Private Games Read online

  London goes on, he thought. London always went on even in the face of tragedy and death, whether the victim was a corrupt hedge fund manager or a bodyguard or a young—

  A pair of fingers appeared in front of his nose. They clicked and he looked round, startled. Karen Pope was looking at him in annoyance. ‘Earth to Knight. Hello?’

  ‘What is it?’ he snapped.

  ‘I asked you if you think Guilder will make it?’

  Knight shook his head. ‘No. I felt his spirit leave him.’

  The reporter looked at him sceptically. ‘What do you mean, you felt it?’

  Knight sighed softly before replying: ‘That’s the second time in my life I’ve had someone die in my arms, Pope. I felt it the first time, too. That ambulance might as well slow down. Guilder is as dead as Mascolo is.’

  Pope’s shoulders sank a little and there was a brief awkward silence before she said, ‘I’d better be going back to the office. I’ve got a nine o’clock deadline.’

  ‘You should include in your story that Guilder confessed to the currency fraud just before he died,’ Knight said.

  ‘He did?’ Pope said, digging in her pocket for her notebook. ‘What’d he say, exactly?’

  ‘He said that the scam was his, and that the money did not go to any member of the Olympic Site Selection committee. It went to his personal offshore accounts. Marshall was innocent. He died a victim of Guilder’s scheming.’

  Pope stopped writing, her scepticism back. ‘I don’t buy that,’ she said. ‘He’s covering for Marshall.’

  ‘They were his last words,’ Knight shot back. ‘I believe him.’

  ‘You have a reason to, don’t you? It clears your mother’s late fiancé.’

  ‘It’s what he said,’ Knight insisted. ‘You have to include that in the story.’

  ‘I’ll let the facts speak for themselves,’ Pope said, ‘including what you say Guilder told you.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I’ve got to get going.’

  ‘We’re not going anywhere soon,’ Knight said, feeling suddenly exhausted. ‘Scotland Yard will want to talk with us, especially because there was gunfire. Meanwhile, I need to call Jack and fill him in, and then speak to my nanny.’

  ‘Nanny?’ Pope said, looking surprised. ‘You have kids?’

  ‘Twins. Boy and girl.’

  Pope glanced at his left hand and said in a joking manner, ‘No ring. What, are you divorced? Drove your wife nuts and she left you with the brats?’

  Knight gazed at her coldly, marvelling at her insensitivity, before saying, ‘I’m a widower, Pope. My wife died in childbirth. She bled to death in my arms two years, eleven months and two weeks ago. They took her away in an ambulance with the siren wailing just like that.’

  Pope’s jaw sagged and she looked horrified. ‘Peter, I’m so sorry, I …’

  But Knight already had his back turned and was walking along the pavement towards Inspector Elaine Pottersfield, who’d only just arrived.

  Chapter 27

  DARKNESS FALLS ON London, and my old friend hatred stirs at the thought that my entire life has all been a prelude to this fated moment, exactly twenty-four hours before the opening ceremony of the most hypocritical event on Earth.

  It heats in my gut as I turn to my sisters. We’re in my office. It’s the first chance the four of us have had to talk face to face in days, and I take the three of them in at a glance.

  Blonde and cool Teagan is removing the scarf, hat and sunglasses she wore while driving the taxi earlier in the day. Marta, ebony-haired and calculating, sets her motorcycle helmet on the floor beside her pistol and unzips her leathers. Pretty Petra is the youngest, the most attractive, the best actor and therefore the most impulsive. She looks in the mirror on the closet door, checking the fit of a chic grey cocktail dress and the dramatic styling of her short ginger hair.

  Seeing the sisters like this, they’re each so familiar to me that it’s hard to imagine a time when we weren’t all together, establishing and projecting our own busy lives, while staying completely unaligned in public.

  And why wouldn’t they still be with me after seventeen years? In absentia in 1997, a tribunal in The Hague indicted them for executing more than sixty Bosnians. Ever since Ratko Mladic – the general who oversaw the Serbian kill squads in Bosnia – was arrested last year, the hunt for my Furies has intensified.

  I know. I keep track of such things. My dreams depend on it.

