But the following season had brought disaster. Instead of rising into the higher league, the team had dropped six places in the First Division. It was then that Lord Grenwood had reluctantly sold the club to the keen and confident Sir Ray Bims—recently knighted, wealthy, anxious to become a ‘name’ in soccer, and certain that the Eels’ fortunes were due to change for the better. And his predictions had been right, measured over the following two years, although the team still failed to reach the Premier Division before it hit another bad run at the end of the subsequent season. That run had extended to the present.

  So, in the circumstances, when Bims drove his turbo-charged Bentley into the stadium at 7.44 it might have been expected that he would have had one of two pressing problems on his mind—either the club’s difficulties, or else his personal ones with a Caribbean bank as reported in the morning newspapers. It was surprising then that, to the contrary, his thoughts were on something totally pleasurable as the car purred across the open concourse, its chassis levelling to the undulations in the ground surface as imperturbably as an ocean-going motor yacht responds to helm on placid water. The car scarcely even disturbed the pigeons, except the ones in its immediate path.

  After parking in the bay reserved for him in the basement, Bims stepped across briskly to the lift nearby. He was a burly figure, thick-set and muscular, and altogether well preserved for his age, which was fifty-four. His thick, black wavy hair was parted in the centre and still grew well forward on his brow. His nose and mouth were heavily pronounced features, the steel grey eyes small, deeply recessed and seeming seldom to blink under untamed bushy eyebrows. He was dressed in a well tailored, loud, blue pinstripe suit, blue shirt, and the tie of an exclusive club in St James’s.

  Emerging from the lift on the mezzanine floor, Bims crossed the lobby and let himself into the chairman’s suite immediately opposite by punching the key codes at the side of the door. The room he entered was large and square with a full-width sunken gallery on the far side. The gallery was largely out of sight from the door because the bar was set in front of most of it.

  The place was expensively furnished in a heavily masculine style, the pine-panelled walls decorated with Eels’ trophies and memorabilia. The carpet was as rich to the tread as the leather armchairs and sofas were to the touch. The desk, to the right of the door, was small but unquestionably antique. The bar, recently enlarged, was now prominent enough to put serious drinkers at their ease. There was a television receiver angled in a recess above the bar with a screen of awesome size.

  The gallery had twenty-four armchairs in two terraced rows behind a long window. It was reached down steps set against the wall to the far left of the bar. There was a fine view from here of the pitch, or there was when the blinds were open. At present they were closed.

  The door in the centre of the wall to Bims’s far right as he entered led to a smallish dressing-room and bathroom, both windowless. The dressing-room contained a bed and had been provided originally for Berty Grenwood who had needed to rest after lunch and before the game on afternoon match days.

  Bims secured the corridor door electrically after shutting it behind him, then made for the dressing-room. As he entered this, a tall, dark-haired young woman had been emerging from the bathroom. She was entirely naked.

  He caught his breath in admiration, not surprise. ‘I’m sorry I’m late. The traffic—’ he began.

  But she had already moved into his embrace and stopped his words, pressing her fingers on his lips and silently shaking her head. Then she kissed him, with a fierce, starved lover’s kiss, her body moulding to his, tightening and moving against him.

  At length, she drew her lips away with a satisfied murmur. ‘You’re all right?’ she said, the concern in her tone deep and genuine.

  ‘Yeah. I think we’ll weather this particular storm.’ His voice was deep and gravelly. He began to caress her, his touch firm and possessive.

  ‘I was worried. By the newspapers. Until you called from the car. So are you going to—’

  ‘Talk about it later, huh?’ It was a command rather than a request.

  ‘Whatever you say, lover,’ she answered. Her concerned expression was replaced by a mischievous smile. ‘So aren’t I good to be ready like you asked?’

  Her firm lissom figure was exquisite rather than generous, matured but not over-ripened. The long straight hair dramatically framed the slim, high-cheekboned face and the deep blue, intelligent eyes. Now she searched his face and neck again with her open mouth, snatching kisses and bites, while her hands were busily involved unknotting his tie, undoing his shirt buttons. She was behaving with nearly the finesse of a well-trained geisha—this Scottish business graduate, the marketing manager of the Eels, and wife of the soccer celebrity Stan Bodworski.

