January Window

  By now I had also realised just how sensitive all of these texts were and how dearly the police would have wanted to see what was on Zarco’s phone. Of course I knew that I was committing a serious offence by not handing it over – withholding evidence in a murder inquiry carries a prison sentence, and I knew all about what that was like. I had no wish ever to go back to Wandsworth. But Zarco’s reputation and that of London City were of greater consequence than this. For the first time in my life I knew the absolute truth of Bill Shankly’s famous quote when he was still the manager of Liverpool: ‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death… I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.’

  And how.

  26

  I went along to the players’ lounge where everyone was watching Sky Sports, just for a change – Tottenham versus West Bromwich Albion, the first of three Super Sunday televised matches. In the studio before the match there was, of course, plenty of talk about Zarco’s death and my appointment as manager, which the three pundits seemed to think was a good thing. I tried not to pay attention to it but I’d always respected Gary Neville; that back pass to Paul Robinson in the Euro 2008 qualifier against Croatia aside, you had to admire a man who, at the age of just twenty-three, had had the strength of character to tell Glenn Hoddle just what he thought about the faith healer the England manager had brought into the squad.

  Every so often an attractive uniformed WPC with a clipboard from the Essex Constabulary would summon one of the players or staff who’d been at Silvertown Dock the day before for a short interview with a detective; but this seemed to be taking a while and some of the lads near the end of the alphabet were impatient to get back home to spend what would have been a rare Sunday with their families. A few of the others were behaving in a rather boorish and tiresome way towards the poor WPC; when she came into the room one of the younger players said, ‘Hey, lads, the stripper’s here,’ and I quickly gained the impression that this had been going on for a while.

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ I said firmly. ‘This woman has got a job to do. Try to remember that this is a murder inquiry and treat her with respect.’

  Which was good, coming from me.

  Everyone groaned, not because they disagreed with me but because Tottenham, who were just three points behind us in the table, scored first.

  ‘Hey, boss, can you get someone to turn the heating on? It’s brass monkeys in here,’ someone said. ‘We’ve asked Big Simon but nothing seems to happen.’

  Which explained why a moody-looking Ayrton Taylor was wearing a black shearling coat from Dolce & Gabbana which seemed to match his curly, rockabilly hair; on the other hand, since the coat cost seven grand, maybe he just didn’t want to leave it lying around for someone to fuck with – give it a haircut, perhaps. I couldn’t blame him for that. Players were always pissing around with each other’s clothes – cutting the arse out of a pair of jeans, and sometimes far worse. I’d looked at that coat in the shop myself and decided that a) seven grand was far too much to pay for a coat and b) I looked like a tit in it anyway. That was how Sonja came to buy me a nice grey cashmere coat from Zegna. Taylor’s hand was still bandaged but he wasn’t trying to hide it in his pocket as perhaps he might have done if he really had battered Zarco to death.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I said, then I caught Taylor’s dark eye. ‘Ayrton. Could I have a word with you, please?’

  ‘Sure.’

  We stepped outside and walked down the corridor until we came to a bulletproof glass cabinet containing Viktor Sokolnikov’s most precious possession – a replica of the famous Jules Rimet trophy that he had bought from the Brazilian Football Confederation for fifty million dollars. The real one was in a vault in Viktor’s bank – but most people believed the one on display at Silvertown Dock was the real thing.

  ‘What happened to your hand?’ I asked.

  ‘I punched a locker door yesterday, after the match,’ said Ayrton. He was English, from Liverpool, but he’d grown up in Brazil where, in spite of a father who wanted him to become a racing driver, he’d learned to play football.

  ‘Why, for Pete’s sake?’

  ‘Because I was frustrated, I suppose.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I wanted to play yesterday, of course. There’s nothing worse than seeing your team do well without you. Even when you’re injured. Christ, you should know that, boss. I just wanted to get on the park and score a goal myself.’

  ‘You still feel that way?’