  In any case, the sisters have lived under the threat of discovery for so long that it pervades their DNA, but that constant cellular-level menace has made them all the more fanatically devoted to me, mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally. Indeed, ever so gradually over the years, my dreams of vengeance have become theirs, along with a desire to see those dreams realised that burns almost as incandescently as my own.

  Over the years, in addition to protecting them, I’ve educated them, paid for minor plastic surgery, and trained them to be expert marksmen, hand-to-hand fighters, con artists and thieves. These last two skills have paid me back tenfold on my investment, but that is another story altogether. Suffice it to say that, to the best of my knowledge, they are the best at shadow games, superior to anyone save me.

  Now the jaded might be wondering whether I am similar to Charles Manson back in the 1970s, an insane prophet who rescued traumatised women and convinced them that they were apostles sent to Earth for homicidal missions designed to trigger Armageddon. But comparing me to Manson and the Furies to the Helter-Skelter girls is deeply misguided, like trying to compare a true story to a myth of heaven. We are more powerful, transcendent and deadly than Manson could ever have imagined in his wildest drug-induced nightmares.

  Teagan pours a glass of vodka, gulps it down, and says, ‘I could not have anticipated that man jumping in front of my cab.’

  ‘Peter Knight – he works for Private London,’ I say, and then push across the coffee table a photograph that I found on the Internet. In it Knight stands, drink in hand, beside his mother at the launch of her most recent fashion line.

  Teagan considers the photograph and then nods. ‘That’s him. I got a good look when his face smashed against my windscreen.’

  Marta frowns, picks up the photograph, studies it, and then trains her dark agate eyes on me. ‘He was with Guilder too, just now, in the bar, before I shot. I’m sure of it. He shot at me after I killed the one guarding Guilder too.’

  I raise an eyebrow. Private? Knight? They’ve almost foiled my plans twice today. Is that fate, coincidence, or a warning?

  ‘He’s dangerous,’ says Marta, always the most perceptive of the three, the one whose strategic thoughts are most likely to mirror my own.

  ‘I agree,’ I say, before glancing at the clock on the wall and looking at her ginger-haired sister, still primping in front of the mirror. ‘It’s time to leave for the reception, Petra. I’ll see you there later. Remember the plan.’

  ‘I’m not stupid, Cronus,’ Petra says, glaring at me with eyes turned emerald green by contact lenses bought just for this occasion.

  ‘Hardly,’ I reply evenly. ‘But you have a tendency to be impetuous, to ad lib, and your task tonight demands disciplined adherence to details.’

  ‘I know what I have to do,’ she says coldly, and leaves.

  Marta’s gaze has not left me. ‘What about Knight?’ she asks, proving once again that relentlessness is another of her more endearing qualities.

  I reply, ‘Your next tasks are not until tomorrow evening. In the meantime, I’d like you both to look into Mr Knight.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’ Teagan asks, setting her empty glass on the table.

  ‘His weaknesses, sister. His vulnerabilities. Anything we can exploit.’

  Chapter 28

  IT WAS ALMOST eight by the time Knight reached home, a restored red-brick town house that his mother had bought for him several years before. He was as exhausted and sore as he’d ever been after a day at work: run over, shot at, forced t
o destroy his mother’s dreams, not to mention being grilled three times by the formidable Inspector Elaine Pottersfield.

  The Metropolitan Police inspector had not been happy when she arrived at One Aldwych. Not only were there two corpses as a result of the shoot-out, she’d heard through the grapevine that the Sun had received a letter from Marshall’s killer and was incensed to learn that Private’s forensics lab had had the chance to analyse the material before Scotland Yard.

  ‘I should be arresting you for obstruction!’ she’d shouted.

  Knight held up his hands. ‘That decision was made by our client, Karen Pope of the Sun.’

  ‘Who is where?’

  Knight looked around. Pope had gone. ‘She was on deadline. I know they plan on turning over all evidence after they go to press.’

  ‘You allowed a material witness to leave the scene of a crime?’

  ‘I work for Private, not the court any more. And I can’t control Pope. She has her own mind.’

