Chapter 317: Christmas I

Margaret had her car keys on the blotter when I came in at 8 on the Monday, and her coat over the back of her chair.

"The strongroom opens at 9," she said. "I will be in Chelmsford when they unlock it and back here by 11. The letter goes to Ted's house in my bag, and it comes home in my bag. Every page of it."

"All 11?"

"All 11, or none of it. My name is on the last page. If I take a page out, my name is on something that is not true."

She put the keys in her pocket. "And I go with it. If they want to know how the rest was checked, I will be sitting there to tell them."

"Ted has moved it to 7," I said. "His treasurer is behind the counter at the building society till half past 5."

"Then 7." She stood up and took her coat off the chair. "If they tell the members, the town has it by Christmas. If they keep it to the 6 of them, Danny Vine has a piece of it by January, and the wrong piece."

"Then they will have to choose which."

"Which do you want?"

"I told Alan so that the trust could ask. I cannot tell the trust and then ask it to keep the answer in a drawer." I held the door for her. "It is still their vote."

She went past me with one arm in her coat and down the stairs to her car.

Ted's bungalow was at the end of Cinder Lane, 5 minutes from the ground. Somebody had put a wreath with a red bow on his door, and the path had been salted.

He had borrowed 3 chairs from next door. Gail, who kept the trust's books, sat on the settee beside a nurse in a blue tunic who was due on nights at 9. The painter from the meeting on the terrace in June had white paint dried on his knuckles.

The lad who ran the trust's website sat on the arm of the settee with a laptop open on his knees, until Margaret looked at it and he shut it. Alan stood in the kitchen doorway.

Ted had his chair by the gas fire, with his stick hooked over the arm. He leaned down and turned the knob, and the fire caught with a soft pop.

Over it, in a thin gold frame, hung his share certificate from the trust, with No. 1 printed in the corner. His 1996 scarf was on the hook behind the door.

"Mrs Bell," he said. "How do you want to do it?"

"One page at a time, round the room," said Margaret. "Each page comes back to me before the next one goes."

She sat on a hard chair from next door with the folder on her knees, and sent page 1 to her left.

It took an hour and 10 minutes. The pages went round the room hand to hand, shff, shff, the way hymn sheets go along a pew.

Ted read his with a magnifying glass from the drawer of his side table. Gail read fastest, and twice she asked for page 6 back before the next one went. Through the wall, next door's television had a quiz on, and somebody won something, ding, ding, ding.

The nurse looked up from page 4. "What is a client account?"

"A solicitor's bank account that holds other people's money," said Margaret. "He cannot touch it for himself. Every pound in it has to be accounted for."

The nurse nodded and passed the page on.

When page 11 came back to Margaret she closed the folder and put both hands flat on it.

Gail had been making notes on the back of an envelope. She turned it over. "Everything from July 2011 has a bank statement behind it and Mrs Bell's name at the end," she said. "Page 2 says 2010, and 'the client states', and that is all."

"I asked him about that in my kitchen," said Alan from the doorway, before I could answer. "Before it was light. He has not changed a word of it since."

Gail wrote that down on the back of her envelope.

Ted had been watching the fire, and he asked his question without looking away from it.

"I have one, son," he said. "If you went under a bus on the way home tonight, what happens to the club?"

"The wages are in the bank for the next 2 years," I said. "What I put in is the club's, as shares. None of it waits on me, and none of it comes back to me if I am gone."

"Then that is my question answered." He put his hand flat on the arm of his chair. "I am 79. I want to know the club does not need either of us."

"It does not."

"Right." He looked round the room. "What do we tell the members?"

"That the board has read where the money came from, and that none of it is borrowed," said Gail. "That is what they need."

"They will ask what it is," said the lad on the arm of the settee.

"Then we tell them the board is satisfied."

"Then we are the 6 people who know and will not say." He had gone red. "That is what the trust was set up to stop. It will be on the forum by Friday anyway. Somebody's cousin will have seen Mrs Bell's car outside."

"Every paper that has written about it since October has put drugs in the first paragraph," said Gail. "Put its name in a letter to 700 people and half of them will hear drugs, and the other half will hear gone by Easter. And our names will be on the bottom of it."

"Mine is on it already," said Alan. "I told you what it was on Friday night."

The painter had not said a word all evening. "What does telling them change?" he said. "The money is in. The ground is still ours to say no about."

The nurse had been checking the fob watch pinned to her tunic. "When I tell a family something on the ward, I tell them all of it the first time," she said. "If I leave a bit out, they find it in the notes, and then they do not believe anything else I say."

She looked at it again. "I am on at 9. Can we have hands?"

Ted waited a moment longer.

"Gail is right that some of them will hear drugs," he said. "Then they can come to the next meeting and ask, and one of us who has read it will stand up and answer them."

He looked up at the frame over the fire. "I have stood on that end since I was 9. Nobody ever told me anything about this club until it was in the Gazette, or until the gates were locked. I said when we started that this trust would not be like that."

He lifted one hand off the chair. "Hands, then. Tell them where it came from."

The lad's hand went up first, then the nurse's, then Alan's. The painter looked at his knuckles and kept his hands on his knees. Gail kept hers on her envelope. Ted put his up last.

"4 to 2," said Ted. "We tell them."

"I have said what I think," said the painter. "I will still be on the table with the forms against Blackburn."

Gail looked at the envelope for a while. "Then I will write the part about the money," she said. "If it is going to 700 people, it is going to be right. We say it is an internet currency. Everybody will know which one."

"Is there anything you want in it, son?" Ted asked me.

"One line," I said. "That the price can halve in a week. And that if it does, the club will not owe a penny."

Gail put her pen down. "It is the trust's letter, Mr Mercer. Not the club's, and not yours."

"Then put it in your words. But put it in." I could see the lad nodding. "It lost a fifth in a morning last Thursday. They will read about that somewhere. Let them read it from you first, with the second half of the sentence beside it."

"The second half is true because the club holds pounds and cannot borrow without your share," said Margaret. "I will stand behind that half."

"Write it, Gail," said Ted.

She wrote it on the envelope in her neat cashier's hand and read it back to the room, and Ted nodded at each half of it.

The nurse had asked for all of it the first time. I did not tell them it would halve before Christmas.

At the door Ted held on to the frame with one hand and his stick with the other while Margaret went down the salted path to her car with the folder under her arm.

"My father would not have believed a word of it," he said.

"Which part?"

"Any of it. Money on a computer. Seats on our end." He laughed and waved me off down the path. "Go on. She is waiting for you."

The letter went to the members on the Friday. Most of them had it by post. Alan took 200 of them round Marsh Road himself, with his old bag over his shoulder.

TILBROOK TOWN SUPPORTERS' TRUST · To every member · Friday 13 December 2013

The board has read the solicitor's letter that sets out where the chairman's money came from. Mrs Bell brought it to us and stayed while we read it.

The chairman put his savings into an internet currency in 2010 and has sold it in pieces since 2011. Every pound he has put into the club is held as shares. None of it is a loan.

The board voted 4 to 2 to write to you. Any member may ask any of us about it.

The price of that currency can halve in a week. If it does, the club will not owe a penny, because the club holds pounds and cannot borrow without the trust.

Ted Cutler, chairman of the trust board