  He nodded at the trophy. ‘There’s a World Cup coming up soon. The only way I can get picked to play for England is if I’m playing regular football, and scoring goals, but there’s not much chance of that happening now.’

  ‘Show me the door,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The door you punched,’ I said. ‘Show it to me.’

  ‘Why do you want to see a fucking door?’

  ‘Just humour me.’

  Taylor shrugged and led the way downstairs to the dressing room where there were twenty-seven locker doors made of polished oak, each of them behind an individual seat upholstered in orange suede. He led me to the number seven locker, which had Christoph Bündchen’s name on it. I opened the door and saw that it was split all the way through the wood, as if it had been struck with considerable force.

  ‘Christ, how hard did you hit it?’

  He looked sheepish. ‘Hard enough. I used to study karate in my spare time and thought I could still do that kind of stuff. But it seems I can’t do that either.’

  ‘Have you had an X-ray?’

  ‘No need. I can tell it’s not broken. I bruised the bones, that’s all.’

  I took his hand by the fingers and turned it over.

  ‘Nice bandage. Who did it?’

  ‘The wife, Lexi. She used to be a nurse. She was waiting at Hangman’s Wood for me to drive me home last night. You know I lost my licence a while back. She always picks me up after—’

  ‘Why her and not the team doctor?’

  ‘Because I was embarrassed about it.’

  ‘You’re fucking crazy,’ I said. ‘You could have broken it.’

  ‘I figured it was better than hitting Christoph,’ said Taylor. ‘Given that it’s him who’s got my place in the team.’

  ‘True.’

  Then he smiled. ‘Oh, I get it. You thought maybe it was me who smacked Zarco.’

  ‘Someone did.’

  ‘It wasn’t me. Between you and me I hated the bastard, sure. And he probably had it coming. But not from me. Besides, I’ve got a witness who saw me do this. Manny.’

  Manny Rosenberg was the kitman.

  ‘Maybe you hit the door because you’d already hit Zarco. Good way of explaining your hand. You could have hit the door to disguise the bruising.’

  ‘But you don’t really think I hit him, do you?’

  ‘Not really.’ I glanced at the Jules Rimet. ‘How old are you, anyway, Ayrton? Twenty-eight?’

  ‘Yes. This is my last chance.’

  ‘You know we’ve had offers for you from other clubs?’

  ‘I know. But Fulham and Stoke City don’t exactly blow my hair back.’

  ‘Can I be frank with you?’ I nodded at the iPhone in his unbandaged hand. ‘That’s to say I don’t want to read anything I say now on Twitter.’

  He nodded and dropped the phone into his coat pocket.

  ‘I thought the way Zarco treated you was unfair. But you should never have sworn at him like that. Even though he threw a cone at you. In my day as a player managers did much worse than that. It’s good to get angry in football. It’s an emotional game. Big Ron Atkinson chased a player around the dressing room at Villa and ended up punching the wrong bloke. Lawrie McMenemy had a ruck with Mark Wright in the showers at Southampton. And when he was at Forest Cloughie punched Roy Keane.’

  ‘Really? Jesus. I can’t imagine anyone punching him.’

  ‘Keane says now it was the best
thing that ever happened to him. Players do things that piss coaches and managers off – like being lazy in training – and when that happens they deserve a kick up the arse. What happened was my fault. You were a lazy bastard but I should have been the one who kicked your arse, Ayrton. Not Zarco. I was taking the training session and it should have been me who bawled you out.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You won’t get a place in the England squad if you’re a lazy cunt – you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I admire fair play and sportsmanship but there’s no place in my squad for anyone who doesn’t work hard in training. If you’re prepared to do that, then I want you in my team. As far as I’m concerned, everything that happened between you and Zarco is water under the bridge if you can tell me now that you want to stay here at City and work your fucking balls off for us.’

  ‘Do I want to stay here? I never wanted to leave.’

