Cherry Picking

by Tim Heath

  Chris Phillips sat there for a moment taking things in a bit. Tommy watched to try and gauge what his reaction was. After all, in Chris’ eyes, these were the players that Tommy was bringing in and in many ways Tommy knew that his reputation, however well it may have grown in such a short time, was under threat if these lads turned out to be flops. But Brendan had been so sure and knowing his boss, Tommy knew he didn’t do things lightly. But Tommy also had to keep up the impression that it was he that pulled the strings for fear that everything he was working for would otherwise just fall down around him.

  “That’s quite a mixture there, Tommy,” Chris said after thinking his answer through. “Only one lad, if I’m correct, actually currently plays the game and he’s the one with the criminal record because he has a short fuse!”

  “Look, Chris,” Tommy said, preparing to go out on a limb in the hope that his faith would be rewarded in time with his expert hand on them, “you’ll have to trust me with these lads and the ones that will follow, and do as I ask. I’m not just looking for success now but am building for the future.”

  “So there will be others then?” Chris said, his tone giving away the fact that clearly this was the talk of the club, rumours flying around as to who would come — and who would go.

  “Chris, these are new days we are in. We’re here to win promotion and we need to strengthen.” This was not anything that Chris wasn’t aware of having worked there for over a decade, but it was the way Tommy said the ‘we’re’ here that made him wonder who he was referring to.

  “Do you mind me asking, Tommy, if there will be any players going?”

  “Is that what the fear is, in the dressing room?”

  “To be honest, yes, of course. Quite a few of the lads are the wrong side of thirty with contracts nearly over and for them they see the threat. They wouldn’t get taken on elsewhere really so they fear their days are numbered. Most of the younger lads aren’t too fazed, though they do fear that their own careers could be sidelined if an influx of experienced players come in to guarantee short-term success.”

  “That’s the kind of short-term thinking that has left most of the established clubs stuck between the need to look to the future and the need to keep shareholders happy with constant quick fixes. And the terrible fate of some of the teams that have recently been bought only goes to prove the point further. No, the money behind all this is to establish something for the future. Of course there will be more competition for places which in itself should only improve those players already here. If you’re good enough you’ll always find a way through. None of the new players that come here will get an automatic place in the team. No, each player will be in the team on merit. Make sure they all know this, Chris.”

  Chris sat there with a smile of relief on his face and was nodding in agreement.

  Tommy continued; “I really need you to be on side, on my side in all this, Chris, to help me understand the mood in the dressing room and to help back up what I want with supportive words and actions.”

  “Of course, you don’t need to ask, its just that…,” Tommy put his hands up to stop him and calm his fears.

  “I know, Chris, I know. You’ve been working with these players for a while, some for over ten years. I, on the other hand, have just arrived, and, before you say it, from nowhere, so of course you’re going to have these mixed feelings. But I need you, Chris. I don’t want to do this on my own. We have to be a united front when it comes to helping some of the lads through this time. Look, you go away and have a read through these sheets I’ve had prepared on our new arrivals coming later this morning. Keep them to yourself but get familiar with the information so that you can help all parties settle in. There are going to be a few more, hopefully this week. I’m also working on something special personally. You’ve heard of Clint Powers, I take it?”

  “Of course! You’re not trying to get him are you? He’d never come here!” Chris had a smirk on his face as if he knew something Tommy didn’t, but not in a positive way, more in the way that seemed to imply that because the club was so insignificant they couldn’t attract such a top player, neither could the manager. Tommy put that thought to one side and pressed on.

  “I know the lad and I’ve known his agent for a while as well. Clint is coming here sometime for a look around. I’ll get him to sign.”

  In his time in football Chris Phillips had heard many such things so had grown used to hearing ambitious sentiments but still he changed his expression and shuffled a little uncomfortably on his chair. In truth he knew that he’d never be a coach at the highest level of things and therefore with a lot of fresh promising talent on the way he’d surely soon be saying goodbye to his job because when the time came, they’d certainly get someone in more qualified.

  Chris picked up the print-outs on the three lads, said his goodbye and made the short trip down the hall and a flight of stairs to his small room that was his office on the ground floor.

  **********

  DCI Jack Derry sat alone and quietly in his office having just finished speaking to Mary Ingham on the telephone, which had taken the best part of an hour. Initially she hadn’t known what to say and they’d discussed quite irrelevant things before she mentioned what had come up out of the last week or so and what she’d asked Simon Allen to look into for her. She’d suddenly felt responsible for it all, picking up in Jack’s tone that maybe this might be a clue, and this made her worried. Jack had done his best to calm her and they chatted more in detail about what and who they were looking at, what he’d shown Mary already and how Terry Goldman might have been involved. He asked her about Terry’s background employment which had resulted in a lengthy delay while she spoke to Human Resources, only to come back and confirm very little. While their records did show that Goldman had been working for them for just over three years and that his CV at the time had meant he’d been suitably experienced and qualified for the job, neither the CV nor his previous employer appeared on file, which was most unusual. She had confirmed to Jack that she would have it investigated and would let him know as soon as she found out.

