January Window

21

I drove back to Manresa Road so that Sonja would have her car when she returned to London from her French conference. We spoke again on the telephone and she told me she was on her way to the Gare du Nord to catch the Eurostar back home, for which I was very glad. Just having her around made me feel better about everything.

As soon as the cab company texted me to say that their driver was in front of the building I grabbed my bag and went outside. It was a bitterly cold January day and the sun was so ill defined in the uniformly white sky that it was almost invisible. With my face shrouded in the upturned collar of my new winter coat — a Christmas present from Sonja — I pushed through the many cameramen and climbed into the back of the people-carrier. I tried telling myself that I was lucky to be working in a sport which could generate this amount of media attention, that if it were any other game but football no one would have been there, but it didn’t work. I felt beleaguered and under pressure — not just from the press, but from my new job and the extra responsibilities given to me by my employer. How was it possible that I was going to successfully manage a Premier League football team and solve a serious crime?

The very next moment, as if he had been reading my mind, I got a text from Simon Page asking me if he thought we should be fielding a full-strength side against the Hammers in a competition like the Capital Cup. It was an easily answered question. In spite of what title-hungry fans thought, you always let the money do your thinking for you: staying in the Premier League was worth between forty and sixty million quid a year to a club; a place in the Champions League group stage was worth about twenty-five million quid; the League Cup was worth shit. I wasn’t sure if I even wanted us to stay in the competition; with the Mickey Mouse cup, sometimes losing was a better outcome than winning, and as poisoned chalices go the League Cup was more toxic than most. But even worse than winning the League Cup was the prospect of the winner being obliged to play in the Europa League, a competition that amounted to the biggest fucking headache in football. I texted back one word: RESERVES. Who knows: maybe we’d find another star like Christoph Bündchen; but for Zarco sacking Ayrton Taylor, Bündchen would still have been on the bench.

I pocketed my iPhone and turned my attention to my iPad. I’d downloaded the Sunday Times to read on the way to Hangman’s Wood. There were a few handsome tributes to Zarco from other managers and players but as far as the circumstances of Zarco’s death were concerned the writers didn’t have much to go on, and quite a bit else of what was printed in that particular newspaper was about the man who was likely to take over from Zarco in the short term, and his own colourful past; in other words, me.

I read this with the kind of horrified fascination I might have felt if I had been reading my own obituary, which, given that a small part of me had died with Zarco, was not so far from reality:

Sonia Dalek was actually Sonja Halek — her nickname at school had been the Dalek Queen, and I knew she wasn’t overly fond of this common misspelling, so I guessed she wasn’t going to be pleased to be reminded of that. I was aged forty, not thirty-nine, and I’d scored only fourteen goals while I was at Southampton. I didn’t speak a word of Russian, although I’d often wanted to learn. My MBA was from the London Business School and I didn’t earn a salary from Pedila, I had a yearly dividend that was very much less than two million pounds. And the Russian company Konkurentsiya had actually offered a billion quid for Pedila after buying a twenty-seven per cent share in the company.

Apart from all that, the story in the newspaper was one hundred per cent correct.

The press were outside the gate at Hangman’s Wood, too, but the entrance to the club’s training facility was so far away from the low-rise buildings that it hardly seemed worth coming and I almost felt sorry for the bastards. I knew most of the players had already arrived, since the car park looked like the Geneva Motor Show.

We drove up to the entrance where the team coach had just arrived to take us all to Silvertown Dock. I got out of the car; for a moment I looked through the glass wall of the indoor pitch where some of the reserves were having an informal kick-about.

They looked very young — too young to pit against a side of thugs like West Ham — and I was gambling that in spite of being close to the bottom of the table, the Hammers manager would make the same decision as I had: I figured they needed the money from surviving in the Premier League even more than we did.

One player quickly caught my eye — the sixteen-year-old Belgian midfielder, Zénobe Schuermans, who we’d bought in the summer from Club Brugge for a million quid. I’d seen him on video in a friendly against Hamburg when he’d scored direct from a corner kick. It was no wonder that Simon Page rated Schuermans as the most talented sixteen-year-old he’d seen since Jack Wilshere. As I watched he suddenly turned on a performance of skills that properly belonged in a Nike freestyle football commercial; it was mesmerising — the best thing I’d seen since watching Zlatan Ibrahimović play keepy-uppy with a piece of chewing-gum — and for a moment I started to dream about what a kid like him might do for us.

The next second I almost had a heart attack as a stray ball hit the glass wall in front of my face. The impact broke only my chain of thoughts; I turned and walked through the front door.