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But while there had seemed a purpose to the carnage wreaked upon a human body by von Hagens, and a genuine investigative value to his carving up a cadaver like a pig carcass in a butcher’s shop, what I was reading now seemed like something altogether different. The pale, rubbery bodies von Hagens used had hardly appeared to be human at all, more like something from the special effects guys at Pinewood Studios – perhaps because they had been emptied of the one thing that had made them human: life itself. And turning the pages of my friend’s autopsy report felt uncomfortably personal, even transgressive. I hadn’t ever sat in a steam bath with any of von Hagens’ cadavers, or embraced them fondly at Christmas; I hadn’t enjoyed a good dinner with any of them, or joined them in joyous celebrations as our team won a match; I hadn’t known them for most of my life. I hadn’t spoken to them less than seventy-two hours ago. It was a little like the computer guy taking your PC to bits in order to fix it – with all of the inside bits laid improbably open for inspection – except of course that no one was going to fix João Gonzales Zarco now. I suppose the moment when it hit me for the first time that Zarco really was dead and wouldn’t be coming back – that my friend and mentor was gone forever – was when I saw a photograph of him lying on the pathology table with a Y-shaped suture zippered up the front of his pale and naked corpse.

What a waste, I thought; what a waste of a spectacularly talented man.

I tried to ignore the many other colour photographs and to concentrate mostly on the text, which was of course written in cold and scientific legalese. The tone was measured, matter-of-fact, dispassionate, like a medical textbook, with very little use of the past conditional tense and almost nothing supposed. Wounds and injuries were simply described and evaluated in an efficient way that rendered them less extraordinary and perhaps, for the detective at least, easier to deal with.

Had Detective Chief Inspector Jane Byrne attended João Zarco’s autopsy? According to the notes, this had taken place during the course of a single hour the previous afternoon. I didn’t envy her if she had. There were better ways to spend your Sunday than listening to the sound of a sternum being snipped open, or the sight of a human crown being removed with a saw like the top of your boiled egg. Perhaps she was used to it. She certainly looked like she was. You can get used to anything, I suppose. More than likely she’d have freaked out at the sight of a badly broken leg on a football pitch, though; I’d seen more than my fair share of those and I don’t think there’s a more traumatic sight in sport. I’d seen several players faint at the sight of a career-ending leg break. What I was looking at now was bad enough but I owed it to Zarco to steel myself to keep reading. Unfortunately there was no cortisone injection I could give myself in order to carry on turning the pages.

Poor Zarco. The pictures of his body, as found by Phil Hobday and the security guards from the dock, showed a man who looked like he had played ninety minutes in goal with his clothes on. These had been examined first and it had been concluded that the body had been clothed at the time of death; the pathologist had matched his injuries to the blood stains on Zarco’s white Turnbull & Asser shirt, his grey Charvet silk tie, and the beautiful black silk coat from Zegna he’d been wearing on the morning of his death. Two grand, it cost him. But it did not look quite so beautiful now after he had crawled some way along the wet ground and several pigeons had come and crapped on him. The knees of his suit were almost as dirty and I was reminded of the night when we had beaten Arsenal and Zarco had ‘done a Wayne’, celebrating with a massive slide on his knees that took him from the technical area right down to the corner flag. Of Zarco’s lucky club scarf – from a shop called Savile Rogue, it was made of cashmere – there was no sign.

The injuries to his body were all blunt trauma injuries, mostly to the head and upper torso, consistent with a severe beating; a violent impact to the front of the skull had resulted in a depressed fracture that had been the most probable cause of death. From the shape of the head fracture it seemed more than likely that Zarco had been struck with a blunt instrument although, so far, no murder weapon had been found.

Which probably explained the police divers in the Thames.

The right-hand side of the chest area was badly bruised, several of the ribs cracked, and his fingers and knuckles badly bruised as if he had fought back. And, underneath the fingernails of his right hand, the pathologist had found minute traces of skin and blood that were not Zarco’s. This did not surprise me. Zarco had never been the type to turn the other cheek; certainly not as a player. Once, when he’d been playing for Celtic, he’d responded to a couple of hard punches from the Rangers player Nwankwo Nkomo with a well-placed and rather more effective head-butt that had broken Nkomo’s nose. Even as a manager of La Braga, Zarco had had his fair share of brawls and fisticuffs, most famously in the tunnel at the San Siro when he’d mixed it with Howard Page, the manager of AC Milan, with the result that FIFA had banned them both from the touchline for several games. Zarco was no shrinking violet and I couldn’t see that anyone taking a swing at him wouldn’t have received something in kind.

