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.
‘I was at Cherton first thing, yes, sir. I’ll go back when we’re done. That’s if there’s time.’
‘Let’s get down to business, then. Because I’ve made a decision. You’ve had your coffee, I expect?’ Bims hardly waited for the other’s nod before he went on. ‘Thinking again about last Saturday. It was a bad defeat, you know? Technically very bad. Same as the week before. Replica, I’d say.’
‘We drew the week before, Sir Ray. That was against Millwall.’
‘I know bloody well who we were playing. I was there, wasn’t I? And I’m telling you they were technically bad performances by the Eels. Both times. For that matter, it’s applied to the whole season. The lads don’t seem to lack keenness, not most of them, but there’s still no co-ordination in their game. No cohesion.’ The speaker leaned forward, arms on the desk. On occasions like these he wished it was the size of desk that enhanced the power of its user. ‘You keep telling me we’re going for an attacking game and we end up playing defensive. And to no purpose.’ He paused, giving the other a chance to respond and doubting he’d dare now—not before he’d heard the decision. ‘You don’t need me to tell you there’s a lot of dissatisfaction being expressed over your management.’
So this was it, Harden thought. He was being fired. ‘I’m doing my best,’ he said. ‘We had all that sickness through December and January. And there’s some this week as well. It’s been hard to build the team back. The new players haven’t—’
It was a feeble defence and Bims interrupted it. ‘Well, maybe it’d be best for all concerned if we let you go,’ he said. ‘There’s not much of your contract left in any case.’
They both knew the manager’s second three-year contract had only four months to run, and that he had been pressing to have it renewed since the previous season. ‘I was hoping it’d be renewed, Sir Ray. I don’t feel I’ve had a chance this season. It’s taken a while to restructure with the new players. But the lads know what I want. It’s coming. Really it is.’
‘So’s Christmas, laddie.’ Bims leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘The other directors feel very strongly you’ve had all the time you should have needed.’
Harden didn’t believe that the views of other directors counted for anything—or that they were being accurately reported even if they’d been taken, which he doubted. Bims seldom consulted anyone. Since he paid for everything he didn’t need to. Everybody knew that. ‘You’ve got another manager lined up, then?’ If there was someone else it had been kept very secret, and that wasn’t so easy. If there wasn’t anyone, they surely wouldn’t want the present manager to leave now, not with a third of the season left. It didn’t make sense.
‘Depends,’ said Bims darkly.
‘On what, sir?’
‘On you and me, Felix.’ The other man smiled for the first time since the interview had begun. It wasn’t a warm smile—more cunning than friendly, but it made a change from the sour expression Bims had been wearing so far.
‘You see, I’ve not said I go along with the others. Not totally. Not to the point where I’ll deny you the chance to get things right.’
Harden swallowed. There was probably a catch coming, but whatever it was, it was better than being fired. Soccer was his life, and team management his future. He was already too old to be taken on again anywhere as a player. ‘I can do it, Sir Ray. I promise you.’
‘And I happen to agree with you. To the point where I’d give you another season to prove it anyway.’ He rocked forward sharply, picked up a silver paperknife from the desk, and fixed Harden with a steady, piercing gaze.
‘A one-year contract, sir?’
‘A one-year extension of the old one, Felix. We can think about a new contract when that’s up.’
‘Fair enough.’ It meant his present salary would be underwritten for another sixteen months.
‘Yes, you and I together can stand up against criticism from any quarter, Felix. Together we’re impregnable. Remember that.’ He held the knife like a baton, waving the point at Harden. ‘If I support you in the teeth of criticism, I expect the same support from you if people start knocking me. Which I’m telling you they will do if I keep you on for another year.’
‘I understand, sir.’ But he didn’t believe it was as simple as that. He suspected a quid pro quo situation. What he had read in the paper had evidently been bad enough to make the all-powerful Bims go looking for allies at Hugon Road on his own account. Maybe people were more anxious to get rid of the Chairman than the team manager.
‘But my decision still depends on your facing a few facts, Felix. Admitting you’ve made mistakes. Accepting you’re ready to rectify them.’
‘Everybody makes mistakes, Sir Ray,’ Harden replied carefully.
‘Sure. But you made a big one making me buy Stan Bodworski.’
‘But it was you—’
‘Not worth a fraction of what he cost me,’ Bims cut in harshly. ‘I’m not faulting the other new players you bought. Not so much, anyway. But that Bodworski’s a bloody dead loss.’
It was a difficult charge for Harden to disprove. Bodworski hadn’t exactly justified himself to date, but there had been other circumstances that had contributed. On top of that, it had been Bim’s own idea to buy Bodworski, though there seemed to be no purpose in pressing that point now. ‘You want me to read him the riot act, Sir Ray?’
‘Better than that. I want you to put him on the transfer list.’ Bims slapped the knife down on to the desk. ‘Stop him from playing in any more games,’ he went on. ‘Lend him to some other club if you can. We don’t need him around Hugon Road any more.’
‘But that’s—’
‘He’s bad medicine. Bad for the other players’ morale. They don’t like him, and they don’t respect him as a player. They think we paid too much for him. Half a million too much. And his ten per cent of that’s resented. Deeply resented. So’s his seventy thousand pound a year playing contract.’
‘Nobody knows that’s what we’re paying him,’ Harden put in quickly.
‘That’s what you believe. They all know. He’s let on, no doubt. Bragging. I’ve got my ear closer to the ground than you think. Closer than you’ve got yours by the sound of it. So what’s it going to be, Felix?’ Bims ended, straightening his back and looking at his watch.
It was as bald an ultimatum as anyone could have issued, even Bims. Harden was longing to ask for more time—but for what? To consider his verdict on Stan Bodworski to whom he owed nothing, or very little at least? In any case, he would only be given Bims pause to reconsider and possibly to withdraw his offer on the future of Felix Harden. The Eels’ team manager knew that his job depended on his suspending the Pole. It was naive to think anything else.
‘I expect you’re right, Sir Ray. About Stan—’ he began, the words already a dead weight on his conscience.
‘Good.’ Bims didn’t allow the other to continue. ‘And another thing, Felix. There’s a crackpot idea about selling up Hugon Road and moving everything out to Cherton. I’m deeply opposed to that, and I expect you to be as well. I’ll tell you why …’