de-sac on Harding Street, face obscured but plainly a woman. At the sound of Mascolo’s shot she twisted, dropped and aimed in one motion, an ultra-professional.
She fired before Knight could and before Mascolo could get off another round. The bullet caught the Private New York agent through the throat, killing him instantly. Mascolo dropped back off the sofa and fell violently through the glass cocktail table.
The shooter was aiming at Knight now. He ducked, raised his pistol above the sill and pulled the trigger. He was about to rise when two more rounds shattered the window above him.
Glass rained down on Knight. He thought of his children and hesitated a moment before returning fire. Then he heard tyres squealing.
Knight rose up to see the shooter on a jet-black motorcycle, its rear tyre smoking and laying rubber in a power drift that shot her around the corner onto the Strand, heading west and disappearing before Knight could shoot.
He cursed, turned and looked in shock at Mascolo, for whom there was no hope. But he heard Pope cry: ‘Guilder’s alive, Knight! Where’s that ambulance?’
Knight jumped off the couch and ran back through the shouting and the gathering crowd towards the crumpled form of Richard Guilder. Pope was kneeling at his side amid a puddle of champagne and a mass of blood, ice and glass.
The financier was breathing in gasps and holding tight to his upper stomach while the blood on his shirt turned darker and spread.
For a moment, Knight had an unnerving moment of deja vu, seeing blood spreading on a bed sheet. Then he shook off the vision and got down next to Pope.
‘They said there’s an ambulance on the way,’ the reporter said, her voice strained. ‘But I don’t know what to do. No one here does.’
Knight tore off his jacket, pushed aside Guilder’s hands and pressed the coat to his chest. Marshall’s partner peered at Knight as if he might be the last person he ever saw alive, and struggled to talk.
‘Take it easy, Mr Guilder,’ Knight said. ‘Help’s on the way.’
‘No,’ Guilder grunted softly. ‘Please, listen …’
Knight leaned close to the financier’s face and heard him whisper a secret hoarsely before paramedics burst into the Lobby Bar. But as Guilder finished his confession he just seemed to give out.
Blood trickled from his mouth, his eyes glazed, and he slumped like a puppet with its strings cut.
Chapter 26
A FEW MINUTES later, Knight stood on the pavement outside One Aldwych, oblivious to patrons hurrying past him to the restaurants and theatres. He was transfixed by the sight and sound of the wailing ambulance speeding Guilder and Mascolo to the nearest hospital.
He remembered standing on another pavement late at night almost three years before, watching a different ambulance race away from him, its siren’s fading cry accompanying a feeling of misery that still had not lifted entirely for him.
‘Knight?’ Pope said. She’d come up behind him.
He blinked and noticed the double-decker buses braking and taxis honking and people hurrying home all around him. Suddenly he felt disjointed in much the same way that he had on that long-ago night when he’d watched the other ambulance speed away from him.
London goes on, he thought. London always went on even in the face of tragedy and death, whether the victim was a corrupt hedge fund manager or a bodyguard or a young—
A pair of fingers appeared in front of his nose. They clicked and he looked round, startled. Karen Pope was looking at him in annoyance. ‘Earth to Knight. Hello?’
‘What is it?’ he snapped.
‘I asked you if you think Guilder will make it?’
Knight shook his head. ‘No. I felt his spirit leave him.’
The reporter looked at him sceptically. ‘What do you mean, you felt it?’
Knight sighed softly before replying: ‘That’s the second time in my life I’ve had someone die in my arms, Pope. I felt it the first time, too. That ambulance might as well slow down. Guilder is as dead as Mascolo is.’
Pope’s shoulders sank a little and there was a brief awkward silence before she said, ‘I’d better be going back to the office. I’ve got a nine o’clock deadline.’
‘You should include in your story that Guilder confessed to the currency fraud just before he died,’ Knight said.
‘He did?’ Pope said, digging in her pocket for her notebook. ‘What’d he say, exactly?’
‘He said that the scam was his, and that the money did not go to any member of the Olympic Site Selection committee. It went to his personal offshore accounts. Marshall was innocent. He died a victim of Guilder’s scheming.’
Pope stopped writing, her scepticism back. ‘I don’t buy that,’ she said. ‘He’s covering for Marshall.’
‘They were his last words,’ Knight shot back. ‘I believe him.’
‘You have a reason to, don’t you? It clears your mother’s late fiance.’
‘It’s what he said,’ Knight insisted. ‘You have to include that in the story.’
‘I’ll let the facts speak for themselves,’ Pope said, ‘including what you say Guilder told you.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I’ve got to get going.’
‘We’re not going anywhere soon,’ Knight said, feeling suddenly exhausted. ‘Scotland Yard will want to talk with us, especially because there was gunfire. Meanwhile, I need to call Jack and fill him in, and then speak to my nanny.’
‘Nanny?’ Pope said, looking surprised. ‘You have kids?’
‘Twins. Boy and girl.’
Pope glanced at his left hand and said in a joking manner, ‘No ring. What, are you divorced? Drove your wife nuts and she left you with the brats?’
Knight gazed at her coldly, marvelling at her insensitivity, before saying, ‘I’m a widower, Pope. My wife died in childbirth. She bled to death in my arms two years, eleven months and two weeks ago. They took her away in an ambulance with the siren wailing just like that.’
Pope’s jaw sagged and she looked horrified. ‘Peter, I’m so sorry, I …’
But Knight already had his back turned and was walking along the pavement towards Inspector Elaine Pottersfield, who’d only just arrived.
Chapter 27
DARKNESS FALLS ON London, and my old friend hatred stirs at the thought that my entire life has all been a prelude to this fated moment, exactly twenty-four hours before the opening ceremony of the most hypocritical event
