Private Games (Private 3)

The melody went on and Farrell stared at her desk, becoming agitated. Then she looked around wildly as if she was hearing hornets. Her hands shot up as though to cover her ears, dislodging the hairpins and loosening her headscarf.

She panicked and raised her hands to hold the scarf in place. Then she leaped to her feet and bolted for the door, choking: ‘For God’s sake turn it off! It’s giving me a migraine! It’s making me sick!’

Knight jumped to his feet and went out after Farrell, who clopped at high speed down the hall before barging into a women’s loo.

‘That set off something big,’ Pope said. She’d come up behind him.

‘Uh-huh,’ Knight said. He went back into the office, headed straight to the classics professor’s desk and plucked a small evidence bag from his pocket.

He turned the bag inside out before picking up one of the hairpins that had fallen before Farrell bolted. He wrapped the bag around the pins and then drew them out before dropping them back on the desk.

‘What are you doing?’ Pope demanded in a whisper.

Knight sealed the bag and murmured, ‘Hooligan says the hair sample from the envelope was female.’

He heard someone approaching the office, slid the evidence into his coat chest pocket and sat down. Pope stood, and was looking towards the door when another woman, much younger than Farrell but with a similar lack of fashion sense, entered and said: ‘Sorry. I’m Nina Langor, Professor Farrell’s teaching assistant.’

‘Is she all right?’ Pope asked.

‘She said she’s suffering from a migraine and is going home. She said if you’ll call her on Monday or Tuesday she’ll explain.’

‘Explain what?’ Knight demanded.

Nina Langor appeared bewildered. ‘I honestly have no idea. I’ve never seen her act like that before.’

Chapter 24

TEN MINUTES LATER, Knight followed Pope up the stairs into One Aldwych, looking questioningly at the hotel doorman he’d spoken with earlier and getting a nod in response. Knight slipped the doorman a ten-pound note and followed Pope towards the muffled sounds of happy voices.

‘That music got to Farrell,’ Pope said. ‘She’d heard it before.’

‘I agree,’ Knight said. ‘It threw her hard.’

‘Is it possible she’s Cronus?’ Pope asked.

‘And uses the name to make us think she’s a man? Sure. Why not?’

They entered the hotel’s dram

atic Lobby Bar, which was triangular in shape, with a soaring vaulted ceiling, pale marble floor, glass walls and intimate groupings of fine furniture.

While the bar at the Savoy Hotel along the Strand was about glamour, the Lobby Bar was about money. One Aldwych was close to London’s legal and financial districts, and exuded enough corporate elegance to make it a magnet for thirsty bankers, flush traders, and celebrating deal-makers.

There were forty or fifty such patrons in the bar, but Knight spotted Richard Guilder, Marshall’s business partner, almost immediately: a corpulent, silver-haired boar of a man in a dark suit, sitting at the bar alone, his shoulders and head hunched over.

‘Let me do the talking at first,’ Knight said.

‘Why?’ Pope snapped. ‘Because I am a woman?’

‘How many allegedly corrupt tycoons have you chatted up lately on the sports beat?’ he asked her coolly.

The reporter grudgingly made a show of letting him lead the way.

Marshall’s partner was staring off into the abyss. Two fingers of neat Scotch swirled in the crystal tumbler he held. To his left, a bar stool stood empty. Knight started to sit on it.

Before he could, an ape of a man in a dark suit got in the way.

‘Mr Guilder prefers to be alone,’ he said in a distinct Brooklyn accent.