Private Games Read online

  ‘Elaine got this case?’ he said, wanting to punch some thing. ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘Dead serious, Peter,’ Casper said. ‘Lucky, lucky you.’

  Chapter 2

  INSPECTOR ELAINE POTTERSFIELD, IN charge of the crime scene, was one of the finest detectives working for the Metropolitan Police, a twenty-year veteran of the force with a prickly, know-it-all style that got results. Pottersfield had solved more murders in the past two years than any other detective at Scotland Yard. She was also the only person Knight knew who openly despised his presence.

  An attractive woman in her forties, the inspector always put Knight in mind of a borzoi dog, with her large round eyes, aquiline face and silver hair that cascaded round her shoulders. When Knight entered Sir Denton Marshall’s kitchen, Pottersfield eyed him down her sharp nose, looking ready to bite him if she got the chance.

  ‘Peter,’ she said coldly.

  ‘Elaine,’ Knight said.

  ‘Not exactly my idea to let you into the crime scene.’

  ‘No, I imagine not,’ replied Knight, fighting to control his emotions, which were heating up by the second. Pottersfield always seemed to have that effect on him. ‘But here we are. What can you tell me?’

  The inspector did not reply for several moments, then finally said, ‘The maid found him an hour ago out in the garden. Or what’s left of him, anyway.’

  Thinking of Marshall, the learned and funny man he’d come to know and admire over the past two years, Knight felt dizzy and he had to put his vinyl-gloved hand on the counter to steady himself. ‘What’s left of him?’

  Pottersfield gestured grimly at the open French window.

  Knight absolutely did not want to go out into the garden. He wanted to remember Marshall as he’d been the last time he’d seen him, two weeks before, with his shock of startling white hair, scrubbed pink skin, and easy, infectious laugh.

  ‘I’ll understand if you’d rather not,’ Pottersfield said. ‘Inspector Casper said your mother was engaged to Marshall. When did that happen?’

  ‘Last New Year,’ Knight said. He swallowed, and moved towards the door, adding bitterly: ‘They were to be married on Christmas Eve. Another tragedy. Just what I need in my life, isn’t it?’

  Pottersfield’s expression twisted in pain and anger, and she looked at the kitchen floor as Knight went past her and out into the garden.

  The air in the garden was motionless, growing hotter, and stank of death and gore. On the flagstone terrace, about five litres of blood, the entire reservoir of Sir Denton Marshall’s life, had run out and congealed around his decapitated corpse.

  ‘The medical examiner thinks the job was done with a long curved blade that had a serrated edge,’ Pottersfield said.

  Knight once more fought off the urge to vomit and tried to take in the entire scene, to burn it into his mind as if it were a series of photographs and not reality. Keeping everything at arm’s length was the only way he knew how to get through something like this.

  Pottersfield said: ‘And if you look closely, you’ll see that some of the blood’s been sprayed back toward the body with water from the garden hose. I’d expect the killer did it to wash away footprints and so forth.’

  Knight nodded. Then, by sheer force of will, he moved his attention beyond the body, deeper into the garden, bypassing forensics techs gathering evidence from the flower beds, to a crime-scene photographer snapping away near the back wall.

  Knight skirted the corpse by several feet and from that new perspective saw what the photographer was focusing on. It was ancient Greek and one of Marshall’s prized possessions: a headless limestone statue of an Athenian senator cradling a book and holding the hilt of a broken sword.

  Marshall’s head had been placed in the empty space between the statue’s shoulders. His face was puffy, lax. His mouth was twisted to the left as if he were spitting. And his eyes were open, dull, and, to Knight, shockingly forlorn.

  For an instant, the Private operative wanted to break down. But then he felt himself filled with a sense of outrage. What kind of barbarian would do such a thing? And why? What possible reason could there be to behead Denton Marshall? The man was more than good. He was …

  ‘You’re not seeing it all, Peter,’ Pottersfield said behind him. ‘Take a look at the grass over there.’

