Private Games (Private 3)

‘We found something, then. Knight has a weakness. A large one.’

Chapter 47

KNIGHT JERKED AWAKE in the twins’ nursery. His mobile was ringing. Sun flooded the room and blinded him. He groped for the phone and answered.

‘Farrell’s gone,’ Inspector Elaine Pottersfield said. ‘Not at her office. Not at her home.’

Knight sat up, still squinting, and said, ‘Did you search both of them?’

‘I can’t get a warrant until my lab corroborates the match that Hooligan got.’

‘Hooligan found something more last night in Cronus’s second letter.’

‘What?’ Pottersfield shouted. ‘What second letter?’

‘It’s already at your lab,’ Knight said. ‘But Hooligan picked up some skin cells in the envelope. He gave you half the sample.’

‘Goddamn it, Peter,’ Pottersfield cried. ‘Private must not analyse anything to do with this case without—’

‘That’s not my call, Elaine,’ Knight shot back. ‘It’s the Sun’s call. The paper is Private’s client!’

‘I don’t care who the—’

‘What about your end?’ Peter demanded. ‘I always seem to be giving you information.’

There was a pause before she said, ‘The big focus is on how Cronus managed to hack into the …’

Knight noticed that the twins weren’t in their cots and stopped listening. His attention shot to the clock. Ten a.m.! He hadn’t slept this late since before the twins were born.

‘Gotta go, Elaine! Kids,’ he said and hung up.

Every worrying thought that a parent could have sliced through him, and he lurched through the nursery door and out onto the landing above the staircase. What if they’ve fallen? What if they’ve mucked around with …?

He heard the television spewing coverage of the 400-metre freestyle relay swimming heats, and felt as if every muscle in his body had changed to rubber. He had to hold tight to the railings to get down to the first floor.

Luke and Isabel had pulled the cushions off the sofa and piled them on the floor. They were sitting on them like little Buddhas beside empty cereal and juice boxes. Knight thought he’d never seen anything so beautiful in his life.

He fed, changed and dressed them while tracking the broadcast coverage of Teeter’s murder. Scotland Yard and MI5 weren’t talking. Neither was F7, the company hired by LOCOG to run security and scanning at the Games.

But Mike Lancer was all over the news, assuring reporters that the Olympics were safe, defending his actions but taking full responsibility for the breaches in security. Shaken and yet resolved, Lancer vowed that Cronus would be stopped, captured, and brought to justice.

Knight, meanwhile, continued to struggle with the fact that he had no nanny and would not be actively working the Cronus case until he could find one. He’d called his mother several times, but she hadn’t answered. Then he called another of the agencies, explained his situation, and begged for a temp. The manager told him she might be able to recruit someone by Tuesday.

‘Tuesday?’ he shouted.

‘It’s the best I can do – the Games have taken everyone available,’ the woman said and hung up.

The twins wanted to go to the playground around noon. Figuring it would help them to nap, he agreed. He put them in their buggy, bought a copy of the Sun, and walked to a playground inside the Royal Hospital Gardens about ten minutes from his house. The temperature had fallen and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. London at its finest.

But as Knight sat on a bench and watched Luke playing on the big-boy slide and Isabel digging in the sandbox, his thoughts weren’t on his children or on the exceptional weather for the first full day of Olympic competition. He kept thinking about Cronus and wondering if and when he’d strike again?

A text came in from Hooligan: ‘Skin cells in second letter are male, no match yet. Off to Coventry for England-Algeria football match.’

Male? Knight thought. Cronus? So Farrell was one of the Furies?

In frustration, Knight picked up the newspaper. Pope’s story dominated the front page under the headline: Death Stalks The Olympics.

The sports reporter led with Teeter’s collapse and death in a terse, factual account of the events as they had unfolded at the opening ceremony. Near the end of the piece, she’d included a rebuttal of Cronus’s charges from Teeter’s brother-in-law who was in London for the Games. He claimed that the lab results Cronus had provided were phoney, and that he, in fact, was the person who had bought deer-antler velvet. Working on construction sites all day long as he did, he said it gave him relief from chronic back spasms.