The Whisper Man

by Stephen Leather

  Nightingale sat back in his chair. ‘People kill themselves,’ he said. ‘It’s a fact of life.’

  ‘Yes they do,’ said Chalmers. ‘But usually there’s a history of depression or mental illness leading to it. Or there’s a stressor involved. They lose their job or a relationship breaks down or they get diagnosed with an incurable illness. The suicides I’m talking about, there’s no rhyme or reason. Perfectly well-adjusted, happy people are killing themselves.’

  Nightingale frowned. ‘And what do you expect me to do about it?’

  ‘I was hoping that as you were on the spot, you might have seen something that would shed some light on it.’

  ‘She seemed fine,’ said Nightingale. ‘She wasn’t nervous, she didn’t appear to be under any stress. Even as she ran towards the train she wasn’t angry or sad, she was pretty emotionless.’ His frown deepened. ‘Come to think of it, her face was blank, pretty much.’

  ‘Blank?’

  ‘Expressionless,’ said Nightingale. He leaned forward. ‘Yeah, there was no expression at all. And considering she was about to throw herself under a moving train, that’s not what you’d expect, is it?’

  ‘I have zero expectations on this, Nightingale. I just want to know what’s happening and if I can stop it happening again.’

  ‘There are no connections between the victims?’ asked Nightingale. He saw a look of contempt flash across the Superintendent’s face and he held up his hands. ‘I didn’t mean to teach you how to suck eggs,’ he said. ‘I was just thinking out loud.’

  ‘We checked, obviously. We even plotted their movements using their mobile phones and at no point were they ever less than half a mile apart. No family connections, no job connections, no connections, period.’

  ‘So maybe it is just random? A statistical anomaly.’

  ‘Yes, maybe.’

  Nightingale could hear the lack of conviction in the man’s voice. ‘But if it’s not, what are you thinking? That somehow one person is causing this to happen? A serial killer who makes his victims kill themselves?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think, Nightingale.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Okay, I’ve got things to do. You can push off.’

  Nightingale stood up and put on his coat. ‘Any chance of a lift back to my office?’

  ‘About as much chance as hell freezing over,’ said Chalmers.

  CHAPTER 4

  Jenny McLean looked up from her desk as Nightingale walked in. He was holding two Starbucks coffees but the peace offering didn’t have any effect. ‘Where have you been?’ she hissed. ‘I told you we had a client.’

  ‘Helping the police with their enquiries.’

  ‘You said you were going to see your accountant.’

  ‘That was the plan.’

  He put one of the coffees down in front of her, then pulled a Starbucks bag from his raincoat pocket and put it on her desk. ‘Banana choc-chip muffin,’ he said.

  ‘You’re still late,’ she said. ‘And Professor Dixon was on time. He’s waiting in your office and he’s not happy.’

  ‘What’s his problem?’

  ‘Your tardiness, for one. But the reason he’s here is his wife.’

  ‘So a divorce job. Terrific.’ He sipped his coffee.

  Jenny got to her feet. ‘You look like shit,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve had a rough day so far.’ He sipped his coffee as Jenny flashed him a disgusted look before walking into his office. He followed her.

  ‘I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting,’ said Jenny to a middle-aged man with receding hair and wire-framed spectacles. ‘Mr Nightingale was delayed.’

  ‘Body under a train,’ said Nightingale. ‘Some people have no consideration.’ He stuck out his hand. The man stood up and smiled showing uneven teeth. His skin was white and pasty as if he rarely saw the sun, and while Nightingale wasn’t a man who cared over much about his own appearance, even he could tell that what was left of the man’s hair seemed to have been cut by a man with vision problems and blunt scissors.

  ‘Simon Dixon,’ he said. ‘Professor Simon Dixon.’

  Nightingale smiled. ‘Jack Nightingale,’ he said. ‘Private Detective Jack Nightingale.’

  Dixon frowned at Nightingale’s attempt at humour.

