Chapter 263 - 6 Real Ones I

I took Tuesday home with me.

It sat on my kitchen table all night under the salt cellar: 11 empty lines, a box at the bottom for the subs, the club crest at the top. I had a biro in my hand twice before midnight. Both times I put it back in the drawer.

At 9 on the Sunday morning I drove round to Sadler’s.

He lives in a semi on the estate behind the bus garage, with a privet hedge he cuts himself and an old Mondeo estate. He was out on the drive in a jumper with the sleeves pushed up, washing the car. slosh of the sponge going back in the bucket.

He saw me get out of the Astra. He went on washing the wing mirror.

"You left this," I said, and held out the sheet.

"I did not leave it. I put it down."

"Then I am bringing it back." I put it on the roof of the Mondeo, on a dry bit. "Yours. It was always yours. I forgot it for a fortnight."

He wrung the sponge out over the bucket. drip. drip.

"3 weeks," he said. "Since Shrewsbury."

"3 weeks. I put my name to a clause that picks your team, and I did not tell you, and on Friday I picked it myself. The lad and the shape. You told me on Friday, and you were right."

"It did."

"And it was never the money. I thought he was further on than he is. You could see where he is, and I would not look."

He put the sponge down on the bonnet.

"Tottenham’s fee comes out of my pocket," I said. "The 20,000 already in Maureen’s book, and every game he sits from now to the end of the season. And I will not say one word to you about who plays until June."

He looked at the sheet on the roof of his car, and then at me.

"That is an expensive apology," he said.

"It is cheaper than the one I nearly had to make."

He dropped the sponge in the bucket and wiped his hands down the front of his jumper. Then he picked the sheet up by one corner, carefully, so as not to wet it.

"You had better come in," he said. "I will put the kettle on."

He filled it at the sink and switched it on. His kitchen was small and clean, with a radio on the windowsill turned low to a football phone-in. There was an envelope on the table, sealed, with CHAIRMAN written on the front.

He saw me see it. click of the kettle switching itself off. He made the tea first, 2 mugs, milk in after. clink of the spoon.

Then he picked the envelope up and put it in the drawer under the cutlery.

"I will keep that a while," he said. "In case."

"Keep it as long as you like."

"I will." He sat down across from me, took a pen off the windowsill, and pulled Tuesday’s sheet in front of him. "Crawley. Home."

I watched him fill it in. He did not ask me anything and I did not offer anything.

He wrote Quinn’s name first, before the keeper’s. Then the rest of them.

It was the 11 he had written on the Friday morning, before I came down that corridor, except for Mahrez, the only one of them who had played every minute at Colchester and on Saturday. He was red on Dev’s wall. Reece came in on the right.

The boy was the fourth of the subs.

"He sits Tuesday," he said. "That is your 5,000."

"That is mine."

"He trains with Gray and Gayle. Doyle works with him every morning on staying in the middle. And when he is ready, I will know before you do." He put the pen down. "That is the deal, Sam. Not your fence."

I nodded. He blew on his tea. On the radio a man from Colchester was ringing in about their goalkeeper.

"I rang Quinn’s mother last night," he said. "Before I went to bed. She answered on the first ring. She thought something had happened to him."

"What did you tell her?"

"That he plays on Tuesday. That he did nothing wrong on Saturday, and if he asks her why he was left out, she can send him to me."

He turned the mug round on the table. "Doyle found him sat in his car in the car park on Friday dinnertime. Engine off. He had been there an hour."

I had not known that.

"What do you tell Danny?" he said.

"The truth. Tonight."

"You do not have to."

"A man stood up and shouted your name at you on Saturday, Craig. 10 rows down from me."

"They have shouted my name before." He drank some of the tea. "Tell him, then. But tell him once, and then stop talking about it. The lads read that paper."

I rang Danny at 8 that night from the kitchen.

"You rang," he said. I could hear a television behind him and a child asking for something. "I told you I wanted to be wrong."

"You were not wrong."

There was a pause, and the television went quieter. "Go on, then."

"The boy starting was my call. Playing him with Vardy was my call. Craig told me on Friday what would happen against a side with 3 in the middle, and it happened. The man who got shouted at on Saturday picked the team I asked him to pick. Print that."

scratch of his pen. He was getting it down word for word.

"You know what that does to you," he said.

"It puts it where it belongs."

"I have known chairmen in this county who would have let the manager wear that for a month. Anything else?"

"No. Print it once. Then it is finished."

"I will print it straight, Sam."

Maureen had the Gazette open on my desk at half past 8 the next morning. She had her reading glasses on and the page was already creased.

"Page 46," she said. "Bottom of the page. Do you want me to read it or will you?"

"Read it."

She cleared her throat. "’The chairman of Tilbrook Town rang me last night and asked me to print one thing. Saturday’s team was his, not his manager’s. Craig Sadler told him on Friday what would happen, and on Saturday it happened.’"

She folded the paper in half. rustle.

"Good," she said.

Margaret came in behind her with one sheet of paper and her pen in her hand. It was a board minute, 4 lines long.

"Every fee back to Shrewsbury comes out of your pocket," she said. "Tottenham will not care whose cheque it is. The League might, if this club’s books ever showed a player costing less than he does."

"So?"

"So your money goes into the club as equity, and the club pays Tottenham, and this says so. It is clean. Sign at the bottom."

I signed it. Maureen took it from me and put it in the front of the green ledger, where she keeps the things she wants to find again.

"That is the minute I said I would write," she said. "You have saved me the job."

At a quarter to 10 I rang the private buyer I had used all year. brrr. brrr. I sold a small slice of the coin, sterling in the account the next morning, enough for the 25,000 I would owe Tottenham by Tuesday night. He never asks what the money is for.

Wilf was at the training ground by 11, standing at the fence of the near pitch with his notebook in his coat pocket. He does that on a Monday. He watches the young ones train and writes nothing down.

I went out to him.

"I want you to watch the boy," I said. "This afternoon, and in the morning. Watch him for me as if I had never said his name."

Wilf’s eyes stayed on the 18s playing small-sided in the corner.

"As if you had never said it."

"As if he had turned up on trial this morning with his boots in a carrier bag and nobody had ever heard of him."

"And if I do not like what I see?"

"Then you tell me. That is the job I should have given you the weekend before he signed."