by Kevin Brooks
She laughed.
It felt OK.
For the next few hours we did what Nan had suggested – we had a nice normal evening together. We ate our beans on toast, I made us some tea, we watched some rubbish on TV together. And the only things we talked about were things that didn’t really mean anything – my investigation into the changing-room thefts, TV celebrities, schoolwork, exams . . .
It was fine.
Perfectly nice and normal.
At around ten o’clock, Nan thanked me for looking after her, said goodnight, and went upstairs to bed. I wasn’t tired at all – I’d been asleep most of the day – so I just went up to my room and sat around, not doing anything in particular, until about one o’clock in the morning. I played a few games of computer chess, read a book for a while, watched some old CSI repeats on my little TV . . . but mostly I just sat around thinking.
I had a lot to think about.
38
At one thirty on Wednesday afternoon I was sitting on the bench with the rest of the substitutes waiting for the Under-15 Twin Town Cup Final to kick off. Kell Cross Secondary v Slade Lane Comprehensive. Although we were the home team, Slade Lane were the odds-on favourites to win. As far as I could remember, we’d never beaten Slade, our best result being a 0-0 draw two years ago, and that was only because most of Slade’s regular first team had been taken ill with a stomach bug.
The weather was surprisingly OK. It was cold, but it wasn’t raining, and the sky was bright and clear. ‘Cup Final weather’, as Mosh Akram had noted while we were getting changed. A massive crowd had turned up for the game: hundreds of Kell Cross kids, and almost as many Slade Lane supporters; teachers and parents from both schools (although there weren’t that many Slade Lane parents); teachers and kids from the German and French schools; dozens of reporters, photographers, and sponsors, and quite a few scouts and representatives from both Premier League and lower league clubs. As well as all the kids and teachers I knew, there were a few other familiar faces in the crowd too. Evie Johnson was there with her boyfriend Daniel. Royce Devon was there too, this time without Bianca. I guessed Jaydie was right – he’d got what he wanted from her, and now he’d dumped her. There were a few other faces from the Slade I recognised too, including the kid I’d knocked out in the square when he’d tried to take my phone. His jaw was still bruised and swollen, and I was pretty sure that if he spotted me – which he didn’t seem to have done yet – he was bound to recognise me, and he might even be tempted to try getting his own back. I doubted it though. I’d already bettered him once, and this time I was on my home ground, and I wasn’t outnumbered either. Revenge is a powerful emotion though, and it doesn’t always listen to reason – as I knew from my own experience – and in view of that I made a mental note to keep half an eye on the kid with the busted-up jaw, just in case he was stupid enough to try something.
The teams were getting ready to kick off now, and there was a real sense of excitement in the air. I was feeling kind of excited myself, to be honest. But, of course, I had other things on my mind as well as the actual match.
I’d come in early to check on the motion sensors in the changing rooms, and they both seemed to be working OK. The car park was so full that I couldn’t see the changing-room doors from the subs bench, but I knew that Mr Wells was guarding the home dressing room again and Mr Ayres was outside the away dressing room. This time, both rooms had been thoroughly checked to make sure that no one was hiding inside before the doors were locked.
I’d called Jaydie earlier to check if she’d heard anything from the voice-activated recorder yet, but she hadn’t. And, as she told me, she would have let me know if she had.
I’d also been keeping an eye on Dee Dee’s whereabouts, following the tracker Jazz had planted on him on my mobile. I’d set up the tracker to show as a green dot on the screen. So far the green dot had been moving around the estate quite a lot, but it hadn’t gone anywhere near the phone box.
I’d heard from Grandad that Courtney had finally been discharged, but only on the condition that she spent the rest of the day at home. So she’d gone back to her house, Grandad had gone into the office, and here I was, sitting on the subs bench, wondering what the day was going to bring.
The ref blew his whistle and Slade Lane kicked off. They immediately gave the ball to Quade Wilson, Evie Johnson’s half-brother, and he set off on a mazy run towards our goal, skipping past four Kell Cross players as if they weren’t there. Although I’d heard how good he was, this was the first time I’d actually seen him play, and as I watched him glide past our defensive midfielder, leaving him rooted to the spot, I shook my head in amazement. He was unbelievably good. The way he looked, and moved with the ball, reminded me a lot of Lionel Messi. He was quite short and slight, but deceptively powerful, and however much he jinked and turned, he never lost control of the ball. It was an awesome thing to see.