  Chapter Three

  It was an hour later when a troubled Arnold Edingly, President of the Eel Bridge Rovers official Supporters Club, left the club premises. Well wrapped up, he was returning on foot for breakfast at his home, No. 6, Albert Grove, two streets away from Hugon Road. He went regularly to the club early on weekday mornings in the winter to, as he put it, make himself useful.

  Edingly was small and dark, with unusually large ears that stuck out a lot from the sides of his head. The ears and the slicked-back hair, small mouth, pointed nose, almost non-existent chin and a disposition to fidget gave him the appearance of a disaffected rabbit. In a way this was appropriate since he was by trade a pest controller, self-employed.

  Making himself useful at the Supporters Club included checking the stock of scarves, T-shirts, blazer badges, pennants, souvenir programmes, and all the other merchandise sold in the shop, as well as the beer, cigarettes, and packaged snacks kept in the bar. He spent more of the time, though, in the office updating the membership and subscription ledgers, dealing with the general mail, and the travel arrangements for away matches involving the hire of coaches and occasionally whole trains. The office was upstairs at the back of the club which was housed in two converted small shops fronting on to Hugon Road, next to the stadium entrance. The office window looked across the main concourse towards the south stand. Edingly enjoyed watching the early comings and goings from this vantage-point.

  The Supporters Club membership, nine-tenths of it male, currently stood at one thousand, six hundred and eighty-two, and it was falling. There was no paid staff. Volunteers served in the shop or behind the bar on match days. The organizational work was done by members of the committee, all dedicated people, but none so dedicated as fifty-year-old Arnold Edingly. Of course, he was the only one who received an honorarium for his efforts—quite a substantial one.

  Eels official supporters were a responsible group with no tearaways among them. The average member was in his mid-forties, with a loyalty to the team that, if it fell short of fanaticism, still bordered on the religious in its depth and fervour. Indeed, Edingly himself was as deeply committed to the Eels during the week as he was on Sundays to the Second Pentecostal Evangelical church where he was a senior elder and a regular lay preacher.

  When he reached Albert Grove he went through to the kitchen, stopping on the way to drape his scarf and overcoat over the stand in the narrow hallway. He also briefly rearranged his underclothes while examining his teeth in the hall mirror.

  It was a modest house, part of a terrace of Victorian dwellings originally intended for skilled artisans but now mostly owned by upwardly mobile executives. Edingly was not one of these; he had simply been in occupation before the street had been gentrified.

  ‘Messages?’ he demanded of his wife, Millie, in a sharp and urgent tone as soon as he entered the kitchen. ‘Messages?’ he said again before the apprehensive woman had time to answer. Repeating himself was something Edingly did quite often, usually to spur people on. Most people found it irritating—though not Millie, or not so that she had ever mentioned it to anyone else. Her husband settled into his usual chair at the table, opening the copy of the Daily Express that she had positioned ready at his right hand.

  ‘Nothing yet, Arnold, no,’ Millie whispered urgently, as if this were intelligence of a high order that had at all costs to be kept secret from competitors. She carefully put the plate of eggs, bacon and sausage in front of him.

  Millie was a plain woman, and smaller than her husband—if she hadn’t been smaller it is doubtful that he would have married her. A bigger wife than Millie would have upset Edingly’s curious sense of the proprieties. She worked afternoons serving in a local fruit and vegetable shop: she could have worked there full time but her husband liked to have her at his beck and call during the earlier part of the day. The food had been ready for his return on the dot of nine: he was a creature of habit.

  ‘Well, I got work on hand in any case,’ he said assertively, using his knife to ladle dark chutney directly from the jar on to his sausage.

  ‘Yes, Arnold.’ She sat at the table and poured his tea. Then she bent to stroke the fluffy grey tomcat that was rubbing against her legs. Millie had breakfasted much earlier—just tea and toast—but she always joined her husband for another cup, to be sociable, except Edingly spent most of the meal engrossed in the newspaper.

