January Window

36

While Maurice escorted a grateful Terry Shelley out of Silvertown Dock, I got up and locked the door to my office before making myself a very strong cup of coffee with the Nespresso machine that sat on top of the filing cabinet. If there’d been any brandy around I might have added some of that to my mug instead of milk from the refrigerator. I figured I needed something strong inside me if I really was going to play detective for the whole nine yards, and it was impossible even to imagine catching Zarco’s killer without knowing the exact circumstances of how the man had met his death. I could see no way of avoiding it. Ignoring a text from the Guardian soliciting my opinion on the absence of black goalkeepers in top-class football — why was it, for example, that City had chosen a Scot instead of the ‘equally talented’ Hastings Obasanjo, or Pierre Bozizé? — I settled down to read.

I hadn’t ever seen an autopsy report or had anything to do with one before. In fact, I hadn’t even seen a dead body, unless you count the guy in the next cell at Wandsworth Prison who got a shiv in his neck and died later in hospital. The closest I’d come to seeing an autopsy had been on the telly when the almost infamous German anatomist Gunther von Hagens had dissected a cadaver ‘live’ on Channel Four television; it had been fascinating to see the human musculature in close detail. I was of course especially fascinated to see those more vulnerable parts of the human leg that give all footballers problems from time to time: the anterior cruciate ligaments, the knee cartilage, the hamstrings and the groin. I remember gasping that something as simple as a length of tendon at the back of the knee could be so fucking painful when it tore, and that an Achilles could reduce you to a whimpering puppy when it snapped. For me it was like my teacher at school explaining how the Pythagorean theorem works infallibly; or, in the case of the anterior cruciate ligament, doesn’t. Some of those Creationist bastards in the US who are forever arguing ‘intelligent design’ — I’d like to see them do that while trying to play on to the end of a match with a torn adductor muscle.

But while there had seemed a purpose to the carnage wreaked upon a human body by von Hagens, and a genuine investigative value to his carving up a cadaver like a pig carcass in a butcher’s shop, what I was reading now seemed like something altogether different. The pale, rubbery bodies von Hagens used had hardly appeared to be human at all, more like something from the special effects guys at Pinewood Studios — perhaps because they had been emptied of the one thing that had made them human: life itself. And turning the pages of my friend’s autopsy report felt uncomfortably personal, even transgressive. I hadn’t ever sat in a steam bath with any of von Hagens’ cadavers, or embraced them fondly at Christmas; I hadn’t enjoyed a good dinner with any of them, or joined them in joyous celebrations as our team won a match; I hadn’t known them for most of my life. I hadn’t spoken to them less than seventy-two hours ago. It was a little like the computer guy taking your PC to bits in order to fix it — with all of the inside bits laid improbably open for inspection — except of course that no one was going to fix João Gonzales Zarco now. I suppose the moment when it hit me for the first time that Zarco really was dead and wouldn’t be coming back — that my friend and mentor was gone forever — was when I saw a photograph of him lying on the pathology table with a Y-shaped suture zippered up the front of his pale and naked corpse.

What a waste, I thought; what a waste of a spectacularly talented man.

I tried to ignore the many other colour photographs and to concentrate mostly on the text, which was of course written in cold and scientific legalese. The tone was measured, matter-of-fact, dispassionate, like a medical textbook, with very little use of the past conditional tense and almost nothing supposed. Wounds and injuries were simply described and evaluated in an efficient way that rendered them less extraordinary and perhaps, for the detective at least, easier to deal with.

Had Detective Chief Inspector Jane Byrne attended João Zarco’s autopsy? According to the notes, this had taken place during the course of a single hour the previous afternoon. I didn’t envy her if she had. There were better ways to spend your Sunday than listening to the sound of a sternum being snipped open, or the sight of a human crown being removed with a saw like the top of your boiled egg. Perhaps she was used to it. She certainly looked like she was. You can get used to anything, I suppose. More than likely she’d have freaked out at the sight of a badly broken leg on a football pitch, though; I’d seen more than my fair share of those and I don’t think there’s a more traumatic sight in sport. I’d seen several players faint at the sight of a career-ending leg break. What I was looking at now was bad enough but I owed it to Zarco to steel myself to keep reading. Unfortunately there was no cortisone injection I could give myself in order to carry on turning the pages.