He was approaching our back four now, and although he had teammates either side of him, it looked as if he was going all the way on his own. On the touchline, Mr Jago was yelling at the top of his voice – ‘CLOSE HIM DOWN! GET TIGHT! CLOSE HIM DOWN!’ Quade was about two metres outside our penalty area now, and both our centre backs – Kendal and another big lunk of a kid called Des Bowker – were closing in on him. I saw Kendal say something to Bowker, and as Bowker slowed down and backed off to the right, Kendal launched himself at Quade. He clattered into him like a bulldozer, knocking him clean off his feet, and everyone could see that he’d made no attempt to play the ball. As the ref blew his whistle, and Quade just lay there on his back, gasping for breath, the Slade supporters went crazy – booing and jeering – and every one of Quade’s teammates, including the goalkeeper, rushed over towards Kendal. He backed away, holding up his hands in apology, trying to make out that he hadn’t meant to hurt Quade, he’d simply mistimed his tackle. It didn’t fool the Slade players for a second, and they all piled in after Kendal, which in turn provoked all of our players, and both teams ended up in a mass scuffle on the edge of the penalty area. The referee and his assistants did their best to calm everything down, and after about a minute or two they finally succeeded. There was no doubt that Kendal’s tackle – or so-called tackle – deserved a straight red card, but somehow he managed to get away with just a yellow. To add insult to injury, Slade’s left back was also shown a yellow card for swearing at one of the ref’s assistants in the heat of the scuffle.
As everything settled down, and players from both sides began getting ready for the free kick, I saw Kendal glance over at Mr Jago and flash him a quick smile. Jago gave him a discreet nod in return.
My mind flashed back to Jago’s last-minute team talk in the dressing room before the game. He’d gathered us all round, told us to shut up and listen, and then reminded us one more time of the game plan.
‘Right,’ he’d said, ‘we all know this Wilson kid can play, and if we try and outplay him, he’s just going to make us look stupid. But remember what I told you: he might be a genius, but he’s got no bottle. He cracks under pressure. So what do we do?’
‘Put him under pressure,’ Kendal had said.
‘Right. And how do we do that?’
‘We get stuck into him.’
Jago nodded. ‘Every time he gets the ball, we make sure he gets hurt. Hit him hard, and keep hitting him hard. But spread it around, OK? Take it in turns. And once you’ve got a yellow, lay off the dirty stuff. We can’t afford to go down to ten men. Is that clear?’
I wasn’t the only one who hated Jago’s ‘tactics’ – there were at least another five or six in the squad who’d rather lose the game than play it Jago’s way – but none of us voiced our opinions. I suppose we all realised that even if we did speak up, it wouldn’t make any difference. Jago wouldn’t change his mind, all he’d do was kick us off the squad. So we all just kept our mouths shut.
The free kick was about to be taken now. It was right on the edge of the penalty area, and Quade Wilson had recovered eno
ugh to take it himself. He placed the ball carefully, took three steps back, and then stood there, with his hands on his hips and his eyes on the goal, waiting for the whistle. The ref blew, and Quade just stepped up to the ball and almost lazily swung his foot at it. He didn’t seem to hit it with any power, but it left his boot like a rocket. Instead of trying to curl it round the wall, he went for a straight up and over dipping shot. It very nearly worked. It easily cleared the wall, then dipped wickedly towards the goal. It moved so fast that our goalie never even moved, he just stood there and watched as it arrowed down towards the top right-hand corner, hit the top of the bar, and flew off behind the goal.
The crossbar rattled, the crowd went ‘Ooohh!’, and everyone on the bench started breathing again.
‘It’s going to be a long eighty minutes,’ Mosh said.
‘Seventy-four minutes,’ I corrected him.
‘Oh, right,’ he said, grinning at me. ‘Well, that’s not so bad then, is it?’
