutes. You said that you spoke for just two minutes before he went over the balcony. So that leaves twenty minutes to be accounted for. What were you and Miss McLean doing for those twenty minutes?’
    Nightingale stared at the superintendent but didn’t say anything.
    ‘Are you refusing to answer the question?’
    ‘I’m thinking how best to phrase my answer,’ said Nightingale.
    ‘Just tell the truth,’ said Chalmers. ‘That’s all we want. What were you doing for twenty minutes?’
    ‘I was cleaning,’ said Nightingale quietly. ‘I was cleaning the surfaces that we touched.’
    ‘You were removing forensic evidence,’ said the superintendent.
    ‘You could say that, yes.’
    ‘You wiped away your fingerprints. You cleaned everything you had touched, and