Читать книгу The Phoenix - Тилли Бэгшоу - Страница 7

It wasn’t until two days later that Professor Noriko Adachi saw the picture. The tattoo on the dead child’s foot filled the screen on her office computer like cancer on an X-ray. Awful. Disgusting. Yet Japan’s most famous living literary scholar couldn’t stop herself from looking at it.

No sooner had charity workers on the beach noticed the unusual ‘L’ sign than theories began abounding on the web as to what it meant. Most were laughably wide of the mark. One or two came closer to the truth, more by luck than judgment in Professor Adachi’s opinion, pointing the finger at ‘people-traffickers’. But no one had yet said the word ‘Petridis’.

Most people still don’t know, Professor Adachi thought bitterly. And those who do are too cowardly to speak out.

Lovingly, she picked up the gilt-framed photograph in pride of place on her desk and traced a finger over the glass. Her only son, Kiko, was standing outside his dorm room in America, beaming with pride in his UCLA T-shirt. Above him, the dazzling California sky shone cartoon-blue. Fifteen years ago next week. What a perfect day it had been, so full of hope and promise.

A year after that picture was taken, Kiko Adachi was dead. The hardworking, diligent student and athlete, and love of his parents’ life, had fatally overdosed on a new, lethally strong brand of cocaine, recognizable by the ‘L’ insignia on the baggies, specially shipped onto US college campuses by Spyros Petridis.

A year after that, Noriko and her husband Izumi, Kiko’s father, had divorced. Izumi complained that his wife had become obsessed with Petridis and his glamorous wife Athena, by that time a UN special ambassador and world-renowned philanthropist whose charisma and beauty had so dazzled the world’s most powerful men that her husband operated their empire with near impunity.

Izumi was right. Noriko was obsessed. She wrote countless articles about the Petridises’ criminal activity, which no one had the balls to publish. She even penned a novel about her son’s death, with the names and identities thinly disguised, but no one would print that either, despite the professor’s fame. After two and a half years of fruitless effort, it was the happiest day of Professor Noriko Adachi’s life when she woke up to the news that Spyros Petridis’s helicopter had gone down in a remote part of Utah, killing him and his wife instantly in a white-hot ball of flames. All that was left of Spyros Petridis had been a few charred bones, just enough to confirm a DNA match. As for Athena – Lady Macbeth – the heat was such that she’d been completely incinerated. Burned to dust. Erased.

In the twelve years since, Noriko Adachi had returned to the University of Osaka and rebuilt her career and what was left of her life. Spyros and Athena had robbed her of her family, but she still found some solace in books, in the literature of tragedy and loss and rebirth that had been her academic world since her own student days.

Until now.

Her gaze returned to the screen.

One picture, one emblem, and it all came flooding back.

Another dead boy.

Somebody else’s son.

Nobody could have survived that crash, Noriko told herself, forcing her rational brain to kick in, to override her emotions. No human could have lived through that fire.

But perhaps Athena Petridis wasn’t human? Perhaps she was truly a monster, a devil, an evil spirit like the Japanese Kamaitachi, mythical sickle-wielding weasels who would slice off children’s legs. Perhaps she was a witch.

Professor Noriko Adachi sat at her desk and let the hate take over, pumping like poison through her veins.

If Athena Petridis is alive … I’ll kill her.