Private Games

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.