  ‘Can I get you another cup of tea, Professor Dixon?’ asked Jenny, flashing Nightingale a warning look.

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ he said, sitting down again. ‘Three cups was more than sufficient.’

  Nightingale put his coffee down on the desk, then took off his raincoat and handed it to Jenny. She looked at him disdainfully. ‘Seriously?’ she said.

  ‘Please, would you mind hanging it up for me?’

  She shook her head in annoyance and went back into the office while Nightingale sat behind his desk. ‘So, my assistant tells me you are having marriage problems?’ he said.

  Dixon nodded. ‘My wife is a witch,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Nightingale. ‘It’s a shame that more men don’t find that out before the ceremony.’

  Dixon frowned. He had a habit of constantly crossing one leg over the other, then reversing their position. Nightingale’s finely honed detective skills deduced nervousness, and he was about to flash the man an encouraging smile when he spoke again.

  ‘I think you misunderstand me, Mr Nightingale,’ he said. ‘I’m not complaining about Catherine’s character. I mean exactly what I say. My wife is a practising witch.’

  ‘A witch? As in flying around on a broomstick? Come on, Mr Dixon, wasn’t that a film? Bewitched?’

  ‘It’s actually Professor Dixon. And I have heard of the film, and the TV series, but believe me, this is no comedy. I’m pretty much at my wits end and I need your help.’

  Dixon seemed pretty young for a Professor, which might have accounted for his insistence on the title. Nightingale took a closer look at his face, perhaps he was a little older than his first guess, there were plenty of wrinkles round his eyes. Black bags under them too, as if he hadn’t been sleeping well lately.

  Dixon shifted in his chair, opened his mouth, closed it again and finally started to speak. ‘It’s going to sound ridiculous,’ he said.

  ‘I hear a lot of strange things,’ said Nightingale. ‘Just tell me. Start at the beginning.’

  ‘Yes. Well, as I said, My name is Simon Dixon, I’m originally from Hastings, but I haven’t been back there in years. It probably starts at University, which was where I met Catherine.’

  ‘Which University?’

  ‘Durham, we were both in the same college, but we never really met until our final year, and have been together ever since. She...we...she was the first woman I ever slept with. Still is. And I’m the only man she’s...’

  Even if it were true, Nightingale thought that was probably too much information. Though if it weren’t true, it could be useful, depending on what it was Dixon actually wanted him to do. It seemed the man was getting to the point pretty slowly.

  Jenny came back into the room and sat on a chair next to the door.

  ‘We’ve been together ever since,’ continued Dixon. ‘All through University, then we both did Masters and PhDs, me in Anthropology and Catherine in European History. After that we managed to get lecturing jobs at the same University, Sussex. Quite a stroke of luck that two suitable vacancies turned up at once.’

  Nightingale nodded, but said nothing. It was taking long enough as it was and he figured that asking questions would only slow things up.

  ‘We did five years there, then had another stroke of luck. Two senior lectureships came up and we got them.’

  ‘Same University again?’

  ‘No, that really would have been a coincidence, but close enough. Mine was at Kingston, hers at Brunel. Close enough for us to buy a house in the middle.’

  Nightingale was getting a little impatient now. ‘Well, congratulations,’ he said. ‘But is all this relevant?’

  ‘I had no idea at the time, but now I really think it is. On those d
ays when I believe the whole thing.’

  Nightingale had no idea what whole thing he might be talking about, but decided not to interrupt.

  ‘We’re both still there, but we’ve done very well. Catherine was made Professor of her department two years ago, the youngest ever, and I got my Professorship last year. Also the youngest ever at Kingston, as it happens.’

  There was no mistaking the tone of pride in Dixon’s voice, but Nightingale had congratulated him once and had reached his limit on ego-massaging. He nodded encouragingly, but Dixon had already begun speaking again.

