Private Games

by James Patterson

  Knight felt horrible. ‘Mother, I desperately want to, but I’ve lost another nanny and …’

  She snorted in disbelief. ‘Another one?’

  ‘She just up and quit on me half an hour ago,’ Knight complained. ‘I’ve got to work every day of the Olympics, and I don’t know what to do. I’ve used every nanny agency in the city, and now I’m afraid that none of them will send anyone over.’

  There was a long silence on the phone that prompted Knight to say, ‘Mother?’

  ‘I’m here,’ Amanda said, sounding as composed as she’d been since she’d learned of Marshall’s death. ‘Let me look into it.’

  ‘No,’ he protested. ‘You’re not …’

  ‘It will give me something to do besides work,’ she insisted. ‘I need something to do that’s outside myself and the company, Peter, or I think I’ll turn mad, or to drink, or to sleeping pills and I can’t stand the thought of any of those options.’

  Chapter 31

  AT THAT SAME moment, inside the British Museum, upstairs in the reception hall outside his new exhibit about the ancient Olympics, Dr James Daring felt like dancing to his good fortune as he roamed triumphantly among the crowd of London’s high and mighty gathered to see his work.

  It has been a good night. No, a great night!

  Indeed, the museum curator had received high praise from the critics who’d come to see the installation. They’d called it audacious and convincing, a reinterpretation of the ancient Olympics that managed to comment in a completely relevant way about the state of the modern Games.

  Even better, several impressed patrons had told him that they wanted to sponsor and buy advertising on Secrets of the Past.

  What did that dead arsehole Sir Denton Marshall know? Daring thought caustically. Absolutely nothing.

  Feeling vindicated, basking in the glow of a job well done, a job that had gone better than according to plan, Daring went to the bar and ordered another vodka Martini to celebrate his exhibit – and more.

  Much more.

  Indeed, after getting the cocktail – and fretting sympathetically yet again with one of the Museum’s big bene factors about Marshall’s shocking and horrible passing – Daring eagerly cast his attention about the reception.

  Where was she?

  The television star looked until he spotted a delightfully feline woman. Her hair was ginger-coloured and swept above her pale shoulders, which were bared in a stunning grey cocktail dress that highlighted her crazy emerald eyes. Daring had a thing for redheads with sparkling green eyes.

  She did rather look like his sister in several respects, the curator thought. The way she tilted her head when she was amused, like now, as she held a long-stemmed champagne glass and flirted with a man much older than her. He looked familiar. Who was he?

  No matter, Daring thought, looking again at Petra. She was saucy, audacious, a freak. The curator felt a thrill go through him. Look at her handling that man, making what were obviously scripted moves seem effortless in their spontaneity. Saucy. Audacious. Freak.

  Petra seemed to hear his thoughts.

  She turned from her conversation, spotted Daring across the crowd, and flashed him an expression so filled with hunger and promise that he shuddered as if in anticipation of great pleasure. After letting her gaze linger on him for a moment longer, Petra batted her eyelids and returned her attention to the other man. She put her hand on his chest, laughed again, and then excused herself.

  Petra angled her way towards Daring, never once looking at him. She got another drink and moved back to the dessert table, where Daring joined her, trying to seem interested in the crème brûlée.

  ‘He’s drunk and taking a taxi home,’ Petra murmured in a soft Eastern European accent as she used tongs to dig through a pile of kiwi fruit. ‘I think it’s time we left too, don’t you? Lover?’

  Daring glanced at her. A freak with green eyes! The television star flushed with excitement and whispered, ‘Absolutely. Let’s say our goodbyes and go.’

  ‘Not together, silly goose,’ Petra cautioned as she plucked two fruit slices onto her plate. ‘We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves, now, do we?’

  ‘No, no, of course not,’ Daring whispered back, feeling wonderfully illicit and deceitful. ‘I’ll wait for you down the street, near Bloomsbury Square.’

  Chapter 32

  JUST AFTER NINE that evening, not long after Karen Pope’s article appeared on the Sun’s website, London radio stations began to pick up the story, focusing on the Cronus angle and rebroadcasting the flute music.