The rest of the first half carried on as it had begun. Quade Wilson got hacked down almost every time he got the ball, and Slade Lane quickly resorted to the same kind of tactics. Their players knew every dirty trick in the book, and as well as the more obvious stuff – shirt-pulling, sly elbows to the face, over-the-top tackles – they were also well-versed in the darker arts of the game. Faking injuries, winding up their opponents, spitting . . . they didn’t stop at anything. Despite all that, there was no denying that they played some excellent football too, and as the game went on, we kept getting pushed back into our own half, until eventually we were virtually camped on our own eighteen-yard line with ten players behind the ball. So even when our solitary striker did get the ball, he was completely on his own, massively outnumbered, with no support and nowhere to go.
Because both sides were really getting stuck into each other, there were lots of stoppages for injuries, some of which were quite serious. With half-time approaching, Kell Cross had already lost two players to injuries. Slade had also used two of their substitutes, and one of their midfielders had been hobbling for the last ten minutes, and it didn’t look as if he’d last much longer.
It was, to put it mildly, a game of attrition.
It wasn’t much fun to watch. No goals, very little goal-mouth action, just twenty-two kids kicking lumps out of each other. The only good thing about it was that, miraculously, we weren’t losing.
As the whistle blew for half-time, and a chorus of boos went up, I turned off the motion sensors, got up off the bench, and started heading back to the changing rooms. I was about halfway there when my mobile rang.
It was Jaydie.
‘Hey, Jaydie,’ I said. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Dee Dee just called Ronnie Bull,’ she said excitedly. ‘They’re meeting later on this afternoon.’
‘What time?’
‘Five o’clock.’
‘Where?’
‘Dee Dee just said five o’clock at the usual place. He must have meant the multi-storey car park.’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘Probably though.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed, doing some quick calculations in my head. The match should finish around three fifteen, ten minutes to get changed, half an hour to get into town . . . as long as they were meeting at the car park, I should have plenty of time.
‘Did they talk about anything else?’ I asked Jaydie.
‘Nope, nothing at all. Just “five o’clock at the usual place”, and that was it. Where do you want to meet?’
‘What?’
‘Where do you want us to meet?’
‘We can’t do this together, Jaydie.’
‘Why the hell not?’ she said angrily. ‘It was my plan. I set it all up. You can’t just shut me out of it now.’
‘I’m not shutting you out—’
‘No? It sounds like it to me.’
‘Look, I’ve got to follow him using the tracker, OK? If he’s not meeting Bull at the car park, I don’t know where I’m going to have to go, and I won’t know until the last minute. I’m not going to have time to keep calling you and trying to work out where to meet—’
‘Why can’t we just meet up now? Then you won’t have to keep calling me, will you?’
‘I’m at the Cup Final now,’ I explained. ‘I’ve got this thing I’m working on.’
‘What thing?’
‘I told you, the thefts from the changing rooms—’
‘Who cares about that? Just leave it.’
‘I can’t just leave it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I gave my word that I’d do it.’
‘Right,’ she said sourly. ‘And that’s more important than taking down Dee Dee, is it?’
‘It’s not that simple, Jaydie. It’s not just a matter of. . . hello? Jaydie? Are you still there?’
She wasn’t there.
The line had gone dead.
She’d hung up.
I tried calling her back, but all I got was her voicemail.
‘Damn it,’ I muttered.
I wondered then if staying here until the end of the match was the right thing to do after all. Maybe I should just leave it, as Jaydie had said. Taking down Dee Dee was far more important than catching a petty thief, and it wasn’t as if I owed anything to Jago or Kendal, or even to the school.
I checked Dee Dee’s tracker on my mobile. He was still on the estate.
I called Jaydie again. Hi, this is Jaydie, leave a message.
‘You ready?’ I heard Mr Jago say.
I looked up and saw him striding towards me, heading back to the pitch. Half-time was already over, I realised. The teams were back out and the changing rooms were locked again.
‘Come on, Travis,’ Jago said, guiding me back to the subs bench. ‘The second half’s just about to start. Are the sensors back on again?’
‘Uh, yeah,’ I mumbled, ending the call to Jaydie and switching screens on my mobile. ‘I’m just doing it now.’
