Chapter 27
‘One of us has won the prize pot, standing this year at a hundred and fifty thousand pounds,’ Westcott continues. ‘And I am pleased to announce that the winner of the Balham Brats Annual Fantasy Football Association Cup is … Mr Jay Hawthorne.’
A little chorus of sarcastic cheers erupts around the table: ‘Fix!’ ‘Yeah, who’d you get arrested, Jay?’
‘What?’ screeches someone at our table, and the nice blonde family in the neighbouring booth look across, concerned. I realise, too late, that it’s me doing the screeching.
Westcott’s voice continues. ‘Con is second, I’m third, Rob’s fourth.
Dave yet again comes a dead last – sorry, poor choice of words there – due to his stupid superstition of fitting players to the same shirt numbers every single year.
The most valuable individual player this season was Haaland, in whom three of us invested – Con and Jay, plus myself – and the highest goal-scorer was, of course … ’
Downstairs, we tune out.
‘That can’t be right,’ Em says. She looks as shocked as I feel. ‘Davy’s notebook. It had all these sums in, all that money … Where is it?’
I dig it out and hand it over to Jonny, who frowns as he flicks to the back page, where the life-altering sums of cash are written out.
‘Ah. Right. So. These letters here, just next to the ￡6.8m, M? – that’s Martin ?degaard.’
‘Who the hell is that?’
‘He’s a Norwegian midfielder, I believe, last seen at Arsenal. And over here for a cool ￡13.1 million we have MS, or Mo Salah.’
Even I’ve heard of Mo Salah. Oh no, oh no. They were just playing Fantasy Football.
‘Sorry, what were they doing?’
‘It’s a game, Elle. You pick a team of footballers who you think are going to do well this season, from all the teams. Then at the end of the season you see which players scored most goals, who assisted with goals, all of that, and you work out whose team has done best.’
‘What’s the point of it?’
‘That’s where the charity money comes from,’ says Em. ‘They don’t raise it. They just bet an obscene amount against each other, and at the end of each year they give the pot to the children of Balham. I bet they write it off against tax.’
‘We can’t know that,’ says Elle. ‘It’s still basically a good thing they’re doing.’
‘I guess so, love. Oh, God. This has absolutely nothing to do with Davy’s death. It’s just a load of rich pricks who like football.’
‘Want to keep listening?’
‘What? Oh, no, Jonny, stop the recording, it’s too depressing. I don’t think Wallace is suddenly going to confess Davy’s murder to his other three closest friends in the world.’
Jonny hits a few keys and gently shuts the laptop.
I take the notebook from the centre of the table and thumb the empty pages. ‘Why would Davy come here today? You’re hiding, in fear for your life, and you make two appointments you’re intending to keep – one to confess to the police, and one for fantasy football?’
‘I think some men just really, really like football,’ says Em. ‘I didn’t know you knew anything about it, Jonny.’
‘Oh, I don’t.’
‘Then how did you spot the initials?’
‘I memorised the top two hundred players in the Premier League last year, to test my memory on subjects in which I have no interest.’
‘… Right. Well, thank goodness you did.’
‘Whatever else we say about Davy, he was insane.’
‘Why?’
‘Picking the same shirt numbers every year. That is the act of a mad sentimentalist. It lowers the odds of you succeeding by …’ Jonny screws up his face. ‘I’ll need a minute to do the maths, but he’s not done himself any favours.’
Em finishes her drink. ‘Shall we go, then? I don’t think we’re going to achieve much more here.’
As we sit in the Uber home – not home, of course, just back to Balfour Villas – we all stay quiet. At a guess:
Em is thinking about what we can do next. That was just a setback, she’ll be saying to herself. We’ll work it out soon.
Elle would never admit it because she’s identified the dominant mood in the cab, but she’s rather proud of how well she acquitted herself after the first microphone took a bath.
She’s disappointed not to have made more progress with the case, but effectively she’s just happy to have helped the team.
Jonny is really gutted about his microphone, which he’d been excited to debut all morning. To avoid any more of his kit suffering the same fate, he’s now establishing a mental checklist of tech protocols, which he will circulate to the rest of us later.
And me? I don’t have Em’s optimism, or Elle’s sunny disposition, or Jonny’s …
habit of formulating detailed lists. I don’t know what we’re doing.
It still feels like Wallace is the man with the most questions to answer, but what if the killer was just on the end of one of Davy’s laundering scams gone wrong?
What if he was simply a client Davy had cheated, who’d sworn vengeance and turned up with a shotgun one night?
Then, of course, we’d have almost no useful information when the police inevitably catch up with us.
Back at the house, we take some time to regroup. I lie down on my bed – just to think for a second – and am disgusted to wake up half an hour later and realise I’ve had an involuntary nap. I shouldn’t be needing daytime naps for another thirty years.
Downstairs, Em and Elle are having an argument, and don’t hear me approach, partly because I approach as quietly as possible in an attempt to eavesdrop.
‘… totally irresponsible.’ That’s Em.
‘Who cares? She’s been like that her whole life. But she still owes us.’
‘She’ll pretend she doesn’t. And I’m not giving her the satisfaction.’
‘Then we tell her that we’ll turn ourselves in, make our surname public, and ruin her career unless she helps us.’
‘Unless who helps you?’ I can’t be bothered piecing it together any more, so I clatter down the stairs. Em and Elle are at opposite ends of the room. Jonny’s in the corner, headphones firmly on, still trying to get into Davy’s laptop.
‘Nobody.’ Em is a human scowl. So, to my surprise, is Elle. ‘None of your business.’
‘Why not?’
‘Family stuff. Doubt you’d understand.’
