‘And no one recognised him?’ I shook my head. ‘Wearing this hat and these sunglasses I can easily see how he made it to the executive suite without attracting attention. But he seems to have left them there. Who owns the suites on either side of 123?’
Maurice typed out the numbers on my keyboard. ‘122 is owned by a Chinese gentleman called Yat Bangguo. Runs something called the Topdollar Property Company. 124 is owned by Tempus Tererent Inc. They’re the people who make games for people like Xbox and PlayStation. Including Totaalvoetbal 2014. The Tempus Tererent people were there yesterday, used all their tickets; Mr Bangguo only used half his tickets. 121 is owned by Tomas Uncliss.’
Tomas Uncliss was the previous manager for London City when they’d been in the Championship League; he’d been sacked unceremoniously by Viktor after a few unlucky results.
‘All of them had catering and hostesses. Might be an idea to speak to some of those girls and see if they noticed anything unusual in 123.’
‘Have you ever spoken to one of those girls?’
‘Can’t say I have.’
‘Most of them aren’t English; and about the only footballer they would ever recognise in a million years is David Beckham. Still, it couldn’t do any harm, could it? See what you can find out.’
‘Sure thing, boss.’
I looked at our prisoner. ‘What do you think, Mr...?’
Maurice pushed back from my desk and handed me a driving licence and a Tesco loyalty card.
‘This cunt’s name is Terence Shelley. Lives in Dagenham. And he shops at Tesco. Apart from that I know fuck all about him.’
‘Well, every little helps, doesn’t it?’
I picked a football off the floor and bounced it hard on the back of Shelley’s head.
‘Hello! Is anyone at home? Talk to us, Mr Shelley, or you’re the Sweeney’s fucking dinner.’
Shelley said nothing.
‘I’m tired. My friend here is tired. So I tell you what we’re going to do: we’re going home, he and I. But we’re going to leave you somewhere safe overnight to reflect upon your situation. Manacled to a nice heavy kettlebell. All right? That is unless you talk to us, now. So, what do you say?’
‘Bollocks,’ said the man.
‘You know something, Terry?’ I said. ‘I can call you Terry, can’t I? You should be on TalkSPORT.’
33
Sonja didn’t much care for football and tended to spend most weekends alone, at her own flat in Kensington. This was just as well as Saturdays and Sundays are always the busiest times at a football club. If we played on Saturday she would come around on Sunday morning; and if we played on a Sunday she would arrive on Sunday night. It was an arrangement that seemed to suit us both very well.
I was especially looking forward to seeing Sonja after her shrinks’ weekend in Paris. As a leading authority on eating disorders she was much in demand as a speaker at practitioners’ conferences. But whenever she was away I felt a definite lack of equilibrium in my life, as if something important was missing from what kept me going; you might say that without her I had too much football, that she was the vital ingredient in the Gestalt that made me a complete man. But to put it much more simply, she made me happy. We always talked a lot, mostly about books and art, and we joked a lot, too — we shared a sense of humour, although sometimes it did seem that I had the lion’s share of it. We were also very attracted to each other, which meant that we always had great sex. I never knew a woman who enjoyed sex with me as much as she did. She was keen on games and on trying to find ways of pleasing me in the bedroom. Not that this was very difficult but for a number of reasons — the affair I’d had when I was married, the fact that I’m in a very physical profession and because I am very fit being the most important ones — she thought that I was also highly sexed, when in fact I don’t think I am. I was just as happy with what you might call main course sex as I was with the many sauces and pickles she was fond of devising. Frankly I think that if anyone was highly sexed it was her. She couldn’t get enough of it but, like a lot of blokes in football, I was often too knackered to have sex every night of the week — which she’d have liked, I think. In fact I’m sure of it.
Before she’d gone to Paris she’d told me that she was going to visit a lingerie shop called Fifi Chachnil in the rue St Honoré to buy something seductive to wear for me just as soon as she was back in London. She was always doing things like that and while I never asked her to, I have to confess I never tired of seeing Sonja in sexy underwear. In fact I had come to appreciate it very much. I suppose I liked her wearing it because it was the absolute antithesis of my own very masculine world of liniment and sweat, jock straps and shin pads, muddy boots and Vaseline, dubbin and compression shorts. The lingerie she bought and wore was improbably, impossibly small and delicate and lacy and utterly feminine, or at least so it seemed to me. And of course she had the most fabulous figure. Her bottom was quite perfect and she had a stomach like a washboard. For a woman who spent a lot of time in an office she was very fit indeed. Whenever she dressed up — as she usually did when she returned from a weekend away — she would light lots of tea lights and scented candles and answer the door wearing something diaphanous and wispy. After the weekend I needed a bit of that, but more importantly I needed a lot of love from the woman I loved; the death of Zarco, and the revelations about Drenno’s friend Mackie — not to mention the crisis with the UKAD people and the pressure I was getting from everyone — had left me feeling very raw indeed.
I turned into Manresa Road and saw the lights on in my flat, which lifted my spirits. In my mind’s eye I was already stepping out of a hot bath into a large towel to be dried carefully by her. At the same time I saw that the press had gone from outside my building. Now that Ronan Reilly had been arrested they had other fish to fry. I breathed a sigh of relief, parked the Range Rover in the underground car park and already happy to be home, I rode the lift eagerly up to my floor. My only regret was that I’d not bought flowers — a white orchid, perhaps; she was very fond of orchids — or some sort of present. I loved buying her presents.
But as I opened the front door I knew immediately something was wrong. For one thing there was no scented candle on the hall table; and for another the Louis Vuitton Bisten 70 suitcase I’d bought her for Christmas was standing on the floor, next to the matching beauty case I’d got for her birthday. I’d joked that I was planning on turning her into a proper WAG, which she thought was very funny, but in truth there was never any danger of that happening; Sonja was much too clever to be something as pejorative as that. I picked the Bisten up by the handle to check the weight; it was heavy, too heavy for a weekend in Paris. Besides, I knew she’d been home to her own flat already.
Another reason I knew something was wrong was that the television was on; she seldom ever watched television and certainly not the news, which she said was mostly disasters and sport. Sonja only watched television when she was trying to take her mind off something at work. A patient. Or a paper she was preparing for a journal. She was wearing a rather businesslike two-piece suit with a pencil skirt, and a white shirt, which was the very opposite of what I’d thought she’d be wearing. She got up when I came into the sitting room — that was another bad sign, I thought; it was as if something formal was about to happen. Which of course it was. Nobody ever sits down to give you bad news.
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ I said, warily. ‘But since this time last night it’s just been one thing after another. But all that can wait, I think. It looks as if you’ve got something important to tell me.’