A Darker Shade of Blue (7 page)

As Will came into the room a black-and-white image of a young Alan Silver was on the screen. White suit, straw hat and cane.

‘My God!' said Silver in mock surprise. ‘Was that me? I'd never have known.'

‘But that was how you started?' said Richard. ‘A bit of a song-and-dance man.'

‘Absolutely.'

‘You don't suppose,' said Jane or Judy, ‘you could still do a few steps for us now?'

Sprightly for a man of his years, Silver sprang to his feet and did a little tap dance there and then. Jane or Judy marvelled and the studio audience broke into spontaneous applause.

‘Not bad for sixty-odd,' Lorraine said.

Will said something non-committal and walked back out of the room.

Alan Silver plumped up his pillows and reached for the glass of water he kept beside the bed. He was tired; his legs ached. The show had gone well, though, he thought. Sparkled, that's what he'd done. Sparkled. Still smiling, he switched out the bedside light. It wouldn't take him long to get to sleep tonight.

A short while later he was wide awake.

Something had woken him but what?

A dream? A noise on the stairs?

Imagination, surely?

But no, there it was again.

Silver felt his skin turn cold.

It couldn't be happening twice.

Carefully, he eased back the heavy covers and rolling on to his stomach, reached beneath the bed.

It wasn't there. The bloody thing wasn't there.

The bedroom door swung open and Silver, turning clumsily, jabbed on the light.

‘Looking for something?' Malkin said, levelling the shotgun towards the centre of the bed.

PROMISE

The way it would usually be: Kiley would be in the pub enjoying a quiet drink when someone would walk over to him or intercept him on his way to the bar. ‘Excuse me, but aren't you that bloke …' And then it would start and Kiley would nod and grin and hear it all again, some blurred version of it anyway, before signing whatever scrap of paper was within reach and shaking hands. ‘Always wondered what happened to you.'

Jack Kiley at forty. A tall man with a barely discernible limp as he carried his pint of Worthington back to his corner table. The face fuller now, the hair as thick, though touched with grey; the eyes a safer shade of blue. His body softer, but not soft, some fifteen pounds heavier than when he came from nowhere to score that hat-trick in extra time. The FA Cup quarter final, 1989.

‘Hey, aren't you …?'

Kiley had been a police officer at the time, a detective in the Met, CID. Seven years in. He'd never stopped playing soccer since he was a kid. Turned out for the force, of course he did. And as an amateur, without contract, for a string of semi-pro clubs, Kidderminster Harriers, Canvey Island, Gravesend. When Stevenage Borough in the Conference came in for him, needing cover for an injured striker, an understanding detective superintendent cleared Kiley's rota for most Saturdays in the season, only for him to spend the best part of each game on the bench, waiting to be thrown on in the dying stages – ‘Go get 'em, Jack. Show ‘em what you can do.' – Kiley clogging through the churned-up mud in search of an equalising goal.

Each year the Cup threw up its giant killer, a team from the lower reaches riding their luck and ground advantage to harry and chase the top pros with their fancy boots and trophy wives, each earning more in a month than Kiley's team would graft in a brace of years. And in '89 it was Stevenage, a home draw against the Villa promising them a place in the last four. One all at the end of the ninety and five minutes into extra time, Kiley, frustrated and cold inside his tracksuit, got the call. ‘Go get ‘em, Jack.'

With his first touch he played the ball straight into the path of the opposing centre half, the second slid beneath his boot and skidded out of touch; his third, a rising shot struck full off the meat of the right boot on the run, swerved high and wide past the goalie's outstretched hand and Kiley's side were in the lead, nineteen minutes to go.

Five minutes later Villa drew level, and then, from the midst of a nine-man goal-mouth melee, Kiley toe-poked the ball blindly over the line.

Kiley's marker, who'd already been trying to kick six shades of shit out of him, clattered against him as they headed back towards the centre circle. ‘Don't think that makes you fucking clever. 'Cause you're not, you're fuckin' shite!' And as the ball arced away towards the left wing, unobserved, he elbowed Kiley in the kidneys and left him face down in the dirt.