That’s rather wounding, but I pretend to ignore it. ‘Family?’
‘Our sister,’ says Elle.
‘Half-sister,’ adds Em.
‘She could help us, but Em doesn’t want to even ask.’
‘What does she do?’
‘Security services,’ Em mutters.
‘What?’
‘Not in a way that could help us. She’s one of those recognisers. You know? She can look at a crowd of football fans and tell you which one was photographed robbing a bank in Hull three years ago. Except for her it’s mostly international stuff.’
‘And she’s in the UK? I thought you were French.’
‘As I said, half-sister,’ says Em. ‘Our dad was English. Look, there’s no point discussing it, because we’re not contacting her.’
‘What’s she called?’
‘None of your business.’
‘Pretty name.’
‘She’s called Claudia,’ says Elle, ‘and I think we’re being stupid not sending her a photo of Mr Bowling Ball to see if he rings any bells. Or even Davy.’
‘Absolutely not,’ says Em. ‘She’ll shop us. She would love it. Can you imagine how pleased she’d be to tell Dad that his favourite daughter was right about the other two all along? It’s not going to happen, love.’
Elle subsides, crossly. I wonder who their father is.
‘I tell you one thing we have to do,’ says Em, in a consoling tone. ‘Let’s burn that diary of Davy’s. We may as well remove one piece of evidence linking us to his place.’
‘All right.’
Em retrieves it from her bag. The three of us take a final look at the page containing the footballers’ initials, then get a metal bucket from the garden, rip the notebook up, and each light a section using Em’s Zippo.
(‘I didn’t know you smoked.’ ‘I don’t. I just like being able to set fire to stuff.
’) We take some satisfaction watching the pages curl to nothingness.
Jonny, who has taken no part in this pagan ritual, pulls off his headphones.
‘Are you guys ready for this meeting?’ Three blank faces look back at him. ‘With the German guy. Davy’s stooge for the companies.’
‘Oh, Hans von Gruber.’
‘Wolfgang Eisenlohr, yes.’ Jonny has his own laptop set up. ‘We said eight p.m. Berlin time. He’ll be there shortly.’
The Zoom connects. The screen shows one of those computer-gaming chairs, all ergonomic black leather designed so you can sit in it playing Warcraft for sixteen hours straight.
Behind the chair, it looks like the bedroom of a teenage boy from 2004.
Posters of Metallica, women in bikinis, a wolf surmounted by a Native American quote, a cannabis-themed tricolour …
It’s like our new friend was at the closing-down sale for Athena.
After about thirty seconds, a youngish man shambles onto the screen, holding a steaming mug, and sits.
He’s about my age, I’d say: pale, tall, scruffy fuzz on his jaw, and a thick black hairline that hardly clears his eyebrows.
He could be a vampire or a zombie, with an outside chance of human.
His T-shirt reads ALL ABOARD THE USB and shows a flash drive with wheels.
He and Jonny are going to get on like a Samsung on fire.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I had to sort my Sleepytime tea.’ (Imagine all of his lines with a thick German accent, please.) He looks at the screen again. ‘Lots of you. There is a problem with Mr David?’
‘You could say that,’ says Em. ‘He’s dead.’
‘Oh.’ He takes a sip of Sleepytime. ‘Naturally?’
‘No. Someone shot him.’
Wolfgang nods, unsurprised. ‘Do I need to be worried about this?’
‘We don’t know. Has anything unusual happened to you recently?’
‘I broke up – you say this phrase, broke up? – with my fiancée, due to a disagreement over my personal habits.’
‘I meant in relation to your work.’
‘Oh. No, that’s all normal.’ He really is very relaxed. I’m starting to think maybe Wolfy’s mug contains something a bit stronger than herbal tea.
‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘can I just check what your work is exactly? The companies …’
‘Excuse me for asking, but you are … authorities?’
‘No.’
‘All right then.’ He’s quite trusting – then again, looking at us, we hardly look like professionals.
He takes another sip. ‘So, firstly, I haven’t done any of this for three years.
Mr David – he did not fire me, but he did not send me further work, you understand?
He, uh, ghosted me?’ It will never cease to amaze me how good the average German is at idiomatic English.
‘It caused me a little financial trouble back then, due to some commitments I had made. When I asked for the outstanding money, he sent it, but with no words, no thanks for years of work. So I was disappointed in him, which is why I do not mind telling you all this now.’
‘OK.’
‘Can you tell us how it worked, Wolfgang?’ Em smiles at him, encouraging, although Wolfy doesn’t need much uncorking.
‘It was simple. Mr David sent me a document, I sign it, he pays me a thousand euros. We did this maybe … two hundred times?’
‘He paid you two hundred thousand euros just for that?’
‘Well. There is work. I have to change the names a bit, maybe the address a bit, maybe the signature a bit. But yes.’ He shrugs. ‘Other people earn more for doing less. But not many, I suppose.’
‘So it’s a trick?’
‘I believed what Mr David was telling me, which is that he wanted to protect his clients because there were security risks for them. It was not safe for them to keep these companies in their own names and they wanted to stay safe.’
‘And,’ Em asks, barely suppressing her excitement, ‘do you have the list of real names? The people who actually owned all these companies?’
Wolfgang frowns. ‘No. Of course not. That would not be the point.’
All four of us sigh. Em swears under her breath. Wolfgang stares off the screen, rather fuzzily, and seems lost in reflection. One of those awful Zoom pauses stretches out for a while, in which everyone takes a second to reflect that this is how they’re spending their one wild and precious life.
Wolfgang pipes up again. ‘No, I do not know the names of the owners.’ He pauses. ‘But I know the name of the man who does.’