  Three years before this, Edingly had been one of two pest controllers employed by the local council, before municipal budget reductions had made him redundant. However, his redundancy had not been balanced by any slackening in demand by the local populace for the services he provided—for the elimination of wasps’ nests, rodent and cockroach infestations, or the keeping down of the burgeoning urban fox population. It had done a great deal, though, to increase the time it took the single surviving council pest controller to deal with people’s complaints. This was why the briefly unemployed Edingly soon discovered that a householder with a hornets’ nest of terrifying dimensions in his attic, or a mole pack submarining under his lawn, was ready to pay handsomely to have the scourge removed without delay by a private contractor which is what, force majeure, Edingly had become.

  In the ‘season’ Edingly could charge almost whatever he liked for prompt service, especially when dealing with the upwardly mobile, and since the ‘season’ broadly coincided with the months of the year when club soccer wasn’t played, he could eat his cake and have it—working short days in winter, devoting more attention then to the Supporters Club, and still ending up immediately better off than ever he had been before. He even had time throughout the year to develop a sideline in property ownership, a small enough enterprise when he had started it.

  ‘I’ll do that cinema this morning. Mice, they told you yesterday? Not rats? Rats?’ he asked in a preoccupied tone that Millie knew better than to translate as lack of interest. He refolded the newspaper to a lower part of the same page before propping it once more against the milk jug. He went on studying the contents as carefully as before, lips moving slightly as he read, head shaking in what Millie recognized as silent outrage.

  ‘Mice it was. I’m sure it was, Arnold.’ She fingered the cheap blue beads at her throat nervously, hoping like anything that she hadn’t got the message wrong on the telephone. She noticed that he was still on the news section of the paper. He was usually reading the sports pages by now. She was not much of a reader herself. She stroked the cat again which was now lying in her lap.

  ‘More tea in that pot, then?’ He always said that at this point, holding out his cup. ‘It’s a bad day for the Eels, and no mistake,’ he added as she poured. He had decided to share his outrage.

  ‘Something in the paper, Arnold?’

  ‘About Sir Ray Bims, the Eels’ chairman.’

  ‘Not dead, is he?’

  ‘Not dead, no. No.’ He paused significantly as though to infer that death might well have been a happier issue than the one presented. ‘Abandoning himself to greed and the fruits of unrighteousness. Living by the profits of drug trading. That’s what it says here. And that’s not all, I can tell you. Since this morning.’ He nodded pointedly.

  ‘Go on?’ She put down the teapot, and scratched her knee before clasping her hands around the cat already asleep on the faded blue pinafore. Millie’s expression showed that she was applying rapt attention to her husband’s words. He liked that.

  Edingly gave a long sniff. ‘I went over to the main offices just before eight this morning. In the south stand. To talk to Mrs Bodworski. About the promotional calendars. We’re running out in the shop. I rang first, but she never answered. I knew she was in. Saw her arrive through the window. She came with her husband.’ He paused, pulling on the lobe of his prominent left ear. ‘The Chairman was in too. Came in his car. Bit later, that was. I thought it was funny, him being so early. Being there at all, really. On a Tuesday. A Tuesday.’

  ‘You told me ages ago he only comes in on match days,’ she said, to prove she’d been listening that time as well.

  ‘That’s right.’ He leaned back in his chair, teacup in his right hand. ‘Well, I went up in the lift to Mrs Bodworski’s office. It’s on the floor above the Chairman’s. The lights were on, but she wasn’t there. And she wasn’t in any of the other offices either. I waited a bit, thinking she was in the ladies’. But when she didn’t come, I left. Went back the other way, though. On the pitch side. Across the terraces. I was checking if they’d renumbered some seats in the south stand, same as they promised. They’re part of the club allocation for the match tomorrow night.’

  ‘And had they?’

  ‘I never looked. Never looked.’ He meditated for a moment, as though this omission might have had important consequences. ‘You see, something else happened. Very upsetting.’ He drank some tea, then put the cup down. ‘I crossed right in front of the Chairman’s box. It was the quickest way. To where I was going. The box is glassed in like the other fancy ones, you know? Only it’s bigger, of course.’

