VIOLENT THUNDERSTORMS STRUCK London late that Saturday afternoon.
Lightning brought rain that pelted off the windscreen as Pottersfield’s unmarked police car sped towards Chelsea, its siren wailing. The inspector kept glancing furiously at Knight who looked as if he was fighting a ghost as he punched in Marta’s mobile number yet again.
‘Answer,’ he kept saying. ‘Answer, you bitch.’
Pottersfield shouted: ‘How could you not have checked her out, Peter?’
‘I did check her out, Elaine!’ Knight shouted back. ‘You did, too! She was just so perfect for what I needed.’
They screeched to a halt in front of Knight’s place where several other police cars were already parked, their lights flashing. Despite the rain, a crowd was gathering. Uniformed officers were already starting to put up barriers.
Knight leaped from Pottersfield’s vehicle, feeling as if he were tottering on the edge of a dark and unfathomable abyss.
Bella? Little Lukey? It was their birthday.
Inspector Billy Casper met Knight at the door, his expression sombre. ‘I’m sorry, Peter. We got here too late.’
‘No,’ he cried, rushing inside. ‘No.’
Everywhere Knight looked he saw the things that surrounded his children: toys, baby powder, and packages of balloons, streamers and candles. He walked numbly past it all and into the kitchen. Luke’s cereal bowl from breakfast still had milk in
it. Isabel’s blanket lay on the floor beside her high chair.
Knight picked it up, thinking that Bella must be lost without it. The enormity of his predicament suddenly threatened to crush him. But he refused to collapse, and fought back in the only way he knew how: he kept moving.
He found Pottersfield and said, ‘Check her flat. Her address is on her C.V. And her prints have to be everywhere in here. Can you track her mobile number?’
‘If she’s got it turned on,’ Pottersfield said. ‘In the meantime, call your friend Pope, and I’ll get to the media people I know. We’ll get the twins’ faces everywhere, Peter. Someone will have seen them.’
Knight began to nod, but then said, ‘What if that’s what they want?’
‘What?’ Pottersfield asked. ‘Why?’
‘A sideshow,’ he said. ‘A diversion. Think about it. If you put their faces everywhere and tell the public that they’ve been kidnapped by a woman believed to be an associate of Cronus, law-enforcement manpower and media attention go to Isabel and Luke, leaving the Olympics open to a final attack.’
‘We’ve got to do something, Peter.’
Knight couldn’t believe he was saying it, but he replied, ‘We can wait them out for a few hours at least, Elaine. See if they get nervous. See if they call. If they don’t by, say, eight, then by all means, put their faces everywhere.’
Before Pottersfield could reply, Knight pulled out his mobile and punched in Hooligan’s number.
Knight heard cheering in the background and Hooligan crowed: ‘Did you catch that, Peter? It’s 1-1.We’re tied!’
‘Come to my house,’ Knight said. ‘Now.’
‘Now?’ Hooligan cried, sounding a little drunk. ‘Have you gone crazy? This is for the bloody gold medal and I’ve got midfield seats.’
‘Cronus has my kids,’ Knight said.
Silence, then: ‘No! Fuck. I’ll be right there, Peter. Right there.’
Knight hung up. Elaine held out her hand for his mobile. ‘I’ll need it for a few minutes while we put on a trace.’
He handed her the phone and went upstairs. He got Kate’s picture and brought it with him into the nursery as thunder shook the house. He sat on the couch, looked at the empty cots and the wallpaper that Kate had picked out and wondered if he had been destined for tragedy and loss.
Then he noticed the bottle of children’s liquid anti-histamine on the changing table. He set Kate’s picture down and went over, noticing that the bottle was almost empty. At that he felt duped and enraged. Marta had been drugging his kids right under his nose.
Pottersfield came in. She glanced at the photograph of Kate on the couch, and then handed Knight his phone. ‘You’re now linked to our system. Any call coming in to your number we should be able to trace. And I just got an alert. We found two bodies in a condemned factory contaminated with hazardous waste not far from the gasworks. Both women in their thirties. One was beaten to death within the last few hours – no ID. The other died earlier this week and was handless. We’re assuming it’s Andjela Brazlic and her older sister, Nada.’