Refusing to look at his mother’s dead fiancé’s eyes, he began to probe between Marshall’s lips with the forceps.
‘Peter, stop that,’ Pottersfield ordered. ‘You’re—’
But Knight was already turning to show her a tarnished bronze coin that he’d plucked from Marshall’s mouth.
‘New theory,’ he said. ‘It’s about money.’
Chapter 5
WHEN I RETURNED to consciousness several days after the stoning, I was in hospital with a fractured skull and the nauseating feeling that I had been rewired somehow, made more alien than ever before.
I remembered everything about the attack and everything about my attackers. But when the police came to ask me what had happened, I told them I had no idea. I said I had memories of entering the building, but nothing more; and their questions soon stopped.
I healed slowly. A crablike scar formed on my scalp. My hair grew back, hiding it, and I began to nurture a dark fantasy that became my first obsession.
Two weeks later, I returned home to the little monsters and Minister Bob. Even they could tell I’d changed. I was no longer a wild child. I smiled and acted happy. I studied and developed my body.
Minister Bob thought that I’d found God.
But I admit to you that I did it all by embracing hatred. I stroked that crablike scar on my head, and focused my oldest emotional ally on things that I wanted to have and to happen. Armed with a dark heart, I went after them all, trying to show the entire world how different I really was. And though I acted the changed boy, the happy, achieving friend in public, I never forgot the stoning or the storms it had spawned in my head.
When I was fourteen, I began looking secretly for the monsters who’d broken my skull. I found them eventually, selling small twists of methamphetamine on a street corner not far from where I lived with Minister Bob and the little monsters.
I kept tabs on the pair until I turned sixteen and felt big and strong enough to act.
Minister Bob had been a steelworker before he found Jesus. On the sixth anniversary of my stoning, I took one of his heavy hammers and a pair of his old work overalls, and I slipped out at night when I was supposed to be studying.
Wearing the overalls and carrying the hammer in a satchel harvested from a rubbish bin, I found the two monsters who’d stoned me. Six years of their drug use and six years of my evolution had wiped me from their memory banks.
I lured them to an empty lot with the promise of money, and then I beat their brains to bloody pulp.
Chapter 6
SHORTLY AFTER INSPECTOR Pottersfield ordered Marshall’s remains bagged, Knight left the garden and the mansion consumed by far worse dread than he’d felt on entering.
He ducked beneath the police tape, avoided the newspaper jackals, and headed out of Lyall Mews, trying to decide how in God’s name he was going to tell his mother about Denton. But Knight knew that he had to, and quickly, before Amanda heard it from someone else. He absolutely did not want her to be alone when she learned that the best thing that had ever happened to her was—
‘Knight?’ a man’s voice called to him. ‘Is that you?’
Knight looked up to see a tall, athletic man – mid-forties and wearing a fine Italian suit – rushing towards him. Below his thick salt-and-pepper hair, anguish twisted his ruddy, square face.
Knight had met Michael ‘Mike’ Lancer at Private London’s offices twice in the eighteen months since the company had been hired to act as a special security detail during the Olympic Games. But he knew the man largely by his reputation.
A two-time world decathlon champion in the 1980s and 1990s, Lancer had served with and in the Queen’s Guard, which had allowed him to train full-time. At the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 he had led the decathlon after the first day of competition but had then cramped in the heat and humidity during the second day, finishing outside the top ten finishers.
Lancer had since become a motivational speaker and security consultant who often worked with Private International on big projects. He was also a member of LOCOG, the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, and had been charged with helping to organise security for the mega-event.
‘Is it true?’ Lancer asked in a distraught voice. ‘Denton’s dead?’
‘Afraid so, Mike,’ Knight said.
Lancer’s eyes welled with tears. ‘Who would do this? Why?’
‘Looks like someone who hates the Olympics,’ Knight said. Then he described the manner of Marshall’s death, and the bloody X.
Rattled, Lancer said, ‘When do they think this happened?’
‘Shortly before midnight,’ Knight replied.