by Alison Bond
An unstoppable wave of nausea overcame her and Samantha darted to the bathroom to unload her anger and her guilt.
After she had thrown up she stared at her own pasty reflection in the bevelled-edge mirror and watched the tears well in her bewildered eyes. Her neck and shoulders were taut with anxiety and she rubbed them with her fingers, trying hard to think of how she could pull this back from the edge.
Is this the end of me? It wasn’t fair. Hadn’t she had enough to fight against? A shitty childhood, a brother in jail, a tangled love life, chauvinist pigs in every meeting she took looking at her like she had no right to be in the same room. Yet, despite this, and sometimes she thought because of it, she had made a name for herself. She had never done anything to deserve such malice. No, it wasn’t fair. She was a stranger to self-pity, but now its insidious ache clawed at her and shook her strong foundations.
Beneath her fingertips her bluebird tattoo reminded her of those hopeful days when all she wanted was success. She had been so close. She wasn’t ready for it to be over. Her career meant everything to her. Instead of being the success she had always dreamt of she would be nothing.
Once more.
She pulled down a long cool breath and held it there, closing her eyes, determined not to open them again until they were dry. It was her mother’s voice she heard. Telling her that crying was for babies, threatening to lock her in the bathroom. Laughing and calling her stupid.
Leanne smiled hopefully when Samantha walked back into the room. ‘You okay?’
She nodded hesitantly, hating herself for feeling unsure.
‘Look, the way I see it,’ Leanne ventured, ‘you play at the top, don’t you? You, Jackson, Richard, a couple of others, you’re like the Premiership of sports agents. When you play at that level then the setbacks are more extreme; it comes with the territory.’
‘So I should expect to get screwed?’
‘When I have a big drama at work you know what I ask myself?’ said Leanne.
‘No, what?’
‘What would Samantha do?’
That was funny. Trust Leanne to make her see the chink of light at the end of this particular tunnel.
‘So?’ said Leanne. ‘What would you do?’
‘I’d stop acting like a woman and start thinking like a man.’ Instead of crying she should be working. Instead of cogitating about who was firing the bullets, she should be stemming the flow of blood.
Damage control.
‘Come on,’ she said to Leanne briskly, hustling her out of the living room and downstairs to the basement office. ‘Pretend you’re my assistant. I know it’s a stretch, but try it.’
There was a familiar fire in her eye, the kind of look she got whenever they were frantic, whenever there was a deal to be done It was a spark of her killer instinct once more.
‘Get the Welsteads on the phone for me. I have to give them the impression that it’s business as usual.’
Monty and Ferris were the jewels on her client list, the one relationship she must protect before all others.
Leanne called the Welstead boys, but there was no reply.
‘Mobiles?’ said Samantha.
‘I’ve tried both of them, and the Fulham apartment too.’
Pinpricks of fear travelled up and down her spine. ‘Try Yorkshire,’ said Samantha, ‘try their home.’
At last they made contact. Not with the boys, but with their father.
‘Mr Welstead? Hi, it’s Leanne at Legends. I have Samantha for you. I’ll put you through.’
Leanne maintained the charade of business as usual by holding the phone for a few seconds before passing it to Samantha, like they were both in the office and not crammed into this windowless room pretending everything was fine.
Samantha’s sense of dread grew sharper still as she listened to what he had to say.
He told her perfectly nicely that, yes, he had seen the piece in the paper, but Richard Tavistock had explained the situation to him some time ago, so it wasn’t a shock and he hoped that everything would be sorted out soon. Until then he was happy to let Jackson and Richard pick up any slack (that was the word he used, ‘slack’) and, no, as far as he was aware the boys didn’t have any concerns they needed to discuss with her.
‘Because you understand I’m here for you one hundred per cent, don’t you?’ said Samantha.
It was like she was scrabbling at the cliff edge, trying to grab on to roots and rocks to stop her from tumbling down. It was a horrible feeling.
‘You’ve been very good to us, to the lads,’ said Mr Welstead. ‘We appreciate everything you’ve done, we really do.’
It sounded like goodbye.
Leanne could tell that the call had not gone well.
‘Call in sick for the rest of the afternoon,’ demanded Samantha. ‘I need you.’
Her mind raced, bouncing from one futile idea to another as she tried to work out what she could do to help herself. She had to know who was behind all this. Perhaps some player who felt mismanaged, some wife who felt let down. It was possible, she supposed, that she had made an enemy without even noticing.
She knew that the journalist would never reveal his source so she instructed Leanne to follow the money instead. How hard could it be to call a bank in the Cayman Islands and find out some pertinent details? Like where the money came from in the first place. After all, the account was ostensibly in her name. She could give them all the security information they needed, date of birth, previous address, the works. All except her mother’s maiden name. She had never known that.
When Leanne hit a brick wall Samantha took over with the bank, redirecting Leanne to review all the email correspondence from the last twelve months to see if there was something she had overlooked, some pissed-off agent or manager that might have the means and motive to launch a vendetta against her.