  By ten, shortly after Knight had read the twins a story, changed Luke’s nappy, and tucked them both into bed, the BBC was whipped into a frenzy, reporting on the allegations about Sir Denton Marshall and the Olympic site-selection process, as well as Guilder’s dying confession that it had all been his swindle.

  Knight cleaned and vacuumed talcum powder until eleven, and then poured himself a beer and a whisky, swallowed more pain medication, and crawled into bed. Jack Morgan called, distraught over Joe Mascolo’s death, and insisted on Knight describing in detail the gunfight that had unfolded at One Aldwych.

  ‘He was fearless,’ Knight said. ‘Went right after the shooter.’

  ‘That was Joe Mascolo all the way,’ Jack said sadly. ‘One of Brooklyn’s finest before I hired him away to run protection for us in New York. He only got here a couple of days ago.’

  ‘That’s brutal,’ Knight replied.

  ‘It is, and it’s about to get worse,’ Jack said. ‘I have to call his wife.’

  Jack hung up. Knight realised that he had not told Private’s owner that he, Knight, had lost his nanny. Better that way, he decided after several moments’ worry. The American already had too much on his plate.

  He turned on the television to find the Marshall and Guilder slayings splashed all over the nightly news and cable outlets, which were luridly portraying the broader narrative as a scandalous murder-mystery, a shocking allegation about the Byzantine world behind the Olympics site-selection process, as well as a slap against London and indeed the entire UK on the eve of the Games.

  Despite Guilder’s dying words to the contrary, the French in particular were said to be very unhappy with Cronus’s allegation about Olympic corruption.

  Knight switched off the television and sat there in the silence. He picked up his whisky glass and drank deeply from it before looking at the framed photograph on his dresser.

  Very pregnant and sublimely beautiful, his late wife Kate stood in profile on a Scottish moor lit by a June sunset. She was looking across her left shoulder, seeming to peer out from the photograph at him, radiating the joy and love that had been so cruelly taken from him almost three years before.

  ‘Tough day, Katie girl,’ Knight whispered. ‘I’m badly beaten up. Someone’s trying to wreck the Olympics. My mother is destroyed. And the kids have driven another nanny from the house and … I miss you. More than ever.’

  He felt a familiar leadenness return to his heart and mind, which triggered a sinking sensation in his chest. He wallowed in that sensation, indeed let himself drown in it for a minute or two, and then did what he always did when he was openly grieving for Kate late at night like this.

  Knight turned off the television, took his blankets and pillows and padded into the nursery. He lay down on the couch looking at the cots, smelling the smells of his children, and was at last comforted into sleep by the gentle rhythm of their breathing.

  Chapter 33

  Friday, 27 July 2012

  THE PAINKILLERS STARTED to wear off and Knight felt the throbbing return to his right side around seven the next morning. Then he heard a squeaking noise and stirred where he lay on the couch in the twins’ nursery. He looked over and saw Isabel on her belly, eyes closed and still. But Luke’s cot was swaying gently.

  His son was on his knees, chest and head on the mattress, sucking his thumbs, rocking side to side, and still asleep. Knight sat up to watch. For much
of the last two years, Luke had been doing this before waking up in the morning,

  After a few minutes, Knight sneaked out of the nursery, wondering if his son’s rocking must have something to do with REM sleep. Was it disturbed? Did he have apnoea? Was that why Luke was so wild and Bella so calm? Was it what made his son’s language development delayed, and kept him from being toilet-trained when his sister was months ahead of the norm? Was that why Luke was a biter?

  Knight came to no solid conclusions as he showered and shaved while listening to the radio, which was reporting that Denton Marshall’s murder and the threats from Cronus had resulted in Michael Lancer and representatives of Scotland Yard and MI5 jointly announcing a dramatic tightening of security at the opening ceremonies. Those lucky enough to have tickets were being told to try to arrive at the Olympic Park during the afternoon in order to avoid an expected crush at the security stations.

