Private Games Read online

  ‘Here’ was a restaurant near Tottenham Court Road called Hakkasan. It had been Kate’s favourite Chinese restaurant in London. It was also the inspector’s favourite Chinese restaurant in London.

  ‘But this place is packed,’ Pottersfield said, taking a seat with some reluctance. ‘It will probably take an hour to …’

  ‘I’ve already ordered,’ Knight said. ‘The dish Kate liked best.’

  His sister-in-law looked down at the table. At that angle she looked every bit Kate’s older sister. ‘Okay,’ she said at last. ‘Why am I here, Peter?’

  Knight gave her the rundown on the Brazlic sisters – the Furies – and their alleged war crimes. As he was finishing his summary, their dinner, a double order of Szechuan Mugyu beef, arrived.

  Pottersfield waited until the waiter left before asking, ‘And when were these sisters last heard of?’

  ‘July 1995, not long after the NATO-supervised ceasefire expired,’ Knight replied. ‘They were supposedly apprehended by Bosnian police officers after the mother of two of their victims recognised the Furies when they tried to buy food in a local produce market. According to that same mother, the girls were taken at night to a police station in a small village south-west of Srebrenica where they were to be turned over to NATO forces who were investigating the atrocities.’

  Pottersfield said, ‘And what? They escaped?’

  Knight nodded. ‘Villagers heard automatic-weapon fire coming from inside the police station in the dead of night. They were too frightened to investigate until the following morning when the bodies of seven Bosnians, including the two police officers, were found massacred. The Brazlics have been hunted ever since, but none of them surfaced until today.’

  ‘How did they get out of the police station?’ Pottersfield asked. ‘I’m assuming they’d been placed in restraints.’

  ‘You would think so,’ Knight agreed. ‘But here’s the other strange thing. Mladic’s kill squads used, for the most part, Soviet-era full-copper-jacket ammunition. So did the Bosnian police. It was Red Army surplus and found in all their unfired weapons. But the seven Bosnian men in the station were killed by 5.56-millimetre rounds throwing a very different kind of bullet – the kind given to NATO peacekeepers, in fact.’

  Pottersfield picked at her meal with chopsticks, thinking. After several bites, she said, ‘So maybe one of the men who were killed that night had a NATO weapon and the sisters got hold of it and fought their way out.’

  ‘That’s one plausible scenario. Or a third party helped them, someone who was part of the NATO operation. I’m leaning towards that explanation.’

  ‘Evidence?’ she asked.

  ‘The bullets, primarily,’ Knight said. ‘But also because James Daring and Selena Farrell were in the Balkans in the mid-1990s attached to that NATO mission. Daring was assigned to protect antiquities from looters. But apart from that photo I saw of Farrell holding an automatic weapon in front of a NATO field truck, her role in the operation remains a mystery to me.’

  ‘Not for long,’ Pottersfield said. ‘I’ll petition NATO for her files.’

  ‘The war-crimes prosecutor is already on it,’ Knight said.

  The Scotland Yard inspector nodded, but her focus was far away. ‘So what’s your theory: that this third entity in the escape – Daring or Farrell or both – could be Cronus?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Knight said. ‘It follows, anyway.’

  ‘In some manner,’ she allowed while still managing to sound sceptical.

  They ate in silence for several minutes before Pottersfield said: ‘There’s only one thing that bothers me about this theory of yours, Peter.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Knight asked.

  His sister-in-law squinted and waved her chopsticks at him. ‘Let’s say you’re right and Cronus was the person or persons who helped the sisters escape, and let’s say that Cronus managed to turn these war criminals into anarchists, Olympics haters, whatever you want to call them.

  ‘The evidence to date reveals people who are not only brutal, but brutally effective. They managed to penetrate some of the toughest security in the world twice, kill, and escape twice.’

  Knight saw where she was going: ‘You’re saying they’re detail-orientated, they’ve planned to the last factor, and yet they make mistakes with these letters.’

  Pottersfield nodded. ‘Hair, skin, and now a fingerprint.’

  ‘Don’t forget the wig,’ Knight said. ‘Anything on that?’

