The Age Of Zeus

by James Lovegrove

  "Zaina, if Aphrodite's been speaking with you, whatever she's said to you I want you to ignore. It's lies, all of it. You have to remember, Sam and me, we're the good guys, and so are you. We're on the same side. We -"

  Sam glimpsed the glint of the blade an instant before it came jabbing through the gap between the door's hinges. She yelled out a warning, but not in time. The knife slashed down Ramsay's arm, raking it from shoulder to elbow. Ramsay recoiled with a shout, colliding with Sam and sending them both asprawl on the landing carpet. He rolled off her, clutching his arm in pain. Sam leapt to her feet.

  Mahmoud came out from behind the door and stood framed in the doorway, bloodied carver in her hand. Her eyes were unnaturally wide and staring. Her smile was likewise unnaturally broad. She looked lost and dazed and at the same time serenely happy.

  "Oh Sam," she said, shaking her head slowly from side to side. "I cut your man. I penetrated him. Just like he penetrates you, when you let him. Doesn't like it, though, does he? Being penetrated. Look at him."

  Ramsay was struggling to get up but he was in shock, grey-faced, gasping. Blood gushed from a deep, foot-long wound in his arm, soaking the carpet.

  "Zaina, put the knife down," Sam said. "It's not you doing this, it's Aphrodite. You have to fight it. She's told you to attack us, kill us, but you know you don't really want to. Deep in your heart you know."

  "My heart?" echoed Mahmoud. "Yes, Aphrodite is in my heart. She loves me, I love her, and I'd do anything for her. You don't know much about love, do you, Sam? You've got a man to fuck, and that's great. Everybody needs a good fucking. Me especially. I haven't had a good fucking in ages, and to be honest I'm jealous of you, you with your big stud there. Wish I'd been able to get him to fuck me. But love? You don't do love, do you, duck? It's not in your vocabulary any more. You've forgotten what it means. You've shut yourself off from it, ever since you lost that other fella of yours, that Ade. Let me open you up to love again, Sam." She reaffirmed her grip on the knife handle. "Let me open up your heart."

  She ran at Sam with the carver held out at chest height. Sam stepped smartly to one side, as she'd been taught in her training at Hendon. Avoiding the impetus of the blow, she parried at the same time, shoving Mahmoud's arm aside. Mahmoud's momentum carried her forward, but she quickly wheeled and came back. Sam knew she ought to use one of the more vicious control techniques she knew to bring Mahmoud down, but couldn't bring herself to. This was her friend. In the event, all she could do was catch Mahmoud's wrist double-handed, just preventing the knife from plunging into her. The two of them slammed against the landing's wooden balustrade. Mahmoud bore down hard on Sam, forcing her to bend backwards, away from the knifepoint, which quivered over her sternum.

  The balustrade was old, an original feature of the house from the late Victorian era. Sam's parents used to caution her often about putting too much weight on it, in case it broke.

  Now, with too much weight being put on the balustrade, her parents' prediction came true. Several of the spindles snapped free from their sockets, the handrail cracked in two and gave way, and Sam and Mahmoud plummeted through onto the stairs. Sam took the brunt of the impact with her shoulders, then together she and Mahmoud, with the carver still between them, slither-rolled down to the foot of the flight. Mahmoud tumbled free at the bottom, spreadeagled across the parquet floor. The knife remained in her clutches.

  Sam lay upended, stunned, her neck and shoulders in spasm, and though she kept telling herself to get up, get going, because the danger was far from over, her body felt numb and unresponsive and stubbornly refused to move. She looked up, and there was Ramsay peering out over the lip of the landing through the broken balustrade, face tight and pain-wracked.

  "Sam..." he groaned. Then, with sudden, bug-eyed urgency: "Sam!"

  Mahmoud appeared, looming over her, the knife poised above her throat.

  Sam had no idea how she managed it, but somehow, through some panicked miracle, she found herself scrabbling up the stairs feet first, on all fours, on her back, faster than she would have ever thought possible, like some sort of human crab. Mahmoud came charging up after her, but Ramsay intercepted, reaching out from the landing and seizing her knife hand with his one good arm. She twisted out of his grasp easily, but the delay gave Sam just enough time to reach the top of the flight and right herself and turn.

