Chapter 309: Piece 1 I

Raj brought him. They were waiting for me at 7 the next evening in the cab office over the kebab shop, with the radio on the desk turned down and the smell of the fryer coming up through the floor.

Raj’s cousin was called Sunny. He was about 30, still in his work fleece with the carpet firm’s name on the chest, and he had a laptop open on the desk with a graph on the screen.

"Raj says you told him to take it out of Tokyo," he said, before I had sat down. "Why?"

"Because since June that company has not let people have their dollars. Have you had any dollars out since?"

"I have not tried. I am not selling."

"Then ring them and ask for 100 dollars of it back, and see how long it takes."

He turned the laptop round to show me the graph. The line had dropped straight down the night before and climbed most of the way back. "It was 109 last night. Everybody on the forums said hold, and it came back. They are the biggest exchange in the world, Mr Mercer."

"They were the biggest in June as well, when they stopped the dollars."

"Banks go bust as well." He folded his arms. "Northern Rock went bust. People got their money back."

"Because the Government stood behind Northern Rock," I said. "Nobody stands behind a company in Tokyo. If it shuts, who do you ring?"

Sunny looked at Raj. Raj was sitting on the edge of the second desk with a can of cola, saying nothing, the way he sat in his cab when a fare was arguing with somebody on the phone.

"How much is in there?" I said.

"My deposit for a flat." He said it to the laptop. "6 years of it. I put it in in June because the building society was paying me nothing, and it has gone up since, even after last night."

"Then it matters where it sits."

"So where am I supposed to put it? Under the bed? My laptop is 7 years old. It is safer in Tokyo than on that thing."

"Somewhere only you can open. The people on your forums argue about how to do that every night. Read what they say, and do it. Get a better laptop if you have to."

He laughed at that, and some of the fight went out of his shoulders. "How do you know about any of this? You run a football club."

"In 2010 this club was in administration," I said. "I sat in a room with the people it owed money to."

"So?"

"Firms that had done the work and been told to wait. Some of them were big firms. Some of them waited a year for it."

The fryer hissed downstairs, tssss, and somebody shouted an order for 2 large doners.

Sunny closed the laptop. "I will think about it."

"Think about it this week."

"I will think about it." He stood up and shook my hand. "You care more about my deposit than my mum does, Mr Mercer."

When he had gone down the stairs, Raj put his can down.

"Mine stays with his," he said. "He does the computer side. I do not know what I am doing with it, and he does."

"Then get him to move yours, at least."

"It is a holiday’s worth, Sam. If it goes, it goes, and I will have learnt something." He walked me down the back stairs, creak, creak, and opened the door onto the alley, where the bins were. "You should have seen Sunny’s face when you said who do you ring."

I drove home and did not ring him again. I had said everything I could say without saying how I knew it.

Middlesbrough beat us 4-0 at their place on the Saturday, and it would have been 6 without Braithwaite. Their wide men went past our full-backs all afternoon.

The rain came in sideways on the A19, tik-tik-tik on the coach windows, and the heater would not work at the back. Carrow sat with his hood up and his eyes shut. Robertson had a towel round his neck and looked out at the dark.

Sadler sat at the front and did not speak until Doncaster. Then he stood up in the aisle with one hand on the luggage rack.

"Monday," he said. "8 o’clock. Everybody."

He sat down again, and nobody on the coach spoke till we were back in Essex.

After the international break, on Friday the 18th, the letter from Chelmsford came. Margaret had it on her desk by 9, 11 pages, and she read every one with a pencil in her hand before she let me sit down.

"Our solicitor has done what I asked," she said. "Every pound into this club since July 2011 has a piece of paper behind it."

She turned the pages back to the start. "The debt in 2011. What you went back for that winter. Every sale through the man in London since. The money in April, through the client account in the City. And both halves in June."

"Good."

"And the Tokyo statements." She turned to a page near the back. "Certified, every page, on Friday the 4th of October."

"Yes."

"Why that week?"

"Because it fell by a fifth on the Wednesday night, and the papers were full of it on the Thursday," I said. "That company has had trouble paying dollars since June. Its statements are the only record of the money that cleared this club’s debt."

"Then a copy goes in the strongroom in Chelmsford with the rest," Margaret said, and wrote it on her pad.

"Here is the part I do not like." She put her pencil under a paragraph on page 2. "Summer 2010. Your first coins. The client states that he paid for them in cash from his savings, through a website that closed in 2011. The client states."

"That is what happened."

"I am sure it is. And the very first pound has nothing behind it but you." She tapped the page. "That is what I said I did not want."

"There is nothing else for that year, Margaret. The website has gone."

She read the paragraph again. Then she took her pen out of the pot and signed her name at the bottom of the last page, under the solicitor’s, scratch, and dated it.

"What is that for?"

"That says the club secretary has read it, and is satisfied that the rest of the trail is complete." She put the letter in a folder and wrote SOURCE OF FUNDS on the front in capitals.

"If the League ever asks about 2010," she said, "they ask me, and I tell them what you told me. I will put my name under your word, Sam. Once."

"Thank you."

"Do not thank me. Go and get Robbie his money."

I went to Fenchurch Street that afternoon and brought one sheet home.

Brighton came to Marsh Road the next day, and it finished 1-1. N’Golo scored his second goal for the club from 20 yards, and Kieran told the whole tea bar it was the cleanest strike he had seen on his grass.

Brighton equalised with a header 4 minutes later. The bedsheet stayed up over the middle of the Bovril End till the final whistle.

On the Monday morning the coin was 175. I typed the key off the sheet into the laptop at the kitchen table, the first time it had been typed anywhere, checked it against the sheet, and sent the first morning’s coin to the quiet man, tok.

My hands were steady. What was left on that sheet would cover the steel as well. It stayed on the laptop in my kitchen, and I did not like it there.

He rang at 10 past 9. "Received, Mr Mercer. 100,000 pounds, into the club’s account by 11."

"Thank you."

"Tomorrow, the same."

It was the same on the Tuesday. Maureen had the bank’s page open on her screen from 10, and at a little before 11 a line came up with 100,000 on it, and she wrote it into the green book when she had checked it.

On the Wednesday the quiet man said something more than "Received".

"The forums are full of people waiting for a higher number, Mr Mercer. You are selling every morning."

"I have a contractor waiting."

"It is your money."

"It is the club’s money by 11."

He rang off.

"300,000," Maureen said that afternoon, when the third line was in. "200,000 to come, and Margaret has the contractor’s form in her tray already."