The pathologist also found several blue woollen fibres underneath Zarco’s fingernails that could not be matched to anything that the Portuguese had been wearing at the time of his death and which, it was implied, might have come from an assailant’s clothing; this seemed to suggest the possibility that Zarco had grabbed hold of the lapel or the collar of whoever it was that had attacked him. Also consistent with a violent struggle having taken place was the way Zarco’s tie had been found around his neck; it had been knotted much too tightly, almost as if an assailant had used it to try and strangle him with.

Traces of Zarco’s vomit had been found on the ground; this was thought to be consistent with his having sustained a hard blow to the stomach.

Of more palatable interest to me were the contents of Zarco’s pockets, and there were colour photographs of these, too: his regular mobile phone – the one his wife knew about – some loose change, a money clip, a wallet for credit cards, a set of keys – which didn’t include a key to the door of the maintenance area where his body had been found – a wedding ring, a leather Smythson notebook in which he would write things during a game, the hard box for his Oakley sunglasses, a Mont Blanc pen, a business card from a councillor with the Royal Borough of Greenwich, a piece of white moulding from a ceiling (rather strangely), a gold coin, a Silvertown Dock pass which had been on a silk lanyard around his neck, and the Hublot watch and light blue prostate cancer silicone band that had been on his wrist.

After Zarco’s father, José, died of prostate cancer, Zarco had become a tireless supporter of Prostate Cancer UK. Growing a terrible moustache every November to help raise funds was only a small part of what he did for this charity, which had already tweeted their grief on learning of his death.

On the ground surrounding the body were found several brooms and brushes, a couple of buckets, and some window-cleaning equipment. Small litter included eleven cigarette ends – most of which were English or American brands, although one was Russian – some spent matches, a button, a few copper coins, a McDonald’s wrapper, several old City ticket stubs, a Styrofoam Starbucks coffee cup, a football programme, a month-old copy of the London
Evening Standard
, and an empty half-bottle of vodka. None of this looked like it was going to provide the vital clue that would solve the mystery of Silvertown Dock.

I closed the report and locked it in my filing cabinet before unlocking my office door again. Rather shamefully, perhaps, my first reaction on having finished reading the report was to congratulate myself on being alive when someone else – someone close to me – was not; but this, in the great scheme of things, is really all you can ask. To be around when others have had their heads bashed in is not much of a philosophy, but in the absence of something better it serves just as well as anything else.

When the training session at Hangman’s Wood was over I sat down with Simon Page and some physio reports and made the team choice for the match on Tuesday night. Christoph was out of the team in favour of Ayrton, and we had some of the more experienced players, like Ken Okri, at the back, but the rest of the side was taken from our reserves and under twenty-ones. At their pre-match press conference the Hammers had announced that they intended to field a full-strength side for the Capital One Cup match. Since the last cup won by West Ham had been the UEFA Intertoto Cup in 1999 – an out-of-season competition that was generally held to be a joke – and before that the FA Cup in 1980, when they’d defeated Arsenal, the club had decided that they owed it to the supporters to actively compete for some silverware.

I was surprised at this decision; then again, it’s an easy mistake to make – to pay attention to what the fans want instead of what’s best for the team. I decided that we were going to stick to our guns – the young guns, that is. But my mind really wasn’t on team selection. I kept on thinking about Zarco’s sunglasses on the floor of suite 123 and what they were doing there.

I had a theory, but as with all good theories I needed to conduct an experiment in order to test it. I rang Maurice.

‘I want you to do me a favour,’ I told him. ‘There’s a place called the Mile End Climbing Wall, on Haverfield Road, in Bow. I want you to go and buy some rope.’

‘Don’t do it,’ said Maurice. ‘You’re too young to die.’