  ‘And you’ll work hard for me?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. You mean it, boss?’

  I put my hands on the boy’s shoulders and looked him squarely in the eye.

  ‘Of course I mean it. We need an experienced player like you, Ayrton. There’s bags of talent here but apart from Ken Okri there’s no one in our squad who can steady the younger lads and help to keep them going if we’re still behind with five minutes left to play. When we lost 4–3 to Newcastle just after Christmas, you were the only one who was still looking for the equaliser at full time. You may be a lazy bastard in training but in a match you’ve got that never-say-die attitude that wins games, Ayrton. There’s no obligation to win when you’re playing football, but there is an obligation to keep trying. That’s what the fans believe. And it’s what I know. The number of games I’ve seen won in the last minute—’

  ‘You’re right, boss. Arsenal against Liverpool in May 1989, Man U against Bayern Munich in 1999, Man City against QPR in 2012.’

  ‘That’s what I’m talking about, son. The really beautiful thing about football is that at any moment, a match can turn the other way. A goal changes everything. The last minute of the game is always, always, without exception, the most important minute of the match; and yet the number of times you see a winning side relax before the whistle has gone. People used to talk about Fergie time as if by chewing the fourth official out he’d unfairly get a few more minutes of extra time so that Man U could steal the match. Bollocks. It was just that Fergie had schooled his players never to give up. The players saw him walking up and down, getting mad and they knew that he hadn’t given up. So they didn’t either. That’s what people didn’t understand. What they still don’t understand.’

  He smiled and it was the first time I’d seen him smile in ages. ‘I’m really off the transfer list?’

  ‘You can play on Tuesday night if Simon thinks you’re fit enough.’

  ‘Fucking brilliant.’

  Ayrton pulled his phone out of his pocket. ‘Can I tell Lexi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’ll be over the moon, boss. There was no way she wanted to leave London to live in fucking Stoke.’

  ‘But no tweets. In fact, if I were you, I’d stop tweeting altogether. It’s only cunts that pay attention to Twitter.’

  ‘Yes, boss. Whatever you say.’

  ‘And no more punching lockers.’

  I didn’t know it, but I’d just made one of the best decisions of my new managerial career.

  27

  I went outside onto the pitch for a cigarette break without the cigarette – to breathe some fresh air and clear my head a little. Mist hung over the stadium like a poison gas rolling across a line of trenches and the east London air tasted fresher than it looked, with just a hint of salt blown in off the last high tide. Just to walk on the pitch made me feel grounded and I longed to run up and down for a while. Instead I fetched a football and for several minutes played keepy-uppy – what the Americans call ‘ball-juggling’. It wasn’t that I was particularly good at it but, for me, there was always a Zen-like absorption to be found in doing this; it clears the head wonderfully because it’s impossible to think of anything else while you’re trying to keep the ball off the ground. Sometimes it’s as good as meditation; perhaps better, in that it helps to keep you fit as well.

  ‘Get off the fucking pitch, you stupid bastard!’

  I looked around to see Colin Evans striding down the touchline like an army sergeant. When he saw it was me, he slowed his stride and checked his anger.

  ‘Sorry, boss,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know it was you.’

  ‘No, you’re right, Colin,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t be on the grass. What with all these coppers around I just had to get outside for a few minutes; and then I couldn’t help myself.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I expect you have a lot on your plate right now.’

  ‘More than I can eat.’ I frowned. ‘That reminds me: I’m hungry.’

  Leaving Colin, I went up to the players’ dining room and collected a chicken salad from the buffet, but not before thanking the kitchen staff – or at least as many of them as I could see – for coming in to the dock on what was supposed to have been a day off. Sometimes being a manager is as much about diplomacy as it is about football. As I see it, you have to make up for all the dimwits who surround you. Like those dimwit players at our own club who didn’t jump to their feet when Peter Shilton – the player with the most caps for England, ever – came to visit our dressing room. Zarco had gone mad at them for the lack of respect. One hundred and twenty-five caps and an England career that spanned twenty years and they didn’t get off their fucking arses.

