by Mel Stein
‘Maybe it’s because you are the only one who knows the answers. Look, Nabil you look beat as well as beaten. I just want to get back to sleep. We’ve given your sister enough time to bond with my girlfriend, so let’s get down to the nitty-gritty.’
Nabil fumbled with the orange juice at his side, tried to pour it, failed miserably and waited for Mark to fill his glass.
‘In case my throat gets dry. It’s a long story. As you’ve probably gathered, my father and I have never got on well. My sister and I, believe it or not, were very close when we were younger. We got even closer after my father ditched our mother for Susie. Susie’s not too bad really. At least she had the taste to get herself out of her marriage to Carr. But you can imagine how we felt at the time. Dominique chose to get out. She got herself involved with a bunch of drop-out druggies and we fell out over that in a big way. It made it worse that she always came crawling back when she ran out of money or when our father bailed her out of more trouble. Meanwhile, my father decided that whether I wanted to or not I was going into the family business. He has some very old-fashioned views sometimes. It’s his Middle-Eastern inheritance. The children do what the father says and the women in particular know their place.’
He paused, took a sip of the orange juice, seemed to be expecting Mark to say something, but his visitor just wanted this to be over, wanted to get to the truth, and then wanted to go home.
‘Anyway, little Jason comes along. He’s quite sweet really, but at the time that was the breaking point for me. And I suppose Dominique as well. Not only is our inheritance threatened, but we’ve got another brand-new rival for Daddy’s affections. I’m not saying that any of this justifies what I’ve done, but I hope it explains it. I just wanted to hurt him at the time and all I could think of was the business. He wanted those ESL rights and I saw a way of making sure he didn’t get them. I had all the information. I was there all the time you were working on it, talking about it and all I had to do was give the information to Carr. You can imagine how delighted he was.’
‘So that was how he could pitch his bid so close to Ball Park’s yet be sure of beating them.’
‘Exactly. There was always the risk that one of the other parties would come in and beat them both, but that was never a real possibility. And, even if they did, at least Carr would have had the satisfaction of knowing that Ball Park hadn’t won through.’
‘You still haven’t explained why you were beaten up.’
‘After Jet won in Zurich I tried to get too clever. I told Carr that as I’d helped him to get the rights the least he could do was to offer me a job. I figured that would seriously piss off my father. He said he didn’t employ losers or traitors. I told him I’d come clean about how he’d won the bidding and he sent a couple of his heavies around to demonstrate what would happen if I tried to do just that.’
‘Sounds as if you haven’t come out of this too well. Why did you say that you’d only tell this to me?’ Mark asked, feeling desperately sorry for the boy who so obviously needed the love of his father.
‘I think I caused you all your problems as well.’
‘You’ve been a busy lad. Tell me,’ Mark said despondently. He thought he knew what was coming.
‘I was there when my father suggested you go over to Carr. I told Nathan exactly what was happening. My father told me what happened to you at Cunningham’s house. I think that just accelerated what they had in store for you.’
There were tears in his eyes and Mark handed him a tissue. It was hard to be angry with him, but there was still a way to go for the boy. He still had to tell all this to his father and, somehow, Mark did not think that was going to be terribly easy. Unless someone else told him first. Nabil’s eyes looked at him pleadingly and Mark knew exactly what he was asking.
‘You want me to talk to your father?’
‘Will you?’ He was pleading and Mark was aware from his dealings with Nabil Halid that this did not come naturally.
‘Sure. Look, Nabil, let’s call it a day. I’ll make some arrangements to see your dad tomorrow. It’ll all be fine. I’m sure of it. All you need as a family is some time and a bit of understanding. I’ll need to tell the police as well, you understand that?’
‘Sure, I understand. You don’t think they’ll make any charges against me, do you?’ There was a desperation in his voice as he asked the question and relief as Mark gave the answer.
‘No, I don’t think industrial espionage is a crime unless the victim complains and I can’t see your father lodging charges. I suppose I was just as guilty of that in my own way.’
‘I don’t see Carr lodging charges either …’
There was something about the boy’s voice, the expression on his face, that suggested to Mark that he was not done.
‘There’s more, isn’t there?’
Nabil nodded.
‘In a way it’s worse. I think it led to something worse.’
‘What do you mean?’ Mark’s question hung in the air like a ghost.
‘I mean Jenny Cooper’s murder,’ Nabil said after what seemed an eternity, and Mark Rossetti realised there and then that it would be some time before he would feel the luxury of the crisp, clean sheets on Patti Delaney’s bed.
CHAPTER 54
After what Nabil told him he knew they could not go straight back to the Burrow. They had to see Inspector Rob Davies first. He owed him that at least, given that the policeman had saved his life.
He’d swallowed three aspirin before he left the Halid house and saw from the impatient tapping of her foot that Patti was as anxious to learn what he had been told as he was to hear exactly what Dominique had confided in her visitor. Patti couldn’t believe it when Mark told her to head back to Hampstead CID.
‘What did your last chauffeur die of? Exhaustion. We’re not in training for the Monte Carlo Rally you know.’
