If Pete Morgan had been a different kind of man, he would have wept. But he wasn’t a crier. Not a man to wallow in self-pity when there was work to be done. So he channelled all of that hatred and disgust into a profound, new sense of purpose.
He thought about his dad and wondered what he would make of the current state of affairs at his beloved Mile End. No doubt he would be spinning cartwheels in his grave.
It was a fucking diabolical situation, and one that couldn’t be allowed to go on much longer. Pete had been well-behaved for a while now (the club had quietly offered to lift his ban on the stadium if he stayed out of trouble), but he could feel himself being drawn back into all those ugly feelings which he had worked so hard to fight. Over the years, Pete Morgan had amassed quite a following. Thanks to social media, it was now easier than ever to spread the good word. He was a new kind of hooligan; he was all about strategy and co-ordination.
He had an uneasy relationship with the club itself. They didn’t seem to know what to do with him. After all, he brought them publicity. But when some footage got leaked via social media of him indulging in what was described as “racist abuse” at a recent match, they’d been forced to ban him. The media circus had a great time smearing him. A few tabloids dug up some dirt, printing old photos of him doing a Nazi salute, things like that. They reckoned he had “far-right connections.” But Pete didn’t believe in politics. He believed in stuff that was real; stuff that really existed. Like football. That was something he could pour his heart and soul into. He knew Mile End couldn’t ban him from matches forever. But at the same time, he had been following their rapidly declining fortunes with a heavy heart. People were sending him messages saying things like “what are we gonna DO about this, Pete?” and he had no answer for them. He simply didn’t know.
Now this useless fucker, this David Carter, had let a lad who might just have been the best thing to happen to the club in decades die in a fiery car explosion. Just brilliant. Yet another disappointment. For a while there it had seemed as though signing Brigante might just be the change in their fortunes the club had been waiting for. But it was not to be.
Nowadays, Pete Morgan lived alone in a flat in East London. He couldn’t work because of his bad back. His benefits kept him in fags, beers and takeaways. He would never admit this to anyone, but he was lonely. Without the football, there was nothing to think about. Nothing to look forward to. More and more, he found himself trawling endlessly through social media, painfully aware that he was running out of things to live for.
But that morning things were different. There was the familiar, unwelcome sound of his doorbell, dragging him from the best night’s sleep he’d had in ages. He staggered out into the hall of his poky flat and unlocked the door. He kept it on the chain though: you couldn’t be too careful.
“Fucking hell,” he said, “what are you doing here?”
“Mr. Morgan,” said Wayne, “or can I call you Pete? I’ve heard a lot about you. Funny we’ve never met before now.”
Wayne Carter was wearing his best business suit. He felt decidedly out-of-place, even on the short walk from his limousine outside to this upstairs flat. But he was a man on a mission; he knew his script; he was in total control.
“You’d better come in,” said Pete Morgan, playing it cool.
You might call it a surreal sight: the aging hooligan making tea in his grubby kitchen for the handsome, young, former footballer. But there was a method in Wayne’s madness. He thought of himself as an avenging angel, sweeping in to wreak destruction.
*
Inspector Edwards spent most of his morning thinking of ways in which he could make life difficult for David Carter. He sat at the desk in his corner office and stared at the wall with a vague smile on his face. You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to suss out the way things were going. David Carter was a cornered animal; he was bound to get desperate. His scheme had come crashing down around his ears.
Edwards, who had made a decent living out of pocketing kickbacks from the football mogul, could now see the beginnings of a very healthy payday indeed. There was only one thing for it – he would need to pay Carter a visit.
Fortunately, none of his colleagues ever paid much attention to what Edwards got up to during the working day, otherwise they might have wondered why a drugs officer was heading out to Mile End Stadium when the deaths of the Linley family and Enrico Brigante were being handled by other, more capable investigators. If it had occurred to them to scrutinise his activities more closely, they would have seen that he’d done everything in his power to paint the whole sorry sequence of events as just an unfortunate coincidence. For instance, he managed to destroy the traces of cocaine which were found in the burnt-out car. He also stole the bullet that had punctured Enrico Brigante’s skull before embedding itself in the dashboard – it was just a matter of retrieving it from its evidence locker and then chucking it in the Thames. Soon, the rest of them would have no choice but to write the whole thing off. There was no conspiracy. And while the connection between and Brigante and David Carter might make some suspect an organised crime element, there was no proof, and the brass didn’t want a length, expensive investigation without evidence.