  Knight clenched his hands into fists and walked off the terrace onto the grass, which scratched against the paper slipons he wore over his shoes. Then he saw what Pottersfield had indicated and stopped cold.

  Five interlocking rings – the symbol of the Olympic Games – had been spray-painted on the grass in front of the statue.

  Across the symbol, partially obscuring it, an X had been smeared in blood.

  Chapter 3

  WHERE ARE THE eggs of monsters most likely to be laid? What nest incubates them until they hatch? What are the toxic scraps that nourish them to adulthood?

  So often during the headaches that irregularly rip through my mind like gale-driven thunder and lightning I ponder those kinds of questions, and others.

  Indeed, as you read this, you might be asking your own questions, such as ‘Who are you?’

  My real name is irrelevant. For the sake of this story, however, you can call me Cronus. In old, old Greek myths, Cronus was the most powerful of the Titans, a digester of universes, and the Lord God of Time.

  Do I think I am a god?

  Don’t be absurd. Such arrogance tempts fate. Such hubris mocks the gods. And I have never been guilty of that treacherous sin.

  I remain, however, one of those rare beings to appear on Earth once a generation or two. How else would you explain the fact that, long before the storms began in my head, hatred was my oldest memory and wanting to kill was my very first desire?

  Indeed, at some point in my second year of life I became aware of hatred, as if it and I were linked spirits cast into an infant’s body from somewhere out there in the void. And for some time that was what I thought of as me: this burning singularity of loathing thrown on the floor in a corner, in a box filled with rags.

  Then one day I began instinctively to crawl from the box, and within that movement and the freedom I gained thereby I soon understood that I was more than anger, that I was a being unto myself, that I starved and went thirsty for days, that I was cold and naked and left to myself for hours on end, rarely cleaned, rarely held by the monsters that walked all around me as if I were some kind of alien creature landed among them. That was when my first direct thought occurred: I want to kill them all.

  I had that ruthless urge long, long before I understood that my parents were drug addicts, crackheads, unfit to raise a superior being such as me.

  When I was four, shortly after I sunk a kitchen knife into my comatose mother’s thigh, a woman came to where we lived in squalor and she took me away from my parents for good. They put me in a home where I was forced to live with abandoned little monsters, hateful and distrustful of any other beings but themselves.

  Soon enough I grasped that I was smarter, stronger, and more visionary than any of them. By the age of nine I did not know exactly what I was yet, but I sensed that I might be some sort of different species – a super-creature, if you will – who could manipulate, conquer, or slay every monster in his path.

  I knew this about myself for certain after the storms started in my head.

  They started when I was ten. My foster-father, whom we called ‘Minister Bob’, was whipping one of the little, little monsters, and I could not stand to hear it. The crying made me feel weak and I could not abide that sensation. So I left the house and climbed the back fence and wandered through some of the worst streets in London until I found quiet and comfort in the familiar poverty of an abandoned building.

  Two monsters were inside already. They were older than me, in their teens, and they were members of a street gang. They were high on something, I could tell that about them right away; and they said I’d wandered onto their turf.
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  I tried to use my speed to get away, but one of them threw a rock that clipped my jaw. It dazed me and I fell, and they laughed and got angrier. They threw more stones that cracked my ribs and broke blood vessels in my thigh.

  Then I felt a hard blow above my left ear, followed by a Technicolor explosion that crackled through my brain like lightning bolts ripping through a summer sky.

  Chapter 4

  PETER KNIGHT FELT HELPLESS as he glanced back and forth, from the Olympic symbol crossed out in blood to the head of his mother’s fiancé.

  Inspector Pottersfield stepped up beside Knight. In a thin voice, she said, ‘Tell me about Marshall.’

  Choking back his grief, Knight said, ‘Denton was a great, great man, Elaine. Ran a big hedge fund, made loads of money, but gave most of it away. He was also an absolutely critical member of the London Organising Committee. A lot of people think that without Marshall’s efforts, we never would have beaten Paris in our bid for the Games. He was also a nice guy, very modest about his achievements. And he made my mother very happy.’

