‘No, you …’ Lancer hesitated and then completed his thought. ‘You shall be my guest tomorrow night at the opening ceremonies.’
Knight was caught flat-footed by the offer. Tickets to the opening ceremony were almost as prized as invitations to the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton had been the year before.
‘If I can get the nanny to cover for me, I’ll accept.’
Lancer beamed. ‘I’ll have my secretary send you a pass and tickets in the morning.’ He patted Knight on his good shoulder, smiled at Pottersfield, and then walked off towards the Jamaican taxi driver who was still getting a hard time from the patrol officers who’d pulled them over.
‘I’ll need you to make a formal statement,’ Pottersfield said.
‘I’m not doing anything until I’ve spoken with my mother.’
Chapter 10
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, a Metropolitan Police patrol car dropped Knight in front of his mother’s home on Milner Street in Knightsbridge. He’d been offered opiate painkillers by the paramedics, but had refused them. Getting out of the police car was agonising and an image of a beautiful pregnant woman standing on a moor at sunset kept flashing into his mind.
Thankfully, he was able to put her out of his thoughts by the time he rang the doorbell, suddenly aware of how dirty and torn his clothes were.
Amanda would not approve. Neither would—
The door swung open to reveal Gary Boss, his mother’s long-time personal assistant: thirties, thin, well groomed and impeccably attired.
Boss blinked at Knight from behind round tortoiseshell glasses, and sniffed. ‘I didn’t know you had an appointment, Peter.’
‘Her son and only child doesn’t need one,’ Knight said. ‘Not today.’
‘She’s very, very busy,’ Boss insisted. ‘I suggest—’
‘Denton’s dead, Gary,’ Knight said softly.
‘What?’ Boss said and then tittered derisively. ‘That’s impossible. She was with him just last—’
‘He was murdered,’ Knight said, stepping inside. ‘I just came from the crime scene. I need to tell her.’
‘Murdered?’ Boss said, and then his mouth sloughed open, and he closed his eyes as if in anticipation of some personal agony in the near future. ‘Dear God. She’ll be …’
‘I know,’ Knight said, and moved past him. ‘Where is she?’
‘In the library,’ Boss said. ‘Choosing fabric.’
Knight winced. His mother despised being interrupted when she was looking at samples. ‘Can’t be helped,’ he said, and walked down the hall towards the doors of the library, readying himself to tell his mother that she was now, in effect, twice a widow.
When Knight was three, his father Harry had died in a freak industrial accident, leaving his young widow and son a meagre insurance payout. His mother had turned bitter about her loss, but then turned that bitterness into energy. She’d always liked fashion and sewing, so she took the insurance money and started a clothing company that she named after herself.
Amanda Designs had started in their kitchen. Knight remembered how his mother had seemed to look at life and business as one long protracted brawl. Her pugnacious style succeeded. By the time Knight was fifteen, his mother had built Amanda Designs into a robust and respected company by never being happy, by constantly goading everyone around her to do better. Shortly after Knight graduated from Christ’s Church college, Oxford she’d sold the concern for tens of millions of pounds and used the cash to fund the launch of four even more successful clothing lines.
In all that time, however, Knight’s mother had never allowed herself to fall in love again. She’d had friends and consorts and, Knight suspected, several short-term lovers. But from the day his father had died, Amanda had erected a solid shield around her heart that no one, except for her son, ever managed to breach.
Until Denton Marshall had come into her life.
They’d met at a cancer fund-raiser and, as his mother liked to say, ‘It was everything at first sight.’ In that one evening, Amanda transformed from a cold, remote bitch to a schoolgirl giddy with her first crush. From that point forward, Marshall had been her soulmate, her best friend, and the source of the deepest happiness of her life.
Knight flashed on that image of the pregnant woman again, knocked on the library door, and entered.
An elegant woman by any standards – late fifties, with the posture of a dancer, the beauty of an ageing movie star, and the bearing of a benevolent ruler – Amanda Knight was standing at her work table, dozens of fabric swatches arrayed in front of her.
‘Gary,’ she scolded without looking up. ‘I told you that I was not to be—’
‘It’s me, Mother,’ Knight said.
Amanda turned to look at him with her slate-coloured eyes, and frowned. ‘Peter, didn’t Gary tell you I was choosing …’ She stopped, seeing something in his expression. Her own face twisted in disapproval. ‘Don’t tell me: your heathen children have driven off another nanny.’
‘No,’ Knight said. ‘I wish it were something as simple as that.’
Then he proceeded to shatter his mother’s happiness into a thousand jagged pieces.
Chapter 11
IF YOU ARE to kill monsters, you must learn to think like a monster.
I did not begin to appreciate that perspective until the night after the explosion that cracked my head a second time, nineteen years after the stoning.
I was long gone from London in the wake of the thwarting of my first plan to prove to the world that I was beyond different, that I was infinitely superior to any other human.
The monsters had won that war against me by subterfuge and sabotage, and as a result, when I landed in the Balkans assigned to a NATO peacekeeping mission in the late spring of 1995, the hatred I felt had no limits to its depth or to its dimensions.
After what had been done to me I did not want peace.
I wanted violence. I wanted sacrifice. I wanted blood.
So perhaps you could say that fate intervened on my behalf within five weeks of my deployment within the fractured, shifting and highly combustible killing fields of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
It was July, a late afternoon on a dusty road eighteen miles from the Drina Valley and the besieged city of Srebrenica. I was riding in the passenger seat of a camouflaged Toyota Land Cruiser, looking out the window, wearing a helmet and a flak vest.
I’d been reading about Greek mythology from a book I’d picked up, and was thinking that the war-torn Balkan landscape through which we travelled could have been the setting of some dark and twisted myth; wild roses were blooming everywhere around the mutilated corpses we’d been spotting in the area, victims of one side’s or the other’s atrocity.
The bomb went off without warning.
I can’t recall the sound of the blast that destroyed the driver, the truck and the two other passengers. But I can still smell the explosive and the burning fuel. And I can still feel the aftershock of the invisible fist that struck me full force, hurling me through the windscreen, and setting off an electrical storm of epic proportions inside my skull.
Dusk had blanketed the land by the time I regained consciousness, ears ringing, disorientated, nauseated and thinking at first that I was ten years old and had just been stoned unconscious. But then the tilting and whirling in my mind slowed enough for me to make out the charred skeleton of the Land Cruiser and the corpses of my companions, burned beyond recognition. Beside me lay a sub-machine gun and an automatic pistol, a Sterling and a Beretta that had been thrown from the truck.