“I’ve done you a favour, you know,” Edwards said to David Carter when he was ushered into the director’s office.
“Have you?” David asked flatly, not taking his eyes off the computer monitor on his desk.
“Oh yes,” Edwards beamed, pulling up a chair. “You’ll thank me later. But right now, I want to talk to you about something.”
“Bit busy at the minute,” David said, still not looking at the Inspector.
Edwards did not let it faze him. “What if I told you,” he commenced, “that I was in a position to do you another favour?”
“I’d tell you I’m busy at the minute,” David snapped, getting suddenly to his feet. Edwards watched him march over to the window and peek out between the blinds. “Jesus Christ,” he said to no one in particular – certainly not to Edwards.
Edwards got a look over the director’s shoulder at the crowds that were gathering in the street below the window. Hundreds of them now. Worse even than the protests of a few weeks ago. This time, it was a carefully orchestrated social media campaign that had ignited the vengeful sentiment among the fans – not to mention the mercurial presence of Pete Morgan.
He was out there now, megaphone in hand, preaching his garbled gospel, flanked by hearses. The hearses were a symbolic touch – they represented not only the deaths of Rob Linley and Enrico Brigante, but the death of the club. Virtually everything Morgan said was met with raucous cheers. Uniformed police were there to keep order, but were doing nothing to disperse the crowds. If anything, the numbers seemed to be growing even as David watched.
“You know what he’s done?” Pete Morgan demanded. “This David Carter? This man we trusted, who pockets heaps of our hard-earned cash every single week? He’s killed this club. Our beloved Mile End. We’ve been there for this club through thick and thin. Haven’t we?”
More cheers.
“And how do the men in suits repay us for our loyalty? They bleed our club dry. This isn’t about the beautiful game anymore. It’s about business. Big business, and money men who don’t know the first thing about football! And just when we thought there was light at the end of the tunnel, they managed to pull the rug out from under us yet again! Enrico Brigante was a good lad. A great player. He was just what the club needed. But this is Mile End – and we’re not allowed nice things, are we? So we lost Enrico Brigante. And who do we have to thank for that? Two words: DAVID CARTER!”
A roar surged from the crowd. It sent a chill down David’s spine. He could see TV trucks assembling in the car park. The gutter press was on the case again.
Pete Morgan held up a hand and the crowd obediently fell silent. “Now, what I want is for us all to have a minute’s silence to honour the memory of Enrico Brigante and everything he would have brought to our Mile End.”
The TV cameras started rolling just in time for the minute of silence. It would be all over every sporting news outlet in the country by this evening.
David skulked away from the window and returned to his desk.
“Oh mate,” said Edwards with another of his insufferable grins, “it looks to me like you need all the help you can get.”
*
Across London, another memorial was taking place. Max Linley stood like a mannequin, listening to the silence. His hands were folded respectfully in front of him as he surveyed the four coffins: two adult-size and two small. This was all that remained of his family. His world. His hatred for David Carter was now a white flame in his chest, burning with a heat so intense that he could scarcely think or breathe.
He was taking a few “personal days.” This had been suggested by one or two of his allies in the club. It was an opportunity to not only gather his strength, but to formulate a plan of attack. Because one thing was for sure: David Carter was a dead man. His lies and failures and finagling had cost Max everything he had. Max had put up with a lot throughout their friendship, but he had finally reached his limit.
*
That morning, Wayne received an unexpected package with the post. It was a brown jiffy bag, the sort of thing you might expect to contain a nail bomb or a heap of dog shit. Instead, it had a DVD in a plastic see-through case. It was neatly labelled: “R.V.”
Only mildly curious, Wayne fired up his old DVD player – which didn’t get much use these days – and slid the disc into the slot.
It was good quality footage.
*
Wayne Carter was out for a walk in the countryside, ostensibly taking the air in the vicinity of his rural home. After all, it was good for his wounded leg (which would never fully heal) to take as much exercise as he could manage. But he had an ulterior motive.
The sun beamed down on him as he reached the layby in that meandering country lane where Mikhail Popov’s limousine was waiting for him. He opened a rear door and climbed inside. Mikhail sat opposite him, his eyes shielded by tinted spectacles. His face was expressionless. He spoke softly:
“Did you receive my gift?”
