Free Lastnight by Stephen Leather Page B

listening.’
    ‘Thanks.’
    ‘No, I’m serious. Most men when they listen to a woman, they’re just waiting for a chance to speak. They nod and they pretend to be interested but really they just want to tell you what’s on their mind. But you really listen, don’t you?’
    ‘I try.’ He smiled. ‘But yes, I do want to hear what you have to say.’
    ‘You see, if they’d sent you instead of that silly Victim Support woman, you might have helped.’
    ‘Well, I hope I’ve helped now.’
    She nodded and smiled over the top of her cup. ‘You have. And the sweet tea was a good idea.’
    ‘Now I was taught to always offer a person in crisis a cup of sweet tea and ideally a biscuit,’ he said.
    ‘Would you like a biscuit?’
    Nightingale laughed. ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

8
    N ightingale sat with Zoe for thirty minutes until her uncle arrived. Murray was in his fifties with greying hair and wire-rimmed spectacles and wearing a Savile Row suit that had almost certainly cost more than Nightingale’s entire wardrobe. He hugged Zoe and nodded at Nightingale over her shoulder. Zoe began to cry almost immediately and Nightingale slipped out, knowing that there was nothing left for him to do.
    He took the stairs down to the ground floor, retrieved his MGB and drove back to South Kensington. Jenny was at her computer when he walked into the office and she smiled up at him. ‘How did it go?’ she asked.
    ‘So far so good, I guess,’ he said, hanging his coat up by the door. ‘You?’
    ‘I’ve spent the day Facebooking and checking Twitter accounts but I don’t see any direct connections.’
    ‘That’s a pity.’
    ‘There are some indirect connections. Oh, I should say that Daryl Heaton didn’t have a Facebook account or a Twitter account.’
    ‘Maybe he had a real life,’ said Nightingale. ‘He was almost forty, he probably couldn’t be bothered. I don’t see the point in all that social media stuff.’
    ‘You know you have a Facebook page?’
    ‘I do not.’
    ‘I set it up for you. It’s linked to your blog.’
    Nightingale’s jaw dropped. ‘My blog?’
    Jenny grinned. ‘You’ve got just over two hundred likes.’
    ‘Likes?’
    ‘People who like your page.’
    ‘When did all this happen?’
    ‘Over the last couple of months. It’s all about bringing in new business, Jack, and social media and blogs can do that. I’ve just put you on LinkedIn, too.’
    ‘I’m not going to bother asking what that is.’
    ‘You don’t have to, I’ll handle it all for you.’ She nodded at her monitor. ‘There are some connections that I’ve found. For instance, Gabe and Luke followed each other on Twitter. But Gabe has fifteen thousand followers and pretty much follows anyone who follows him. I can’t find any conversations between the two of them.’
    ‘Fifteen thousand?’
    ‘That’s nothing in the Twitter world,’ said Jenny. ‘Justin Bieber has more than forty million.’
    ‘How does anyone have forty million friends?’
    ‘They’re not friends, Jack. They’re the people following his tweets. Gabe had fifteen thousand and I guess it’s because he tweeted a lot about music and video games.’ She sat back and stretched her arms above her head. ‘I’ve been working my way through their Twitter feeds and I can’t see them being at the same place at the same time. But I’ve only been back about a month. Luke was a compulsive tweeter and so was Stella. Fifteen or twenty times a day.’
    ‘Did they tweet on the days they died?’
    Jenny nodded. ‘Stella tweeted from a pub called the Hobgoblin. It’s a Goth place in Camden. Six tweets in all, mainly saying how all the guys she saw were less than attractive.’ She grinned. ‘She said there were only two-baggers there.’
    ‘Two-baggers?’
    ‘I think the idea is that they’re so ugly that you have to put a bag over their head. And one for your own head so that no one recognises you.’ She shrugged. ‘She had just turned