  With my back to the room and sitting at a corner table I’d hoped to snatch lunch without being bothered by anyone, but I wasn’t there for very long before Detective Inspector Louise Considine was hovering over me with a coffee cup in her hands and a curious look in her eye.

  ‘Mind if I join you?’ She smiled. ‘On second thoughts, please don’t answer that. I’m so not up to anyone being aggressive to me today.’

  ‘Please do,’ I said and for a moment I even stood up, politely. ‘No, really. You’re very welcome.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Hard day?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it.’

  We sat down. She was wearing jeans and a tailored tweed jacket with a matching waistcoat. The handbag slung over her arm was old but classic: something her grandmother had given her, perhaps.

  ‘So I assume they must have drafted you in for your footballing expertise, Miss Considine? Not that you’d know very much if you support Chelsea.’ I frowned. ‘Why do you support Chelsea, anyway?’

  ‘Because José Mourinho is the handsomest man in football?’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘That was obviously before you met me.’

  ‘Obviously.’ She sipped the coffee and grimaced. ‘This isn’t a patch on the coffee you make at home,’ she said.

  ‘I’m glad you think so.’

  ‘Who needs a man to be handsome as long as he makes excellent coffee?’

  ‘It’s a point of view. Every man needs a skill, right?’

  ‘So, when they sack you from London City, you can open your own coffee shop.’

  ‘I’ve only just got the job,’ I said. ‘It’s a little early to be thinking about the sack.’

  ‘Not at City. How many managers has the club had since it came into being? A dozen?’

  ‘Maybe. I never counted.’

  ‘You’re number thirteen by my count.’

  ‘I guess I deserve that after my Chelsea remark.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’ She smiled and stared out of the window at the pitch. Light filled her clear, perfect blue eyes so that they resembled two matching sapphires. Suddenly I wanted to lean forward and kiss each of them in turn.

  ‘Then if I might mention manager number twelve, for a moment,’ I said. ‘And the crime scene. Have the forensics people finished down there?’

/>   ‘Yes. Who should we return the key to?’

  ‘You can give it to me,’ I said.

  She laid a key on the table. I picked it up and dropped it into my pocket.

  ‘Find anything interesting?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not a thing. But then I haven’t yet had a chance to go crawling over the ground with a magnifying glass.’

  ‘I suppose you wouldn’t say even if you had.’

  ‘Walls have tweets,’ she said. ‘Especially around here.’

  ‘Footballers and their smartphones, eh? I sometimes wonder what they did before them.’

  ‘Read books, like everyone else. Then again, maybe not. Did you know that one of your players – and I won’t say who – is illiterate. He couldn’t read his own statement.’

  ‘That’s not so surprising. English is a foreign language for a lot of—’

  ‘He is English.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  Louise Considine shook her head.

  ‘He really can’t read?’

  ‘That’s what illiterate means, Mr Manson. Oh, and another of the players thought Zarco was Italian.’

  I finished eating and sat back on the chair.

  ‘We have all sorts of nationalities here. Sometimes I have trouble remembering these things myself.’

  ‘Now that I don’t believe. You being such a polyglot.’

  ‘I’m half German, remember? And you know what they say: a man who speaks three languages is trilingual, a man who speaks two is bilingual and a man who speaks one is English.’

  She smiled. ‘That’s me. O-level French, and that’s it, I’m afraid. I can barely tell my cul from my coude.’

  ‘Now I know that’s not true.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘They’re like children, sometimes, footballers. Very large, very strong children.’

  ‘And how. Two of them wept like babes: Iñárritu, the Mexican, and the German – Christoph Bündchen.’

  ‘That’s nothing to be ashamed of. They’re sensitive lads. I wept myself when I heard the news.’