Private Games (23 page)

At last her thoughts turned grudgingly to Knight’s advice that she should look more closely into Selena Farrell. But it had been four days since the professor’s DNA had been matched to the hair found in the first letter from Cronus, and three days since MI5 and Scotland Yard had launched the manhunt for her, and there’d been nothing. She’d vanished.

Who am I to look if
they
can’t find her? Pope thought before her pugnacious side asserted itself: Well, why
not
me?

The reporter chewed on her lip, thinking about Knight’s revelation that Farrell was a fashion connoisseur, and then remembered the full list of evidence taken from the professor’s house and office that he had sent her the day before at the Aquatics Centre. She’d looked through the list, of course, searching for the evidence of anti-Olympics sentiment, checking the essays denouncing the Games, and the recording of the flute music.

But she hadn’t been looking for clothes, now had she?

Pope called up the evidence list and began scrolling. It didn’t take her long to find references to cocktail dresses from Liberty of London and skirts and blouses from Alice by Temperley. Big-money frocks. Hundreds of pounds, easy.

Knight said she’d had a secret life. Maybe he was right.

Excited now, Pope began scouring her notebook, looking
for
a phone number for the professor’s research assistant, Nina Langor. Pope had talked to the assistant several times during the past four days, but Langor had consistently claimed that she was baffled by her boss’s sudden disappearance and had no idea why Farrell’s DNA would have surfaced in the Cronus investigation.

The research assistant answered her phone guardedly, and sounded shocked when Pope told her about Farrell’s haute-couture lifestyle.

‘What?’ Langor said. ‘No. That’s impossible. She used to make fun of fashion and hairdos. Then again, she used to wear a lot of scarves.’

‘Did she have any boyfriends?’ Pope asked. ‘Someone to dress up for?’

Langor got defensive. ‘The police asked the same thing. I’ll tell you what I told them. I believe she’s gay, but I don’t know for sure. She’s a private person.’

The assistant said she had to go, leaving Pope at eleven o’clock that Wednesday evening feeling as if she’d run multiple marathons in the past six days and was suddenly exhausted. But she forced herself to return to the evidence list and continued on, finding nothing until the very end, when she saw reference to a torn pink matchbook with the letters
CAN
on it.

She tried to imagine a pink matchbook bearing the letters
CAN
. Cancer institute? Breast cancer awareness? Wasn’t pink the colour of that movement? Something else?

Stymied by her inability to make the evidence talk, Pope made a last-ditch effort around midnight, using a technique that she’d discovered quite by accident a few years before when she’d been presented with disparate facts that made no sense.

She started typing strings of words into Google to see what came up.

‘PINK CAN LONDON’ yielded nothing of interest. ‘PINK CAN LONDON OLYMPICS’ got her no further.

Then she typed: ‘LONDON PINK CAN GAY FASHION DESIGN LIBERTY ALICE’.

Google gnawed at that search query and then spat out the results.

‘Oh,’ Pope said, smiling. ‘So you are a lipstick lesbian, professor.’

AT TEN THE
following evening Pope turned along Carlisle Street in Soho.

It had been an insanely aggravating and fruitless day. The reporter had called the war-crimes prosecutor ten times and had been assured each time by a saccharine, infuriatingly polite secretary that he would be returning her call soon.

Worse, she’d had to follow a story in the
Mirror
that described the intense global manhunt for Selena Farrell and James Daring. Worse still, she’d had to follow a story in
The Times
about initial autopsy and toxicology reports on the dead Chinese gymnastics coaches. Holes the size of bee stings had been found in both their necks. But they had not died of anaphylactic shock. They’d succumbed to a deadly neurotoxin called
calciseptine
derived and synthesised from the venom of a black mamba snake.

A black mamba? Pope thought for the hundredth time that day. Every paper in the world was going loony over that angle, and she’d missed it.

