Viktor shrugged off his coat and sat down on the sofa.
‘Did you see the news on television?’ he asked me. ‘About Reilly?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think he killed Zarco?’
‘I honestly don’t know, Viktor.’
‘If you’re innocent, why run away?’
‘I’ve been wondering that myself.’
‘They used to be friends, he and Zarco. Did you know that? Long before all that stupid business at the SPOTY. When Reilly and Zarco were still playing, back in the early nineties, there was an incident on the football pitch, during a match. Reilly used to play for Benfica. This was at the same time Zarco was playing for Porto. Anyway, words were exchanged and Zarco elbowed Reilly in the face, which almost cost him an eye and ended his season. Indeed, it almost ended Reilly’s career.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘It’s in Reilly’s book, which is long out of print so I don’t suppose anyone really remembers it now. But I do. I remember it because I remember everything I read. I don’t say I have an eidetic or photographic memory. Frankly I don’t believe they exist. However, my memory is exceptional.’
‘Since you remember so much, tell me more about the lunch. About Zarco and how he was the last time you saw him.’
‘Like I say, he seemed himself,’ explained Viktor. ‘Dry and funny, as he always was. And confident about the match, of course. Always confident. Sometimes too confident. He had steak for lunch. And a glass of red wine — just the one. What else? Yes, he had a hat with him, and a pair of sunglasses.’
‘A hat? What kind of a hat? Malcolm Allison, Roberto Mancini or Tony Pulis?’
‘Malcolm Allison, I don’t know. I’ve never heard of this man. A Roberto Mancini, I think. A woolly hat. Well, yesterday was a very cold day.’
‘City colours?’
‘Actually no. The orange ones make your head look like a flower pot. A black one. He was wearing the hat and a pair of scary-looking motorcyclist’s gloves. With black knuckle armour.’
‘He was scared of you, did you know that?’
‘Sophocles says that to him who is in fear everything rustles.’ Viktor smiled. ‘Believe me, Scott, around me there is always a lot of rustling. Everyone seems to hear it. Everyone except me. It’s said — mostly by people who are my enemies — that I have ties to organised crime. This is not true; but what is true is that this was not always the case. When I first started doing business in Russian and Ukraine it was more or less impossible not to make deals with so-called Russian Mafia figures. But let me tell you, if I may, something about the Russian Mafia. It does not exist. It never did exist. It was convenient for the racist government in Moscow — Boris Yeltsin’s government — to blame all of the country’s problems on so-called ethnic gangs: the Georgians, the Chechens, the Tatars, the Ukrainians and the Jews. Always the Jews. But you know mostly these were just businessmen who saw an opportunity and took it in a country where opportunity had not existed in almost a hundred years. Were they greedy? Yes. Were they ruthless? Sometimes. Was I one of these men? Undoubtedly. Did I make a fast buck after the collapse of the USSR? Certainly. Did I do it by means that would not satisfy the SEC or the FSA? Perhaps. Did I ever have anyone killed? No, I did not.’
He meant this little speech to be reassuring, I think, and yet somehow it wasn’t. For one thing there were the bodyguards outside, and for another there was the simple reality that even if Viktor was just a businessman, he knew plenty of people who operated on the edge of the law.
He grinned. ‘Next you’re going to be asking me for my alibi, Scott. It’s just as well I spent the whole afternoon with those people from the Royal Borough of Greenwich. They’ll vouch for me.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. Because I think Zarco had a good reason to be afraid of you. He’d done something wrong. Something illegal.’
‘So, you know about that.’ Viktor’s cold, dark eyes narrowed. ‘I can see I wasn’t wrong about you, Scott. I made the right choice.’
‘Let’s hope you still think so at the end of this conversation, Viktor.’
‘I’m not an idiot. I knew there was a good reason Zarco preferred us to use Paolo Gentile rather than Denis Kampfner for the Traynor transfer. I suspected he was going to take a bung on the deal. Partly it’s my fault. Let me explain: you see, a long while back Zarco had begged me for a share tip. I hate doing that kind of thing but he insisted, so I told him about this energy company in the Urals. They’d just had a big find of oil and it was generally held that the shares would go through the roof. I had bought some and so, I believe, did he. Except that there hadn’t been a big find of oil, it was all a fraud, and instead the shares went down the toilet. Zarco lost a lot of money. Not as much as I did, but then I can afford it. I felt bad about that. Very bad. He lost at least a quarter of a million pounds, I think. So when he asked if we could use Gentile as the agent on the Traynor transfer I agreed so that Zarco could recover what he’d lost. I even pretended to believe what Zarco told me — that Denis couldn’t be trusted. Yes, it’s true, I turned a blind eye to being robbed by my own manager.’
Viktor lit a little cigar with a gold lighter. That’s the thing about owning your own football club; the anti-smoking laws just don’t apply.
‘You remember when people first had cars? Well, of course you don’t remember it. What I mean is that in 1865 the British parliament passed a series of acts called the Locomotive Acts, which applied to self-propelled vehicles on British roads. A law that was copied in America, by the way. For safety reasons a man with a red flag was obliged by law to walk sixty yards ahead of each vehicle. It’s the same with me. My money walks sixty yards ahead of me with a red flag and everyone sees me coming, in the full sense of this figure of speech. Like a patsy, you know? What else do you call someone who always has to pay full price? And no one ever gives me value for money. Not unless I push hard for it, which means, of course, that I am always seen as ruthless. Ruthless and grasping. But only because I want the same value for money as anyone else.
‘You’re well off in your own right, Scott. Well off and comfortable — but not rich, perhaps. But when you’re very rich you get used to people robbing you, my friend. To some extent you learn to put up with it. I’ve been ripped off by everyone. My PA, my lawyer, my pilot, my driver, my butler, my ex-wife, my accountant — you name it, Scott, they’ve ripped me off. When you’re as rich as me it’s an occupational hazard. I suppose they think I’m so rich I won’t notice. But of course I do. I always do. It’s a sad fact, Scott, but when you’re as rich as I am the only people you can trust are the people who don’t want anything from you. It was extremely disappointing to find that Zarco was stealing from me. But it wasn’t exactly a surprise. It’s as simple as that.’
‘Not quite.’
The narrow eyes narrowed a little more. He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue and said, ‘Explain, please.’
‘When Zarco learned that the planning objections to the Thames Gateway Bridge were about to be rejected by the Royal Borough of Greenwich, he used the money from the bung to buy shares in SSAG. Almost half a million quid’s worth.’
‘This I didn’t know.’
‘Him and Gentile.’
‘Wait.’ Viktor sighed wearily. ‘Don’t tell me he used the same company to buy the shares that he did to buy those Urals Energy shares? Monaco STCM?’
‘I’m afraid he did. It was only later on that he discovered Monaco STCM was partly owned by the Sumy Capital Bank of Geneva.’
‘Idiot. If you’ll forgive me, this is why people go to prison, Scott. Because they’re stupid and they make stupid mistakes.’