‘And you?’ Casper demanded. ‘What’s your personal stake in this? You a friend of his or something?’
‘Much more than a friend. He was engaged to my mother.’
Casper’s hard expression softened a bit and he chewed at his lip before saying, ‘I’ll see if I can get you in. Elaine will want to talk to you.’
Knight felt suddenly as if invisible forces were conspiring against him.
‘Elaine got this case?’ he said, wanting to punch some thing. ‘You can’t be serious.’
‘Dead serious, Peter,’ Casper said. ‘Lucky, lucky you.’
Chapter 2
INSPECTOR ELAINE POTTERSFIELD, IN charge of the crime scene, was one of the finest detectives working for the Metropolitan Police, a twenty-year veteran of the force with a prickly, know-it-all style that got results. Pottersfield had solved more murders in the past two years than any other detective at Scotland Yard. She was also the only person Knight knew who openly despised his presence.
An attractive woman in her forties, the inspector always put Knight in mind of a borzoi dog, with her large round eyes, aquiline face and silver hair that cascaded round her shoulders. When Knight entered Sir Denton Marshall’s kitchen, Pottersfield eyed him down her sharp nose, looking ready to bite him if she got the chance.
‘Peter,’ she said coldly.
‘Elaine,’ Knight said.
‘Not exactly my idea to let you into the crime scene.’
‘No, I imagine not,’ replied Knight, fighting to control his emotions, which were heating up by the second. Pottersfield always seemed to have that effect on him. ‘But here we are. What can you tell me?’
The inspector did not reply for several moments, then finally said, ‘The maid found him an hour ago out in the garden. Or what’s left of him, anyway.’
Thinking of Marshall, the learned and funny man he’d come to know and admire over the past two years, Knight felt dizzy and he had to put his vinyl-gloved hand on the counter to steady himself. ‘What’s left of him?’
Pottersfield gestured grimly at the open French window.
Knight absolutely did not want to go out into the garden. He wanted to remember Marshall as he’d been the last time he’d seen him, two weeks before, with his shock of startling white hair, scrubbed pink skin, and easy, infectious laugh.
‘I’ll understand if you’d rather not,’ Pottersfield said. ‘Inspector Casper said your mother was engaged to Marshall. When did that happen?’
‘Last New Year,’ Knight said. He swallowed, and moved towards the door, adding bitterly: ‘They were to be married on Christmas Eve. Another tragedy. Just what I need in my life, isn’t it?’
Pottersfield’s expression twisted in pain and anger, and she looked at the kitchen floor as Knight went past her and out into the garden.
The air in the garden was motionless, growing hotter, and stank of death and gore. On the flagstone terrace, about five litres of blood, the entire reservoir of Sir Denton Marshall’s life, had run out and congealed around his decapitated corpse.
‘The medical examiner thinks the job was done with a long curved blade that had a serrated edge,’ Pottersfield said.
Knight once more fought off the urge to vomit and tried to take in the entire scene, to burn it into his mind as if it were a series of photographs and not reality. Keeping everything at arm’s length was the only way he knew how to get through something like this.
Pottersfield said: ‘And if you look closely, you’ll see that some of the blood’s been sprayed back toward the body with water from the garden hose. I’d expect the killer did it to wash away footprints and so forth.’
Knight nodded. Then, by sheer force of will, he moved his attention beyond the body, deeper into the garden, bypassing forensics techs gathering evidence from the flower beds, to a crime-scene photographer snapping away near the back wall.
Knight skirted the corpse by several feet and from that new perspective saw what the photographer was focusing on. It was ancient Greek and one of Marshall’s prized possessions: a headless limestone statue of an Athenian senator cradling a book and holding the hilt of a broken sword.
Marshall’s head had been placed in the empty space between the statue’s shoulders. His face was puffy, lax. His mouth was twisted to the left as if he were spitting. And his eyes were open, dull, and, to Knight, shockingly forlorn.
For an instant, the Private operative wanted to break down. But then he felt himself filled with a sense of outrage. What kind of barbarian would do such a thing? And why? What possible reason could there be to behead Denton Marshall? The man was more than good. He was …
‘You’re not seeing it all, Peter,’ Pottersfield said behind him. ‘Take a look at the grass over there.’
Knight clenched his hands into fists and walked off the terrace onto the grass, which scratched against the paper slipons he wore over his shoes. Then he saw what Pottersfield had indicated and stopped cold.
Five interlocking rings – the symbol of the Olympic Games – had been spray-painted on the grass in front of the statue.
Across the symbol, partially obscuring it, an X had been smeared in blood.
Chapter 3
WHERE ARE THE eggs of monsters most likely to be laid? What nest incubates them until they hatch? What are the toxic scraps that nourish them to adulthood?
So often during the headaches that irregularly rip through my mind like gale-driven thunder and lightning I ponder those kinds of questions, and others.
Indeed, as you read this, you might be asking your own questions, such as ‘Who are you?’
My real name is irrelevant. For the sake of this story, however, you can call me Cronus. In old, old Greek myths, Cronus was the most powerful of the Titans, a digester of universes, and the Lord God of Time.
Do I think I am a god?
Don’t be absurd. Such arrogance tempts fate. Such hubris mocks the gods. And I have never been guilty of that treacherous sin.
I remain, however, one of those rare beings to appear on Earth once a generation or two. How else would you explain the fact that, long before the storms began in my head, hatred was my oldest memory and wanting to kill was my very first desire?
Indeed, at some point in my second year of life I became aware of hatred, as if it and I were linked spirits cast into an infant’s body from somewhere out there in the void. And for some time that was what I thought of as me: this burning singularity of loathing thrown on the floor in a corner, in a box filled with rags.
Then one day I began instinctively to crawl from the box, and within that movement and the freedom I gained thereby I soon understood that I was more than anger, that I was a being unto myself, that I starved and went thirsty for days, that I was cold and naked and left to myself for hours on end, rarely cleaned, rarely held by the monsters that walked all around me as if I were some kind of alien creature landed among them. That was when my first direct thought occurred: I want to kill them all.
I had that ruthless urge long, long before I understood that my parents were drug addicts, crackheads, unfit to raise a superior being such as me.
When I was four, shortly after I sunk a kitchen knife into my comatose mother’s thigh, a woman came to where we lived in squalor and she took me away from my parents for good. They put me in a home where I was forced to live with abandoned little monsters, hateful and distrustful of any other beings but themselves.