Wayne nodded, his eyes fixed on the middle distance. He would never be able to un-see what was on that disc.
“Everything seems to be proceeding according to plan. And your idea of recruiting Peter Morgan has certainly paid off. Tell me, have you managed to re-establish contact with your mother?”
There was a pause before Wayne replied. “Not yet.” Then, after another increasingly awkward silence, he said, “Why did they take so long?”
“Hmm? What do you mean?”
“Ronnie Vincent. The disc. That video was over three hours long.”
Mikhail smiled now. “I like to know I am getting my money’s worth. Didn’t you enjoy it?”
Wayne’s gaze snapped toward the Russian, but he didn’t say anything.
Mikhail persisted: “Isn’t that what you wanted, Wayne? Your revenge?”
“Not like that,” said Wayne quietly. “Not like that.”
“Well, ‘you can’t always get what you want.’ Isn’t that the way the old song goes? But you have nothing to worry about. I understand the Spanish police have no leads whatsoever.”
Ronnie Vincent, footballer turned actor, had been drinking with a few of his friends in the bar of the hotel where he was staying in Alicante. He was there to film scenes for the gangster film in which he was playing the second-lead. The role was that of a brutal assassin and torturer known as “Thumbscrew.” It was a fun role that would likely have cemented Ronnie’s reputation as the go-to character actor for this type of mid-budget venture. The director knew it; Ronnie knew it; everyone knew it. So he was in good spirits that night when he eventually sloped back to his suite.
That was the last time he was seen alive.
The hotel CCTV caught sight of a couple of unidentified and decidedly shifty looking men striding through the corridors. Nobody was able to ascertain how they got past hotel security, but it was obvious from the few bits of grainy footage that they knew exactly where they were going. Wayne, of course, had watched the whole evening’s work from their point of view; one of them had been carrying a small camera which he used to record every last second of their midnight rendezvous.
The following morning Ronnie Vincent failed to show up on set. The driver that had been sent to pick him up reported that Ronnie was not answering his door. Eventually, a maid was dispatched with a master key to see what the fuck was going on. Her screams echoed around the hotel corridors, and before long the details of her discovery were public knowledge.
It was the sort of murder that was designed to make headlines; to send a message. What the message was, nobody knew. But the fact remained that there would be no open-casket wake for Ronnie Vincent.
The carpets were awash with blood, and the walls lashed with bucketloads of the dark, sticky stuff. Ronnie's limbs were in the bath, four ruined appendages criss-crossing one another like twigs. His torso was on the bed, his head glowered down from the top of the wardrobe with a look of horror on its twisted features, and his cock was slammed in the window. There were various broken bones, bruises, contusions, abrasions and hideous flaps of flesh. Disturbingly, investigators were unwilling to speculate publicly as to how much of the mutilation and dismemberment had taken place while Ronnie Vincent was still alive. Add to that the fact that none of the guests in nearby rooms had heard as much as a squeak that night, and you were left with a pair of truly diabolical assassins who were professional and left no trace. A murder that was destined to remain unsolved and provide plenty of fodder for true crime documentaries in the decades to come.
"Perhaps you were a little shocked by the footage?" said Mikhail, taking evident pleasure in Wayne's discomfiture. "Perhaps you thought it was overkill? That the nature of his transgression did not merit such a response?"
Wayne was silent. He stared out of the window at the countryside. On any other day, the clear skies and rolling hills would have been a soothing sight. But now the images from that video were rolling backwards and forwards in front of his eyes.
Mikhail spoke in soft yet strangely cajoling tones. "You got what you asked for, Wayne. I honoured that part of the bargain. When are you going to call your mother, Wayne? I'm sure she will be glad to hear from you."
Wayne snapped his gaze back toward the Russian, but still resisted the urge to say anything.
"After all," Mikhail persisted, "that address and telephone number cost you a great deal. It would be a shame to waste them."
"When Pete Morgan has finished with the protests, I think you should get rid of him." Wayne spoke slowly and carefully. It was not an impulsive statement, but a carefully considered one. Mikhail could respect that.
"Yes," said the Russian, "I was thinking the same thing. No loose ends. You are getting good at this, Wayne."
Wayne did not reply.
