all. His doting aunt. She wants me to kill as many Titans as I can, then myself. And she's right to want that. It's the best way, the kindest way. Like putting down a pet, remember? Euthanasia.'
'Zain-'
But with a sudden, startling burst of strength Mahmoud lunged upwards, shoving Sam off. She scrambled on her hands and knees to get to the knife. Sam sprang after her, but Mahmoud was faster, nearer, and snatched up the carver from under the table and began twisting round to meet her opponent. Sam dived on her back, driving her onto the floor. She'd hoped to lodge the knife securely beneath Mahmoud's body, flat, out of harm's way. That had been the plan. Put the weapon beyond immediate use, then hold Mahmoud down, applying minimum restraint techniques — armlock, wrist flexed round, one knee on her back. Continue trying to talk her round from Aphrodite's bewitchment. Failing that, keep her secured in place until the spell wore off. As a rule, Aphrodite's commands had a life of half an hour or so, after which their influence rapidly waned. Sam was willing to hold Mahmoud down for that long, longer if she had to. With Ramsay's help, perhaps she could truss her up with bedsheets or something until her mind was fully clear again.
But Mahmoud had stopped moving, had gone entirely limp, and even as Sam bore down on her with her full bodyweight she knew the truth. The truth had been in the angle of the carver's blade as she had landed on Mahmoud. The truth was in the soft rattling croak that now escaped Mahmoud's throat, followed by utter silence. The truth began leaking out on either side of Mahmoud's torso, a seeping dark flood that submerged the parquet tiles, erasing their unevenness with its thick, oily smoothness. The awful crimson truth.
Sam clambered off her friend and crawled to the edge of the hallway, clear of the spreading blood and the motionless body. Knees to chest, knuckles to mouth, she began to choke. Then she began to sob. For the first time in a long while tears came to her eyes, burning as they brimmed and spilled. Soon she was howling, and shaking uncontrollably, and it felt terrible but it felt good as well, for as much as she was filled with grief, she was filled with hatred too. The old familiar hatred but a new strain of it — stronger, hotter, purer. A hatred so intense that, like some all-dissolving acid, it seemed nothing could ever contain it.
That was how Ramsay found her as he came limping down the stairs, his belt lashed around his bicep as a makeshift tourniquet. Sam was hunched up, in torment, and hating as she had never hated before.
57. DI PROTHERO
H e came as soon as she rang. Off-duty, enjoying a quiet night in with a DVD of all-time great Welsh rugby victories and a bottle of single malt, but he came straight over without hesitation or qualm.
'Akehurst, Akehurst, Akehurst,' he said, sadly, sternly. 'What the hell kind of a mess have you got yourself into here?'
He didn't appear to have aged much in the three years since she'd last seen him. A few more speckles of grey in his hair perhaps, and he seemed shorter than she remembered, but essentially no change. If the sight of a body lying in a pool of blood in her hallway shocked him, he didn't let on, and that was no change either. It took a lot to perturb DI Dai Prothero.
'So who is she? Intruder? Stalker? Neighbour complaining about your raucous sex parties? What?'
'She is — was — a friend,' Sam said.
'If this is how you treat your friends, Akehurst, maybe I should leave.'
You couldn't be a cop and not develop a gallows humour.
She took him into the living room, out of sight of Mahmoud's corpse. She sat him down and offered him a drink, which he declined, saying he'd had a couple of snifters already and he had a feeling he was going to need a clear head from this point on.
'Come on, then,' he said. 'I'm bracing myself. Out with it. What have you done?'
What had she done? She told him everything. If she couldn't confide in this man, who could she confide in? Everything. The cryptic invitation, Bleaney, Landesman, Titanomachy II, the monsters, Hercules, Hermes, Xander Landesman, Dionysus and Aphrodite, Mahmoud. She unburdened herself of it all to the one person she had faith in to keep his cool and not disbelieve her. For a time, as he sat there listening, it was like it used to be, the old days, the two of them together, master and pupil, her trust in him implicit, his unflappable calm her lodestone, her magnetic north.
She'd loved Prothero like a second father, and known that he loved her back in his own way, and now that love was still strung tightrope-like between them, perhaps a little less taut than it once was, and dusty from disuse, but still there. His presence here confirmed it, as did the fact that he didn't butt in once during Sam's narrative, even though the temptation must have been immense. He didn't query anything she said or mutter a phatic 'Yes?' or 'Really?' to prove he was paying attention. He simply paid her the respect of letting her talk, uninterrupted.
When she finished, he was quiet for a few seconds, then said, 'This American bloke, Rick Ramsay — sounds like a hardboiled private eye in a movie, name like that — where's he now?'
'I packed him off in a cab to St Mary's Paddington. Hopefully they're stitching him up there even as we speak.'
'Poor fellow. Submitting himself to the tender mercies of the
NHS.'
'He can take it. He was a soldier.'
'Even so. Some British hospitals are worse than war zones. What's he telling them about how he got injured?'
'Accident with a lawnmower. He was fixing the blade back on, slipped, fell against it, cut himself. He's going to play the dumb Yank. He can do that quite well.'
'Can't they all.'
'We reckon a busy, overstretched A and E doctor isn't going to enquire too deeply. The wound does look like a knife wound but the lawnmower story's just about swallowable, especially since Rick's had a beer or two and they'll smell the alcohol on his breath. Drunk and American…'
'Chances are they won't report it as suspicious.'
'Chances are.'
'We-e-ell now…' Prothero took a deep breath. 'First things first. I think I will have that drink after all. Whisky if you've got it. Doesn't do to mix. Second of all, I'll tell you this. No word of a lie, it did occur to me that you were caught up in what's been going on lately, the monster killings, the attacks on the Olympians, all that. Don't ask me how, but a couple of times it definitely flitted through my mind, like. 'That could be Akehurst,' I said to myself, 'out there giving the Pantheon a bloody nose. That'd be just the sort of thing she might do.''
'Really?'
'Really. Which is partly why none of what you've been telling me comes as a total surprise. The Agonides clip had something to do with it too. I watched that, and blow me if one of the armoured figures in it didn't move just like you do. You know me, how I am about posture and bearing and all that. That could easily be Akehurst, look you, I thought, because we Welsh even think in stereotype phrases like 'look you.' Sounds like her as well, I thought, though the dialogue was pretty hard to pick up on. And you've phoned me a couple of times lately, according to my caller ID. I didn't call back because I felt you'd leave a message if you wanted to chat — when you were ready to chat. But to phone me at all, out of the blue like that, after such a long silence…'
He sipped the whisky she had just brought him.
'So all in all,' he continued, smacking his lips, 'the evidence has been pointing pretty firmly in a certain direction, though not so firmly that I've been able to go 'eureka!' — 'til now. You should have come to me earlier, bach. You should have known you could share all this with me and I wouldn't breathe a word of it to anyone else.'
'I've come to you now.'
'Now that you need my help.'