‘Two hundred feet of rope, to be exact. In fact, I want everything you’d need to go climbing on the Crown of Thorns. A helmet, a padded harness, the rope, and someone who knows how to use that gear. If Sir Edmund Hillary is knocking around tell him there’s two hundred quid and a pair of tickets in it for him if he’ll come back to the dock with you. Otherwise, bring back anyone else who looks like he knows his ice axe from his elbow. I need two things from him: one is to lower me safely out of a high window; the other is to keep his mouth shut. If there’s no one prepared to help we’ll just have to work it out ourselves. But I want to do this today before it rains or snows again.’

‘All right. Will do. It’s your neck. What’s this about, boss?’

‘I’ll explain everything when I see you.’

A couple of hours later Maurice was back at the dock accompanied by a thin, intense-looking man with red hair and a beard; he was wearing a green Berghaus fleece and carrying a large coil of rope and a rucksack full of gear. His name was Sean and he was from Bethnal Green, which is of course where a lot of great Alpinists have hailed from. I was still wearing my tracksuit and a pair of trainers from the training session at Hangman’s Wood. I led the two men up to suite 123 and closed the door behind us.

‘What is this room, then?’ asked Sean.

‘Private hospitality suite. Belongs to some guy from Qatar.’

‘Really? Looks like the inside of my dad’s Jaguar.’

I showed Sean into the kitchen and then opened the kitchen window.

He peered out of it and nodded, circumspectly. ‘That’s about a fifty-foot drop.’

‘About that, yeah. I figure twenty feet to the descending cross beam and then another thirty or so to the ground.’

‘You’re serious about this, aren’t you?’

‘Very.’

‘That cross beam looks a bit awkward. You wouldn’t want to have to climb on it. Especially in this weather. It looks slippy.’

‘Probably.’

‘What the fuck’s the point of it, anyway? The beam, I mean. In other words, does it have a function?’

‘It’s modern architecture,’ I said. ‘There’s no function. Just form.’

‘So what’s this all about?’ he asked. ‘Are you an adrenalin junkie or did you just drop your mobile phone out of the bleeding window?’

‘Let’s just say I’m doing it because it’s there.’

‘Comedian.’ Sean smiled a thin sort of smile. ‘Everyone thinks they’re Mallory and Irvine these days. You ever done any climbing before?’

‘Only the stairs,’ I said.

‘Got a head for heights?’

‘I guess we’ll find out.’

‘True.’ Sean sighed. ‘Two hundred quid and a couple of tickets, right?’

I nodded and handed over the money and the tickets for the Hammers match, which had been in my pocket.

‘Paid in full.’

‘Cheers, mate. I’d have preferred tickets for Tottenham, myself, but I ’spose these’ll do, yeah. Thanks.’

All the time he kept glancing around as if checking out his surroundings.

Sean went out of the kitchen and into the sitting room. He pointed at the sliding door.

‘What’s out there?’

Maurice lifted the roller blinds and then opened the door to reveal the stadium seating and, in the centre, the pitch.

‘Ah,’ said Sean. ‘Now that’s what I’m looking for.’ He pointed at some of the seats in front of the hospitality suite. ‘First principle of climbing: find something stronger than yourself to tie a rope onto. These seats will do fine.’

When he’d finished tying the rope onto the seats he fetched the climbing harness from his backpack and fed the long piece of webbing around my waist, through the buckle, and then back again; with the two leg loops he did much the same. He checked the three buckles were fastened to his satisfaction and then tugged a loop in front of my navel towards him.

‘This is the belay loop,’ he explained. ‘The single strongest point of the harness. And the bit that’s going to attach you to life. Are you left-handed or right-handed?’

‘Right-handed.’

He attached a karabiner to a belay device and clipped it onto the belay loop. Then he took a bite of rope and forced it through the bottom of the belay device. ‘This lower part of the rope is your brake,’ he explained. ‘The brake hand is your right hand and that never comes off the line. Not for a moment. The guide hand on the upper part of the rope is your left hand. You’re safely tied in now.’

‘I’m beginning to think my two hundred quid is well spent,’ I said.

‘Hopefully you won’t ever know just how well,’ said Sean. ‘Now all you have to do is belay.’