  After hearing that Private would be given a role in the increased security, Knight tried to call Jack Morgan. No answer, but the American was probably going to need him soon.

  He knew that his mother had promised to help, but he needed a nanny now. He got a bitterly familiar file from a drawer and opened it, seeing a list of every nanny agency in London, and began calling. The woman who’d found Nancy and the nanny before her laughed at him when he explained his plight.

  ‘A new nanny?’ she said. ‘Now? Not likely.’

  ‘Why not?’ he demanded.

  ‘Because your kids have a terrible reputation and the Olympics are starting tonight. Everyone I’ve got is working for at least the next two weeks.’

  Knight heard the same story at the next three agencies, and his frustration began to mount. He loved his kids, but he’d vowed to find Marshall’s killer, and Private was being called on to contribute more to Olympic security. He was needed. Now.

  Rather than getting angry, he decided to hope that his mother would have better luck at finding someone to care for the twins and started doing what he could from home. Remembering the DNA material he’d taken off Selena Farrell’s hairpin, he called a messenger to come and take the evidence to Private London and Hooligan.

  Then he thought about Daring and Farrell, and decided that he needed to know more about them – about where their lives had crossed, anyway. Hadn’t Daring said something about the Balkans? Was that where the photo of Farrell holding the gun had been taken? It had to be.

  But when Knight went online and started searching for Farrell, he came up only with references to her academic publishing, and, seven years back, her opposition to the Olympic Park.

  ‘This decision is flat-out wrong,’ Farrell had stated in one piece published in The Times. ‘The Olympics have become a vehicle to destroy neighbourhoods and uproot families and businesses. I pray that the people behind this decision are made to pay some day for what they’ve done to me and to my neighbours at the public’s expense.’

  Made to pay, professor? Knight thought grimly. Made to pay?

  Chapter 34

  ALMOST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after the flute music had triggered a brutal migraine and a violent bout of nausea, the melody still played as a cruel soundtrack to Selena Farrell’s thoughts as she lay in bed, the curtains of her bedroom drawn.

  How was it possible? And what did Knight and Pope think of her? She had all but given them a reason to suspect her of something when she’d fled the scene like that. What if they started digging?

  For what seemed like the thousandth time since bolting from her office and fleeing home to her tidy little flat in Wapping, Farrell swallowed hard against a burning in her throat that would not leave her. She’d drunk water all afternoon, and taken a handful of antacid tablets. They had only helped a bit.

  She’d been dealing with migraines since she was a child, however, and a prescription medicine had blunted the agony of the electric head-clamp, leaving a dull aching at the back of her skull.

  Farrell tried to fight the urge to ease that feeling. Not only was it a bad idea, given the medicine she was on, but when she drank alcohol she tended to become another personality, an almost completely different one.

  I’m not going there tonight, she thought before the image of an exotic woman sitting deep in the corner of a pink tufted couch flashed into her head. At that, the decision was made for her. Farrell got out of bed, padded to the kitchen, opened the freezer and took out a bottle of Grey Goose vodka.

  Soon the classics professor was on her second Martini, the ache at the back of her head was gone, and she believed she’d erased the memory of the flute melody. It was a syrinx melody, actually. The syrinx or Pan pipes featured seven reeds bound side by side. Along with the lyre, the Pan pipes were one of the oldest musical instruments in the world. But their eerie, breathy tonality had been banned from the ancient Olympics because it sounded too funereal.

  ‘Who cares?’ Farrell grumbled, and then gulped at her drink. ‘To hell with the Olympics. To hell with Denton Marshall. To hell with the lot of them.’

  Buzzing on the vodka now, becoming another person, Farrell vowed that with the migraine behind her she wasn’t going to dwell on loss or injustice, or oppression. It was Friday night in London. She had places to go. People to see.

  The professor felt a thrill go through her that deepened into a hunger when she swayed down the hall, went into her bedroom closet and unzipped a garment bag hanging there.

  Inside was a dramatic hip-hugging A-line black skirt slit provocatively up its right flank, and a sexy sleeveless maroon satin blouse designed to show plenty of abundant cleavage.