‘Chop-chop,’ he said, patting me on the shoulder. And with that he marched off to his position and started clapping his hands and shouting out encouragement. ‘LET’S GO, KELL CROSS! COME ON, WE CAN WIN THIS THING!’
I sighed heavily and sat down.
It looked like I was stuck here whether I liked it or not.
‘Sorry, Jaydie,’ I muttered under my breath.
‘What?’ Mosh said.
‘Nothing.’
Mosh frowned at me.
I shrugged.
The whistle blew and the game kicked off. The ball went out to our winger, he tried to go past a Slade midfielder, the midfielder hacked him down.
Here we go again, I thought.
39
The second half had only been going for about five minutes when, to the shock and surprise of everyone, and completely against the run of play, Kell Cross took the lead. Even the goal scorer – a kid called Nicky Beale – admitted later that it was pretty fluky. It came from a long punt upfield by our goalie. Nicky was on his own, as usual, the only Kell Cross player in Slade’s half, and as the high ball came towards him, instead of trying to win the header he took a chance and slipped round the goal-side of the Slade centre back, hoping that he might misdirect his header or something. As the centre back glanced round at Nicky to see what he was doing, his feet got tangled up and he stumbled over, missing the ball altogether. The other centre back was covering him, but as the ball bounced towards Nicky, he made the decision to back off rather than closing Nicky down. It wasn’t a bad decision. Nicky was on his own, still about thirty metres out, and there were two more defenders between him and the goal. So there shouldn’t really have been any danger.
Nicky said afterwards that the only reason he went for the shot was that he was too tired to do anything else.
‘I’d been running around on my own for the whole of the first half,’ he said. ‘I was absolutely knackered.’
So he just waited for the bouncing ball to come down and swung h
is boot at it. It was the kind of effort that ninety-nine times out of a hundred goes flying up into the air and misses the target by miles, but this time Nicky caught the ball perfectly with a powerful looping volley that sailed up and over the astonished Slade goalkeeper and smashed into the top right-hand corner of the goal. There was a stunned silence for a second, no one quite sure they could believe what had just happened, and then all at once the home crowd erupted and the Kell Cross players went crazy, whooping and yelling, chasing after Nicky and throwing themselves all over him.
It was unbelievable. We’d actually scored. 1–0 to Kell Cross.
We were beating Slade Lane in the Twin Town Cup Final!
I couldn’t help getting caught up in all the excitement – jumping up off the bench with everyone else, shouting and cheering – and for the next ten minutes, as the match suddenly burst into life, I got so drawn into it that I almost forgot about everything else – the changing-room thefts, Dee Dee and Ronnie Bull, Jaydie, Gloria . . . all I could think about was the game, and the possibility that we might actually win it.
Slade Lane were going all out for an equaliser now, throwing everyone forward, and we were having to defend with our backs to the wall. It was still a very physical game, but a lot of the dirty stuff had been forgotten now, with both teams concentrating on the actual football. But ten minutes after we’d scored, the violence suddenly flared up again. It happened at a Slade corner kick, and the penalty box was so crowded, with everyone doing the usual pushing and shoving, that it was hard to tell what really happened. Kendal claimed later that as the corner was taken and the ball came in, one of the Slade centre backs – who’d come up for the corner – deliberately elbowed him in the face. It was a vicious blow, breaking Kendal’s nose and loosening one of his teeth, and as the blood streamed down his face, he doubled over in agony with his head in his hands. Apparently the referee didn’t see what happened, but as the corner kick was cleared by one of our defenders, and the rest of the players started to clear the box, Kendal went over to the guy who’d elbowed him and punched him in the head. The guy went down as if he’d been shot, moaning and clutching at his face, and the referee blew his whistle and immediately pointed to the penalty spot. Kendal started shouting at the ref, complaining that he’d been elbowed first, but the ref just reached into his pocket and pulled out a red card. Then bedlam broke out. Kendal refused to go off, pointing out his broken nose to the ref, the crowd started booing and jeering, and both managers rushed onto the pitch with their first-aid kits to tend to their injured players. While Mr Jago worked on Kendal’s broken nose, he also started arguing with the ref, and then Slade’s manager joined in, shouting and cursing at Mr Jago and the ref . . .