  ‘That’s really when all this started,’ he said. ‘We went out and celebrated my promotion with some friends. Rather an expensive Chinese restaurant. We all had wine, then since we’d spent so much, the owner gave us a few rounds of Chinese liqueurs. I didn’t fancy it much, but Catherine really liked it, she finished hers and mine too. On top of the wine, it was a little too much for her. She’s never been that much of a drinker. Anyway, she was really quite squiffy, got rather affectionate in the taxi home. And then, when we actually got home, she wanted a nightcap. We have a cocktail cabinet, but it’s usually only for guests. That night she had a brandy on top of all the rest. And that’s when she told me.’

  Most other men would have asked the obvious question when Dixon paused for effect, but Nightingale had done several interrogation courses when he was a cop and the rule was to always let the other person speak as much as possible so he just smiled and nodded.

  ‘We were talking about how things had always seemed to work out so well for us, we’d always been so lucky. She laughed at that, and she said, ‘Yes, it’s like we have the luck of the Devil’ or something like that.’

  Nightingale leaned forward across the desk, looked straight into Dixon’s eyes, and this time he did interrupt.

  ‘Can you remember the exact words please, Professor?’

  Dixon pursed his lips and nodded.

  ‘I think those were the exact words, certainly about ‘the luck of the Devil’. I said something about us having a very efficient Guardian Angel, and she shook her head. She said the Angels had nothing to do with it. I asked her what she meant, she was getting pretty far gone by then, but I remember her exact words this time.’

  He paused again, but Nightingale wasn’t biting. Dixon finally got to the point.

  ‘That’s when she told me that I had married a witch. ‘You married a witch’ were her exact words.’

  ‘What did you say to that?’

  ‘Nothing much. I’d had quite a few too, so I didn’t take it seriously. I got her up to bed and we slept it off. I think it took me a couple of days to ask her about it.’

  ‘And what did she say?’

  ‘She laughed it off, or tried to. But there was a strangeness about her, the laughter wasn’t genuine it seemed to me, and something about her didn’t ring true. I know my wife very well, Mr Nightingale, or at least I thought I did.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Put it out of my mind, it all seemed rather silly, and it wasn’t as if either of us had achieved anything really out of the ordinary. Luck, certainly, but no lottery wins or anything like that. If she’d really been a witch, wouldn’t she have gone for a film star or a footballer rather than a professor at a minor university? I’m a rational man, Mr Nightingale...or at least I was.’

  There was obviously more to come, Nightingale needed a cigarette break, but didn’t want to interrupt Dixon’s story, so he forced the craving back down.

  ‘But it made me more sensitive to good luck and happy coincidences. Happy for me anyway. Two months ago, the senior Professor in my department dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of a lecture. Fifty-two years old, no history of heart problems. I got the job.’

  Nightingale shrugged his shoulders. ‘Happens all the time,’ he said. ‘People die. There was nothing suspicious about the death?’

  ‘Nothing at all, as far as I know.’

  ‘So what, then?’

  ‘By itself nothing, though Dennis Jackson’s death did create an opening for me. Not one I’d been looking for, or thinking about. I liked Dennis. And then...’

  Another pause. Again Nightingale held his tongue. ‘And then, four weeks ago, Catherine’s head of department threw herself from the fourth floor of a multi-storey car-park.’

  Nightingale’s eyebrows headed upwards.

  ‘Any reason?’

  ‘None that anyone could come up with. She was happily married, with two grown-up children, no marital problems, no health or money worries.’

  ‘And your wife is likely to get the position?’

  ‘Confirmed last week.’

  ‘But it’s all just a string of coincidences. Have you mentioned it to your wife again?’

  ‘Yes, several times in the last few months but she laughs it off. The same false laugh as before. Tells me not to be so silly.’

  ‘So why are you being silly?’

  ‘I’ve been doing some investigating of my own lately.’

  ‘And? Broomsticks in the closet?’ He smiled thinly when Dixon shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Joke.’

  The Professor didn’t show any sign of finding Nightingale amusing. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We have a happy marriage in...er...every sense of the word, but Catherine is prone to insomnia, so she has her own bedroom for when she can’t sleep and doesn’t want to disturb me. She also uses it as overflow wardrobe space, she has a lot of clothes. I searched it when she was out. I really had no idea what I was looking for. I found it under the mattress.’

