Which was why Karen Pope was up in the stands, watching through binoculars, boredom slackening her face.
Pope was a sports reporter for the Sun, a London tabloid newspaper with six million readers thanks to a tradition of aggressive bare-knuckle journalism and publishing photographs of young bare-breasted women on page three.
Pope was in her early thirties, attractive in the way that Renée Zellweger was in the film Bridget Jones’s Diary but too flat-chested ever to be considered for the Sun’s page three. Pope was also a dogged reporter, and ambitious in the extreme.
Around her neck that morning hung one of only fourteen full-access media passes granted to the Sun for the Olympics. Such passes had been severely limited for the British press because more than twenty thousand members of the global media would also be in London to cover the sixteen-day mega-event. The full-access passes had become almost as valuable as Olympic medals, at least to British journalists.
Pope kept thinking that she should be happy to have the pass and to be here covering the Games at all, but her efforts this morning had so far failed to yield anything truly newsworthy about archery.
She’d been looking for the South Koreans, the gold-medal favourites, but had learned that they had already finished their practice session before she arrived.
‘Bloody hell,’ she said in disgust. ‘Finch is going to kill me.’
Pope decided her best hope was to research a feature that with lively writing might somehow make the paper. But what sort? What was the angle?
Archery: Darts for the Posh?
No – there was absolutely nothing posh about archery.
Indeed, what in God’s name did she know about archery? She’d grown up in a football family. Earlier that very morning Pope had tried to explain to Finch that she’d be better off assigned to athletics or gymnastics. But her editor had reminded her in no uncertain terms that she’d only joined the paper from Manchester six weeks before and was therefore low-person on the sports desk.
‘Get me a big story and you’ll get better assignments,’ Finch had said.
Pope prodded her attention back to the archers. It struck her that they seemed so calm. It was almost as though they were in a trance over there. Not like a cricket batsman or a tennis player at all. Should she write about that? Find out how the bowmen got themselves into that state?
C’mon, she thought in annoyance, who wants to read about Zen in sports when you can look at bare boobs on page three?
Pope sighed, set down her binoculars, and shifted her position in one of the blue grandstand seats. She noticed, stuffed down into her handbag, a bundle of mail that she’d grabbed leaving the office and started going through the stack, finding various press releases and other items of zero interest.
Then she came to a thick Manila envelope with her name and title printed oddly in black and blue block letters on the front.
Pope twitched her nose as if she’d sniffed something foul. She hadn’t written anything recently to warrant a nutcase letter, most definitely not since she’d arrived in London. Every reporter worth a damn got nutcase letters. You learned to recognise them quickly. They usually came after you’d published something controversial or hinting at diabolical conspiracy.
She slit the envelope open anyway, and drew out a sheaf of ten pages attached by paper clip to a folded plain paper greeting card. She flipped the card open. There was no writing inside. But a computer chip in the card was activated by the movement and flute music began to play, weird sounds that got under her skin and made her think that someone had died.
Pope shut the card and then scanned the first page of the sheaf. She saw that it was a letter addressed to her, and that it had been typed in a dozen different fonts, which made it hard to read. But then she began to get the gist of it. She read the letter three times, her heart beating faster with every line until it felt like it was throbbing high in her throat.
She scanned the rest of the documents attached to the letter and the greeting card, and felt almost faint. She dug wildly in her bag for her phone, and called her editor.
‘Finch, it’s Pope,’ she said breathlessly when he answered. ‘Can you tell me whether Denton Marshall has been murdered?’
In a thick Cockney accent, Finch said, ‘What? Sir Denton Marshall?’
‘Yes, yes, the big hedge-fund guy, philanthropist, member of the organising committee,’ Pope confirmed, gathering her things and looking for the nearest exit from the cricket ground. ‘Please, Finchy, this could be huge.’
‘Hold on,’ her editor growled.
Pope had made it outside and was trying to hail a cab across from Regent’s Park when her editor finally came back on the line.
‘They’ve got the yellow tape up around Marshall’s place in Lyall Mews and the coroner’s wagon just arrived.’
Pope punched the air with her free hand and cried: ‘Finch, you’re going to have to get someone else to cover archery and dressage. The story I just caught is going to hit London like an earthquake.’
Chapter 9
‘LANCER SAYS YOU saved his life,’ Elaine Pottersfield said.
A paramedic prodded and poked at a wincing Knight, who was sitting on the bumper of an ambulance on the east side of Sloane Street, a few feet from the Rasta’s parked red cab.
‘I just reacted,’ Knight insisted, aching everywhere and feeling baked by the heat radiating off the pavement.
‘You put yourself in harm’s way,’ the inspector said coldly.
Knight got annoyed. ‘You said yourself I saved his life.’
‘And almost lost your own,’ she shot back. ‘Where would that have left …’ She paused. ‘The children?’
He said, ‘Let’s keep them out of this, Elaine. I’m fine. There should be footage of that cab on CCTV.’
London had 10,000 closed-circuit security cameras that rolled twenty-four hours a day, spread out across the city. A lot of them had been there since the 2005 terrorist bombings in the Tube left fifty-six people dead and seven hundred wounded.
‘We’ll check them,’ Pottersfield promised. ‘But finding a particular black cab in London? Since none of you got the licence number plate that’s going to be near-impossible.’
‘Not if you narrow the search to this road, heading north, and the approximate time she got away. And call all the taxi companies. I had to have done some damage to her bonnet or radiator grille.’
‘You’re sure it was a woman?’ Pottersfield asked sceptically.
‘It was a woman,’ Knight insisted. ‘Scarf. Sunglasses. Very pissed-off.’
The Scotland Yard inspector glanced over at Lancer who was being interviewed by another officer, before saying, ‘Him and Marshall. Both LOCOG members.’
Knight nodded. ‘I’d start looking for people who have a beef with the organising committee.’
Pottersfield did not reply because Lancer was approaching them. He’d wrenched his tie loose around his neck and was patting at his sweating brow with a handkerchief.
‘Thank you,’ he said to Knight. ‘I am beyond simply being in your debt.’
‘Nothing that you wouldn’t have done for me,’ Knight replied.
‘I’m calling Jack,’ Lancer said. ‘I’m telling him what you did.’
‘It’s not necessary,’ Knight said.
‘It is,’ Lancer insisted. He hesitated. ‘I’d like to repay you somehow.’
Knight shook his head. ‘LOCOG is Private’s client, which means you are Private’s client, Mike. It’s all in a day’s work.’