He was tempted to tell her that she was one of the last people to whom he was prepared to entrust himself in any kind of race, but he didn’t think he’d win any Brownie points or cooperation from trading insults, however light his tone.
‘It was all true about Dominique and Barry,’ Patti began as she threw the car around a corner, Mark’s condition totally forgotten in her anxiety to get the story out first.
‘How did they meet?’ Mark asked.
‘Ball Park had a party at the end of last season. All sorts of people from the game were there, including young Barry. Dominique was in the midst of one of her home visits. Daddy thinks it might be a good idea if she comes along, mix with a bit of normal society, if you can call footballing folk normal. She meets Barry because there aren’t that many youngsters there. It all begins as a way to get back at her father. She thinks the last thing he’d want is for her to get involved with a bit of rough like Barry so she picks him up. The only thing is that they rather like each other. Bingo.’
It had all fallen into place for Mark, even as Nabil had confessed to him the rest of his story. When he’d got the printout from Barry’s room at the team hotel in Colombia there had been a whole stream of calls to Mo’s home number. He couldn’t understand at the time why young Barry Reed should have been phoning Mo but now it was clear. He’d been phoning Dominique. His worried, distracted look had also become clear. She’d told him he was about to become a father and she’d given him the choice of whether or not she kept the baby. Branco and his crew must have discovered the same information. They knew all about Barry and Dominique and presumably they must have told Cunningham. Mark hadn’t been paranoid in thinking he was being followed in Bogota on his later trip. By then Carr knew he was still working for Halid and anything Carr knew he would almost certainly tell Branco.
It took most of the drive for Mark to relate to Patti everything Nabil had told him about the betrayal of his father and they were nearly back in Hampstead by the time he got around to the second betrayal.
‘It wasn’t enough for Nabil to hurt Mo, he had to try and hurt Dominique and Susie too
. He overheard his sister confide in Susie about her pregnancy. She thought she had to tell somebody even before she told the father-to-be.’
‘So what did he do? Even his sister’s not too sure.’
‘He sent a letter to the Football Association accusing Barry Reed of putting his sister in the club. And one or two other things as well. He even suggested that he’d been responsible for getting her involved in drugs.’
‘I don’t understand. Why hasn’t that letter ever come to light?’ Patti asked.
‘He wanted to be certain it would be read, so he addressed it to someone he was sure would read it. Even marked it strictly private and confidential, for their eyes only. The only person he knew at the FA was a contact I’d used for Ball Park.’
‘Jenny Cooper.’ Patti said in puzzlement.
‘Exactly.’
They sat in the car outside the police station, parked on a double yellow line, oblivious to the curious looks they received from the passers-by.
‘I may be thick, but I still don’t understand. Why should anybody kill Jenny just because she’d got an anonymous letter telling her that one of the young England players had knocked up the daughter of the boss of a television company and was also possibly a drug addict?’
‘That threw me at first, but I think I’ve worked it out,’ Mark said triumphantly. ‘Why don’t we surprise Rob and share our news with him?’
Davies was less than amused when Mark told him where they’d just come from.
‘You don’t listen, do you? I thought I made it clear that if you were going to visit Nabil that I wanted to be there.’
‘I was trying to make life easy for you. I’m sure that you’ve got lots to do catching speeding motorists. And anyway I doubt if he’d have been half as forthcoming if you’d been there.’
Rob led them through to a smoky interview room at the rear of the station. The walls were a depressing shade of yellow, the one window gave little natural light, the table was battered and the chairs were rickety. Mark could understand how the atmosphere could be used to gain confessions and he was glad that he and the Welsh policeman were on the same side.
‘So let me into Nabil’s little secrets,’ Davies said resignedly, pen poised over paper.
For the second time Mark went over what he’d been told and at the end Davies looked as bewildered as Patti.
‘You’ve obviously got something worked out in that devious mind of yours, Rossetti, so why don’t you let the pair of us have a peek in there? I promise you that for somebody with a broken rib the bunks in our cells can be very uncomfortable indeed and that’s where I’m tempted to cool you off for a while.’
Mark looked long and hard at Davies and saw that this time he wasn’t necessarily joking.
‘All right. This is what I think happened. Nabil writes to Jenny. She takes the letter home to deal with along with a load of the rest of her post. She told me she often worked at home. She reads the letter. She knows I know Barry better than anybody else so she tries to call me. I’m not there. Then she had a visitor. We suspect that she’s into drugs. Let’s assume it’s a supplier or someone she knows can get them supplied. We know she sleeps around. Let’s assume it’s someone she’s slept with. Either way, or maybe both ways, she lets him in. Perhaps she’s become a threat to him, a danger. She’s into drugs, she’s into booze, she’s a loose cannon so she has to be silenced. We don’t know what kind of threats she’s been making. He kills her. He reads the letter and then maybe he realises that she’s been on the phone. He checks who she’s been calling and finds out it’s me. He takes the letter away with him, perhaps he destroys it. Now what does all that tell you?’
Davies and Patti were fascinated into silence and gave him no answer.