  ‘I didn’t think that was possible,’ Pottersfield remarked.

  ‘Neither did I. Neither did Amanda. But he did,’ Knight said. ‘Until just now, I didn’t think Denton Marshall had an enemy in the world.’

  Pottersfield gestured at the bloody Olympic symbol. ‘Maybe it has more to do with the Olympics than who he was in the rest of his life.’

  Knight stared at Sir Denton Marshall’s head and returned his gaze to the corpse before saying, ‘Maybe. Or maybe this is just designed to throw us off track. Cutting off someone’s head can easily be construed as an act of rage, which is almost always personal at some level.’

  ‘You’re saying this could be revenge of some kind?’ Pottersfield replied.

  Knight shrugged. ‘Or a political statement. Or the work of a deranged mind. Or a combination of the three. I don’t know.’

  ‘Can you account for your mother’s whereabouts last evening between eleven and twelve-thirty?’ Pottersfield asked suddenly.

  Knight looked at her as if she was an idiot. ‘Amanda loved Denton.’

  ‘Spurned love can be a powerful motive to rage,’ Pottersfield observed.

  ‘There was no spurning,’ Knight snapped. ‘I would have known. Besides, you’ve seen my mother. She’s five foot five and weighs just under eight stone. Denton weighed nearly sixteen. There’s no way she’d have had the physical or emotional strength to cut off his head. And she had no reason to.’

  ‘So you’re saying you do know where she was?’ Pottersfield asked.

  ‘I’ll find out and get back to you about it. But first I have to tell her.’

  ‘I’ll do that if you think it might help.’

  ‘No, I’ll do it,’ Knight said, studying Marshall’s head one last time and then focusing on the way his mouth seemed twisted as if he’d been trying to spit something out.

  Knight fished in his pocket for a pen-sized torch, stepped around the Olympic symbol and directed the beam into the gap between Marshall’s lips. He saw a glint of something, and reached back into his pocket for a pair of forceps that he always kept there in case he wanted to pick something up without touching it.

  Refusing to look at his mother’s dead fiancé’s eyes, he began to probe between Marshall’s lips with the forceps.

  ‘Peter, stop that,’ Pottersfield ordered. ‘You’re—’

  But Knight was already turning to show her a tarnished bronze coin that he’d plucked from Marshall’s mouth.

  ‘New theory,’ he said. ‘It’s about money.’

  Chapter 5

  WHEN I RETURNED to consciousness several days after the stoning, I was in hospital with a fractured skull and the nauseating feeling that I had been rewired somehow, made more alien than ever before.

  I remembered everything about the attack and everything about my attackers. But when the police came to ask me what had happened, I told them I had no idea. I said I had memories of entering the building, but nothing more; and their questions soon stopped.

  I healed slowly. A crablike scar formed on my scalp. My hair grew back, hiding it, and I began to nurture a dark fantasy that became my first obsession.

  Two weeks later, I returned home to the little monsters and Minister Bob. Even they could tell I’d changed. I was no longer a wild child. I smiled and acted happy. I studied and developed my body.

  Minister Bob thought that I’d found God.

  But I admit to you that I did it all by embracing hatred. I stroked that crablike scar on my head, and focused my oldest emotional ally on things that I wanted to have and to happen. Armed with a dark heart, I went after them all, trying to show the entire world how different I really was. And though I acted the changed boy, the happy, achieving friend in public, I never forgot the stoning or the storms it had spawned in my head.

  When I was fourteen, I began looking secretly for the monsters who’d broken my skull. I found them eventually, selling small twists of methamphetamine on a street corner not far from where I lived with Minister Bob and the little monsters.

  I kept tabs on the pair until I turned sixteen and felt big and strong enough to act.

  Minister Bob had been a steelworker before he found Jesus. On the sixth anniversary of my stoning, I took one of his heavy hammers and a pair of his old work overalls, and I slipped out at night when I was supposed to be studying.