Poor Zarco. The pictures of his body, as found by Phil Hobday and the security guards from the dock, showed a man who looked like he had played ninety minutes in goal with his clothes on. These had been examined first and it had been concluded that the body had been clothed at the time of death; the pathologist had matched his injuries to the blood stains on Zarco’s white Turnbull & Asser shirt, his grey Charvet silk tie, and the beautiful black silk coat from Zegna he’d been wearing on the morning of his death. Two grand, it cost him. But it did not look quite so beautiful now after he had crawled some way along the wet ground and several pigeons had come and crapped on him. The knees of his suit were almost as dirty and I was reminded of the night when we had beaten Arsenal and Zarco had ‘done a Wayne’, celebrating with a massive slide on his knees that took him from the technical area right down to the corner flag. Of Zarco’s lucky club scarf — from a shop called Savile Rogue, it was made of cashmere — there was no sign.

The injuries to his body were all blunt trauma injuries, mostly to the head and upper torso, consistent with a severe beating; a violent impact to the front of the skull had resulted in a depressed fracture that had been the most probable cause of death. From the shape of the head fracture it seemed more than likely that Zarco had been struck with a blunt instrument although, so far, no murder weapon had been found.

Which probably explained the police divers in the Thames.

The right-hand side of the chest area was badly bruised, several of the ribs cracked, and his fingers and knuckles badly bruised as if he had fought back. And, underneath the fingernails of his right hand, the pathologist had found minute traces of skin and blood that were not Zarco’s. This did not surprise me. Zarco had never been the type to turn the other cheek; certainly not as a player. Once, when he’d been playing for Celtic, he’d responded to a couple of hard punches from the Rangers player Nwankwo Nkomo with a well-placed and rather more effective head-butt that had broken Nkomo’s nose. Even as a manager of La Braga, Zarco had had his fair share of brawls and fisticuffs, most famously in the tunnel at the San Siro when he’d mixed it with Howard Page, the manager of AC Milan, with the result that FIFA had banned them both from the touchline for several games. Zarco was no shrinking violet and I couldn’t see that anyone taking a swing at him wouldn’t have received something in kind.

The pathologist also found several blue woollen fibres underneath Zarco’s fingernails that could not be matched to anything that the Portuguese had been wearing at the time of his death and which, it was implied, might have come from an assailant’s clothing; this seemed to suggest the possibility that Zarco had grabbed hold of the lapel or the collar of whoever it was that had attacked him. Also consistent with a violent struggle having taken place was the way Zarco’s tie had been found around his neck; it had been knotted much too tightly, almost as if an assailant had used it to try and strangle him with.

Traces of Zarco’s vomit had been found on the ground; this was thought to be consistent with his having sustained a hard blow to the stomach.

Of more palatable interest to me were the contents of Zarco’s pockets, and there were colour photographs of these, too: his regular mobile phone — the one his wife knew about — some loose change, a money clip, a wallet for credit cards, a set of keys — which didn’t include a key to the door of the maintenance area where his body had been found — a wedding ring, a leather Smythson notebook in which he would write things during a game, the hard box for his Oakley sunglasses, a Mont Blanc pen, a business card from a councillor with the Royal Borough of Greenwich, a piece of white moulding from a ceiling (rather strangely), a gold coin, a Silvertown Dock pass which had been on a silk lanyard around his neck, and the Hublot watch and light blue prostate cancer silicone band that had been on his wrist.

After Zarco’s father, José, died of prostate cancer, Zarco had become a tireless supporter of Prostate Cancer UK. Growing a terrible moustache every November to help raise funds was only a small part of what he did for this charity, which had already tweeted their grief on learning of his death.

On the ground surrounding the body were found several brooms and brushes, a couple of buckets, and some window-cleaning equipment. Small litter included eleven cigarette ends — most of which were English or American brands, although one was Russian — some spent matches, a button, a few copper coins, a McDonald’s wrapper, several old City ticket stubs, a Styrofoam Starbucks coffee cup, a football programme, a month-old copy of the London Evening Standard, and an empty half-bottle of vodka. None of this looked like it was going to provide the vital clue that would solve the mystery of Silvertown Dock.

I closed the report and locked it in my filing cabinet before unlocking my office door again. Rather shamefully, perhaps, my first reaction on having finished reading the report was to congratulate myself on being alive when someone else — someone close to me — was not; but this, in the great scheme of things, is really all you can ask. To be around when others have had their heads bashed in is not much of a philosophy, but in the absence of something better it serves just as well as anything else.