82
Jet-lagged and hungry, Mitzi sips coffee and watches dawn break, not in all its glory, but in shabby shades of nicotine and burned orange.
She’s come out on the roof garden of the hotel for fresh air, her eyes fixed south towards the Thames but her mind on events thousands of miles away. Her children: one sick and needing her, the other angry and not wanting her. Her sister: lonely and confused because her heart’s been broken. Her ex: violent and troublesome, but still the only man she ever loved. Irish: a good soul, ground down by the job, now just bones and skin waiting to be buried. Life seems to go so fast and to do such damage with its speed.
Mitzi returns to her room, makes instant coffee and tries to work out why Sophie Hudson got killed. She has a very good idea what the motive was, but needs to know all the facts before she draws conclusions.
Once her computer’s powered up she reads the full report from Kirstin, then examines JPEGs of the crime scene. Digital shots of turned-out drawers, smashed vases, and emptied containers. Coffee, sugar, chocolate, rice and cereals are spread all over the floors. Sophie’s clothes have been torn to shreds. Including those she was wearing.
Mitzi checks the ME’s report. The girl was badly beaten. Punched both sides of the face. Hit in the stomach and breasts. There are signs of bruising to oral, vaginal and anal cavities.
A rookie might write off the scene as a rape robbery. It looks for all the world like a cokehead came looking for cash and lost sexual control when he found a pretty girl home alone.
But Mitzi knows better.
Whatever swabs have been sent to the labs will come back to show nil semen and nil DNA. She hadn’t been raped, she’d been cavity searched. The bruise patterns around Sophie’s wrists and cotton traces in her mouth indicate she’d been bound, gagged and interrogated by someone ruthlessly looking for something.
Mitzi opens her laptop case and takes out the memory stick.
It has to be this.
Having seen the autopsy pictures she was in no doubt that Sophie had told her torturer that she’d given the stick to the FBI woman. She’d have spat out that particular fact soon after the first punch in the face, but the murderer would have tortured her just to check it right up to her dying breath.
Now he’ll be coming after her.
Either him, or the men who are paying him for his brutal and homicidal skills.
83
Angelo Marchetti wakes in pain.
It had been nearly four a.m. by the time nurses at St Thomas’s finished stitching him up. There’d been a couple of awkward moments. One when he’d needed to drop the triage nurse a fifty-pound note and a story about a jealous husband coming home early to stop her calling the cops. And another when he was leaving and saw an ambulance unloading two of the guys he shot.
Aside from that, he counted his blessings. The wound was only two inches deep and hadn’t hit anything except fat on his hips.
He fumbles in the little white bag the hospital pharmacist gave him and takes two painkillers with the last of the water he’d put on the bedside cabinet. For the next hour, he sleeps. Submerges himself in a soft and healing slumber, glad to be unconscious.
It’s eight o’clock when he comes round and stares at the digital clock that’s also charging his iPhone. He makes it three in the morning in DC, the place where there is one less store assistant sleeping soundly because he paid for her to be murdered.
He swings his legs out of bed and blood rushes to his head. He can almost feel the guilt too, growing inside his cranium like a tumour. He knows he mustn’t think about it. He can’t afford to let it eat away at him.
The girl’s a casualty. Collateral damage. Nothing else.
But the harder Marchetti tries to blot her out, the more her ghost haunts him.
He staggers to the bathroom and looks at the blood-soaked patch around his hip. He wishes he’d been killed last night. Wishes those punks had got their shit together and put him out of his misery.
He runs the shower and tries to face up to what he has to do.
Today is the start of another day. Another series of bold steps in the quicksand of sin. And unless he gets what he needs, at least another murder to blacken his soul.
84
Bronty knuckle-raps Mitzi’s door to walk her to breakfast.
She ushers him in with the overnight news: ‘Sophie Hudson, Goldman’s assistant, got killed in her apartment.’
‘When?’ He shuts the door behind him.
‘Yesterday. I got a call from DC Police just before I went to sleep. Tortured and neck broken. Pro job by the look of the autopsy shots. Twist and snap, it’s much harder to do than they show on TV.’
He flinches. ‘Too graphic, Mitzi. I don’t do death this side of coffee and carbs.’
‘I figure someone’s after the stick she gave me.’ She hands him two sheets of paper that she ran off in the business lounge more than an hour ago. ‘Top page is a copy of the transcript Vicks sent us last night. Underneath is a new fragment she just mailed through from the cryptologists.’
Extract from directory headed ‘The Arthurian Cycle’:
Beware you who boldly turn this page and bend inquisitive head to look upon these weighted words.
Be sure your soul is strong enough to support their meaning and you are naught but noble and chivalrous.
Be certain you have only fullness of courage and surfeit of kindness in your mind and heart.
Be absolute that you are virtuous and incorruptible, for this text is written in holy blood and is by divine right a mirror held to your soul.
Should you be found wanting then your search for the secrets of ‘the ruler known by many names’ will not only be the death of you, it will be the ruination of your afterlife. Be warned — if Darkness finds a home in you, then you in turn will find no home in the Promised Land and you will curse your family with your sins.
Take not my words lightly, for I am the sorcerer who made the true king, the one who was, who is and who will always be.
It is I, who forged his righteousness in the image of man and doused his soul in human mortality, I who curdled fact and fiction to create the clouds that cover centuries of history.
Know that knowledge is never absolute. Learn this, or you will never understand the Arthurian Cycle and how it turns with the planets and shapes the history of the earth.
Every man has a birth. All belief has a beginning. Every circle has a start.
But what if the strongest of circles were cast whole? If, like molten iron, they were poured into a seamless mould. Would the beginning of such a circle be said to come at the moment the hot metal touched the cold? Or would the start lie in the creation of the mould? Or in the hand of he who created the mould? Or in the bodies of those who created the man who created the mould? Or in the mind and heart of the one who imagined it all? See how ill-equipped we are to speak of beginnings and endings, of time and place and our positions within them.
To separate great men from the great myths that surround them, you must understand the forging of the Circle of Iron. For the King of Kings is a Man of Iron. Belief is the mould and generation by generation a new man is poured into it. Century by century, those who stand around him point him out and say he was the one, is the one, will be the one.