  The Scotland Yard inspector responded by fixing Knight with a glare. ‘Seems as if I’ve heard that excuse before from you, Peter – with deadly consequences.’

  Knight flushed and his throat felt heated. ‘We’re not having this conversation again. You should be asking about Guilder and Mascolo.’

  Pottersfield fumed, and then said, ‘Spill it. All of it.’

  Knight spilled all of it: their meetings with Daring and Farrell as well as a blow-by-blow account of what had happened in the Lobby Bar.

  When he finished, the inspector said, ‘You believe Guilder’s confession?’

  ‘Do dying men lie?’ Knight had replied.

  As he climbed the steps to his front door, Knight considered Guilder’s confession again. Then he thought of Daring and Farrell. Were they part of these killings?

  Who was to say that Daring wasn’t some kind of nut behind the scenes, bent on destroying the modern games? And who was to say that Selena Farrell wasn’t the gunman in black leather and a motorcycle helmet? She’d been holding an automatic weapon in that picture in her office.

  Maybe Pope’s instincts were spot on. Could the professor be Cronus? Or at least involved with him? What about Daring? Didn’t he say he’d known Farrell from somewhere in his past? The Balkans back in the 1990s?

  Then another voice inside Knight demanded that he think less about villains and more about victims. How was his mother? He’d not heard from her all day.

  He’d go inside. He’d call her. But before he could get his key into his front lock he heard his daughter Isabel let loose a blood-curdling cry: ‘No! No!’

  Chapter 29

  KNIGHT THREW OPEN the front door into the lower hallway as Isabel’s cry turned into a cutting screech: ‘No, Lukey! No!’

  Her father heard a high-pitched maniacal laugh and the pattering of little feet escaping before he entered the living area of his home, which looked as though a snow tornado had whirled through it. White dust hung in the air, on the furniture, and coated his daughter, about three years old, who saw him and broke into sobs.

  ‘Daddy, Lukey, he … ! He …’

  A dainty little girl, Isabel went into hiccupping hysterics and ran towards her daddy, who tried to bend down to comfort her. Knight gritted his teeth at the throbbing ache all down his left side, but scooped her up anyway, wanting to sneeze at the baby-powder. Isabel’s tears had left little streams of baby powder paste on her cheeks and on her eyelashes. Even covered in talc like this, she was as beautiful as her late mother, with curly fawn-coloured hair and wide cobalt-blue eyes that could cleave his heart even when they weren’t spilling tears.

  ‘It’s okay, sweetheart,’ Knight said. ‘Daddy’s here.’

  Her crying slowed to hiccups: ‘Lukey, he … he put bottom powder on me.’

  ‘I can see that, Bella,’ Knight said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Lukey thinks bottom powder is funny.’

  Knight held onto his daughter with his good arm and moved towards the kitchen and the staircase that led to the upper floors. He could hear his son cackling somewhere above him as he climbed.

  At the top of the stairs, Knight turned towards the nursery only to hear a woman’s voice yell, ‘Owww! You little savage!’

  Knight’s son came running from the nursery in his nappy, his entire body covered in talc. He carried a bonus-sized container of baby powder and was laughing with pure joy until he caught sight of his father glaring narrowly at him.

  Luke turned petrified and began to back away, waving his hands at Knight as if he were some apparition he could erase. ‘No, Daddy!’

  ‘Luke!’ Knight said.

  Nancy, the nanny, appeared in the doorway behind his son, blocking his way, powder all over her, holding her wrist tight, her face screwed up in pain before she spotted Knight.

  ‘I quit,’ she said, spitting out the words like venom. ‘They’re bloody lunatics.’ She pointed at Luke, her whole arm shaking. ‘And that one’s a pant-shitting, biting little pagan! When I tried to get him on the loo, he bit me. He broke skin. I quit, and you’re paying for the doctor’s bill.’

  Chapter 30

  ‘YOU CAN’T QUIT,’ Knight protested as the nanny dodged around Luke.

  ‘Watch me,’ Nancy hissed as she barged right by him and down the stairs. ‘They’ve been fed, but not bathed, and Luke’s crapped his nappy for the third time this afternoon. Good luck, Peter.’