Which is why Kiley was unmarked, moments later, when the ball came ballooning towards him out of the Villa defence, Kiley thirty yards from goal, open space in front of him and he met it on the half-volley, sweet like driving a passing shot down the line on Centre Court, or pulling a six head-high to the boundary at Lord's, that rare and perfect combination of technique and relaxation, and he knew, even before the roar of the crowd or the sight of his own players cartwheeling in pleasure, that he had scored.

At the final whistle, with the home crowd chanting his name, his marker sought him out, and with a toothless grin, threw an arm around his shoulder. ‘No hard feelings, eh?' And when Kiley looked back at him, ‘Swap shirts, then? What d'you say?'

Kiley nodded and waited till the player had lifted his arms above his head. And punched him once, a short right to the ribs that dropped the man, breathless, to his knees.

The referee red-carded him for that, which meant Kiley was ineligible for the semi-final, which they lost seven-one to Liverpool, a necessary corrective to their uppity behaviour. In professional soccer, each giant-killer – so valuable for filling column inches and the turnstiles both – is only allowed so many sacrificial giants.

For Kiley, though, fame lingered on, his hat-trick the stuff of innumerable sports-show repeats, and it was no surprise when someone offered him the chance to turn professional a few months short of his twenty-ninth birthday. The manager of Charlton Athletic had something of a reputation for making silk purses from sow's ears, turning grit into gold. And Kiley knew it was the only chance he would get. With too few second thoughts, he resigned from the Met.

Most of his first season was spent in the reserves or on the bench: in all he made just three first team starts, scoring once. The following summer he trained hard, determined; played in all three pre-season friendlies, looking sharp; in the first league game he hit a volley from twenty-five yards that slammed against the bar, and narrowly missed with a diving header inside the box. The second game, away, he was stretching for a ball that was never really his when the tackle came in, two-footed, late, and broke his leg. Some legs, young legs, mend. After two operations, rest, light training, lots of physio, Kiley called it a day. The club were more generous than many, the insurance settlement better than he might have hoped. For months he did little or nothing, left books half-read, watched afternoon movies, moped. Considered a civilian job with the Met. Then a former colleague from the force offered him work with the security firm he was running. ‘No uniform, Jack. No bullshit. Just wear a suit, look large and smile.' For the best part of three years, he was a paid bodyguard to B-list celebrities, obscure overseas royals, sports personalities and their hangers-on.

At Wimbledon, Kiley found himself sharing overpriced strawberries and champagne with Adrian Costain, a sports agent he'd brushed up against a few times in his soccer days, and when Costain rang him a week later with the offer of some private work, he thought, why not?

So here he was, ten years down the line from his twenty-five minutes of fame, a private investigator with an office, a computer, pager, fax and phone; a small but growing clientele, a backlog of successfully resolved, mostly sports-associated cases.

Jack Kiley, whatever happened to him?

Well, now you know.

*

Kiley was alone in his office, August third. Two rooms above a bookshop in Belsize Park. A bathroom he shared with the financial consultant whose office was on the upper floor.

‘So what d'you think?' Kate had asked him the first time they'd looked round. ‘Perfect, no?' Kate having been tipped off by her friend, Lauren, who managed the shop below.

‘Perfect, maybe. But rents in this part of London … There's no way I could afford it.'

‘Jack!'

‘It's all I can do to keep up with the payments on the flat.'

‘Then let it go.'

‘What?'

‘The flat, let it go.'

Kiley had stared around. ‘And live here?'

‘No, fool. Move in with me.'

So now Kiley's name was there in neat lettering, upper and lower case, on the glass of the outer door. The office chair behind the glass-topped desk was angled round, suggesting his secretary had just popped out and would be back. As she might, were she to exist. In her stead, there was Irena, a young Romanian who waited on tables across the street, and two mornings a week did Kiley's filing for him, a little basic word processing, talked to him of the squares and avenues of Bucharest, excursions to the Black Sea, of storks that nested by the sides of country roads.

In Kiley's inner sanctum were a smaller desk, oak-faced, an easy chair, a couch on which he sometimes napped, a radio, a TV whose screen he could span with one outstretched hand. There was a plant, jasmine, tiny white flowers amongst a plethora of glossed green leaves; a barely troubled bottle of single malt; a framed print Kate had presented him with when he moved in: two broad bands of cream resting across a field of mottled grey, the lines between hand-drawn and slightly wavering.

