‘So. Here’s what’s going to happen. Kojo, you and I still have a contract of employment and a watertight non-disclosure agreement. You’ll continue to be paid by me, but I don’t ever expect to see you again. And certainly not at my football club, or any other club for that matter. I expect you to disappear, Kojo. Go somewhere you can really use that fly-whisk — somewhere in Africa would be good, I think — and draw your salary. But don’t ever think of working in football again. And always remember this: my arm is long; but my memory is even longer.’
Kojo stood up. ‘What about my things on the boat? My laptop? My clothes?’
‘I’ll have my ship’s captain bring your luggage to shore at the Astir Palace tomorrow morning at eight o’clock. Now get out.’
Kojo Ironsi picked up his fly-whisk and smiled. ‘Congratulations, Scott,’ he said. ‘You won tonight. Then again, maybe you didn’t win anything. Like the man once said, a game is not won until it’s lost.’
After Kojo had gone there was a longish silence, mostly from me since I didn’t know what to say although I now knew exactly what I had to do.
‘Four — nil,’ said Phil, eventually. ‘Incredible.’
He looked at me and then at Vik. ‘What about Scott?’ he asked. ‘I believe he has the same kind of non-disclosure agreement in his own contract, if he bothers to read it.’
‘Scott Manson?’ Vik spoke my name as if he was trying it out to see how loyal it still sounded in that room. ‘I don’t know, Phil. It’s really up to him, isn’t it? He’s been very clever. Maybe he’s too clever for football. Perhaps that’s his problem as a manager. But really, there’s not much hard evidence here. If you ask me, that cop Varouxis will be satisfied with the suicide of the girl and the name of that other guy. The one who murdered those hookers back in 2008, or whenever Scott said it was.’
‘The Hannibal murders,’ supplied Phil.
‘Precisely. Him. And that’s a good collar, I’d have thought — solving an unsolved crime that no one even knew was unsolved. Every policeman dreams of doing something like that. Yes, he’ll have to make do with that. Because I certainly didn’t hear any confession from Kojo. Did you?’
Phil shook his head. ‘No. Nothing at all.’
Vik thought for a moment and then wagged a finger at me. ‘Everything else we’ve heard here tonight is just speculation,’ he continued. ‘The girl — Nataliya — committed suicide; we knew that already from that unsent email we found on her iPhone. And now that the police know that they can hardly keep us here any longer. But we’ll probably never discover who poisoned Bekim Develi. You might almost say it was the hand of God. That’s how the insurance companies describe these things, isn’t it?’
‘I think that’s called an act of God,’ said Phil.
‘Yes,’ admitted Vik, ‘you’re right. It’s slightly different in Russian, of course. But better the hand of God than the hand of an innocent child, don’t you think? After all, I’m sure Scott here wouldn’t like it to become known that it was a little child’s hand that was used by unscrupulous, greedy men as a murder weapon in this case. Imagine what it would be like to be that child; to go through life knowing that you were the person who killed Bekim Develi. No, that’s not a cross that any child should ever have to bear. Wouldn’t you agree, Scott?’
I sighed a deep sigh and unzipped my tracksuit top; I was feeling hot from all my exertions; and not just those, perhaps. I was maybe a little sick, too, only this had nothing to do with heat, or smacking Kojo around the room. Having just qualified for the next round I should have been feeling on top of the world. Instead I wanted to find a hole and crawl into it.
I picked up the bottle of Krug, drank from the bottle for a second in a way I calculated was insulting to them both, burped loudly and then shook my head. ‘The trouble with rich people...’
Vik groaned as if he’d heard this lecture before; and very likely he had.
‘Be careful,’ he said, ‘you’re not exactly poor, Scott.’
‘No, I’m not. And you are quite right to remind me of that fact, Vik. I guess that’s the difference between your kind of money and mine. You see, I’ve never really had to deal with the idea that, under the right circumstances, there might be absolutely nothing I wouldn’t do and nobody whose face I wouldn’t step on to keep a hold of that money, or to accumulate even more. Does that make any sense to either of you? No, I didn’t think it would somehow.’
I nodded at them both.
‘You’ll have my written resignation in the morning, gentlemen. But right now I’m going to say goodbye to my team before spending the rest of the evening with my girlfriend.’
60
Even when you’re winning and on top you never know when the whistle may blow. Just ask Roberto Di Matteo, the caretaker manager of Chelsea who steered the club to a memorable double in 2012, and was promptly sacked following a mildly shaky start to the 2012–13 season. Or Vincent Del Bosque who got the bullet from Real Madrid just forty-eight hours after they won La Liga in 2003. Now that was harsh. Success in football rarely breeds more success, merely great expectations; and like the story goes, great expectations are often disappointed.
Already I had a few grey hairs on my head where none had existed before and that was after just seven months in charge — one less than Di Matteo. The fact is, after a week of combining football management with amateur detective work I was knackered and looking forward to a good rest.
Of course, most football managers get the sack or leave because another club makes them an offer they can’t refuse; but it’s perhaps rare for a manager to walk away from a club having just secured qualification for the next round of Champions League football, and the English press were all over the story like a colony of ants when Louise and I flew back to Heathrow’s Terminal Five without the rest of the team. And not just that story, either.
To my girlfriend’s credit she hadn’t ever repeated what she’d told me on Vik’s boat when I seemed to be on the verge of finding out exactly what had happened to Bekim Develi: nothing in this world gets solved the way you think it should — the way it ought to be solved. But she was right. It doesn’t. I felt absolutely no satisfaction in having discovered how Bekim Develi had been killed and who had been behind it; and I could never have predicted that solving the case could feel so utterly pointless. Most of the time I wondered why I’d ever bothered. She got that right, too.
As for me I could have said a lot about what happened in Athens to the mass of reporters at Heathrow but I hardly cared to spend any more time involving myself in the murky financial affairs that had prompted my resignation from London City. That was all behind me now and I felt as if a great weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Instead I chose to confine all of my remarks to football, which suited me a lot better. That’s the nice thing about football. There are moments in life when only football seems important. When everything else seems trivial and inconsequential and sometimes you think it’s probably the only reason why fields are flat, why grass is cut short and why gravity was invented. Besides, I honestly wouldn’t have known how to explain Greek sovereign national debt.
‘I didn’t resign to go and manage another football club,’ I told the waiting reptiles. ‘I didn’t resign because I wanted more money or more power to buy the players I wanted. I didn’t resign because of the Leicester City result or because we lost the first leg to Olympiacos in Athens. I didn’t even resign because the police chose to detain our whole team in Greece for no good reason. Contrary to the suggestions of some papers, I resigned because I had a profound difference of opinion with the owner of the club as to how it should be run but, with no disrespect to Mr Sokolnikov, that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who loves the game. After all, football is something about which a lot of men and women feel very passionately and sometimes that passion means that people find they can no longer work with each other. It’s as simple as that. It’s just the way the balls come out of the bag, right?