Philip Kerr - Hand of God

‘I’d forgotten that helicopters make you nervous, Scott,’ he explained.

‘I don’t think I ever mentioned it, did I?’

He shrugged. ‘A man doesn’t have to say anything at all for him to be just as eloquent as Hamlet,’ he said. ‘Sometimes, his body says everything for him. Besides, I think you’ve had more than enough stress for one day, my friend. I know I have. So then. Take the launch. Go back to the hotel. Eat something. Try to get a good night’s sleep. And like I said before, leave everything other than tomorrow’s football match in my hands. But before you do all that, forgive me please. I’m sorry I put you down like that earlier. I made you feel insignificant and unimportant and that really wasn’t necessary. My apologies.’

It was perhaps a modest demonstration of omniscience; all the same it was a touching one.

And then he embraced me warmly.

When I got back to the hotel I found the police waiting for me in the lobby; they explained that there would have to be a post-mortem and that for legal reasons Bekim Develi’s possessions could not be removed from his bungalow at the hotel, which was now closed until further notice.

‘It’s the coroner’s office,’ they explained. ‘When a man of just twenty-nine drops down dead there are procedures that must be observed.’

‘I understand,’ I said.

It looked as though any funeral plans that Viktor Sokolnikov might have had for Bekim Develi to be buried in his home town of Izmir were now on hold.

We resumed the match abandoned the previous night with eighty-three minutes still to play. And the game started well. How could it not? We were already a goal up. This was an away goal too, the best kind in UEFA’s Animal Farm world where some goals are more equal than others. Our players seemed anxious to win the game, for Bekim’s sake if nothing else. The sports page of every English newspaper urged us on to victory over the Greeks and — with one Cassandra-like exception, the always-prescient Henry Winter at the Daily Telegraph — predicted that City would surely prevail.

Unfortunately no one had shown Olympiacos the script of how this particular revenge tragedy was supposed to play.

Our evening began to break up like the Elgin Marbles almost as soon as the City players stepped onto the pitch. It was as if, having lost Hector, our doom had been sealed for we were uncertain in defence, clueless in midfield, and impotent in attack. Schuermans and Hemingway were both outplayed by the thirty-two-year-old Argentine Alejandro Domínguez, who proved that his team had no need of centre forward Kostas Mitroglu — sold to Fulham for £12.5 million — to score goals. He equalised with just fifteen minutes on the clock, running on to a fantastic through ball from Giannis Maniatis, Olympiacos’s captain and central midfielder, whose pass looked as if he might have called Jesus Christ’s bluff and got a camel through the proverbial eye of the needle. Why our own midfielders didn’t close him down was one mystery; but it was wrapped up in the enigma of how our almost sedentary defenders didn’t manage to stop Domínguez from finding space to take a shot that Kenny Traynor ought to have saved easily. Unsighted and wrong-footed, our goalkeeper dived one way and Domínguez neatly flicked the ball the other. The ball crossed the line with an almost cartoonish lack of pace, as if Jerry the mouse could have stopped it, adding to Traynor’s obvious distress. He slapped the ground several times and shouted at the pitch, as if blaming the gods of the underworld below our feet.

The Legend fired off several red flares behind Traynor’s goal, which only served to underline the Scotsman’s infernal performance and filled the air in the stadium with a strongly sulphurous smell.

‘Fucking hell,’ exclaimed Simon. ‘I’ve seen some daft defending in my time but those two twats take the biscuit. The way they ran at the lad Domínguez you’d have thought they were trying to do a scissors in fucking rugby. Do you want to shout at them or shall I? Because I am so fucking angry about that, boss. I am so fucking angry.’

‘Be my guest,’ I said.

Simon spat out his extra-strong mint like a loose tooth, marched to the edge of the technical area, gesticulated furiously at our back four and let rip with a stream of obscenities that made me glad the Greek supporters were so loud. All I heard were the words ‘stupid cunts’, and in truth, when you come right down to it, those were the only two words he really needed. I wasn’t sure if FIFA could have envisaged what Simon was doing as ‘an element of the game’ within the change it had made to the laws in 1993, bringing technical areas into existence, but I doubted this kind of thing really did ‘improve the quality of play’. Of course, I was guilty of this sort of intemperate behaviour myself; indeed there were a couple of times when I’d been sent to the stands for what the referees’ association called ‘aggressive coaching’.

By now our goalmouth had disappeared in the cloud of red smoke from the Greek flares, which spared our goalkeeper’s blushes, and wisely, the referee waited a full minute before restarting the game.

‘Simon,’ I called, ‘come back here. You’ll give yourself a fucking heart attack.’

He didn’t hear me. Brick-faced and full of rage, the big Yorkshireman continued to shout and wave his arms about like a madman conducting an orchestra of deaf musicians and suddenly it occurred to me, after what had happened to Bekim Develi, that his having a heart attack wasn’t so very improbable. And as the game restarted I got out of my seat and, leaving the dugout, went to fetch him back. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Hristos Trikoupis complaining to the fourth official that I had stepped in his technical area, which wasn’t true, of course, but, at that particular moment, I had other things to worry about.

‘Leave it, Simon,’ I repeated, taking hold of his arm. ‘They can’t even see you, cos of the smoke.’

He was about to take my advice when a high ball came our way and, immediately in front of us, Daryl Hemingway and Diamntopoulou both jumped to head it. The Greek seemed to mount up on the Englishman’s back in an almost gymnastic attempt to reach the ball. Neither man quite making contact, but in the wrestling match that ensued the Greek suddenly fell clutching his face in pain, as if Daryl had deliberately straight-armed him to the ground. It was patently obvious to me and to Simon — and must have been equally clear to the linesman standing right beside us — that Daryl’s back-swinging arm had done little more than brush Diamntopoulou’s girlish top-knot of hair. But with the Greek still rolling on the pitch in agony as if he had been stabbed in the eye with a red-hot poker, we were astonished to see the lino raise his flag and Merlini, the referee, already striding towards Daryl and reaching for the card in his top pocket.

A yellow would have been bad enough; the red was an outrage. Daryl Hemingway stood there as if he could hardly believe what was happening. Nor could Simon and I. How we restrained ourselves from further comment at that moment, I shall never know. I put a hand on Daryl’s shoulder and started to walk him to the dugout but not before changing our own formation from 4-3-3 to 4-4-1. If we dug in, we might hold on to a draw, which was at least something we could build on back in London.

‘I didn’t fucking touch him, boss. Honest.’

‘I saw the whole thing, Daryl. It wasn’t your fault. One of these bastards has been bought. That much is now obvious, anyway.’

I looked back to the pitch in time to see Diamntopoulou get back to his feet, without a mark on his face, and Simon, still on the edge of the technical area, sneer: ‘You cheating, fucking bastard. He never touched you. Call yourself a sportsman? You’re a fucking girl, that’s what you are, son. A fucking girl.’