  ‘Not yet, though this war-crimes angle should help us if DNA samples were ever taken from the sisters.’

  Knight ate a couple more bites, and then said, ‘There’s also a question as to whether Farrell, Daring or both of them had the wherewithal, the financial means to concoct a deadly assault on the Olympics. It has to cost money, and lots of it.’

  ‘I thought of that too,’ Pottersfield replied. ‘This morning we took a look at James Daring’s bank accounts and credit-card statements. That television show has made him wealthy. And his accounts show several major cash withdrawals lately. Professor Farrell, on the other hand, lives more modestly. Except for hefty purchases at expensive fashion boutiques here and in Paris, and getting her hair done at trendy salons once a month, she leads a fairly austere life.’

  Knight recalled the dressing table and the high-end clothes in the professor’s bedroom and tried again to make it fit with the dowdy woman he’d met at King’s College. He couldn’t. Was she dressing up to meet Daring? Was there something between them that Knight and his colleagues weren’t aware of?

  He glanced at his watch. ‘I’ll pay and take my leave, then. The new nanny is working overtime.’

  Pottersfield looked away as he put his napkin on the table and raised his hand for the bill. ‘How are they?’ she asked. ‘The twins?’

  ‘They’re fine,’ Knight said, and then gazed sincerely at his sister-in-law. ‘I know they would love to meet their Aunt Elaine. Don’t you think they deserve to have a relationship with their mother’s sister?’

  It was as if invisible armour instantly enclosed the Scotland Yard inspector. Her posture went tight and she said, ‘I’m simply not there yet. I don’t know if I could bear it.’

  ‘Their birthday’s a week from Saturday.’

  ‘Do you honestly think I could ever forget that day?’ Pottersfield asked, getting up from the table.

  ‘No, Elaine,’ Knight replied. ‘And neither will I. Ever. But I have hope that at some point I’ll be able to forgive that day. I hope you will, too.’

  Pottersfield said, ‘You’ll settle the bill?’

  Knight nodded. She turned to leave. He called after her, ‘Elaine, I’ll probably be having a birthday party for them at some point. I’d like it if you came.’

  Pottersfield looked over her shoulder at him, her voice raspy when she replied. ‘Like I said, Peter, I don’t know if I’m there yet.’

  Chapter 70

  IN THE TAXI on the way home to Chelsea, Knight wondered if his sister-in-law would ever forgive him. Did it matter? It did. It depressed him to think that his kids might never get to know their mother’s last living relative.

  Rather than sink into a mood, however, he forced his mind to other thoughts.

  Selena Farrell was a fashionista?

  It bothered him so much that he called Pope. She answered, sounding as if she was in a bad temper. They’d had an argument in Hooligan’s lab earlier in the day about when and how she should deal with the war-crimes information. She’d wanted to publish immediately, but Knight and Jack had argued that she should wait to get independent corroboration from The Hague and from Scotland Yard. Neither man wanted the information attributed to Private.

  Pope said, ‘So did your sister-in-law corroborate the fingerprint match?’

  ‘I think that will probably be tomorrow at the earliest,’ Knight said.

  ‘Brilliant,’ the reporter said sarcastically. ‘And the prosecutor at The Hague is not returning my calls. So I’ve got nothing for
tomorrow.’

  ‘There’s something else you could be looking into,’ Knight offered as the taxi pulled up in front of his home. He paid the driver and stood out on the pavement, describing the dressing table and clothes at Selena Farrell’s home.

  ‘High fashion?’ Pope asked, incredulous. ‘Her?’

  ‘Exactly my reaction,’ Knight said. ‘Which means a lot of things, it seems to me. She had to have had sources of money outside academia. Which means she had a secret life. Find it, and you just might find her.’

  ‘All well and good for you to say,’ Pope began.

  God, she irritated him. ‘It’s what I’ve got,’ he snapped. ‘Look, Pope, I have to tuck my kids in. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’

  He hung up, feeling as though the case had consumed him the way the mythical Cronus had consumed his own children. That thought left him supremely frustrated. If it wasn’t for the Olympics he’d be working full-time to find out who had killed his colleagues at Private and why. When this was over he told himself he would not stop until he solved that crime.