‘Twelve months?’ said Leanne, aghast. It was a mammoth task.
‘The sooner you start the sooner you will be finished,’ said Samantha, picking up the phone to get back on to the bank.
It was useless. She gained nothing from a day on the phone to CoralBanc but an expensive phone bill. The account had been frozen pending money laundering investigations and other than that nobody could tell her a thing. Worse than useless, because there would now be a record of her making this call, which could be construed as suspicious. Damn it. She would have to disclose it.
‘Email Higham and Colville,’ she said to Leanne. ‘Explain that I asked you to call the bank.’
‘You’re sure?’ said Leanne.
‘Just do it.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To see an old friend.’
Why were the streets of London so crowded in the middle of a weekday afternoon? Surely they couldn’t all be tourists? Hadn’t they got jobs to go to? Was the blonde with the purple Liberty bag a trophy wife or a high-class call girl? Was the mop-haired youth a student or the bass player in a hot new band she hadn’t had the time to hear of? Had they always been here, all these people packing out the pavements of Oxford Street, and she just hadn’t noticed? Had she once been so busy that she simply didn’t see them?
She was a part of them now. The aimless. A stupefying dullness had blanketed her days until she could hardly muster the effort to turn on the radio, never mind read a newspaper or apply herself to saving her career. But now she knew that the only way to blow everything out in the open was to find out who was behind all this. And defeat them.
She was on her way to a dingy office above a haberdashery on Berwick Street. As she twisted through the streets of Soho on her way there she became certain that she was being followed.
The man behind her looked both familiar and out of place.
Was it possible that he was someone she knew?
Or perhaps he recognized her. Perhaps he was a football fan.
Except that wasn’t it. Fans looked for a way in – when she caught his eye this man looked for a way out, dropping his ga
ze immediately and crossing the street.
It could be that she was paranoid.
But it could be that she was being watched.
‘Remember me?’ she said, in the Soho office of Eric Royston, a private detective she had employed on a client’s behalf a few years ago.
‘Miss Sharp,’ he said warmly, as her previous business had been both straightforward and lucrative, his favourite kind. ‘One of your players got himself into a spot of bother again?’
Last time he had helped her find some information on a girl that was blackmailing her client so that they could persuade her to stop. Or, as he had succinctly put it at the time, counter-blackmail. It had worked.
‘Not this time,’ she said. ‘This time it’s personal.’
She didn’t get an enormous sense of assurance from him, but he bit down on her case with the hunger of a starved dog. She knew the look in his eyes. He could smell money. She knew the look because she saw it in the mirror every morning.
Was it any wonder that Carl Higham thought she was corrupt? She had worked at Legends a long time and in that time had never given the impression that there might be a limit to what she was willing to do for money.
‘We have an excellent track record in tracing offshore funds,’ he said. ‘Excellent. Asset location is the cornerstone of our company.’
‘Really?’ she said.
‘Oh yes. We have a particular method of identifying the beneficial owners of offshore trusts, as well as the source.’
‘So you’ve done this kind of thing before?’
‘Not this exactly,’ he said. ‘Divorces, isn’t it? Rich husbands trying to hide their true net worth from estranged partners in an effort to pervert the course of justice.’
‘And rich wives, I presume?’
Eric Royston laughed jovially as if she’d made an excellent joke.
She read the banner headline advertising the Evening Standard as she passed a newsagent, but she didn’t really take it in until she was half a dozen steps past it, so she walked back. And she read it again.
Superagent in New Drugs Shame.
Couldn’t be her. She didn’t take drugs. So it couldn’t be her.
Yet even as she bought her copy she knew her past had found her.
The photograph had been taken very recently, she could tell from her unhappy expression and her casual clothing. She looked drawn and haggard.
This woman, said the article, this evil woman, started her career as a millionaire sports agent by supplying drugs to some of the Premiership’s top stars.
This woman was a one-stop shop for class-A drugs, an agent who lured young players into her den of iniquity, a seedy drug dealer.
Samantha Sharp sold drugs to young impressionable boys who just wanted to play football.
Lock up your children.
She found a bench, damp with cold, in the shadow of St Margaret’s church, and read the article twice, feeling the last remnants of spirit leave her. New sensations that taunted her. Shame. Shame and regret.
The article was inflammatory and salacious, the sort of writing that could ruin lives.
And it was true. However much you stretch the truth it’s still not a lie.
Once. It had happened once.
She hadn’t been at Legends very long, a few weeks. There was a party. An extraordinary party that made her feel like she had been kidding herself before, thinking she was living in London when really she’d been on the outside, and not just geographically, looking in. To think, all those nights she had been watching television with Liam there would have been parties like this one going on behind closed doors. Parties where beautiful people chatted and chatted up, parties with waitresses and goodie bags, themes and dress codes, hundreds of people having a thoroughly sybaritic time. And she was a part of it.