  Chapter 35

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK that Friday afternoon, Knight was in his kitchen making the twins dinner, resigned to the fact that he would not witness the opening ceremony of the Games live and in person.

  Knight felt spent, anyway. All day long, from the moment Luke had awoken crying, he had been consumed by the needs of his children, his frustration with the nanny issue, and his inability to push the Cronus investigation forward.

  Around noon, while the twins were playing, he had called his mother and asked her how she was holding up.

  ‘I slept two hours,’ she replied. ‘I’d nod off and all I could see in my dreams was Denton, and every time I’d feel such joy that I’d wake up and then face heartbreak all over again.’

  ‘God, how horrible, mother,’ said Knight, remembering the insomnia and anguish he’d suffered in the immediate weeks after the birth of the twins and Kate’s death. Many nights he’d thought he was going crazy.

  He thought to change the conversation. ‘I forgot to tell you: Mike Lancer invited me as his guest to sit in the organising committee’s box for the opening ceremonies. If you find me a nanny, we can go together.’

  ‘I don’t know if I’m ready for that volume of pity quite yet. Besides, no memorial service has been planned. It would be unseemly for me to look as if I’m celebrating.’

  ‘The Olympics are part of Denton’s legacy,’ Knight reminded her. ‘You’d be honouring him. Besides, it would do you good to get out of the house and help me defend Denton’s reputation to one and all.’

  ‘I’ll consider it.’

  ‘And by the way: no nanny, no work on Denton’s murder investigation.’

  ‘I’m not a nincompoop, Peter!’ his mother snapped.

  Then Amanda Knight hung up on her son.

  Around three, when the children were napping, Knight reached Jack Morgan. Private’s owner was usually laid back and very cool, but even over the phone Knight could sense the pressure that Jack was under.

  ‘We’re doing everything we can to find a nanny,’ Knight said.

  ‘Good,’ Jack said. ‘Because we need you.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Knight fumed after he’d hung up.

  His doorbell rang at around five-thirty. Knight looked through the security peephole and saw his mother in stylish black slacks, shoes and blouse, grey pearl necklace and earrings. Dark sunglasses. He opened the door.

  ‘I arrange
d a nanny for the evening,’ Amanda said, and then stepped aside to reveal a very unhappy Gary Boss, resplendent in pedal-pusher khaki trousers, argyle socks, loafers, and a bow tie with barber-pole stripes.

  His mother’s personal assistant sniffed at Knight as if he were the purveyor of all things distasteful, and said: ‘Do you know that I personally spoke with Nannies Incorporated, Fulham Nannies, the Sweet & Angelic Agency, and every other agency in the city? Quite the reputation, I’d say, Peter. So where are they? The little brutes? I’ll need to know their schedules, I suppose.’

  ‘They’re in the living room, watching the telly,’ Knight said. Then he looked at his mother as Boss disappeared inside. ‘Is he up for this?’

  ‘At triple his exorbitant hourly wage, I’m sure he’ll figure out a way,’ Amanda said, taking off her sunglasses to reveal puffy red eyes.

  Knight ran up the stairs to his bedroom and changed quickly. When he came down he found the twins hiding behind the couch, eyeing Boss warily. His mother was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Her highness is in the car,’ Boss said. ‘Waiting.’

  ‘I done one, Daddy,’ Luke said, patting the back of his nappy.

  Why couldn’t he just use the loo?

  ‘Well, then,’ Knight said to Boss. ‘Their food is in the fridge in plastic containers. Just a bit of heating-up to do. Luke can have a taste of ice cream. Bella’s allergic, so digestive biscuits for her. Bath. Story. Bed by nine, and we’ll see you by midnight, I’d think.’

  Knight went to his children and kissed them. ‘Mind Mr Boss, now. He’s your nanny for tonight.’

  ‘I done one, Daddy,’ Luke complained again.

  ‘Right,’ Knight said to Boss. ‘And Luke’s had a BM. You’ll need to change it straight away or you’ll be bathing him sooner rather than later.’

  Boss became distressed. ‘Change a shitty nappy? Me?’