January Window

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.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry for your loss. Again.’

I nodded back at her. ‘You know, it’s been a while since Matt Drennan hanged himself. But the police still haven’t released the body so his poor family can bury him. Why is that, please?’

‘I don’t really know. I’m no longer on that case. At least not that particular case.’

‘Case? I didn’t realise it was a case. What’s taking so long?’

‘These things can take a little time. Besides, the circumstances of Mr Drennan’s death have obliged us to reopen a previous inquiry.’

‘What exactly does that mean?’

She looked around. ‘Look, perhaps this isn’t the right place to tell you about it.’

‘We can go to my office if you like.’

‘I think that might be better.’

We got up from the table and went along to my office in silence. She walked with her bag slung over one shoulder and her arms folded in front of her chest, the way women do when they’re not entirely comfortable about something. I closed the door behind us, drew out a chair for her and then sat down. I was close enough to smell her perfume — not that I could tell what it was, merely that I liked it. In spite of who and what she was, I liked her, too.

‘So. What did you want to tell me, Miss Considine?’

‘I’m sorry to land it on you like this,’ she said. ‘Really, I am. Especially now. But you’ll hear about it soon enough. Tomorrow, probably, when we make it official.’ She paused for a moment and then said: ‘We’re reopening the police inquiry into the rape of Helen Fehmiu.’

I was silent as, for a moment, it was 23 December 2004 and I was back in the dock at St Albans Crown Court, about to be sentenced to eight years in prison for rape. I closed my eyes wearily, half expecting that Louise Considine was going to tell me that I was under arrest again. I lowered my head onto the desk in front of me and let out a groan.

‘Not again.’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Christ, why?’

To my surprise she laid her hand on my shoulder and left it there.

‘Look, Mr Manson, you’re not a suspect so there’s no need for you to worry. No need at all. I promise you, you’re in the clear. If anything, this is good news for you. You have my word on it.’

I sat up again. ‘That’s easy for you to say.’

‘It really is good news, you know. It will completely remove any lingering suspicion that in spite of your acquittal you might have had something to do with it.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Why now? It’s been almost ten years. And how does Matt Drennan’s death have any bearing on what happened to Helen Fehmiu?’

‘Well, you see we found a suicide note in Mr Drennan’s pocket. In the note he talked about you. In fact, his suicide seems to have had quite a bit to do with you, Mr Manson.’

‘I find that hard to believe.’

‘Rather than me try to explain what I mean, the quickest thing would be if I were to let you read it. The note. I have a PDF of it here.’

She picked up her handbag, took out an iPad and then showed me an image of a handwritten note. I didn’t recognise the childlike handwriting but the signature at the bottom with a smiley face inside the capital ‘D’ of Drennan was familiar, although on a suicide note it struck me as rather strange. Then again, it was quite typical of the man: I imagined him writing the note, then signing it with the smiley face out of sheer habit, as if he’d been signing an autograph for a fan in a pub or outside a football ground. Drenno was never too busy to sign an autograph for whoever asked him. It was one of the reasons why so many people loved the man.

‘I’ve managed to get hold of a photograph of Sergeant MacDonald,’ she said, ‘and if you’ll forgive me I think it’s fair to say that he looks not unlike you. He was part Nigerian. It might account for why Mrs Fehmiu was prepared to identify you as the rapist.’

I nodded slowly.

‘You’re nodding like it seems to make sense,’ she said.

‘It certainly explains one or two things that have always puzzled me about what happened back then,’ I said.

‘Such as?’

I told her how my car had disappeared from outside Karen’s house in St Albans, and then reappeared again; and how Drenno had visited me regularly in prison.

‘He obviously felt guilty,’ she said.

‘I suppose so. And now I come to think of it, Mackie had a conviction for car theft. Drenno used to say he’d nicked cars, too, when he was a kid in Glasgow, only he never got caught.’ I sighed. ‘The fucking idiot. Drenno was always playing stupid practical jokes like that. Every day. And I mean every day. Sometimes it seemed to me that he wanted to make people laugh more than he wanted to play football. Once some bloke’s wife bought him one of those fat Mont Blanc Meisterstück pens as a birthday present and Drenno filled it with his own piss. Stupid. Juvenile. But at the time very funny.’

‘So he must have known that you were having an affair with this woman, Karen, and where your car would be. Did you tell him?’

‘God, no. But for all his stupid larks he was actually quite clever, so he must have worked it out. And now I seem to remember that one day he tailed me in his car from the Arsenal training ground at Shenley. I was sure it was him and then I wasn’t, if you know what I mean. But it must have been him, I think. I should have known there were no lengths Drenno wouldn’t go to for the sake of a practical joke.’ I nodded. ‘Wait, I remember now. My car keys. He came to the garage with me when I bought the car. He said he was thinking of buying one the same. Maybe he did, for all I know. Anyway, he must have rung up the salesman, pretending to be me, told him I’d lost my key and asked him to order me a spare from Germany. That’s the only way they could have done it. If he gave that bastard Mackie a key.’

Louise Considine nodded. ‘I know Helen Fehmiu is dead and it won’t help her, but rape is a serious crime and we’re reopening the inquiry because we have to, although it seems pretty cut and dried. I may have to interview you formally, so that you can tell me the full story again. I hope you’ll understand. And I give you my word that when I do, the press won’t know about it.’

‘Thank you.’

She touched my hand. ‘I’m sorry I had to mention it at all. But you had to know the truth about what happened. I think you know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m just sorry it’s going to change your perception of Matt Drennan.’

I shook my head. ‘It won’t, you know. I honestly can’t find it within me to condemn him. After all, he’s paid a dreadful price. He’s dead. That’s much, much worse than anything that happened to me.’