  Standing up now, Jack stretched, feeling that he was getting somewhere. He needed another coffee so opened the door, nearly knocking into PC Chambers who appeared to have been about to enter the office. They chatted a little while they walked, but about nothing in particular and he had left Jack before he’d made it to the kitchen. Thinking it a little odd, Jack brushed the feeling to one side for the moment, he already had far too much on his plate. He poured himself a large coffee from the freshly made batch that sat now keeping warm on the side. Jack planned to do a lot more digging before he’d close this particular case.

  **********

  Robert Sandle planned to keep his head down for a little while, having realised that he might have got a little too close for comfort with his activities of the last week. It didn’t make sense to risk too much, too early on and while he waited for any more relevant information he would stay where he was and do further study.

  What he really wanted to get his head around and to break new ground with was the detailed history of the Wentworth family, whose house he was currently living in. He knew quite a bit from detailed studies over the last few years but there were large gaps in places and surely key pieces of information were yet to be known.

  The lounge he now sat in, which in its day had been the focal point of this grand house before it fell into relative disrepair, must have heard a thousand secrets, all long hidden in its oak clad walls. The house had been the family home of Ernest and Betty Wentworth for nearly forty years and the children had been raised there. The two sons had grown to be world renowned scientists and their theories and inventions made rapid progress that brought a Nobel prize to each of them, in time, and made them household names. All of this had happened after the sons had moved out of the house, having both been given scholarships for Oxford University, where most of their successes were first recognised. They had been very quiet men,
brilliantly intelligent but rarely interviewed and they never spoke about their childhood or time in the family home in the country. Robert knew that the brothers had been into their twenties before they moved out. Christopher had been about twenty-four when he’d gone to Oxford, his brother Nathan benefiting from his going and following him there two years later aged twenty.

  The six year age gap that there had been between them had meant they had never been too close, though in time they grew to enjoy each other’s company, few other people ever really got to know them. The world soon saw their minds at work and it was clear, as far as the distant observer could discern, that the original thinking was coming from the older brother Christopher and that much of Nathan’s work followed on from his older brother’s starting point. Neither of them ever discussed this in public and they were never interviewed regarding it, but it was clear to most who was following who.

  Robert Sandle, however, was not always so convinced. He knew he could never think to the level that these two great men had thought but he was very perceptive at picking up on anomalies that others would either not see, or brush to one side ignoring them. Looking at their life’s work, there had been certain jumps that had been made, especially by Nathan, that just didn’t fit within the tight framework the science world had placed around them. And while other people, if even aware of these gaps, could skip over them, Robert couldn’t. And this is what drove Robert forward into deeper research. But research was so hard to do on two people who were so reclusive and it had proved a problem. It was by chance that Robert had stumbled upon the location of the family home but it felt right for him to start his search there. Within the tight and long established community that lived and worked in this idyllic location, Robert had started to build a bit more of a picture for himself.

  Ernest Wentworth had moved from London to stay with his ageing uncle and aunt when he was about twenty-five and had grown really attached to the place. When at thirty-five he met Elizabeth Clegg, an eighteen-year-old maid working in the neighbouring farm, they fell in love and married the following year. When his uncle and aunt died in the space of three months of each other, Ernest and Betty, as she had become known, inherited the house and decided to settle there. She’d fallen pregnant within a few months but complications had meant she’d lost the baby after ten weeks. Needing rest in order to recover they had put things on hold for a while but within a few years did have their first child, Christopher, named after the great explorer and one of Ernest’s heroes, Columbus. Nathan followed on after this, but Robert knew very little of the details apart from the odd diary entry from Betty that still remained. No detailed mention was made about further children though it always expressed her desire to have a little girl one day. It was not known whether she ever did.

  When Christopher had turned twenty, Robert knew from reports that they’d started to have financial pressures, clearly the difficulty of maintaining a large house with a growing family had become too much. Four years later Christopher had gained the scholarship and was eager to move away. With Nathan gone within two years as well, Robert understood that they must have realised they didn’t need such a large house and had moved out a couple of years later. Ernest died within six months from lung cancer and Betty lived a further twenty-three years before herself dying of liver failure. By then she’d seen her sons rise to become world renowned scientists but she had little contact with them in her last weeks, indeed dying before either of them had been aware of her condition. They came and visited her grave two weeks after her death, the first time in a long time, and the last time that the two brothers had met. Christopher died in an accident, drowning in the icy waters of a Swiss mountain lake in winter time, and not much more was known about Nathan – where he had gone, lived or died.

