Chapter 268 - 5 O’Clock, Thursday I

On the Thursday before Easter the loan window shut at 5 o’clock. At 20 to 10 the Coat was already sitting in our reception with his legs crossed, reading Tuesday’s programme.

"He is in reception," Priya said from my doorway. "In the coat."

"He is early."

"He has been early since half past 9. He asked for a tea and said it was the best tea he has had in Essex."

I went down to fetch him myself. He stood up when he saw me, folded the programme in half and put it in his inside pocket to keep.

The camel coat stayed on. Up close it was older than it would have looked across a room, soft at the cuffs and well looked after.

"Mr Mercer. Thank you for seeing me on a short week."

"You came a long way to say something you could have said on the phone."

"I rang you twice on Monday. Some things a man should hear across a desk." buzz from one of his pockets. He took the phone out, read the screen, and put it back without answering. "That one can wait. Most of them can."

In my office he did not sit down straight away. He stopped by the door, in front of the framed shirt and the photograph of the day we were promoted into this division, and took his time over it.

"Good day, that," he said.

"The best one we have had."

"So far." He sat. "The club from January rang me again on Monday. Still 7 million in June. They would go to 8 if I told them he was unhappy."

"Is he unhappy?"

"No. So I have not told them."

"Then what are you here for?"

"I look after Riyad. Only Riyad," he said. "But I eat lunch with the men who look after your number 9, your number 4 and your number 6."

buzz again, in the other pocket this time. He let it ring out.

"There has been a great deal of lunch this month. Championship clubs for your number 9, and for your number 6 one not far from where he grew up. For the French boy, a club in France that would like him home."

He smiled. "You have 4 players the whole country has started to look at, and you are paying all 4 of them what League One pays."

"They signed what they signed."

"They did, and they will play out every day of it, because they are good boys." He put both hands on his knees. "In February I told you his mother would hold him to his word. She will. She has started asking what the word is worth."

"And what is it worth?"

"Championship money, top half. For all 4 of them, because the day you pay one, I tell the other 3 at lunch. No chairman in League One has ever paid it. When you find you cannot either, we talk about which week in June."

He reached into the coat and brought out a folded sheet of notepaper, lined, torn from a pad.

"His mother wrote this in French so I could not soften it," he said. "I have put it into English. I have not changed a word. She does not trust agents. She is right not to."

He read it from the page.

"’Mr Mercer told my son he was keeping him safe. From my kitchen, safe and cheap look the same.’"

He folded the page again and laid it on my desk, and did not take it back.

"She asked me to bring it," he said. "I would have brought it anyway. It helps me."

tick of the clock over the door.

Tell her I am keeping you safe, I had said to Riyad before Christmas, with a 2 million pound bid on the table. She would be half right about cheap, I had told him, and safe was the half that mattered. His mother had been living on the other half ever since.

"Tell me what I tell her," he said.

"Tell her she will have an answer before Easter."

"Easter is Sunday."

"Then before Sunday."

He held my eye a second longer, nodded once, and went. I heard him thank Priya for the tea on his way past her desk. buzz, as he reached the stairs, and this time he answered it.

I sat with his mother’s page in front of me for a quarter of an hour.

7 million pounds was what the world thought Riyad Mahrez was worth that spring. In the life before this one, in 2016, an unfancied club in the Midlands won the Premier League and he was voted the best player in the country. 2 summers later another club paid a fortune for him.

I knew the rest of it as well. The number 9 had scored in 11 top-division games on the trot and won the same title. The French boy had run the middle of that side and then won a World Cup. The boy from Sheffield had cost one club more than any defender ever cost.

They were all here now, in amber, on League One money. None of what they could become was in anybody’s ledger in March 2013. In June, some of it would start to be.

If I waited for June, I would be bidding against men with 7 million in their pockets for players I already had.

If I moved now, I would be paying 4 League One footballers what a Championship club pays, and every sensible person in this building would think I had taken leave of my senses.

I had done the second thing before. It had always worked.

At half past 11 I took the page down the corridor to Maureen’s office. The clock on her wall said 11:31. She was standing under it with the green book open on her desk.

A paper bag of hot cross buns from the baker sat on the filing cabinet. She buys them every Maundy Thursday, for whoever is in.

"3 days to Easter," she said, before I had the door shut.

"I know."

"I asked you in February for the bonus money by Easter. In the club’s account, where I could look at it. 400,000 pounds. 14 lads with a clause that pays out the day we go up."

She put her finger on the page. "There is the page. It is empty."

"It is coming."

"It has been coming since February, Sam."

Margaret came in behind me with her folder under her arm and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair. "Priya said you wanted me. Priya also said Mahrez’s agent has been here."

"He has." I put the mother’s page on top of the green book. They both read it, and for a moment neither of them said anything.

"I want to re-sign all 4 of them," I said. "Vardy, Mahrez, Kanté, Maguire. Offers out today. 4 years each, on what a Championship club in the top half pays, and a signing fee of 200,000 each."

Margaret took her glasses down out of her hair and put them on.

"Against what turnover?"

"Equity. It lands on Friday the 12th of April."

"How much equity?"

"Work it out."

She did it on the back of her folder, in pencil, with her lips moving. scratch of the lead. Maureen did not watch the pencil. She watched me.

"4 signing fees at 200,000 is 800,000," Margaret said. "New wages from the 1st of April to the end of June, about 600,000. Maureen’s 400,000. 1.8 million of player money this season. At 60 percent, it needs 3 million of turnover behind it."

"3 million."

"For this season. Next season starts again on the 1st of July, whichever division we are in."

"3 million," I said. "On the 12th."

"Then the 4 offers go out this afternoon. The contracts I will draw up for the 12th." She wrote 12/4 on the front of her folder and underlined it once.

Maureen had not moved. She had her fountain pen in her hand, the one she keeps for the green book.

"In February," she said, "I wrote down that the finance director said wait. Now you want 3 million pounds of promise in my book on the Thursday before a bank holiday."

"One promise. One date."

"Why the 12th?"

The coin would be at its highest in the second week of April, and I meant to sell into that week. The 12th was its Friday. Sold today, near 90 dollars, the same 3 million pounds would cost me 3 coins for every one it would cost me then.

It was too big for the quiet man I had used all year. It would go through the big exchange, near the top, and be pounds in the club’s account by the Friday.

"Because it will be there by the 12th," I said.

Maureen turned from the empty page to the mother’s note and back.

"Every number you have ever given me has come," she said. "Every one, since the receivers were sitting in that chair."

"This one will."

She put the cap back on the fountain pen, laid it down beside the book, and picked up a pencil instead.

"Pencil," she said.

"Ink."

"At 5 o’clock." She put the pencil down too. "When I have seen what else you do today. Then I will decide what it goes in."

Margaret went back to her office with the folder under her arm. Maureen went back to her book.

The building was half empty by 12. The club shop had a card in the door in Priya’s handwriting, CLOSED GOOD FRIDAY, OPEN SATURDAY 9 TILL 12.

The girl on the ticket window was telling callers there was nothing left for Tuesday.

"Bovril End, every ticket," Priya said as I passed her desk. She had the phone wedged under her ear and a pen in each hand. "I have started a waiting list. We have never had a waiting list."

"Who is on it?"

"Half of Canvey, and a man who says he is your cousin." She covered the mouthpiece. "Are you going out?"

"Training ground. Back by 3."

I drove out along the seawall road with a hot cross bun on the passenger seat and the mother’s page in my pocket. The tide was out, a mile of brown mud with the gulls standing on it.

At the lights by the bus garage I checked the coin on my phone. Near 90. I turned the phone over on the seat and ate the bun.