And so when a footballer, a client, cornered her on the dance floor and casually put his mouth close to her ear to ask if she knew where he could get any cocaine she had nodded with assurance and used the number she had on her phone for a pal of Liam’s that she knew dabbled with dealing.
She wasn’t trying to corrupt anyone. She even thought that perhaps procuring drugs was all part of the service. Jackson sometimes procured women, escorts, for his stars. God, she had even felt proud back then that she was able to help him out. Like she was streetwise, connected. She was little Miss Fix-It – ask and she could get an old friend to deliver.
She had talked about it indiscreetly. Naming names. She told the dealer who it was for. She told a couple of colleagues later. It had been a bit of gossip, something to say for a girl trying to make new friends.
And someone had remembered, the player himself perhaps, because he never amounted to very much, and now she was a drug dealer. It said so in the newspaper so it must be true.
In the cold shadow of St Margaret’s church Samantha turned the page of the newspaper. Another photograph, this one better. She looked drop-dead glamorous, a designer dress and plenty of red lipstick. She looked like a gangster.
The sort of high-class sleaze that would have a dealer on speed dial.
Outside her front door a handful of reporters was waiting. She wasn’t sure what was going on until she was close enough for them to see her. Camera bulbs flared and she was so stunned by their presence that for a moment she just stood there, slack-jawed and speechless.
In all the newspapers the next day she looked vacant and exhausted. As if she’d been taking too many drugs.
‘Samantha,’ they called. ‘Sam, this way. Any comment on the allegations in the paper today? Any comment on the darker side of sport?’
Flash, flash.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. But they didn’t move.
‘Sam, what sort of impression does it make if an ambassador of the game supplies drugs? Sam, Sam, over here.’
What was she supposed to do?
No comment, no comment, no comment.
She had to use her elbows to get past them, head down, their questions and accusations raining down on her like hailstones.
‘Please, fellas, can I get to my door, huh?’ She tried to appeal to their better natures, after all, surely many of them had been on the phone to her office in the past wanting information or quotes for stories and she had always been nice to the press, always.
Unless someone was being a pain in the arse.
Was this how they felt? Those clients of hers who were caught in flagrante delicto, or pursued by rumours that may or may not be true. Did they wonder if they would ever be able to leave their homes again? She advised them to ignore it, always to ignore it, but now she saw just how useless that advice had been.
How could you ignore something when it was waiting on your doorstep?
Slowly she beat a path to her door and closed it shut behind her, hearing their plaintive pleas as she did so.
Whoever it was that was out to get her must be laughing now. They must be tasting triumph and finding it sweet. The thought enraged her. It pumped her with anger and indignation, but all the vitriol had nowhere to go and so it simply churned around in her head until she was exhausted by her own thoughts.
One day she would find out who was responsible, if only to stop herself from going crazy with bitterness.
Next came the call from Legends.
‘At your convenience,’ said Jackson’s assistant.
She resisted the urge to tell her that her convenience wasn’t hard to come by.
She dressed for business. A striking suit in oxblood red with a pencil skirt and a tightly fitted jacket. A suit that said, don’t fuck with me, I’m a woman.
Her hand shook as she did up the zip at the back of the skirt.
You’re innocent.
She kept reminding herself of this fundamental truth.
She pushed her feet into her highest, sharpest, blackest heels.
Leanne was hovering in the main reception. ‘You’ll let me know what goes on?’
‘They’ll find something for you whatev
er happens, Leanne,’ she said. ‘You’re a good assistant.’
‘I know I am,’ she said. ‘That’s not why I care.’
Jackson didn’t smile when she walked into his office. He didn’t ask how she’d been or what she’d been doing to keep herself busy. She despised the way her heart bounced with a jolt of desire when she saw him. She’d thought she was stronger than that.
Carl Higham sat next to him once more. This, and the fact that there wasn’t an ice bucket cradling a bottle of champagne to toast her unconditional return to the fold, made her sense that the news would not be good. The constant feeling of dread that she had been keeping at bay for weeks settled onto her shoulders, pushing her down. She had a terrible feeling she might be fucked.
She was right.
‘We have been unable to make any satisfactory link to the source of the money,’ said Jackson, his voice cool. ‘In fact, aside from the address details and so on, we have as yet been unable to connect S. Sharp of the Cayman Islands account with Samantha Sharp of Legends, with you.’
‘You won’t be able to,’ said Samantha. ‘I told you that.’
Jackson ignored her. ‘However,’ he said. ‘There have been a couple of other developments, which impact on the situation.’
She waited for him to continue. She didn’t like the sideways look the two men shared. She didn’t like the way Jackson looked down at the table rather than straight in her eyes. She thought about their past, about everything he had done for her and stupidly trusted a tiny flutter in her gut that said he wouldn’t let her down. Not after everything.
‘Monty and Ferris Welstead have asked to have alternative representation in this agency,’ he said.
She took a step back as if she had been hit in the face. The Welstead boys had fired her? Her number-one clients, the ones she had discovered in the backwoods of the North East and signed to the richest club in the best league in the world. They had asked for a substitute?