It only made her more determined when she went through the doors of the Candy Club, submitted to a security search of her bag by a very large Maori woman, and then entered the ground-floor bar. The club was surprisingly crowded for a Thursday night, and the reporter instantly felt uncomfortable when she noticed several glamorous women watching her, evaluating her.

But Pope walked right up to them, introduced herself, and showed them a photograph of Selena Farrell. The bar staff hadn’t seen her, nor had the next six women the reporter asked.

She went back to the bar then, spotting a pink matchbook that looked like the one described in the evidence list. One of the bartenders came over to her, and Pope asked what she’d recommend for a cocktail.

‘Candy Nipple?’ the bartender said. ‘Butterscotch schnapps and Baileys?’

The reporter wrinkled her nose. ‘Too sweet.’

‘Pimm’s, then,’ said a woman on the barstool next to Pope. Petite, blonde, late thirties, and extremely attractive, she held up a highball glass with a mint sprig sticking out from the top. ‘Always refreshing on a hot summer’s night.’

‘Perfect,’ Pope replied, smiling weakly at the woman.

Pope had meant to show the picture of Farrell to the bartender, but she’d already walked away to prepare her Pimm’s. Pope set the photo on the bar and turned to the woman who’d recommended the drink. She was studying the reporter in mild amusement.

‘First time at the Candy Club?’ the woman asked.

Pope flushed. ‘Is it that obvious?’

‘To the trained eye,’ the woman said, a hint of lechery crossing her face as she held out a well-manicured hand. ‘I’m Nell.’

‘Karen Pope,’ she said. ‘I write for the
Sun
.’

Nell’s eyebrows rose. ‘I do so enjoy Page 3.’

Pope laughed nervously. ‘Unfortunately, I don’t.’

‘Pity,’ Nell said, her face falling. ‘Not even a wee bit?’

‘A pity, but no,’ Pope replied, and then showed Nell the photograph.

Nell sighed and leaned closer to Pope to study the picture of Farrell with no make-up, and wearing a matching peasant skirt and scarf.

‘No,’ Nell said, with a dismissive gesture. ‘I know I’ve never seen
her
here. She isn’t exactly the type. But
you
, I must say, most definitely fit in here.’

Pope laughed again before gesturing at the picture and saying, ‘Think of her in a tight cocktail dress from Liberty of London or Alice by Temperley, and her hair done by Hair by Fairy, and, well, you can’t see it from this angle, but she has this tiny mole on her jaw.’

‘A mole?’ Nell sniffed. ‘You mean with little hairs sticking out of it?’

‘More like a beauty spot. Like Elizabeth Taylor used to have?’

Nell looked confused, and then she studied the photograph again.

A moment later, she gasped, ‘My God – it’s Syren!’

KNIGHT HEARD FEET
padding around at seven-thirty that morning. He opened his eyes and saw Isabel holding her Pooh Bear blanket.

‘Daddy,’ she said in high seriousness. ‘When am I three?’

‘August the eleventh,’ Knight grumbled, and glanced at that picture of Kate on the moor in Scotland. ‘A week from tomorrow, honey.’

‘What’s today?’

‘Friday.’

Isabel thought about that. ‘So one more Saturday and one more Friday, and then the next one?’

Knight smiled. His daughter always fascinated him with the out-of-the box way her mind worked. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Give me a kiss.’

Isabel kissed him. Then her eyes widened. ‘We get presents?’

‘Of course, Bella,’ Knight replied. ‘It will be your birthday.’

She got wildly excited, clapping her hands and dancing in
a
tight circle before stopping dead in her tracks. ‘What presents?’

‘What presents?’ Luke asked from the doorway. He was yawning as he came into the room.

‘I can’t tell you that,’ Knight said. ‘It won’t be a surprise.’

‘Oh,’ Isabel said, disappointed.

‘Lukey three?’ his son asked.

‘Next week,’ Knight assured him, and then heard the front door open. Marta. Early again. The world’s first perfect nanny.

