Chapter 275: Buyer I

The phone shop on the Mile End Road had a window full of second-hand handsets with the prices written on yellow paper stars. The side door was next to it, green, with 3 bells and no names. I pressed all 3. None of them made a sound.

I knocked. knock knock. Feet came down a staircase on the other side.

"Mercer?"

"Yes."

"Felix." He was younger than his message, 24 at most, in a suit jacket over a jumper with a hole at the elbow, and he talked faster than he walked. He had a mug in his hand. "Come up. Mind the 4th step. It moves."

The stairs smelled of new plastic from the shop and fried chicken from next door.

The room at the top had a laptop on a card table, a kettle on the floor plugged into an extension lead, and 2 chairs. That was all. The window looked down on the bus stop. hiss of a bus kneeling at the kerb.

"Tea?" he said. "I have not got any sugar. I have not got any milk either, now I think about it."

"I am fine."

"You are not, or you would not be up my stairs on a Monday." He sat down on one chair and pointed me at the other. "You said size in your message. People say size and they mean 10 grand."

"I mean millions."

"How many?"

"14."

He put the mug down on the floor very carefully, next to the kettle.

"Pounds."

"Pounds. In my account by 4 o’clock today."

He turned the laptop round so I could see it. The big exchange in Tokyo had been open again since Friday and it was trading at 94. On Wednesday at 1 o’clock it had been 266. On Friday it had touched 54.

"It is on the floor," Felix said. "Nobody sells on the floor unless they have to."

"I have to."

"What for?"

"A football club."

He looked at me properly for the first time. "Which one?"

"Tilbrook Town."

"Never heard of them."

"We are in League One. 3 years ago we were not in the League at all."

"Is League One good?"

"It is the third division."

"And the third division costs 14 million pounds?"

"This week it does." I told him the parts that were mine to tell. "4 players on new contracts. And a woman at the club who will not file a single one of them until she can see 2 years of wages in the bank, in pounds."

"I like her," Felix said. "I would hire her."

"She would not work for you."

"No." He pulled the laptop back. "Here is how it is. I did 2 years on a currency desk in Canary Wharf and got bored. Now I buy this for people with pounds who want more of it."

"Who?"

"3 men in Geneva and a family in Hong Kong. They all watched it go to 266 last week without them. Their pounds have been sitting in a solicitor’s client account in the City since Wednesday night, with my name on the instructions, waiting for somebody like you to come up those stairs."

"What are they paying?"

"60."

"The exchange says 94."

"The exchange is a queue in Tokyo with half the world’s money stuck in it. You would not be up my stairs otherwise." He drank his tea. "I am a man in a room with pounds. 60 dollars a coin, paid in pounds at this morning’s rate."

"80."

"I put it in the message so you would not come all this way to haggle." He did not raise his voice, and he did not look away. "60. Everybody who is selling this week has not finished selling yet. By tomorrow the exchange will be down near my number on its own."

I sat on the hard chair and looked at the 94 on his laptop.

I knew it would come back. I could not have told you the day, but it would be over 120 again inside the week.

I had told a dressing room Tuesday, and Danny had printed it.

So I did the sum, the one I had not let myself do in Sheffield. I did it properly, year by year.

14 million pounds at 60 dollars. By the end of November those same coins would be worth more than 200 million pounds. In the December of 2017, more than 5 billion. By the May of 2025, nearly 30 billion.

There was not a football club in the world that had ever been sold for that, in either life. I was about to give it to 3 men in Geneva and a family in Hong Kong for 14 million, because of what I had said in a dressing room in Sheffield.

On Wednesday night, at 203, my hand had come off the mouse. I put both hands flat on my knees.

"60," I said.

Felix waited, in case I was going to say anything else. I did not.

"This is how we do it," he said. "You send me a piece. I watch it land, I tell them, and the solicitor pays you out of the client account. CHAPS, straight into your bank, same day, no limit on the size. Then you send the next. 2 million at a time."

"Why not all at once?"

"Because I have never met you." He opened a notebook. "The network makes a new block about every 10 minutes. I want one block on every piece before I tell them it is there. The banks stop sending at about 4. If we start now, we finish by 3."

"And if you keep the first piece?"

"Then you have lost 2 million pounds, and you will never find me." He said it the way he would have told me the time. "That is what it costs you, not knowing me. It is a lot of pounds for one afternoon, Mr Mercer. My people are trusting me with theirs."

He gave me a number to send to. I opened my own laptop on my knees and sent the first piece at 11:32. My hand did not stop this time.

click.

Then we sat there. hiss of another bus. Downstairs, through the floorboards, the man in the phone shop had the radio on, a phone-in about parking.

"Does he know what you do up here?" I said.

"Kemal? He thinks I sell phones on the internet." Felix kept his eyes on the laptop. "My mum thinks I am in insurance. She tells her friends in Bradford I do pensions. It is easier than this."

ping. "One block," he said, and picked up his phone and typed. "Geneva has it."

At 11:58 my bank’s page showed 2 million pounds that had not been there at half past. I sent the second piece.

By 1 o’clock he had made tea 3 times and I had drunk a cup of it to be polite. It was strong and it had nothing in it, and it tasted of the kettle.

"Do you like football?" I said.

"No." He did not look up. "Is yours on tonight?"

"Tomorrow."

"Right." He typed something. ping. 4 pieces. Then 5.

At 2:51 I sent the 7th piece, and at 3:14 the 7th 2 million landed in my account. I watched the number at the bottom of my bank’s page until I was sure it was going to stay there.

14 million pounds.

"That is the most anybody has ever sold me," Felix said. He closed his notebook. "Why not wait a month? You know it comes back. You knew it before you came up the stairs."

"I told 4 lads they would have it before they played again," I said. "They play tomorrow night."

"That is it?"

"It was in the paper as well."

He sat back in his chair.

"You are the worst seller I have ever met, Mr Mercer," he said. He had his phone to his ear before I was out of the chair. "Geneva," he said into it. "All 7."

What was left in my wallet when I went down his stairs was still a fortune. It was a long way less of one than it had been at 11 o’clock.

I rang Margaret from the bus stop under his window at 3:25.

"It is in my account," I said. "All of it. My bank will not send anything that size after 3, so it will be in the club’s account by 9 tomorrow."

"How much?"

"14."

There was a silence on the line. Behind me a bus pulled away. hiss.

"That is twice what I asked you for," Margaret said.

"Half of it is your 2 years. The club holds it and never touches it. The other half pays the 4 contracts and the lads’ 400,000."

"Never?"

"Put it in writing. And send me whatever the bank is going to ask me for, because a bank is going to ask me."

"It went to you an hour ago," she said. "I wrote it on Friday afternoon. I had a feeling."

I rang my bank at 8:55 on the Tuesday morning and sent the 14 million from my account to the club’s, from my desk, with the door shut.

At 9:40 the bank rang me back. A man from their financial crime team wanted to know where 14 million pounds had come from on Monday afternoon, and where it was going on Tuesday morning.

"Payments of this size normally sit with us for 5 working days, Mr Mercer," he said, "while we look at them."

"It has to be there before 7:45 tonight."

"I understand. Where did it come from?"

I read him Margaret’s letter, every line. I gave him Felix’s company name and the bank references for all 7 payments. He put me on hold for 11 minutes. When he came back he told me he had rung the solicitor in the City, and the solicitor had answered on the first ring.

"That has been released, Mr Mercer," he said.

That same day the exchange in Tokyo went down to Felix’s number on its own, as he had said it would.