Private Games

Chapter 71

SITTING AT HER desk in the Sun’s newsroom later that evening, half-watching the highlights of England’s remarkable victory over Ghana in the final round of group-stage football, Pope fumed yet again over the fact that she could not reveal the link between Cronus and the Furies and war crimes in the Balkans.

Even her editor, Finch, had told her that, amazing as it was, she did not have enough to publish the story; and might not have for two, maybe even three days, at least until the prosecutor in The Hague agreed to talk to her on the record.

Three days! she moaned to herself. That’s Saturday. They’ll never publish that kind of story on a Saturday. That means they’ll wait for Sunday. Four days!

Every hard-news journalist in London was working the Cronus case now, all of them chasing Pope, trying to match or better her stories. Until today she’d been way out ahead of the curve. Now, however, she feared that the war-crime angle might leak before she could lay full claim to it in print.

And what was she to do in the meantime? Sit here? Wait for the war-crimes prosecutor to call? Wait for Scotland Yard to run the print against their database and confirm it to the world?

The situation was driving her batty. She should go home. Get some rest. But she was unnerved by the fact that Cronus knew where she lived: she felt afraid to go home. Instead, she started poring over every angle of the story, trying to figure out where she could best push it forward.

At last her thoughts turned grudgingly to Knight’s advice that she should look more closely into Selena Farrell. But it had been four days since the professor’s DNA had been matched to the hair found in the first letter from Cronus, and three days since MI5 and Scotland Yard had launched the manhunt for her, and there’d been nothing. She’d vanished.

Who am I to look if they can’t find her? Pope thought before her pugnacious side asserted itself: Well, why not me?

The reporter chewed on her lip, thinking about Knight’s revelation that Farrell was a fashion connoisseur, and then remembered the full list of evidence taken from the professor’s house and office that he had sent her the day before at the Aquatics Centre. She’d looked through the list, of course, searching for the evidence of anti-Olympics sentiment, checking the essays denouncing the Games, and the recording of the flute music.

But she hadn’t been looking for clothes, now had she?

Pope called up the evidence list and began scrolling. It didn’t take her long to find references to cocktail dresses from Liberty of London and skirts and blouses from Alice by Temperley. Big-money frocks. Hundreds of pounds, easy.

Knight said she’d had a secret life. Maybe he was right.

Excited now, Pope began scouring her notebook, looking for a phone number for the professor’s research assistant, Nina Langor. Pope had talked to the assistant several times during the past four days, but Langor had consistently claimed that she was baffled by her boss’s sudden disappearance and had no idea why Farrell’s DNA would have surfaced in the Cronus investigation.

The research assistant answered her phone guardedly, and sounded shocked when Pope told her about Farrell’s haute-couture lifestyle.

‘What?’ Langor said. ‘No. That’s impossible. She used to make fun of fashion and hairdos. Then again, she used to wear a lot of scarves.’

‘Did she have any boyfriends?’ Pope asked. ‘Someone to dress up for?’

Langor got defensive. ‘The police asked the same thing. I’ll tell you what I told them. I believe she’s gay, but I don’t know for sure. She’s a private person.’

The assistant said she had to go, leaving Pope at eleven o’clock that Wednesday evening feeling as if she’d run multiple marathons in the past six days and was suddenly exhausted. But she forced herself to return to the evidence list and continued on, finding nothing until the very end, when she saw reference to a torn pink matchbook with the letters CAN on it.

She tried to imagine a pink matchbook bearing the letters CAN. Cancer institute? Breast cancer awareness? Wasn’t pink the colour of that movement? Something else?

Stymied by her inability to make the evidence talk, Pope made a last-ditch effort around midnight, using a technique that she’d discovered quite by accident a few years before when she’d been presented with disparate facts that made no sense.

She started typing strings of words into Google to see what came up.

‘PINK CAN LONDON’ yielded nothing of interest. ‘PINK CAN LONDON OLYMPICS’ got her no further.

Then she typed: ‘LONDON PINK CAN GAY FASHION DESIGN LIBERTY ALICE’.

Google gnawed at that search query and then spat out the results.

‘Oh,’ Pope said, smiling. ‘So you are a lipstick lesbian, professor.’