  Mahmoud aimed a couple of ferocious stabs at Ramsay's face, which he barely succeeded in evading. Next moment, Sam hurled herself down the stairs in a headlong lunge, slamming into Mahmoud. The two women staggered all the way to the bottom and crashed together onto the hall floor. This time it was Mahmoud who, being underneath Sam, got the worst of it. The impact jarred the knife from her hand and sent it skidding under the small round table near the front door on which Sam left her house keys and her unopened post.

  Sam straddled Mahmoud, pinning her wrists to the parquet.

  "Zaina! Listen to me! Snap out of it!"

  "This is kinky, isn't it?" Mahmoud's wheedling tone was accompanied by a leery grin. "I always suspected you'd be an on-top kind of woman. But girl on girl? Isn't that more Thérèse's thing?"

  "Shut up. This isn't you. This isn't the Zaina Mahmoud I know. Aphrodite's turned you into a... a thing. A perverted thing. You have to remember who you are."

  "Such a beautiful voice, the goddess has," Mahmoud crooned. "When you hear it - hear it properly - you can't help but listen. It's still in my head, and my heart. She loves us, us Titans. Loves us so much. But we can't carry on. We can't carry on hurting the Olympians. She can't let us. Zeus doesn't want it, and she is his aunt after all. His doting aunt. She wants me to kill as many Titans as I can, then myself. And she's right to want that. It's the best way, the kindest way. Like putting down a pet, remember? Euthanasia."

  "Zain-"

  But with a sudden, startling burst of strength Mahmoud lunged upwards, shoving Sam off. She scrambled on her hands and knees to get to the knife. Sam sprang after her, but Mahmoud was faster, nearer, and snatched up the carver from under the table and began twisting round to meet her opponent. Sam dived on her back, driving her onto the floor. She'd hoped to lodge the knife securely beneath Mahmoud's body, flat, out of harm's way. That had been the plan. Put the weapon beyond immediate use, then hold Mahmoud down, applying minimum restraint techniques - armlock, wrist flexed round, one knee on her back. Continue trying to talk her round from Aphrodite's bewitchment. Failing that, keep her secured in place until the spell wore off. As a rule, Aphrodite's commands had a life of half an hour or so, after which their influence rapidly waned. Sam was willing to hold Mahmoud down for that long, longer if she had to. With Ramsay's help, perhaps she could truss her up with bedsheets or something until her mind was fully clear again.

  But Mahmoud had stopped moving, had gone entirely limp, and even as Sam bore down on her with her full bodyweight she knew the truth. The truth had been in the angle of the carver's blade as she had landed on Mahmoud. The truth was in the soft rattling croak that now escaped Mahmoud's throat, followed by utter silence. The truth began leaking out on either side of Mahmoud's torso, a seeping dark flood that submerged the parquet tiles, erasing their unevenness with its thick, oily smoothness. The awful crimson truth.

  Sam clambered off her friend and crawled to the edge of the hallway, clear of the spreading blood and the motionless body. Knees to chest, knuckles to mouth, she began to choke. Then she began to sob. For the first time in a long while tears came to her eyes, burning as they brimmed and spilled. Soon she was howling, and shaking uncontrollably, and it felt terrible but it felt good as well, for as much as she was filled with grief, she was filled with hatred too. The old familiar hatred but a new strain of it - stronger, hotter, purer. A hatred so intense that, like some all-dissolving acid, it seemed nothing could ever contain it.

  That was how Ramsay found her as he came limping down the stairs, his belt lashed around his bicep as a makeshift tourniquet. Sam was hunched up, in torment, and hating as s
he had never hated before.

  57. DI PROTHERO

  He came as soon as she rang. Off-duty, enjoying a quiet night in with a DVD of all-time great Welsh rugby victories and a bottle of single malt, but he came straight over without hesitation or qualm.

  "Akehurst, Akehurst, Akehurst," he said, sadly, sternly. "What the hell kind of a mess have you got yourself into here?"

  He didn't appear to have aged much in the three years since she'd last seen him. A few more speckles of grey in his hair perhaps, and he seemed shorter than she remembered, but essentially no change. If the sight of a body lying in a pool of blood in her hallway shocked him, he didn't let on, and that was no change either. It took a lot to perturb DI Dai Prothero.

  "So who is she? Intruder? Stalker? Neighbour complaining about your raucous sex parties? What?"