  Wearing the overalls and carrying the hammer in a satchel harvested from a rubbish bin, I found the two monsters who’d stoned me. Six years of their drug use and six years of my evolution had wiped me from their memory banks.

  I lured them to an empty lot with the promise of money, and then I beat their brains to bloody pulp.

  Chapter 6

  SHORTLY AFTER INSPECTOR Pottersfield ordered Marshall’s remains bagged, Knight left the garden and the mansion consumed by far worse dread than he’d felt on entering.

  He ducked beneath the police tape, avoided the newspaper jackals, and headed out of Lyall Mews, trying to decide how in God’s name he was going to tell his mother about Denton. But Knight knew that he had to, and quickly, before Amanda heard it from someone else. He absolutely did not want her to be alone when she learned that the best thing that had ever happened to her was—

  ‘Knight?’ a man’s voice called to him. ‘Is that you?’

  Knight looked up to see a tall, athletic man – mid-forties and wearing a fine Italian suit – rushing towards him. Below his thick salt-and-pepper hair, anguish twisted his ruddy, square face.

  Knight had met Michael ‘Mike’ Lancer at Private London’s offices twice in the eighteen months since the company had been hired to act as a special security detail during the Olympic Games. But he knew the man largely by his reputation.

  A two-time world decathlon champion in the 1980s and 1990s, Lancer had served with and in the Queen’s Guard, which had allowed him to train full-time. At the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 he had led the decathlon after the first day of competition but had then cramped in the heat and humidity during the second day, finishing outside the top ten finishers.

  Lancer had since become a motivational speaker and security consultant who often worked with Private International on big projects. He was also a member of LOCOG, the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, and had been charged with helping to organise security for the mega-event.

  ‘Is it true?’ Lancer asked in a distraught voice. ‘Denton’s dead?’

  ‘Afraid so, Mike,’ Knight said.

  Lancer’s eyes welled with tears. ‘Who would do this? Why?’

  ‘Looks like someone who hates the Olympics,’ Knight said. Then he described the manner of Marshall’s death, and the bloody X.

  Rattled, Lancer said, ‘When do they think this happened?’

  ‘Shortly before midnight,’ Knight replied.

  Lancer shook his head. ‘That means I saw him only two hours before his death. He was leaving the party at Tate Britain with …’
He stopped and looked at Knight in sad reappraisal.

  ‘Probably with my mother,’ Knight said. ‘They were engaged.’

  ‘Yes, I knew that you and she are related,’ Lancer said. ‘I’m so, so sorry, Peter. Does Amanda know?’

  ‘I’m on my way to tell her right now.’

  ‘You poor bastard,’ Lancer said. Then he looked off towards the police barrier. ‘Are those reporters there?’

  ‘A whole pack of them, and getting bigger,’ Knight said.

  Lancer shook his head bitterly. ‘With all due loving respect to Denton, this is all we need with the opening ceremony tomorrow night. They’ll blast the lurid details all over the bloody world.’

  ‘Nothing you can do to stop that,’ Knight said. ‘But I might think about upping security on all members of the organising committee.’

  Lancer made a puffing noise, and then nodded. ‘You’re right. I’d best catch a cab back to the office. Marcus is going to want to hear this in person.’

  Marcus Morris, a politician who had stood down at the last election, was now chairman of the London Organising Committee.

  ‘My mother as well,’ Knight said and together they headed on towards Chesham Street where they thought there’d be more taxis.

  Indeed, they’d just reached Chesham Street when a black cab appeared from the south across from the Diplomat Hotel. At the same time, farther away and from the north, a red cab came down the near lane. Knight hailed it.

  Lancer signalled the taxi in the northbound lane, saying, ‘Give my condolences to your mother, and tell Jack I’ll be in touch sometime later today.’

  Jack Morgan was the American owner of Private International. He’d been in town since the plane carrying five members of the London office had gone down in the North Sea with no survivors.

  Lancer stepped off the kerb, and set off in a confident stride heading diagonally across the street while the red cab came closer.