Midnight: The Second Jack Nightingale Supernatural Thriller by Stephen Leather

copper?’
    ‘For my sins,’ said Nightingale.
    ‘Never had much stock in that,’ said Thomas. ‘The best cops are the ones who put in the years on the streets. That’s where you learn what matters, not on bloody courses.’
    ‘I walked a beat,’ said Nightingale.
    ‘Yeah, but I bet you made sergeant in three years and inspector two years after that.’
    Nightingale shrugged. ‘That’s the way it works,’ he said. He blew smoke up into the air. ‘I figure you don’t get too many serial killers in this neck of the woods.’
    ‘We had one back in 1995,’ said Thomas. ‘I was a lowly DC then but I was on the case. Guy called Peter Moore killed four men for fun. But you’re right – they’re few and far between. Of course, we don’t know for sure that there’s one out there now.’
    ‘Could be a cluster, right?’
    ‘Could be. You get cancer clusters and disappearance clusters, so a suicide cluster is possible.’
    ‘Is there anything about any of the suicides that suggests there was someone else involved?’
    Thomas shook his head. ‘No forensics, no eyewitnesses.’
    ‘Notes?’
    ‘Sometimes. Not always. It could be that the ones that have notes are genuine suicides.’
    Nightingale inhaled, holding the smoke deep in his lungs for several seconds, and then exhaled slowly. ‘What about methods? How did the ones who didn’t leave notes kill themselves?’
    ‘Hanging, like Connie Miller. Tablets. Slashed wrists.’
    ‘But always in private? No witnesses?’
    ‘Nothing suspicious in that,’ said Thomas. ‘Women tend to do it quietly. It’s men who want to go out in a blaze of glory – throwing themselves in front of trains or smashing up their cars. Women are the gentler sex, God bless them.’
    ‘Mrs Miller said that her daughter didn’t go out much.’
    ‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ said Thomas. ‘She wasn’t one for the bright lights, but she had plenty of friends. And none of them thought that she was depressed.’
    ‘She was online quite a lot, that’s what Mrs Miller said.’
    ‘Who isn’t, these days?’
    ‘Did you check her computer?’
    Thomas narrowed his eyes. ‘You wouldn’t be trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs, would you?’
    Nightingale chuckled. ‘Wouldn’t dare,’ he said. ‘But she might have been talking to someone on email or on social networking sites, Facebook, MySpace, those sorts of places.’
    ‘There was nothing on her computer that raised any red flags,’ said Thomas. ‘We checked her emails. And her Facebook page. And we gave the house a going-over. And we spoke to her family, friends and colleagues. They weren’t aware of anyone in her life who might have been a danger to her.’
    ‘So the killer, if there is one, is a stranger.’
    ‘Which, statistically, means a white middle-aged male in a low-paid job who wet his bed and set fires and tortured small animals when he was a kid.’
    ‘That’s probably half the male population of Wales, right?’ Nightingale grinned. ‘Joke.’
    The superintendent blew smoke. ‘What about you? Were you a bed-wetter?’
    ‘I didn’t kill Connie Miller,’ said Nightingale. ‘I live in London; why would I come all the way to Wales to kill? It’d be a hell of a lot easier to do it on my home turf. And a lot easier to hide what I was doing.’
    ‘You might have a reason.’
    ‘Like what? I hate the Welsh, is that it?’
    ‘Who knows?’ said Thomas. ‘The Yorkshire Ripper went after prostitutes. Harold Shipman murdered pensioners. Maybe you’ve got a thing about Welsh women. Maybe you were once snubbed by Charlotte Church or Catherine Zeta-Jones. I’m not a profiler, I’m a cop. And at the moment you’re the only suspect I’ve got.’
    ‘Assuming you have a serial killer and not just a statistical variation,’ said Nightingale.
    ‘Killer or not, it doesn’t explain why you keep breaking into houses in Abersoch.’
    ‘I didn’t break in anywhere,’ said Nightingale, though he