Chapter 2
INSPECTOR ELAINE POTTERSFIELD, IN charge of the crime scene, was one of the finest detectives working for the Metropolitan Police, a twenty-year veteran of the force with a prickly, know-it-all style that got results. Pottersfield had solved more murders in the past two years than any other detective at Scotland Yard. She was also the only person Knight knew who openly despised his presence.
An attractive woman in her forties, the inspector always put Knight in mind of a borzoi dog, with her large round eyes, aquiline face and silver hair that cascaded round her shoulders. When Knight entered Sir Denton Marshall’s kitchen, Pottersfield eyed him down her sharp nose, looking ready to bite him if she got the chance.
‘Peter,’ she said coldly.
‘Elaine,’ Knight said.
‘Not exactly my idea to let you into the crime scene.’
‘No, I imagine not,’ replied Knight, fighting to control his emotions, which were heating up by the second. Pottersfield always seemed to have that effect on him. ‘But here we are. What can you tell me?’
The inspector did not reply for several moments, then finally said, ‘The maid found him an hour ago out in the garden. Or what’s left of him, anyway.’
Thinking of Marshall, the learned and funny man he’d come to know and admire over the past two years, Knight felt dizzy and he had to put his vinyl-gloved hand on the counter to steady himself. ‘What’s left of him?’
Pottersfield gestured grimly at the open French window.
Knight absolutely did not want to go out into the garden. He wanted to remember Marshall as he’d been the last time he’d seen him, two weeks before, with his shock of startling white hair, scrubbed pink skin, and easy, infectious laugh.
‘I’ll understand if you’d rather not,’ Pottersfield said. ‘Inspector Casper said your mother was engaged to Marshall. When did that happen?’
‘Last New Year,’ Knight said. He swallowed, and moved towards the door, adding bitterly: ‘They were to be married on Christmas Eve. Another tragedy. Just what I need in my life, isn’t it?’
Pottersfield’s expression twisted in pain and anger, and she looked at the kitchen floor as Knight went past her and out into the garden.
The air in the garden was motionless, growing hotter, and stank of death and gore. On the flagstone terrace, about five litres of blood, the entire reservoir of Sir Denton Marshall’s life, had run out and congealed around his decapitated corpse.
‘The medical examiner thinks the job was done with a long curved blade that had a serrated edge,’ Pottersfield said.
Knight once more fought off the urge to vomit and tried to take in the entire scene, to burn it into his mind as if it were a series of photographs and not reality. Keeping everything at arm’s length was the only way he knew how to get through something like this.
Pottersfield said: ‘And if you look closely, you’ll see that some of the blood’s been sprayed back toward the body with water from the garden hose. I’d expect the killer did it to wash away footprints and so forth.’
Knight nodded. Then, by sheer force of will, he moved his attention beyond the body, deeper into the garden, bypassing forensics techs gathering evidence from the flower beds, to a crime-scene photographer snapping away near the back wall.
Knight skirted the corpse by several feet and from that new perspective saw what the photographer was focusing on. It was ancient Greek and one of Marshall’s prized possessions: a headless limestone statue of an Athenian senator cradling a book and holding the hilt of a broken sword.
Marshall’s head had been placed in the empty space between the statue’s shoulders. His face was puffy, lax. His mouth was twisted to the left as if he were spitting. And his eyes were open, dull, and, to Knight, shockingly forlorn.
For an instant, the Private operative wanted to break down. But then he felt himself filled with a sense of outrage. What kind of barbarian would do such a thing? And why? What possible reason could there be to behead Denton Marshall? The man was more than good. He was …
‘You’re not seeing it all, Peter,’ Pottersfield said behind him. ‘Take a look at the grass over there.’
Knight clenched his hands into fists and walked off the terrace onto the grass, which scratched against the paper slipons he wore over his shoes. Then he saw what Pottersfield had indicated and stopped cold.
Five interlocking rings – the symbol of the Olympic Games – had been spray-painted on the grass in front of the statue.
Across the symbol, partially obscuring it, an X had been smeared in blood.