‘It'll grow on you,' she'd said.

He was still waiting.

The phone chirruped and he lifted it to his ear.

‘Busy, Jack?' Costain's voice was two-thirds marketing, one-third market stall.

‘That depends.'

‘Victoria Clarke.'

‘What about her?'

‘Get yourself down to Queen's. Forty-five minutes to an hour from now, she should be towelling down.'

Kiley was enough of a Londoner to know car owning for a mug's game. Within three minutes, he'd picked up a cab travelling south down Haverstock Hill and they'd set off on the zigzag course that would shuttle them west, Kiley wondering how many billboards of Victoria Clarke they would pass on the way.

That damp June and July she had been a minor sensation at the Wimbledon Championships, the first British woman to reach the semi-finals since Boadicea, or so it seemed, and ranked currently twenty-three in the world. And she had sprung from nowhere, or somewhere near the Essex end of the Central line at best; a council flat she had shared growing up with her sister, stepdad and mum. And like the Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, in the States, she had learned to play on public courts, enjoying none of the privilege that usually attended the luckless Amandas and Betinas of the English tennis world. Nor did it end there. Her face, which freckled slightly in the sun, was beautiful in a Kate Moss kind of a way, her legs slender and long; the quality of the sports photographer's long lens and of television video ensured that not one salted bead of sweat that languished on her neck then slowly disappeared into the dècolletage of the thin cotton tops she liked to wear was spared from public view.

Before the tournament was over, Costain had the contracts signed, the company's ad campaign agreed. Less than a fortnight later, the first of the advertisements appeared: Clarke crouching on the baseline, racket in hand, lips slightly parted, waiting to receive. In another she is watching the high toss of the ball, back arched, about to serve, white cotton top stretched tight across her breasts. For these and others, the strapline is the same: ‘
A Little Honest Sweat!
' Just that and a discreet Union Jack, the deodorant pictured lower right, close by the product's name.

Unreconstructed feminists protested and sprayed slogans late at night; students tore them down as trophies for their rooms; Kate devoted her column in the
Independent
to the insistent eroticising of the everyday. One giant billboard near an intersection on the Al north was removed after advice from the Department of Transport.

In the
Observer Sport Monthly's
annual list of ‘
Britain's Top 20 Sportswomen
', Victoria Clarke was number seven with a bullet, the only tennis player to appear at all.

‘Forgot your racket,' the cabbie joked, glancing at Kiley, empty-handed, waiting outside Queen's Club for his change and his receipt.

Kiley half-grinned and shook his head. ‘Different game.'

Costain was in the bar: tousled hair, rimless glasses, Paul Smith suit and large gin. He bought Kiley a small Scotch and water and they moved to a pair of low leather chairs by the far wall. Good living, Kiley noticed, had brought Costain the beginnings of a belly the loose cut of his suit just failed to disguise.

‘So how is it really?' Costain asked with a smile.

‘You know.'

‘Still with Kate?'

Kiley nodded.

‘How long's that now?' And then, quickly, ‘I know, I know, who's counting?'

In a week's time it would be two years since they'd started seeing one another; nine months, almost to the day, since he'd moved into Kate's house in Highbury Fields. Kate, Kiley knew, had gone out with Costain a few times some few years back; kissing him, she said, was like being force-fed marinated eel.

‘Victoria Clarke,' Kiley said, ‘what's the problem? There is a problem, I suppose.'

Costain drank a little more gin. ‘She's being blackmailed.'

‘Don't tell me she was a Page Three Girl for the
Sun
.'

For an answer, Costain took an envelope from the inside pocket of his suit coat and passed it across. Inside, a black-and-white copy of a photograph had been pasted to a single sheet of paper: a young woman in a park, holding a small girl, a toddler, high above her head; in the background, another woman, beside an empty buggy, looks on. The first woman, and the girl, are smiling, more than smiling, laughing; the second woman is not. The quality of the copy was such, it took a keen eye to identify the former as Victoria Clarke. Even then, there was room for doubt.