r that I’ll keel over. The light all around me seems ultraviolet except for a diesel-green halo that pulses in time with the ripping sensations in my skull.
‘You all right?’ a man’s voice asks.
I can hear the crying on the phone, which now hangs in my hand at my side. I look up through the green halo and see a grounds worker standing a few feet from me.
‘Fine,’ I manage, fighting for control against a rage building in me, making me want to cut the grounds worker’s head off for spite. ‘I’m just a little dizzy.’
‘You want me to call someone?’
‘No,’ I say, struggling to my feet. Though the green halo is still pulsing and the ripping goes on in my skull, the air around me is shimmering a bit less.
Walking away from the groundsman, I growl into the phone: ‘Shut that goddamn kid up.’
‘Believe me, if I could, I would,’ Marta retorts. ‘Here, I’ll go outside.’
I hear a door shut and the beeping of a car horn. ‘Better?’
Only a little. My stomach churns when I ask, ‘What do they know?’
In a halting voice, Marta tells me that they know about the Brazlic sisters, and it all starts again: the ripping, the diesel-green halo, and the ultraviolent rage that so completely permeates me now that I feel like a cornered animal, a monster myself, ready to rip out the throat of anyone who might approach me.
There’s a bench ahead on the path and I sit on it. ‘How?’
‘I don’t know,’ Marta replies, and then explains how she overheard Pope mention ‘Andjela and the other Brazlic sisters’, which had so shocked her that she’d dropped a glass bowl, which had shattered on the kitchen floor.
Wanting to throttle her, I say, ‘Does Knight suspect?’
‘Me? No,’ Marta says. ‘I acted embarrassed and apologetic when I told him the glass was wet. He told me not to worry about it, and to make extra sure the floor was free of glass before letting his little brats walk around.’
‘Where are they now, Knight and Pope? What else do they know?’
‘He left with her ten minutes ago, and said he would not be back until late,’ Marta replies. ‘I don’t know any more than what I’ve told you. But if they know about the sisters, then they know what the sisters did in Bosnia, and the war-crimes prosecutors know we are in London.’
‘They probably do,’ I agree at last. ‘But nothing more. If they had more, they’d be tracking you by one of your current names. They’d be at our doors.’
After a moment’s silence, Marta asks, ‘So what do I do?’
Feeling increasingly sure that the gap between who the Furies were and who they have become is wide enough to prevent a connection, I reply, ‘Stay close to those children. We may need them in the coming days.’
Chapter 75
Sunday, 5 August 2012
BY SEVEN P.M. The intensity inside the Olympic Stadium was beyond electric, Knight thought from his position in the stands on the west side of the venue, high above the track’s finish line. The Private London investigator could sense the anticipation rippling through the ninety thousand souls lucky enough to have won a ticket to see who would be the fastest man on Earth. He could also see and hear fear competing with anticipation. People were wondering whether Cronus would attack here.
The event was certainly high-profile enough. The sprint competition so far had gone down as expected. Both Shaw and Mundaho had been brilliant in the 100-metre qualifying heats the day before, each of them dominating and winning easily. But while the Jamaican was able to rest between races, the Cameroonian had been forced to run in the classifications for the 400-metres.
Mundaho had performed almost superhumanly, turning in a time of 43.22 seconds, four one-hundredths of a second off Henry Ivey’s world-record performance of 43.18 at the 1996 Atlanta Games.
Two hours ago, Mundaho and Shaw had won their 100-metre semi-final heats, with the Cameroonian just two one-hundredths off Shaw’s world record of 9.58 seconds. The men were getting ready to face each other in the 100-metre dash final. After that, Shaw would rest and Mundaho would have to run in the 400-metre semi-finals.
Gruelling, Knight thought as he scanned the crowd through his binoculars. Could Mundaho do it? Win the 100, 200 and 400 at a single Olympic Games?
In the end, did it matter? Would people really care after all that had happened to London 2012? Aside from the joy that Londoners had expressed earlier in the day when Mary Duckworth won the women’s marathon, the past forty-eight hours had seen a dramatic ratcheting-up of the anxiety surrounding the Games. On Saturday, the Sun had finally published Pope’s story describing the link between the killings and the wanted war-crime suspects, the Serbian Brazlic sisters. She had also detailed how both James Daring and Selena Farrell had served in the Balkans at about the same time as the Brazlics were actively executing innocent men and boys in and around the city of Srebrenica.
Farrell, it turned out, had been a volunteer UN observer assigned to NATO in the war-torn area. There were still not many details of the professor’s exact duties on the mission, but Pope had discovered that Farrell had been badly hurt in some kind of vehicular accident in the summer of 1995 and had been sent home. After a short convalescence, she’d resumed her doctoral studies and gone on with her life.
The story had caused an uproar that grew when, late on Saturday evening, the body of Emanuel Flores, a Brazilian judo referee, was discovered near a rubbish skip in Docklands, several miles from the ExCel Arena where he’d been working and not on Olympic grounds. An expert in hand-to-hand combat, Flores had nevertheless been garrotted with a length of cable.