  In an age before mass media, these brothers had been known by reputation but little in terms of personal relationship, such were their quiet characters. This had made Robert’s job all the harder as he knew there must be much more that just wasn’t known about them all. It was again a chance find when Robert came across a name that he recognised — G.A. Smithson. Having used the local shop there in the village several times before, the name caught his attention in something that Betty Wentworth, in all likelihood, had written not long before leaving. Going out and checking that same day, Robert had been excited to confirm that indeed that same name, G.A. Smithson, was still written in big, albeit fading letters above the shop. A short study through the village records going back over the decades had confirmed that the shop’s current owner, having kept it in the family, was a Mr Norman Gregory Smithson, grandson of the late Gregory Albert Smithson, whose name Robert had just read written in Betty Wentworth’s own handwriting. It was the first breakthrough or lead of any type he’d had in a long time.

  Robert soon found a few reasons to keep visiting the shop but Norman, now on his own, was only too happy to talk about the past, his history, how life had been so much better back then. Norman’s father, he’d said to Robert one day, had told him the stories from a young age about how his grandfather had worked on the farm next to the house and had got to know the boys, playing with them before one of the sons had got sick. It was at this moment that Robert had his biggest breakthrough yet. “Which of the two lads had got sick, Norman? And what was it?”

  “Two lads? No, there were three. It was the middle lad and I don’t know exactly what had been wrong with him but they stopped playing with Gregory after that. They must have been fifteen or sixteen.”

  “Three brothers? But there’s no record of a middle brother.”

  “No, well there wouldn’t be. They couldn’t handle him, the middle one I mean. Grandpa used to say he could make anything from anything. Such a bright lad, a genius, but his mind wasn’t right. He’d get terrible fits of rage, smashing things. Men would have to hold him down. He spent most of his teenage years in the house after that, working away on things, keeping his mind busy. His brothers were the only ones who could understand him. Once the first one left for university Grandpa said everything broke down and they sent him off to the funny farm, you know a mental home. They allowed him back once a fortnight though he’d never leave the house. After the second son had left he never came back for visits again, his parents struggled with mounting debts and he was shipped off overseas once the house had been sold. Grandpa had no real news from them after that. Of course, he started to hear about the brothers’ progress like everyone else did back then. He had heard some things from them from time to time and I’m sure he’d said they’d both visited the middle brother now and then but he never said where they had sent him to.”

  Robert had been surprised at what he’d been told that day, but it had started to fit into some of the gaps he thought he’d found. Once the house had been unoccupied for some time, the family unable to sell it due to its size and need for repair. Nathan Wentworth, fresh from his Nobel prize award, had actually purchased the house again officially from his mother so that it would remain within the family. Spending a few summers there, he had done some repairs as well as collecting up all that there had been left lying around, especially the workings of the middle brother, Austin, who’d long since left. It was while working through all these papers that Nathan had first seen plans for a doorway that Austin had drawn repeatedly, each page inscribed in thick capital letters all across it with the name — AUSTIN WENTWORTH DOOR.

  Now looking at things afresh and reminding himself of how far he’d come, Robert Sandle picked up his next batch of papers which listed shipping movements from around the time he suspected Austin would have been sent away. If he could find where he had gone then maybe it would open new options. Robert became convinced that the crucial pieces of information were now connected with the details surrounding Austin Wentworth, the forgotten or even unknown brother. If it was indeed Austin, and not Christopher, who first dreamed up the WENTWORTH DOOR then everything was about to change. Austin was the key now. He had to find out where he’d been sent.<
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  **********

  Tommy Lawrence’s desk phone had been ringing all day and he’d long since instructed his secretary to start fielding the calls. He really didn’t want to get totally sidetracked with all the questions that were being asked by journalists, especially the tabloids, who he knew couldn’t wait for him to fail as they’d hated everything about the takeover.

  His secretary buzzed through to him, breaking the silence, apart from the pouring rain relentlessly tapping at the windows on the far side.

  “You’ll want to take this one, sir. It’s Mr Charles.” Tommy straightened in his chair while the call was connected. “And what can I do for you, Mr Charles,” he said, trying to be as nice as he could without wanting to sound too fake.

  “I’m just calling to see how the lads have settled in.”

  “Yes, they’ve been given the usual welcome. They’re just getting cleaned up now. Some of them need a lot of work on their attitudes but I can’t fault their ability. I’ll soon have then thinking the Tommy way.”

  “Which is why you’re there, Tommy, don’t you forget that. On a slightly different note I have some bad news for you in relation to that player Clint Powers you were asking about.” Tommy didn’t like his tone.

  “Go on.”

  “It’s a no as far as Powers is concerned. You are to stick with the players we’ve highlighted, most of whom we’ve already contacted.”

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean ‘it’s a no’? Who says it’s a no? You?”