Chapter 30
‘YOU CAN’T QUIT,’ Knight protested as the nanny dodged around Luke.
‘Watch me,’ Nancy hissed as she barged right by him and down the stairs. ‘They’ve been fed, but not bathed, and Luke’s crapped his nappy for the third time this afternoon. Good luck, Peter.’
She grabbed her things and left, slamming the door behind her.
Isabel started to sob again. ‘Nancy leaves and Lukey did it.’
Feeling overwhelmed, Knight looked at his son and shouted in anger and frustration: ‘That’s four this year, Luke! Four! And she only lasted three weeks!’
Luke’s face wrinkled. He cried: ‘Lukey sorry, Daddy. Lukey sorry.’
In seconds his son had been transformed from this force of nature capable of creating a whirlwind to a little boy so pitiful that Knight softened. Wincing against the pain in his side, still holding Isabel, he crouched down and gestured to Luke with his free arm. The toddler rushed to him and threw his arms so tight around Knight that he gasped with the ache that shot through him.
‘Lukey love you, Daddy,’ his son said.
Despite the stench that hung around the boy, Knight blew the talc off Luke’s cheeks and kissed him. ‘Daddy loves you too, son.’ Then he kissed Isabel so hard on the cheek that she laughed.
‘A change and a shower is in order for Luke,’ he said, and put both his children down. ‘Isabel, shower too.’
A few minutes later, after dealing with the soiled nappy, they were in the big stall shower in Knight’s master bath, splashing and playing. Knight got out his mobile just as Luke picked up a sponge cricket bat and whacked his sister over the head with it.
‘Daddy!’ Isabel complained.
‘Clonk him back,’ Knight said.
He glanced at the clock. It was past eight. None of the nanny services he’d used in the past would be open. He punched in his mother’s number.
She answered on the third ring, sounding wrung-out, ‘Peter, tell me it’s just a nightmare and that I’ll wake up soon.’
‘I’m so sorry, Amanda.’
She broke down in muffled sobs for several moments, and then said, ‘I’m feeling worse than I did when your father died. I think I’m feeling as you must have with Kate.’
Knight felt stinging tears well in his eyes, and a dreadful hollowness in his chest. ‘And still often do, Mother.’
He heard her blow her nose, and then say: ‘Tell me what you know, what you’ve found out.’
Knight knew his mother would not rest until he’d told her, so he did, rapidly and in broad strokes. She’d gasped and protested violently when he’d described Cronus’s letter and the accusations regarding Marshall, and now she wept when he told her of Guilder’s confession and his exoneration of her late fiancé.
‘I knew it couldn’t be true,’ Knight said. ‘Denton was an honest man, a great man with an even greater heart.’
‘He was,’ his mother said, choking.
‘Everywhere I went today, people talked about his generosity and spirit.’
‘Tell me,’ Amanda said. ‘Please, Peter, I need to hear these things.’
Knight told her about Michael Lancer’s despair over Marshall’s death and how he’d called the financier a mentor, a friend, and one of the guiding visionaries behind the London Olympics.
‘Even James Daring, that guy at the British Museum with the television show,’ Knight said. ‘He said that without Denton’s support, the show and his new exhibit about the ancient Olympics would never have got off the ground. He said he was going to thank Denton publicly tonight at the opening reception.’
There was a pause on the line. ‘James Daring said that?’
‘He did,’ Knight said, hoping that his mother would take comfort from it.
Instead, she snapped, ‘Then he’s a bald-faced liar!’
Knight startled. ‘What?’
‘Denton did give Daring some of the seed money to start his television show,’ Amanda allowed. ‘But he most certainly did not support his new exhibit. In fact, they had a big fight over the tenor of the display, which Denton told me was slanted heavily against the modern Olympics.’
‘It’s true,’ Knight said. ‘I saw the same thing.’
‘Denton was furious,’ his mother told him. ‘He refused to give Daring any more money, and they parted badly.’
Definitely not what Daring told me, Knight thought, and then asked, ‘When was this?’
‘Two, maybe three months ago,’ Amanda replied. ‘We’d just got back from Crete and …’
She began to choke again. ‘We didn’t know it, but Crete was our honeymoon, Peter. I’ll always think of it that way,’ she said, and broke down.
Knight listened for several agonising moments, and then said, ‘Mother, is anyone there with you?’
‘No,’ she said in a very small voice. ‘Can you come, Peter?’
Knight felt horrible. ‘Mother, I desperately want to, but I’ve lost another nanny and …’
She snorted in disbelief. ‘Another one?’
‘She just up and quit on me half an hour ago,’ Knight complained. ‘I’ve got to work every day of the Olympics, and I don’t know what to do. I’ve used every nanny agency in the city, and now I’m afraid that none of them will send anyone over.’
There was a long silence on the phone that prompted Knight to say, ‘Mother?’
‘I’m here,’ Amanda said, sounding as composed as she’d been since she’d learned of Marshall’s death. ‘Let me look into it.’
‘No,’ he protested. ‘You’re not …’
‘It will give me something to do besides work,’ she insisted. ‘I need something to do that’s outside myself and the company, Peter, or I think I’ll turn mad, or to drink, or to sleeping pills and I can’t stand the thought of any of those options.’