Knight put on a tracksuit bottom and a T-shirt, and carried the twins down the stairs. Marta smiled at them. ‘Hungry?’

‘It’s my birthday two Fridays and a Saturday from now,’ Isabel announced.

‘And Lukey,’ her brother said. ‘I’m three.’

‘You
will
be three,’ Knight corrected.

‘We’ll have to plan a party then,’ Marta said, as Knight set the kids down.

‘A party!’ Isabel cried and clapped.

Luke hooted with delight, spun in circles, and cried, ‘Party! Party!’

The twins had never had a birthday party, or at least not on the exact date of their birth. That day had been so bittersweet that Knight had moved cake and ice-cream celebrations to a day or two later, and had kept the celebration deliberately low-key. He was torn now over how he should reply to Marta’s suggestion.

Luke stopped spinning and said, ‘Balloons?’

‘Mr Knight?’ Marta said. ‘What do you think? Balloons?’

Before Knight could answer, the doorbell rang, and then rang again, and again, and again, followed by someone pounding the knocker so hard that it sounded like a mason chipping stone.

‘Who the hell is that?’ Knight groaned, heading towards the door. ‘Can you get them breakfast, Marta?’

‘Of course,’ she said.

The pounding on the door knocker started again before he looked through the security peephole to see an exasperated Karen Pope on his front step.

‘Karen,’ he called out to her. ‘I don’t have time to—’

‘Make time,’ she barked. ‘I’ve made a break in the case.’

Knight ran his fingers back through his sleep-ravaged hair, and then opened the door. Looking like she’d been up all night herself, Pope barged in while Marta went towards the kitchen with Luke and Isabel.

‘Lukey want sausages,’ Luke said.

‘Sausages it is,’ Marta replied as they disappeared.

‘What’s the break?’ Knight asked Pope, heading into the living area and clearing enough toys off the couch for them to sit down.

‘You were right,’ the reporter said. ‘Selena Farrell had a secret life.’

She told Knight that the professor had an alter ego called Syren St James, a name that she would adopt when she went to the Candy Club to pick up women. As Syren, Farrell was everything the professor was not: flamboyant, funny, promiscuous, a party girl of the highest order.

‘Selena Farrell?’ Knight said, shaking his head.

‘Think of that part of her as Syren St James,’ Pope replied. ‘It helps.’

‘And you know all this how?’ he asked, smelling sausages frying off in the kitchen.

‘From a woman named Nell who frequents the Candy Club and has had several one-night stands with Syren over the past few years. She identified her by that mole at her jawline.’

Knight remembered how he’d thought the professor would have been attractive under the right circumstances. He should have listened to his instincts.

‘When was the last time she saw, uh, Syren?’ he asked.

‘Last Friday, late in the afternoon before the Games opened,’ Pope replied. ‘She came into the Candy Club dressed to kill, but blew Nell out, saying she already had a date. Later, Nell saw Syren leave with a stranger, a woman wearing a pill hat with a black lace veil that covered the upper part of her face. I’m thinking that woman could be one of the Brazlic sisters, aren’t you?’

In Knight’s kitchen, something fragile crashed and shattered.

THE OLYMPIC VILLAGE
is well past its first stirring now. Swimmers from Australia are already heading to the Aquatics Centre where the men’s 1,500-metre heats will unfold. Cyclists from Spain are going to the Velodrome for a quick ride before the men’s team pursuit competition later in the day. A Moldovan handball team just passed me. So did that American basketball player – that one with the name I always forget.

It’s irrelevant. What matters is that we’re at the end of week one and every athlete in the village is trying not to think of me and my sisters, trying not to ask themselves whether they’ll be next. And yet they can’t help but think of us, now can they?

As I predicted, the media has gone berserk over our story. For every weepy television tale of an athlete overcoming cancer or the death of a loved one to win a gold medal, there have been three more about the effect we are having on the games. Tumours, they’ve called us. Scourges. Black stains on the Olympics.