‘I’ll tell you what it tells me. Whoever killed Jenny knew not only her, but Barry and me. I think you’ve already got the killer banged up on other charges. Why don’t you ask Kenny Cunningham to tell you exactly why he murdered Jenny Cooper?’
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EPILOGUE
The winter had turned to spring and in the intervening months Hertsmere had steadily climbed up the Premiership. One by one their challengers had fallen away until it had become a two-horse race. Now with the last game of the season the only threat to their title ambitions came from their old rivals, Thamesmead. Thamesmead had just got their noses in front and opened up a two-point lead. All they needed to do was defend on their visit to Park Crescent and they would be the English entrants into the first year of the European Super League rather than Hertsmere for whom nothing less than victory would do.
The television companies were ecstatic. The computers had done them proud by saving the best to last. It was Liverpool against Arsenal back in 88-89 all over again. There was the added piquancy that this would be the last match ever played at Hertsmere’s cramped Park Crescent stadium.
That in itself had created its own problems. The police had placed an 18,000 security limit on the crowd and, despite the live coverage of the game, the tickets could have been sold twenty times over. Helen Davies looked distraught as Mark and Patti, with Emma Rossetti in tow, passed her on their way to the seats in the Director’s Box.
‘If one more person turns up claiming that they know David Sinclair personally and that he’s promised them a ticket then I’m going to make sure that my husband goes down there and arrests them for attempted fraud.’
‘So he got the day off then?’ Patti asked.
‘Miracle of miracles, yes he did. Although I have to say he’s been flavour of the month with his bosses ever since he closed the Jenny Cooper murder and also ended a fairly sophisticated drugs business.’
There was a smile on her harassed features as she spoke and clearly Rob had told her that he’d done very little in the operation other than sweep up behind Mark.
It had not been too difficult to break Cunningham down into a confession. Jenny Cooper had been one of the routes he’d used to sell drugs to players. She’d been becoming difficult, drinking too much, using the drugs herself too much, talking too much. She had become a threat and she had to be stopped. He seemed only too anxious to place as much of the blame as he could on Nathan Carr and Alissa. Mark had been spot on in his analysis of the night of the murder and even Patti had begun to treat him with some respect.
‘When I first met you, there’s no way that you’d have figured that out. Maybe you do have a vocation in the investigation business after all.’
He’d shaken his head. He really didn’t want to be involved in any business. He just wanted a good long rest, wanted to spend as much of his time in Patti’s company as he possibly could and certainly during the last few months she’d raised no real objection to that.
It had not all been sunshine and roses. They’d gone together to Jessica Brown’s funeral, and had stood side by side as her young, ravaged body was consigned to the ground. Patti had kept her promise and had given the news to her parents face to face. It had not been easy, but when she told them what had been the effect of the journey she had begun on behalf of their daughter she felt it had eased the pain a little. She had gone to tell Jessica as well, and her old friend had listened carefully and then extracted another promise from Patti.
‘You’ve got the story. It’s my story really. You were always a better writer than me, so write it for me.’
Patti had done that single-mindedly. Like Mark she had no financial pressures on her to work and she’d sat at her screen for hours every day, made phone calls at night and allowed Mark back into her life and her bed. She never told him how much she liked to have him around, how much she needed to have him around, but then she didn’t have to. It had been a mere week before this vital match that she had heard
from the publishers that they would buy the book. Not only that but they thought she had a major bestseller on her hands.
‘I thought I’d give most of the advance to that hospice where Jessica died. What do you think?’ she’d asked. It wasn’t often that she asked Mark’s opinion, and he’d kissed her gently and nodded his agreement because he felt too choked to speak.
The book was almost forgotten as the match began to grip their attention. Mo and Nabil were seated a row or two behind them. Mo was particularly interested in the outcome. He’d finally succeeded in securing the rights for ESL for Ball Park and Nabil had in turn thrown himself into the company with a new enthusiasm that had even won over the cynics working around him. Susie had left Jason in the club’s crèche to be with her husband and stepson and only Dominique was absent. But then there was no way that she could be there.
There were a lot of nervous spectators and the anxiety transmitted itself to the field of play. The rival fans found their voices but it was hard to whip up any genuine enthusiasm for a game so littered with fouls, free-kicks and misplaced passes. Barry Reed had almost automatically been awarded his place back in the team, but his club form had been indifferent. However, England’s new coach, Jeff Niven, had kept faith with him in the national side. He’d looked particularly out of sorts throughout the afternoon and, with ten minutes to go, Ray Fowler was fumbling with the numbers to take him off.
Reed seemed to spot the imminent substitution from the corner of his eye and rolled up his sleeves with increased determination. Sergovich, who had already made a string of fine saves to keep Hertsmere in the match, threw a long ball out to him. The Geordie midfielder controlled the ball with all his natural skill and suddenly set off on a solo run. Aled Williams went with him down the left and Reed feinted past the big Thamesmead centre back and switched the ball out to the Welshman. Williams made ground himself and the crowd, instead of urging him on, held their breath in anticipation. Reed kept on running. The Thamesmead sweeper kept him onside and when Williams centred, Reed took the ball on the volley and drove it home.