  She grabbed her things and left, slamming the door behind her.

  Isabel started to sob again. ‘Nancy leaves and Lukey did it.’

  Feeling overwhelmed, Knight looked at his son and shouted in anger and frustration: ‘That’s four this year, Luke! Four! And she only lasted three weeks!’

  Luke’s face wrinkled. He cried: ‘Lukey sorry, Daddy. Lukey sorry.’

  In seconds his son had been transformed from this force of nature capable of creating a whirlwind to a little boy so pitiful that Knight softened. Wincing against the pain in his side, still holding Isabel, he crouched down and gestured to Luke with his free arm. The toddler rushed to him and threw his arms so tight around Knight that he gasped with the ache that shot through him.

  ‘Lukey love you, Daddy,’ his son said.

  Despite the stench that hung around the boy, Knight blew the talc off Luke’s cheeks and kissed him. ‘Daddy loves you too, son.’ Then he kissed Isabel so hard on the cheek that she laughed.

  ‘A change and a shower is in order for Luke,’ he said, and put both his children down. ‘Isabel, shower too.’

  A few minutes later, after dealing with the soiled nappy, they were in the big stall shower in Knight’s master bath, splashing and playing. Knight got out his mobile just as Luke picked up a sponge cricket bat and whacked his sister over the head with it.

  ‘Daddy!’ Isabel complained.

  ‘Clonk him back,’ Knight said.

  He glanced at the clock. It was past eight. None of the nanny services he’d used in the past would be open. He punched in his mother’s number.

  She answered on the third ring, sounding wrung-out, ‘Peter, tell me it’s just a nightmare and that I’ll wake up soon.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Amanda.’

  She broke down in muffled sobs for several moments, and then said, ‘I’m feeling worse than I did when your father died. I think I’m feeling as you must have with Kate.’

  Knight felt stinging tears well in his eyes, and a dreadful hollowness in his chest. ‘And still often do, Mother.’

  He heard her blow her nose, and then say: ‘Tell me what you know, what you’ve found out.’

  Knight knew his mother would not rest until he’d told her, so he did, rapidly and in broad strokes. She’d gasped and protested violently when he’d described Cronus’s letter and the accusations regarding Marshall, and now she wept when he told her of Guilder’s confession and his exoneration of her late fiancé.

  ‘I knew it couldn’t be true,’ Knight said. ‘Denton was an honest man, a great man with an even greater heart.’
>
  ‘He was,’ his mother said, choking.

  ‘Everywhere I went today, people talked about his generosity and spirit.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Amanda said. ‘Please, Peter, I need to hear these things.’

  Knight told her about Michael Lancer’s despair over Marshall’s death and how he’d called the financier a mentor, a friend, and one of the guiding visionaries behind the London Olympics.

  ‘Even James Daring, that guy at the British Museum with the television show,’ Knight said. ‘He said that without Denton’s support, the show and his new exhibit about the ancient Olympics would never have got off the ground. He said he was going to thank Denton publicly tonight at the opening reception.’

  There was a pause on the line. ‘James Daring said that?’

  ‘He did,’ Knight said, hoping that his mother would take comfort from it.

  Instead, she snapped, ‘Then he’s a bald-faced liar!’

  Knight startled. ‘What?’

  ‘Denton did give Daring some of the seed money to start his television show,’ Amanda allowed. ‘But he most certainly did not support his new exhibit. In fact, they had a big fight over the tenor of the display, which Denton told me was slanted heavily against the modern Olympics.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Knight said. ‘I saw the same thing.’

  ‘Denton was furious,’ his mother told him. ‘He refused to give Daring any more money, and they parted badly.’

  Definitely not what Daring told me, Knight thought, and then asked, ‘When was this?’

  ‘Two, maybe three months ago,’ Amanda replied. ‘We’d just got back from Crete and …’

  She began to choke again. ‘We didn’t know it, but Crete was our honeymoon, Peter. I’ll always think of it that way,’ she said, and broke down.

  Knight listened for several agonising moments, and then said, ‘Mother, is anyone there with you?’

  ‘No,’ she said in a very small voice. ‘Can you come, Peter?’