Read Online (1992) Prophecy by Peter James - Free Book Online

it.
    ‘I’m sorry about the news – about your friend being killed.’
    ‘Thanks,’ she said heavily. ‘I didn’t really know him that well – hadn’t seen him since university. But he was nice.’ She hunched her shoulders and smiled more brightly. ‘Doesn’t seem as if either of us are having much good news tonight.’
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘Well – except that you’re here, and that’s pretty good news.’
    Their eyes met. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
    Someone at Seb’s table was telling a story and a girl was squealing in protest. Frannie felt a chilly draught from the air-conditioning against her neck, then a sudden rash of goose-pimples down between her shoulder-blades. She drank some more of the cocktail, but could not feel any effects from it yet. Oliver Halkin and Jonathan Mountjoy’s death were now intertwined in her mind, as if somehow connected. She tried to control the crazy notion that the news was an omen about her and Oliver. That she should pull out now, while she still could.
    A waiter hovered; they looked at their menus and ordered, then there was an awkward silence. Oliver shook a stick out of his packet of
pannini
, then laid both the stick and the packet down, aligning them carefully so they lay parallel to his cutlery. ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ he said.
    ‘I was thinking about the coincidence – of bumping into Seb – and that we should both know him.’
    Oliver broke a piece off the end of his
pannini
stick and ate it in silence. ‘Coincidences make me uneasy,’ he said.
    ‘Why’s that?’
    He shrugged, then lowered his eyes to the tablecloth, as if embarrassed by what he was about to say. ‘I’vehad rather too many in the past few years; not very happy ones. I find them bad news. They bother me. Probably sounds daft.’
    Frannie smiled back at him, surprised that he was superstitious. ‘They happen to everybody, surely? Don’t you ever have harmless coincidences – like when you’re thinking about someone and they phone you?’
    ‘I’m not sure there is such a thing as a meaningless coincidence.’
    As she watched his serious face, she began to feel excluded, and her sceptical grin faded. ‘What’s happened to make you feel that way?’
    He fiddled around for some moments with the
pannini
packet, then responded in a way that did nothing to make her feel better. ‘I suppose the worst was my wife’s death.’ He moved his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Frannie said. ‘What happened?’ She felt that she needed to know.
    He leaned forward, pressed his fingernail hard into the tablecloth, and with intense concentration began to make a straight line across. ‘Almost any sort of coincidence,’ he said distantly, as if he had not heard her question. ‘Bumping into someone like Seb Holland. The same number coming up a couple of times. Anything.’
    His expression suddenly changed into a distant smile that seemed to be directed at the universe in general rather than at her. ‘The French mathematician Laplace said that chance is the expression of man’s ignorance.’
    ‘Is that what you believe?’
    He picked his glass up by the stem, cupped the base in the palm of his hand and twisted it round slowly, studying the contents with an air of suspicion. ‘Chaos. All these bubbles firing off in here at random. But theeffect works; it tastes good and it’s intoxicating. Order from chaos! See?’ He continued to hold the glass in the air as if in a mood of childish contentment.
    ‘Perhaps the next coincidence is going to change your luck,’ she said and drank some more.
    ‘Maybe,’ he said, unconvinced.
    An image slipped silently through her mind. Jonathan Mountjoy wearing a battered old greatcoat, standing with his hands in his pockets, staring into space. That was how she remembered him, always slightly out of it, in his own world. Dozy, silent Jonathan, handing over his wallet, then the gun coming up, firing.
    Over.
    She swallowed, placed