  Again Nightingale didn’t bite. Dixon was a master of the dramatic pause.

  ‘It was a book, Mr Nightingale. A brown leather book, which seemed to have very old binding, but crisp new pages. Black pages. Each page had a name written on it in gold ink. And a date. The final name was Catherine’s head of department, Sheila Fletcher. And the date was the sixth of last month. The date she died.’

  ‘But that proves nothing, a list of names and dates.’

  ‘Ordinarily I’d agree, except that I found that book four days before Sheila Fletcher killed herself.’

  Nightingale frowned. ‘Four days before? That does change things.’

  ‘Yes. Though I didn’t think of it at the time. It was only when I heard about her death that it became a connection.’

  ‘Tell me about the other names and dates.’

  ‘Well, there were a few I didn’t recognise, with dates before I met Catherine. The first one that was familiar was my girlfriend from Hastings.’

  ‘She died?’

  ‘No, I still hear from her, she’s married with two kids. But the date in the book was pretty much around the time she called me to say she’d met someone else.’

  ‘Your wife knew her?’

  ‘No, they never met, I’ve talked about her, but it was over before I met Catherine.’

  Nightingale nodded. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘Some of the names after that I didn’t know either. But there were people I’d worked with, some of whom took other jobs and left my way clear, I recognised the name of a woman who’d been on a short list for a lecturing job with me. The last name before Sheila Fletcher was Dennis Jackson, and it had the date of his death.’

  ‘Your head of department?’

  Dixon nodded.

  ‘So, did you tell your wife you’d found the book?’

  ‘Not at first. Once Sheila Fletcher died and I made the connection I took days thinking about it, trying to make a decision. It’s not that easy to accuse the woman you love of being complicit in people’s deaths. Finally I had it out with her two days ago. I told her I’d found the book, told her about the prediction of Sheila Fletcher’s death, and I demanded to know what it was all about.’

  ‘And what did she say?’

  ‘She was furious and terrified at the same time, it seemed to me. She berated me for snooping, denied everything, but I just kept at her with it and finally she broke down.’


  Nightingale waited again.

  ‘She told me that it had been her great aunt who initiated her to the art, as a novice at just sixteen. Apparently the aunt had come over from Central Europe as a refugee at some time and had married an Englishman. She was initiated into a group near her home, though apparently she’d moved on and up in the system since then. Now she was with a much more powerful group and could use greater influence. To influence people in stronger ways.’

  ‘To kill, is that what you mean?’ said Nightingale. ‘They were getting people to kill for them?’

  ‘She swore that was none of her doing, the leader of the group just told her that things would arrange themselves, once they performed the ritual and the name was written in the book. She swore to me that after Sheila Fletcher’s death she would never use it again. She was going to leave the group.’

  ‘And you believed her?’

  Dixon nodded.

  ‘So what is this group?’ asked Nightingale. ‘Do they have a name?’

  ‘That she wouldn’t tell me for any amount of persuasion. Talking about it even obliquely seemed to drive her hysterical with fear. In the end I left it there, we both took a couple of sleeping pills and she went to sleep in the spare room.’

  ‘And afterwards?’

  ‘There was no afterwards. When I woke up she was gone. That was yesterday morning.’

  ‘Had she taken luggage? Packed her bags?’

  ‘Not that I could see. But the book was gone. At least, I haven’t been able to find it.’

  Nightingale frowned. He had about a dozen questions that were just itching to be asked. He settled on - ‘Do you have any children?’

  ‘No. We’ve been trying recently, but it hadn’t happened. We’ve been thinking of making some appointments with fertility experts.’

  Nightingale pressed on. ‘Did you try her relatives?’

  ‘She doesn’t have any left, as far as I know. Her parents died in a car crash a year or so before I met her.’

  ‘The aunt?’