Private Games

Chapter 34

ALMOST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after the flute music had triggered a brutal migraine and a violent bout of nausea, the melody still played as a cruel soundtrack to Selena Farrell’s thoughts as she lay in bed, the curtains of her bedroom drawn.

How was it possible? And what did Knight and Pope think of her? She had all but given them a reason to suspect her of something when she’d fled the scene like that. What if they started digging?

For what seemed like the thousandth time since bolting from her office and fleeing home to her tidy little flat in Wapping, Farrell swallowed hard against a burning in her throat that would not leave her. She’d drunk water all afternoon, and taken a handful of antacid tablets. They had only helped a bit.

She’d been dealing with migraines since she was a child, however, and a prescription medicine had blunted the agony of the electric head-clamp, leaving a dull aching at the back of her skull.

Farrell tried to fight the urge to ease that feeling. Not only was it a bad idea, given the medicine she was on, but when she drank alcohol she tended to become another personality, an almost completely different one.

I’m not going there tonight, she thought before the image of an exotic woman sitting deep in the corner of a pink tufted couch flashed into her head. At that, the decision was made for her. Farrell got out of bed, padded to the kitchen, opened the freezer and took out a bottle of Grey Goose vodka.

Soon the classics professor was on her second Martini, the ache at the back of her head was gone, and she believed she’d erased the memory of the flute melody. It was a syrinx melody, actually. The syrinx or Pan pipes featured seven reeds bound side by side. Along with the lyre, the Pan pipes were one of the oldest musical instruments in the world. But their eerie, breathy tonality had been banned from the ancient Olympics because it sounded too funereal.

‘Who cares?’ Farrell grumbled, and then gulped at her drink. ‘To hell with the Olympics. To hell with Denton Marshall. To hell with the lot of them.’

Buzzing on the vodka now, becoming another person, Farrell vowed that with the migraine behind her she wasn’t going to dwell on loss or injustice, or oppression. It was Friday night in London. She had places to go. People to see.

The professor felt a thrill go through her that deepened into a hunger when she swayed down the hall, went into her bedroom closet and unzipped a garment bag hanging there.

Inside was a dramatic hip-hugging A-line black skirt slit provocatively up its right flank, and a sexy sleeveless maroon satin blouse designed to show plenty of abundant cleavage.