  Knight went inside and climbed the stairs, hearing a door slide over carpet, followed by footsteps. Marta was leaving the nursery. She saw Knight, and held her index finger to her lips.

  ‘Can I say goodnight?’ he whispered.

  ‘They’re already asleep,’ Marta said.

  Knight glanced at his watch. It was just eight. ‘How do you do that? I can never get them down before ten.’

  ‘An old Estonian technique.’

  ‘You’ll have to teach it to me sometime,’ Knight said. ‘Eight a.m.?’

  She nodded. ‘I will be here.’ Then she hesitated before moving past him and going down the stairs. Knight followed her, thinking he’d have a beer and then get to sleep early.

  Marta put on her jacket and started to open the front door before looking back at him, ‘Have you caught the bad people?’

  ‘No,’ Knight said. ‘But I feel like we’re getting awfully close.’

  ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘Very, very good.’

  Chapter 71

  SITTING AT HER desk in the Sun’s newsroom later that evening, half-watching the highlights of England’s remarkable victory over Ghana in the final round of group-stage football, Pope fumed yet again over the fact that she could not reveal the link between Cronus and the Furies and war crimes in the Balkans.

  Even her editor, Finch, had told her that, amazing as it was, she did not have enough to publish the story; and might not have for two, maybe even three days, at least until the prosecutor in The Hague agreed to talk to her on the record.

  Three days! she moaned to herself. That’s Saturday. They’ll never publish that kind of story on a Saturday. That means they’ll wait for Sunday. Four days!

  Every hard-news journalist in London was working the Cronus case now, all of them chasing Pope, trying to match or better her stories. Until today she’d been way out ahead of the curve. Now, however, she feared that the war-crime angle might leak before she could lay full claim to it in print.

  And what was she to do in the meantime? Sit here? Wait for the war-crimes prosecutor to call? Wait for Scotland Yard to run the print against their database and confirm it to the world?

  The situation was driving her batty. She should go home. Get some rest. But she was unnerved by the fact that Cronus knew where she lived: she felt afraid to go home. Instead, she started poring over every angle of the story, trying to figure out where she could best push it forward.

  At last her thoughts turned grudgingly to Knight’s advice that she should look more closely into Selena Farrell. But it had been four days since the professor’s DNA had been matched to the hair found in the first letter from Cronus, and three days since MI5 and Scotland Yard had launched the manhunt for her, and there’d been nothing. She’d vanished.

  Who am I to look if they can’t find her? Pope thought before her pugnacious side asserted itself: Well, why not me?

  The reporter chewed on her lip, thinking about Knight’s revelation that Farrell was a fashion connoisseur, and then remembered the full list of evidence taken from the professor’s house and office that he had sent her the day before at the Aquatics Centre. She’d looked through the list, of course, searching for the evidence of anti-Olympics sentiment, checking the essays denouncing the Games, and the recording of the flute music.

  But she hadn’t been looking for clothes, now had she?

  Pope called up the evidence list and began scrolling. It didn’t take her long to find references to cocktail dresses from Liberty of London and skirts and blouses from Alice by Temperley. Big-money frocks. Hundreds of pounds, easy.

  Knight said she’d had a secret life. Maybe he was right.

  Excited now, Pope began scouring her notebook, looking for a phone number for the professor’s research assistant, Nina Langor. Pope had talked to the assistant several times during the past four days, but Langor had consistently claimed that she was baffled by her boss’s sudden disappearance and had no idea why Farrell’s DNA would have surfaced in the Cronus investigation.

  The research assistant answered her phone guardedly, and sounded shocked when Pope told her about Farrell’s haute-couture lifestyle.

  ‘What?’ Langor said. ‘No. That’s impossible. She used to make fun of fashion and hairdos. Then again, she used to wear a lot of scarves.’

  ‘Did she have any boyfriends?’ Pope asked. ‘Someone to dress up for?’

  Langor got defensive. ‘The police asked the same thing. I’ll tell you what I told them. I believe she’s gay, but I don’t know for sure. She’s a private person.’

