Was he pushed? Did he trip? Did Nightingale hit him and he fell accidentally? Was Underwood so stricken by guilt that he threw himself out of the window? The investigators put every possible scenario to Nightingale, with a few impossible ones for good measure, but Nightingale refused to say anything. He didn’t even say, ‘No comment.’ He just sat staring at the investigators with a look of bored indifference on his face. They asked him several times if he wanted the services of his Police Federation representative, but Nightingale shook his head. He spoke only to ask to go to the toilet or outside to smoke a cigarette.
For the first couple of days the newspapers were after Nightingale’s blood, crying police brutality, but when a sympathetic clerk in the coroner’s office leaked the post-mortem details to a journalist on the Sunday Times and it became known that Underwood had been molesting his daughter, the tide turned and the tabloids called for Nightingale to be honoured rather than persecuted.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission sent two more investigators to talk to him but he was as uncommunicative with them as he had been with the PSD detectives. The IPCC officers offered Nightingale a deaclass="underline" if he told them that Underwood had jumped there would be no charges. If he told them that Underwood had slipped and fallen through the window, there would be no charges. All they wanted was to close the file on the man’s death. Nightingale said nothing.
There were some in the Met who said Nightingale had his head screwed on right, that the IPCC and the PSD were lying sons of bitches and that, no matter what he said, they’d hang him out to dry. There were others who said that Nightingale was an honourable man, that he’d killed Underwood and wasn’t prepared to lie about what he’d done. Whatever the reason, whatever had happened to Underwood, Nightingale simply refused to talk about it, and after a week the investigators gave up.
Nightingale went to Sophie’s funeral but kept his distance, not wanting to intrude on the family’s grief. A photographer from one of the Sunday tabloids tried to take his picture but Nightingale grabbed his camera and smashed it against a gravestone. He left before Sophie’s coffin was lowered into the cold, damp soil.
There were two reports into the death, by the PSD and the IPCC. Both were inconclusive and criticised Nightingale for refusing to co-operate. Without his statement, there was no way anyone could know what had happened in the meeting room that day. Two eyewitnesses had seen the body fall to the Tarmac, close enough to hear Sophie’s father shout, ‘No!’ all the way down, but not close enough to see if he had jumped or if he had been pushed. There was CCTV footage of the reception area, which clearly showed Nightingale arriving and leaving, but there was no coverage of the room and no CCTV cameras covering the area where Underwood had hit the ground. Both reports went to the Crown Prosecution Service at Ludgate, and they decided there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute Nightingale.
He had been on suspension until the reports were published, when he was called into the office of his superintendent who told him that his career was over and the best thing for everyone was for him to resign. Superintendent Chalmers had the letter already typed out and Nightingale signed it there and then, handed over his warrant card and walked out of New Scotland Yard, never to return.
Sophie’s mother killed herself two weeks after the funeral. She swallowed a bottle of sleeping tablets with a quantity of paracetamol, and left a note saying she was so, so sorry she hadn’t been a better mother.
3
Two years later
Nightingale knew he was dreaming, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. He knew he wasn’t really climbing the stairs to the twentieth floor of the tower block in Canary Wharf where Simon Underwood worked. He was moving too slowly, for a start, and there was no exertion, no sweat, no shortness of breath. He walked out of the stairwell, showed his warrant card to a faceless receptionist, who shook her head but didn’t say anything, and moved silently down a corridor to Underwood’s office, even though he knew the banker wasn’t there. Then he was going down another corridor, the sound of his heartbeat echoing off the walls, towards a set of double doors. They burst open and Underwood was there, standing in front of a group of suits. His mouth moved but made no sound. Nightingale pointed at the doorway and the suits hurried out, leaving him alone with the banker. ‘You’re going to hell, Jack Nightingale,’ said Underwood, his eyes blazing with hatred. Then, in slow motion, he turned to the floor-to-ceiling window behind him.
Nightingale opened his mouth to shout at the man but his alarm went off and he woke, bathed in sweat. He lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling. He had had the nightmare at least once a week since the day that Simon Underwood had fallen to his death. He groped for his packet of Marlboro and smoked one to the filter before getting up and showering.
His flat was a third-floor walk-up in Bayswater, two bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen he hardly ever used. On the ground floor a Chinese restaurant did a great bowl of duck noodles and it was a short walk to the tube station. Nightingale had bought the flat when he’d been promoted to inspector and in another twenty-one years he’d own it outright. He liked Bayswater. Day and night it was lively and buzzing – there were always people around and shops open – and on the days when he felt like jogging, Hyde Park was only a few minutes away. Not that he felt much like jogging, these days. He went downstairs, bought himself a cup of Costa coffee, then walked to the lock-up where he kept his MGB and drove to the office of Nightingale Investigations. It was in South Kensington, another walk-up but this time above a hairdresser’s that offered him a fifty per cent discount, provided he allowed a trainee to cut his hair.
Nightingale arrived shortly after nine o’clock and his secretary was already at her desk. Jenny McLean was in her mid twenties, with short blonde hair and blue eyes that always reminded Nightingale of Cameron Diaz. Jenny was shorter than the actress and smarter, educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, then Cambridge, and fluent in German, French and Japanese. Her family owned a country pile with five hundred bedrooms and twelve acres, or vice versa, chased foxes and shot wild birds at the weekend. Nightingale had absolutely no idea why she worked for him. He’d placed an advert in the local paper and she’d walked off the street with her CV and told him she’d always wanted to work for a private investigator, that she could type and knew her way around Microsoft Office. He’d wondered at first if she was an undercover agent for the Inland Revenue, checking on his tax returns, but she’d worked for him for more than a year and now he didn’t know how he’d manage without her. She smiled brightly and nodded at the door to his office. ‘Mrs Brierley’s already here,’ she said.
‘Can’t wait to hear the bad news, huh?’ said Nightingale. He didn’t like divorce work. He didn’t like following unfaithful husbands or wayward wives, and he didn’t like breaking bad news to women who cried or men who threatened violence. He didn’t like it, but it paid the bills and he had a lot of bills to pay.
‘Can I get you a coffee or a tea, Mrs Brierley?’ he asked, as he walked into his office.
Joan Brierley was in her early fifties, a heavy-set woman with dyed blonde hair, too much makeup and lines around her mouth from years of smoking. She declined and held up a packet of Benson amp; Hedges. ‘Do you mind if I…?’ she said.