Chapter XXXV:
A Pitiful Incident

WHILE I HAD been galumphing about with Malory on the wrong side of the Pond, I had presumed that matters regarding the London Knights would be safe in the hands of the trustees and managers. I presumed incorrectly. The lack of communication from the front office had lulled me into complacency, and working on the memorial had forced the team from my mind—though not for long.

I returned to my hotel suite that night to a message indicator flashing so red and so insistently that it must surely discharge its sacred duty or die. I retrieved the message—two, as it transpired, both urgent and pitiful to their very roots. The next day I took my leave of Malory, packed, and hustled back to London as fast as the Transatlantic Bullet Worm could swim me there.

The messages informed me of two separate scandals enveloping the team, one involving a player and the other a farm-team player’s wife.

Locating Sandy to speak with him about his secret would have to wait.

The player, one of my left-handed pitchers, had allegedly raped and murdered a woman, and set fire to her house to destroy the evidence. Scratch “allegedly,” a word for lawyers representing cowards who lack the genitalia to admit what they did and accept the consequences thereof. Multiple witnesses saw the pitcher having dinner with the woman at the Outfield Inn, leaving the establishment with her, and arriving at her residence. Her neighbors heard their argument and her screams,—and the house’s explosion. They saw him rush off, tossing a bloody nine-iron into the shrubbery. They encircled the house, indulging their curiosity as the fire brigade fought to douse the blaze and prevent it from damaging said neighbors’ homes. Those not obligated to be elsewhere come morning watched the investigators comb through the smoldering wreckage, recover the club, find the woman’s bashed-skull remains, and determine that the gas stove had been detonated. The fickle finger of Fate permitted samples of the pitcher’s DNA to be recovered at the scene and from the woman’s body.

Without too much difficulty he was arrested, jailed, and suspended from the team pending the official ruling regarding these allegations. The pitcher’s wrongdoings—I beg your pardon, “alleged” wrongdoings—were not my primary concern.

My concern and sympathies lay with the wife of the Odiham Ogres shortstop who had been jailed for having stolen baby food and diapers, while her husband was playing on an extended road trip on the Continent. Allegedly stolen. Whatever.

This may not seem on its surface to be a world-stopping event—and certainly not worthy of the attention of the franchise’s owner, being rather a matter for the farm team’s management. It would not have been world-stopping if the woman had quietly accepted her punishment, which was thirty days behind bars while her parish priest cared for her baby.

However, she did not go quietly but kept insisting that she had been driven to her desperate acts because her husband’s pitifully low farm-league salary was rendered even lower from having been skimmed by the team manager, the supposed reasons being flagging gate receipts and too big a tab for sponsoring Free Beer Fridays. With her husband hundreds of miles away and herself unemployed and friendless, with a starving baby, she had nowhere to turn for aid. Why she did not approach her priest to begin with is a matter of debate.

When my staff—men, every one—offered to investigate the wife’s allegations, I insisted on handling the affair myself. Find any century wherein a woman’s word is accepted over a man’s and verily you have found a rare marvel indeed.

I visited the woman in jail to hear the story from her own lips, but before she would consent, she laid upon me a most urgent and piteous plea for news regarding her baby. Although my son Uwaine lies centuries dead, a mother never forgets, never fails to feel within her heart the tautness of this eternal bond. I rose up without delay, rang the parsonage, asked the priest to turn on his Netcam and frame it upon the baby, and streamed the images of the baby playing on the floor with the parson’s cat to my phone, which I showed the mother in her cell.

How she cooed and oohed over that child, uttering all manner of endearments, even though she knew her baby could not hear her; it wrung my heart. Her claim of a duplicate ledger—which she had heretofore not mentioned to anyone else because she knew not whom to trust—strengthened my resolve, and I launched my investigation of the farm team with all the vigor of an invading army.

A thorough examination of the Ogres’ ledgers and search of the team’s office and computers turned up nothing. I netted the same result at the manager’s house. He denied everything with the vociferousness of the guilty. I accepted his claims for what they were and widened my search to include the stadium, vendor booths, dugouts, and equipment storage facilities. In the home-team locker room under the false bottom of the hamper for soiled uniforms I found the handwritten ledger proving the shortstop’s wife’s story. I sacked the manager and his accountant on the spot.

 

“I sacked the manager and his accountant on the spot.”

 

 

Furthermore, I bailed the woman out of jail and settled the matter of her minor thefts with the store’s owner and the town magistrate. I gave her the former accountant’s job, confident that anyone with the brains to discover the embezzlement would manage the books with competence and honor. Lastly, I visited the Lord Mayor of Odiham to suggest that he assist any of the other players’ wives who desired employment. As an inducement, I endowed the town with enough funds to establish a subsidized child care facility—available for hire by anyone in Odiham but free in perpetuity for Ogre children.

The looks of gratitude bestowed upon me by the Ogres’ new accountant and the other wives defy paltry words. I shall treasure the moment always.

As for the pitcher, I left him to languish in jail regardless of the impact his absence wrought upon the team. No one treats a woman so despicably and goes unpunished if I possess the power to do something about it.