January Window (20 page)

‘Good. I’m glad.’ She nodded. ‘He was right about you, Scott. He always said that you were the most dependable bloke in the whole club. Just make him proud, okay? That’s all I ask. Go and win the next one for Zarco.’

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;

Following the murder of João Zarco speculation surrounds the appointment of a new manager at London City but, in the short term at least, the job seems likely to go to Zarco’s 39-year-old assistant manager, Scott Manson. Born in Scotland, Manson is the son of Henry ‘Jock’ Manson, who played for the Edinburgh football club Heart of Midlothian, and won fifty-two caps for his country. He also played for Leicester City before founding the Pedila Sports Shoe Company in 1978, which today generates almost half a billion dollars a year in net income. Recently Manson turned down an offer from the Russian sports apparel giant, Konkurentsiya, to purchase the company for five billion dollars. Henry Manson was an old friend of the Portuguese manager, who was one of the first players to endorse a Pedila football boot when he was at Celtic.

A director of his father’s company, which also earns him a salary of over two million pounds per annum, Scott Manson was a talented schoolboy footballer and played for Northampton Town while still attending the local grammar school. He was a member of the side that won the 1986–7 Fourth Division Championship with a record 99 points.

Choosing a university degree in modern languages at Birmingham University instead of a career in football, Manson played for and coached his university side and was a part-time player for Stafford Rangers, where he was scouted by the famous John Griffin and, upon graduation, joined Crystal Palace as a centre back in 1995 under Dave Bassett. After an unsuccessful season in the Premier League, Palace were relegated and Manson was sold to Southampton where he scored sixteen goals under Glenn Hoddle, and then Gordon Strachan. Southampton did well in the 2001–2 season, and even better the year after when the twenty-seven-year-old Manson was sold to Arsenal. But his career as a player ended when, in 2004, he was wrongly convicted of raping a woman at a service station off the A414 in the London Borough of Brent. Manson served eighteen months of an eight-year sentence before his conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal, since which time he has been working his way slowly up the ladder of football management as a trainee coach at Barcelona and then Bayern Munich.

Zarco had managed La Braga and the Brazilian side Atletico Mineiro before his first spell at London City, but he was sacked in 2006 after a disagreement with the billionaire club owner Viktor Sokolnikov, and went on to manage AS Monaco before his return to London City in 2013, with Scott Manson as his assistant manager. Manson has a German mother and speaks the language fluently; he also speaks Spanish, French, Italian and Russian, which would be one reason why he might get on well with Ukrainian-born Sokolnikov. Manson, who has an MBA from INSEAD, the international business school in Paris, is generally held to be one of the smartest men in football and shares a luxury flat in Chelsea with Sonia Dalek, who is a consultant psychiatrist specialising in the field of eating disorders, and the author of several books on the subject.

Zarco’s death marks the end of a tragic month in English football; two weeks ago saw the suicide of Matt Drennan, the troubled ex-England star who was a close friend of Scott Manson and formerly his team mate at Arsenal.

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.

Several of the older players were waiting patiently inside the entrance and fell silent as I walked in the door. They all looked suitably sombre. A few were already wearing black or sporting black armbands. Simon Page tossed aside the
Mail on Sunday
and jumped up off the waiting area sofa to greet me; Maurice, too. But I couldn’t have felt less like the real manager of London City if I’d been carrying a lacrosse stick. I don’t think there was anyone who wasn’t aware of the fact that the last time we had done this as a team Zarco had still been alive.

It was then that I noticed a Roman Catholic priest was standing beside Ken Okri.

‘Is everyone here?’ I asked, one eye on the priest.

‘Yes, boss,’ said Simon.

As soon as I had everyone’s attention I told them what they all probably knew, which was that I had accepted Viktor’s offer of the manager’s job.

‘That’s really all I have to say for now,’ I told them. ‘You’ll hear plenty from me soon enough. Which reminds me: if you must tweet, then keep it sweet. Right then, let’s get everyone on the bus. The quicker we get there the quicker we can go home. And by the way, no headphones or Skullcandy, please. This is the saddest day in the club’s history so please, let’s make sure that when we get to the dock we look like we recognise that fact.’

‘Boss,’ said Ken, ‘this is Father Armfield from St John’s Church in Woolwich. Before we get on the bus, if it’s all right with you, the lads would like him to say a short prayer for Mr Zarco. It is a Sunday, you know.’

‘Of course,’ I replied and bowed my head in prayer, wishing I’d had the nous to think of inviting a priest along that morning. Zarco had been a staunch Roman Catholic, and so was I. It was being a Catholic that helped get me through prison. At least that’s what I told myself. The priest was a welcome surprise. But there was more to come when we got on the bus: to my surprise all the lads started to sing the FA Cup hymn, ‘Abide with Me’. I was surprised that they knew the words – many of them were foreigners, after all – only until I saw that they had downloaded the words onto their smartphones. I might have joined in myself but couldn’t because I was so choked with emotion and, for a moment, I was transported to Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium in 2003 and the only FA Cup Final I ever played in. I was hugely impressed with this show of loyalty to Zarco and wished only that Matt Drennan could have been here to hear it, as no one loved the hymn more than he had.

The bus route west along the B1335 through Aveley and Wennington was pretty well known to the residents of east London, and to our surprise – London City was a new club, after all – many had lined the route to pay their respects. Twenty minutes later we were driving through the gates at Silvertown Dock, slowly, so as not to crush the hundreds of fans gathered there, or the many bouquets of flowers that had been laid there as a mark of respect to Zarco. The gates themselves were almost invisible, hidden under a mass of orange scarves. Candles had been lit and the whole area now resembled the scene of some national disaster – a rail crash or royal death.

‘Is the chairman joining us?’ I asked Maurice.

‘Yes.’

‘What about Viktor?’

‘He’s coming later on with Ronnie. He decided it was better to meet them here rather than have them over to KPG.’

‘When we get inside you’d better put the lads in the video analysis room,’ I told Simon. ‘They can watch the Tottenham match while they’re waiting for their turn with Chief Inspector Byrne.’

‘Right, boss.’

‘Maurice? I’ll want you with me in my office. We’ve got a lot to talk about.’

‘Too right we have.’

We trooped inside the door of the south entrance where, on a black easel with a black laurel wreath, there was a framed photograph of Zarco – a larger version of the same Mario Testino picture that we had found in the grave.

Uniformed officers and men from the Essex Constabulary were already there, of course. Probably they’d been there all night. The corridor leading down to the crime scene was cordoned off with tape.

Simon led the players along to the video analysis suite, while Maurice and I went upstairs to the executive dining room where I found Chief Inspector Byrne and the members of her team, only now she was also accompanied by the two detective inspectors she had drafted onto her inquiry: Denis Neville, who had investigated the hole in the pitch, and Louise Considine, who was – as far as I knew – still investigating the suicide of Matt Drennan. Both of these events already seemed a long time ago.

I wished Jane Byrne a good morning, trying my best to conceal my loathing; she had conspired to have me nicked for drunk driving, after all. She smiled thinly, no doubt wondering if I was going to mention it. So was I.

‘You’ll remember Detective Inspector Neville and Detective Inspector Considine,’ she said.

‘Yes, of course,’ I replied. ‘Thank you for giving up your Sundays to be here. We’re grateful. Detective Inspector Neville?’

‘Sir?’

‘I’d like to apologise for not being more cooperative when you were here the last time. Perhaps if we’d taken things a little more seriously then you wouldn’t be here again now.’

Neville smiled a wry-looking smile as if he didn’t quite believe me.