  The assistant said she had to go, leaving Pope at eleven o’clock that Wednesday evening feeling as if she’d run multiple marathons in the past six days and was suddenly exhausted. But she forced herself to return to the evidence list and continued on, finding nothing until the very end, when she saw reference to a torn pink matchbook with the letters CAN on it.

  She tried to imagine a pink matchbook bearing the letters CAN. Cancer institute? Breast cancer awareness? Wasn’t pink the colour of that movement? Something else?

  Stymied by her inability to make the evidence talk, Pope made a last-ditch effort around midnight, using a technique that she’d discovered quite by accident a few years before when she’d been presented with disparate facts that made no sense.

  She started typing strings of words into Google to see what came up.

  ‘PINK CAN LONDON’ yielded nothing of interest. ‘PINK CAN LONDON OLYMPICS’ got her no further.

  Then she typed: ‘LONDON PINK CAN GAY FASHION DESIGN LIBERTY ALICE’.

  Google gnawed at that search query and then spat out the results.

  ‘Oh,’ Pope said, smiling. ‘So you are a lipstick lesbian, professor.’

  Chapter 72

  Thursday, 2 August 2012

  AT TEN THE following evening Pope turned along Carlisle Street in Soho.

  It had been an insanely aggravating and fruitless day. The reporter had called the war-crimes prosecutor ten times and had been assured each time by a saccharine, infuriatingly polite secretary that he would be returning her call soon.

  Worse, she’d had to follow a story in the Mirror that described the intense global manhunt for Selena Farrell and James Daring. Worse still, she’d had to follow a story in The Times about initial autopsy and toxicology reports on the dead Chinese gymnastics coaches. Holes the size of bee stings had been found in both their necks. But they had not died of anaphylactic shock. They’d succumbed to a deadly neurotoxin called calciseptine derived and synthesised from the venom of a black mamba snake.

  A black mamba? Pope thought for the hundredth time that day. Every paper in the world was going loony over that angle, and she’d missed it.

  It only made her more determined when she went through the doors of the Candy Club, submitted to a security search of her bag by a very large Maori woman, and then entered the ground-floor bar. The club was surprisingly crowd
ed for a Thursday night, and the reporter instantly felt uncomfortable when she noticed several glamorous women watching her, evaluating her.

  But Pope walked right up to them, introduced herself, and showed them a photograph of Selena Farrell. The bar staff hadn’t seen her, nor had the next six women the reporter asked.

  She went back to the bar then, spotting a pink matchbook that looked like the one described in the evidence list. One of the bartenders came over to her, and Pope asked what she’d recommend for a cocktail.

  ‘Candy Nipple?’ the bartender said. ‘Butterscotch schnapps and Baileys?’

  The reporter wrinkled her nose. ‘Too sweet.’

  ‘Pimm’s, then,’ said a woman on the barstool next to Pope. Petite, blonde, late thirties, and extremely attractive, she held up a highball glass with a mint sprig sticking out from the top. ‘Always refreshing on a hot summer’s night.’

  ‘Perfect,’ Pope replied, smiling weakly at the woman.

  Pope had meant to show the picture of Farrell to the bartender, but she’d already walked away to prepare her Pimm’s. Pope set the photo on the bar and turned to the woman who’d recommended the drink. She was studying the reporter in mild amusement.

  ‘First time at the Candy Club?’ the woman asked.

  Pope flushed. ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘To the trained eye,’ the woman said, a hint of lechery crossing her face as she held out a well-manicured hand. ‘I’m Nell.’

  ‘Karen Pope,’ she said. ‘I write for the Sun.’

  Nell’s eyebrows rose. ‘I do so enjoy Page 3.’

  Pope laughed nervously. ‘Unfortunately, I don’t.’

  ‘Pity,’ Nell said, her face falling. ‘Not even a wee bit?’

  ‘A pity, but no,’ Pope replied, and then showed Nell the photograph.

  Nell sighed and leaned closer to Pope to study the picture of Farrell with no make-up, and wearing a matching peasant skirt and scarf.

  ‘No,’ Nell said, with a dismissive gesture. ‘I know I’ve never seen her here. She isn’t exactly the type. But you, I must say, most definitely fit in here.’