  "She is - was - a friend," Sam said.

  "If this is how you treat your friends, Akehurst, maybe I should leave."

  You couldn't be a cop and not develop a gallows humour.

  She took him into the living room, out of sight of Mahmoud's corpse. She sat him down and offered him a drink, which he declined, saying he'd had a couple of snifters already and he had a feeling he was going to need a clear head from this point on.

  "Come on, then," he said. "I'm bracing myself. Out with it. What have you done?"

  What had she done? She told him everything. If she couldn't confide in this man, who could she confide in? Everything. The cryptic invitation, Bleaney, Landesman, Titanomachy II, the monsters, Hercules, Hermes, Xander Landesman, Dionysus and Aphrodite, Mahmoud. She unburdened herself of it all to the one person she had faith in to keep his cool and not disbelieve her. For a time, as he sat there listening, it was like it used to be, the old days, the two of them together, master and pupil, her trust in him implicit, his unflappable calm her lodestone, her magnetic north.

  She'd loved Prothero like a second father, and known that he loved her back in his own way, and now that love was still strung tightrope-like between them, perhaps a little less taut than it once was, and dusty from disuse, but still there. His presence here confirmed it, as did the fact that he didn't butt in once during Sam's narrative, even though the temptation must have been immense. He didn't query anything she said or mutter a phatic "Yes?" or "Really?" to prove he was paying attention. He simply paid her the respect of letting her talk, uninterrupted.

  When she finished, he was quiet for a few seconds, then said, "This American bloke, Rick Ramsay - sounds like a hardboiled private eye in a movie, name like that - where's he now?"

  "I packed him off in a cab to St Mary's Paddington. Hopefully they're stitching him up there even as we speak."

  "Poor fellow. Submitting himself to the tender mercies of the NHS."

  "He can take it. He was a soldier."

  "Even so. Some British hospitals are worse than war zones. What's he telling them about how he got injured?"

  "Accident with a lawnmower. He was fixing the blade back on, slipped, fell against it, cut himself. He's going to play the dumb Yank. He can do that quite well."

  "Can't they all."

  "We reckon a busy, overstretched A and E doctor isn't going to enquire too deeply. The wound does look like a knife wound but the lawnmower story's just about swallowable, especially since Rick's had a beer or two and they'll smell the alcohol on his breath. Drunk and American..."

  "Chances are they won't report it as suspicious."

  "Chances are."

  "We-e-ell now..." Prothero took a deep breath. "First things first. I think I will have that drink after all. Whisky if you've got it. Doesn't do to mix. Second of all, I'll tell you this. No word of a lie, it did occur to me that you were caught up in what's been going on lately, the monster killings, the attacks on the Olympians, all that. Don't ask me how, but a couple of times it definitely flitted through my mind, like. 'That could be Akehurst,' I said to myself, 'out there giving the Pantheon a bloody nose. That'd be just the sort of thing she might do.'"

  "Really?"

  "Really. Which is partly why none of what you've been telling me comes as a total surprise. The Agonides clip had something to do with it too. I watched that, and blow me if one of the armoured figures in it didn't move just like you do. You know me, how I am about posture and bearing and all that. That could easily be Akehurst, look you, I thought, because we Welsh even think in stereotype phrases like 'look you.' Sounds like her as well, I thought, though the dialogue was pretty hard to pick up on. And you've phoned me a couple of times lately, according to my caller ID. I didn't call back because I felt you'd leave a message if you wanted to chat - when you were ready to chat. But to phone me at all, out of the blue like that, after such a long silence..."

  He sipped the whisky she had just brought him.

  "So all in all," he continued, smacking his lips, "the evidence has been pointing pretty firmly in a certain direction, though not so firmly that I've been able to go 'eureka!' - 'til now. You should have come to me earlier, bach. You should have known you could share all this with me and I wouldn't breathe a word of it to anyone else."

  "I've come to you now."

  "Now that you need my help."

  "Sorry."

  "No, it's fine. Nice to be needed by someone. Especially by the best DS I ever had. You should see this new chap they've got me working with. Barely looks old enough to shave, and if the good Lord gave him any brains at all it was only as a token effort, just so's he'd have something to put in his skull. His reports are atrocious! University degree, and he can't even spell 'forensic.' Puts a 'k' at the end, which, I grant you, has a certain ironic aptness but is hardly a ringing endorsement of the quality of modern higher education. Doesn't even bother him that the spellchecker underlines it. I'd have you back in the job like a shot, Akehurst, if that was a possibility." His expression clouded. "Only it isn't a possibility, is it? Not now. Not from the way you've been speaking. You're set on rejoining the Titans, is that right?"

