Private Games

Friday, 3 August 2012

KNIGHT HEARD FEET padding around at seven-thirty that morning. He opened his eyes and saw Isabel holding her Pooh Bear blanket.

‘Daddy,’ she said in high seriousness. ‘When am I three?’

‘August the eleventh,’ Knight grumbled, and glanced at that picture of Kate on the moor in Scotland. ‘A week from tomorrow, honey.’

‘What’s today?’

‘Friday.’

Isabel thought about that. ‘So one more Saturday and one more Friday, and then the next one?’

Knight smiled. His daughter always fascinated him with the out-of-the box way her mind worked. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Give me a kiss.’

Isabel kissed him. Then her eyes widened. ‘We get presents?’

‘Of course, Bella,’ Knight replied. ‘It will be your birthday.’

She got wildly excited, clapping her hands and dancing in a tight circle before stopping dead in her tracks. ‘What presents?’

‘What presents?’ Luke asked from the doorway. He was yawning as he came into the room.

‘I can’t tell you that,’ Knight said. ‘It won’t be a surprise.’

‘Oh,’ Isabel said, disappointed.

‘Lukey three?’ his son asked.

‘Next week,’ Knight assured him, and then heard the front door open. Marta. Early again. The world’s first perfect nanny.

Knight put on a tracksuit bottom and a T-shirt, and carried the twins down the stairs. Marta smiled at them. ‘Hungry?’

‘It’s my birthday two Fridays and a Saturday from now,’ Isabel announced.

‘And Lukey,’ her brother said. ‘I’m three.’

‘You will be three,’ Knight corrected.

‘We’ll have to plan a party then,’ Marta said, as Knight set the kids down.

‘A party!’ Isabel cried and clapped.

Luke hooted with delight, spun in circles, and cried, ‘Party! Party!’

The twins had never had a birthday party, or at least not on the exact date of their birth. That day had been so bittersweet that Knight had moved cake and ice-cream celebrations to a day or two later, and had kept the celebration deliberately low-key. He was torn now over how he should reply to Marta’s suggestion.

Luke stopped spinning and said, ‘Balloons?’

‘Mr Knight?’ Marta said. ‘What do you think? Balloons?’

Before Knight could answer, the doorbell rang, and then rang again, and again, and again, followed by someone pounding the knocker so hard that it sounded like a mason chipping stone.

‘Who the hell is that?’ Knight groaned, heading towards the door. ‘Can you get them breakfast, Marta?’

‘Of course,’ she said.

The pounding on the door knocker started again before he looked through the security peephole to see an exasperated Karen Pope on his front step.

‘Karen,’ he called out to her. ‘I don’t have time to—’

‘Make time,’ she barked. ‘I’ve made a break in the case.’

Knight ran his fingers back through his sleep-ravaged hair, and then opened the door. Looking like she’d been up all night herself, Pope barged in while Marta went towards the kitchen with Luke and Isabel.

‘Lukey want sausages,’ Luke said.

‘Sausages it is,’ Marta replied as they disappeared.

‘What’s the break?’ Knight asked Pope, heading into the living area and clearing enough toys off the couch for them to sit down.

‘You were right,’ the reporter said. ‘Selena Farrell had a secret life.’

She told Knight that the professor had an alter ego called Syren St James, a name that she would adopt when she went to the Candy Club to pick up women. As Syren, Farrell was everything the professor was not: flamboyant, funny, promiscuous, a party girl of the highest order.

‘Selena Farrell?’ Knight said, shaking his head.

‘Think of that part of her as Syren St James,’ Pope replied. ‘It helps.’

‘And you know all this how?’ he asked, smelling sausages frying off in the kitchen.

‘From a woman named Nell who frequents the Candy Club and has had several one-night stands with Syren over the past few years. She identified her by that mole at her jawline.’

Knight remembered how he’d thought the professor would have been attractive under the right circumstances. He should have listened to his instincts.

‘When was the last time she saw, uh, Syren?’ he asked.

‘Last Friday, late in the afternoon before the Games opened,’ Pope replied. ‘She came into the Candy Club dressed to kill, but blew Nell out, saying she already had a date. Later, Nell saw Syren leave with a stranger, a woman wearing a pill hat with a black lace veil that covered the upper part of her face. I’m thinking that woman could be one of the Brazlic sisters, aren’t you?’

In Knight’s kitchen, something fragile crashed and shattered.