  ‘Yes, Arnold.’

  ‘Couldn’t see in because the blinds were closed. But when I got to the end, I could hear a noise, like.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He pursed his lips. ‘Listen and I’ll tell you. It came from a vent in the wall.’ This made her brow furrow. ‘Ventilation shaft,’ he clarified brusquely. ‘At the end. It looked new. Part of the rebuilding last summer. Goes to the Chairman’s bedroom and bathroom inside. I saw them once. In Lord Grenwood’s day. He showed me over. Now there’s a real gentleman. Real gentleman.’ He paused, with a faraway look in his eyes—or it might have been a calculating one. ‘Anyway, you wouldn’t have noticed the noise in the ordinary way. Only when everything else was quiet. It was … well, it was groans, whimpers and shrieks.’

  ‘Groans?’

  ‘Whimpers and shrieks,’ he repeated, which he would probably have done in any case if she hadn’t responded so quickly. He began spreading butter on his toast with an unnatural energy.

  ‘A person in pain.’

  ‘No, two persons … making passionate love.’ He had hesitated over the last phrase. He could have used words less choice and a lot more graphic to describe the sounds of depraved behaviour he had overheard, but he needed to spare his wife’s blushes—as well as to take into account her limited understanding of what was involved in love-making of the more abandoned kind.

  Millie’s right hand went to her mouth, waking the cat. ‘You sure?’ Her eyes were eager and he was surprised to note that her cheeks had failed to turn pink.

  ‘Positive. So would you have been if you’d been standing where I was. Specially when it came to the end. Real screams then from the woman. Of ecstasy. Ecstasy.’ He pronounced the last word with a good deal of savour and what could have been a suggestion of jealousy. Now Millie’s face flushed a little—but with excitement, not shame, as her husband went on. ‘Afterwards, they were talking.’

  ‘Did you hear what they were saying, Arnold?’

  ‘No. Wouldn’t have been right, would it? Anyway the voices were low. Very low. Not like before.’ Despite the moralizing stricture, there was no disguising the enduring disappointment. ‘Know who it was, though. No doubt at all.’

  ‘Was it Sir Ray with someone?’ She shuffled in the seat, disturbing the cat again which got to its feet and stretched on her lap before dropping to the floor.

  ‘It was Sir Ray with Lilian Bodworski, all right.’ He was spreading strawberry jam on to his toast so liberally now that it dribbled on to his hand.

  ‘On top of what’s in the paper about him too.’ Millie leaned forward. ‘You going to …?’ She dropped her voice, again it seemed to foil eavesdroppers although there was only the cat within hearing distance. ‘You going to do anything, Arnold?’

  He scowled, licking jam off his fingers. ‘That’s something that needs thinking about. I’m not saying that second wife of Sir Ray’s is any different from him. Looks a flighty piece, and hoity-toity with it. But Stan Bodworski deserves better from his wife. Stan’s all right. Even if he is foreign.’ He ruminated for a moment and gave a low belch. ‘Terrible tempers Poles have, of course,’ he said.

  Felix Harden knocked on the door and entered the Chairman’s office after the green light came on and the remote control mechanism released the lock. It was ten o’clock precisely.

  The Eels’ manager was a freckled, sandy-haired light-weight with a still boyish face who kept himself as fit as any of his players. He was dressed now in a team tracksuit.

  ‘ ’Morning, Sir Ray,’ he called cheerfully as he crossed the room, his step a lot lighter than his spirits. His relationship with Bims had always been a formal one and latterly it had become increasingly cool. He was not expecting an easy time today, and the apprehension was worsened by his not knowing exactly why he had been summoned.

  Bims was seated behind the desk. ‘ ’Morning. Take a seat. Come back from training, have you?’ Bims knew this well enough without asking. Harden would not have missed the beginning of the session at Cherton and given Bims the chance to say he was slacking. Even so, the meeting had been called for a time which had made the manager’s trip to Cherton hardly worth while.

 

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