Майкл Ридпат - Fatal Error

April 1999, The City, London

I paused at the top of the steps and glanced at the traditional red-and-white striped pole. I was in a narrow alley behind the Bank of England. In front of me, crammed into a basement, was the barber’s shop I had visited every six weeks or so for the previous three years. Except that it was only a fortnight since I had been there last.

I took a deep breath, descended the steps and pushed open the door.

Within five minutes I was in the chair, examining my hair in the mirror. Short. Slightly curly. Not fashionable, but not unfashionable either.

‘The usual, sir?’

‘No, George. I’ll have a number two all over.’

I had been mumbling the phrase to myself all morning. I had rejected a number one as just being a little too final.

The Greek Cypriot barber raised his heavy eyebrows, but said nothing and reached for his electric clippers. He fiddled with attachments and switched it on. The buzz made my heart rate soar. In the mirror I saw him hold the vibrating clippers just above my head. He caught my eye and smiled. Sweat poured from my armpits. Get a grip, I thought. This is only hair. It will regrow. I smiled back.

He lunged. I closed my eyes. The noise increased. I braced myself for the pain of hair being ripped from my scalp, but the sensation was more like a brief, intense massage. I opened my eyes again. A swathe of stubbled skin bisected my hair where my parting used to be. It was like an inverted Mohican. George’s smile widened.

There was no going back now.

Wapping High Street wasn’t much of a high street. More a lane between converted warehouses, or modem apartment blocks made to look like converted warehouses. There was little traffic, no pedestrians, but plenty of grinding and chugging from the construction equipment hidden behind hoardings.

I found Malacca Wharf and took the lift to the second floor.

‘Nice haircut,’ Guy said as he opened the door.

‘I knew you’d like it.’ I pushed past him into the flat. Half of the small living room was taken up with a pine table, groaning under the weight of computers and piles of paper. Owen’s bulk was hunched over a keyboard, tapping away. He looked little different from when I had last seen him several years before, except that the hair peeking out beneath his baseball cap was dyed an unlikely shade of white-blond.

‘Hello, Owen.’

He glanced up at me for a moment. ‘Hi,’ he responded in his high-pitched voice.

‘What do you think?’ Guy said. ‘This is ninetyminutes.com’s global HQ.’

‘Impressive. And where’s my office?’

‘Just here.’ Guy indicated a chair at the table, opposite a pile of paper.

‘Very nice.’

‘Good view, though, don’t you think?’

I walked over to the French windows that opened on to a small balcony. The Thames rushed past brown and turbulent, and on the opposite side of the river more converted warehouses stared back at us.

‘Why do you live here? Not much going on, is there?’

‘It’s Dad’s place. An investment he bought a while ago. He’s trying to kick me out, but I won’t go.’

‘You said you two weren’t getting on.’

‘We’re not. We have as little to do with each other as possible.’

‘Ah.’

I realized that that meant more than just Guy having to curtail his spending habits. It meant that the most obvious source of finance for ninetyminutes.com had already dried up. I’d find out more about that later.

Guy went through to the tiny kitchen and began making coffee. ‘How did they take it at Gurney Kroheim?’

‘My boss didn’t like it at all,’ I said. ‘I was quite touched, actually. He tried to plead with me at first, but he gave up after a few minutes. He said I was better off out of it. Poor guy. I don’t give him long.’ Giles was history and he knew it. The next reorganization would see him whited out of the Specialized Finance organogram. I hoped he would find another job.

‘Much better job security here,’ said Guy.

‘Of course,’ I replied with a wry grin. I took off my jacket and hung it on the back of my chair. ‘So. What do we do?’

Guy started talking. And talking. It was like a dam bursting. He had obviously been thinking of nothing else for weeks and he was desperate for someone to share those thoughts with. Owen wasn’t exactly right for the job, but I was. Guy was clearly glad to have me around. It made me feel needed and totally involved right from the outset.

The first thing to do was to get the ninetyminutes.com website up and running. Guy had a pretty good idea of what he wanted to put on it. There was the basic stuff: match reports, news, photos, player profiles, statistics, different sections for each club, the kind of things every soccer website needed. Then there were the things that Guy hoped would make Ninetyminutes different: gossip, chat, humour, cartoons to start with. And later betting, a fantasy football game, video clips, and the ultimate prize: e-commerce. Once we had attracted visitors to the site, we would begin selling merchandise: clothing, mugs, posters, anything and everything the football fan could want. Stage three would be to design our own range of clothing and other products to push through the site.

It was amazing how much of all this could be done by outsiders. Owen was working on the technical specifications of the site, making sure that it was ‘scalable’, in other words it could grow as the traffic and complexity increased. But outside companies would provide us with the software and hardware we needed, and a design consultancy would help us with the all-important look and feel of the website itself. News, photos and statistics could be downloaded in digital form from press agencies and then manipulated however we wanted.

This left the all-important question.

‘Who’s going to write all this?’ I asked. ‘The opinions, the humour, the chat? Are we going to leave it all to Owen?’

‘Ha ha,’ said Owen, his only contribution to the conversation so far.

Guy smiled. ‘Come and look.’

He hit some keys on his computer and a sheet of bright purple flashed on his screen. The words ‘Sick As A Parrot’ in a shaky font were emblazoned on it in green.

‘Nice title,’ I said. ‘And lovely graphics.’

‘I know, I know. But take a look.’

I looked, clicking on stories about the latest England manager, a volatile Arsenal striker, the rumoured transfer of a French international to Liverpool. There were articles about grounds, commentators, notorious supporters, the businessmen behind the clubs, what had happened to the star players in the previous year’s World Cup in France. There was a whole section comparing the tactics of the Premier League teams in terms that even I could understand. It was brilliantly written. Witty in places, opinionated in others, every piece was concise, clear and interesting.

‘This guy knows his stuff,’ I said. ‘That is, assuming it is all one guy.’

‘Oh, it is.’

‘What’s his name? Gaz?’ I said, peering at the screen.

‘His full name is Gary Morris and he lives in Hemel Hempstead.’

‘But who’s behind it?’

‘No one. Just him. It’s an unofficial site. He probably has a day job, but spends the rest of his waking life watching football and reading and writing about it.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘It’s our first corporate acquisition, Mr Bigshot. We’re going to buy Sick As A Parrot.’

‘For how much?’

‘I don’t know. A pint of lager and a packet of peanuts? We won’t find out until we meet Gaz.’

‘And when are we going to do that?’

Guy looked at his watch. ‘In about two hours.’

Number 26 Paget Close was a white pebbledashed terraced house in a row of white pebbledashed terraced houses. We opened the low wooden gate and stepped carefully through a tiny, immaculately kept front garden. A plastic ginger cat guarded the door. Guy rang the bell. It chimed sweetly.