  "I am."

  "And kicking yet more Olympian arse."

  "Yes."

  "And what you want from me is to make this" - he gestured towards the hallway - "go away. Is that it? Remove the body. Baffle any investigation. Keep your record clean so that you can carry on with your mission, which you now feel more fervently about than ever."

  "No. I mean, yes about the mission. You're dead-on there. I'm going to get the Olympians back not only for Ade but for Zaina. They turned a friend against me. They made me kill her. And, worse, if I'd been the one who'd picked up the phone..." The sentence trailed off into a shudder.

  "It was an accident, the way you described it. Self-defence. Your friend was not in her right mind, and she fell on the knife while you were trying to restrain her."

  "Still, I was the one who pushed her onto it. I as good as stuck it into her."

  "The Aphrodite defence has been used successfully in courts of law. The mob that killed that would-be assassin in Corsica, for instance. They were held to be not responsible for their actions, not of sound mind, because of Aphrodite, and it applies here too, the other way round."

  "I don't care. I'm not trying to wriggle out of this, sir."

  "I'm not 'sir.' I'm not your boss any more."

  "Nor," Sam went on, "am I hoping you'll help me cover this up, sir. I wouldn't dare ask something like that from you. Wouldn't dream of it."

  "That is, I must admit, a relief," said Prothero. "Call me old-fashioned, but I have this thing about being police and not perverting the course of justice."

  "I'd be ashamed if the thought even crossed my mind. All I want is for you to know that I did not commit murder here. When the body is eventually found, when it comes out that the police are searching for former detective sergeant Sam Akehurst in connection with a suspected homicide, when the story hits the headlines and the shit hits the fan, I just want it known by you that I'm innocent. I don't care what anyone else thinks, so long as one person, you, is in possession of the full facts.
"

  "Akehurst... Sam... I'm truly not liking the way this sounds."

  "How does it sound?"

  "Permanent," said Prothero. "Irreversible. Like you're heading down some path you don't think you're coming back from."

  "Well good, that's how it's supposed to sound. What happens to me isn't important any longer. It's what happens to them that counts."

  He surveyed her over the rim of his tumbler. She could see thoughts churning behind those bright, penetrating blue eyes of his, affection wrestling with duty, past vying with present.

  Finally he said, "I'd be a fool to try and talk you out of this. I'd be wasting my breath. Your heart's set, and frankly I pity those poor Olympians. They've mucked with the wrong lass, and they don't know what's coming. You can't expect me not to call in the discovery of a dead body, though."

  "No, of course not."

  "So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you ten minutes. You phoned. You sounded peculiar on the line, a bit 'off.' I came round to see you. You let me in. Then, while I was standing in the hall goggling at the corpse, you ran. Gave me the slip, scarpered out the garden way, over the fence and along the alley at the back. Wheezy, paunchy, middle-aged Prothero gave chase but there was little hope of him catching young, slim, nimble you. OK so far?"

  "And why did I phone you?"

  "To get me over here, to... confess to your old guv'nor, I suppose. Only, you must have had a last-minute change of heart. Took one look at me. Panicked. Fled."

  "Who is the woman in the hallway?"

  "A friend who you had a falling-out with, will be my assumption. Over a man. Yes?"

  "Sexist but acceptable."

  "You'd rather it was over a knitting pattern?"

  "A man gives me reasonable motive. There'll be no clear evidential history between me and Zaina Mahmoud, though."

  "You said she was a cop. Maybe that's how you two knew each other. Met and bonded at some training seminar a while back, then ended up dating the same fellow. Another cop perhaps, or a mutual friend, someone who commutes between London and - where did you say she was from? Manchester. The thing is, the why of it won't be anywhere near as significant as the fact that her body is lying in your house with your knife in her and your fingerprints all over her. That's the picture everyone'll see, that's what'll stick in people's minds, and by comparison the background details will hardly matter. Besides, crimes of passion so often are random-seeming. There's not always a direct, unambiguous trail linking one person to another. You know this."