Майкл Ридпат - Fatal Error

I was concerned about the shareholders’ agreement. I wasn’t a lawyer, but it seemed to me that there were holes in it. As the number of shareholders grew, this agreement would become more important. Guy had used a law firm who specialized in film and TV contracts. They were difficult to pin down and when I did get hold of them, they waffled at my objections. We considered using some of the City firms I knew, but they would be far too expensive at this stage so we decided we would have to put up with Guy’s lawyers until we had proper funding.

Ninetyminutes wasn’t exactly going to be a ‘virtual’ company but it was going to be pretty close. Especially in the early stages. We didn’t have the time or the money to employ our own experts on everything: we were going to have to use consultants. The most important of these was the web designer. Guy had selected a firm called Mandrill, and they called us to say they were ready with our design.

Mandrill’s office was a large loft above a garment trader in one of the small streets just north of Oxford Street. Brick, pipes, skylights, precious little furniture, no internal walls. A folded-up micro-scooter rested against a cappuccino machine by the door. There were three islands of people working their computers around large curved black tables. We were met by two men and a woman. They intimidated the hell out of me. The men had tightly cropped goatee beards, carefully arranged combat trousers and T-shirts, hair cut just so. I had suddenly become an aficionado of shaven heads, but neither of the two men had had a simple ‘all over’ job. The woman, whose black hair was at least an inch longer than the men’s, sported an eyebrow stud and at least six rings in each ear. Against this, Guy’s all-black kit and inch-long blond hair looked so 1998. Owen and I weren’t even contenders.

We crowded round a small table bearing a projector. The leader, one of the goatees called Tommy, asked for the lights to be dimmed and switched on the machine. It flashed a search-engine page on to the screen. We watched as Tommy typed the letters www.ninetyminutes.com. A click and up it came, our new logo on a light blue background. Another click and we were into the site. It didn’t look anything like the other soccer sites on the web. Most of these resembled the contents pages of magazines transferred to the Internet. Mandrill’s site, or rather our site, consisted of a series of dark blue bubbles floating on a light blue background. There was something about it that invited you to click to see what was in the bubbles. We clicked. And clicked. And clicked.

‘Nice,’ said Guy. ‘What do you think, Gaz?’

‘Cool. Yeah, cool.’

‘Let’s take a closer look at the logo.’

Tommy clicked on the opening screen. The woman with the multiple earrings handed round a T-shirt with the new logo printed on it.

‘Obviously the real clothing will be better quality than this,’ she said. ‘But it should give you an idea.’

The T-shirt bore the figures nine and zero, with a few strokes suggesting a stopwatch within the zero. Next to it was a tiny football, and the word ‘com’ in forward-sloping lower-case letters. It looked good.

‘It’s like a kind of mixture between Ralph Lauren and Adidas,’ Guy said.

Tommy changed the screen. An image of a whiteboard splattered with scribblings appeared. I recognized Guy’s writing. Tommy zoomed in on the words ‘Adidas’ and ‘Ralph Lauren’.

Guy laughed. ‘You’re just giving my ideas back to me!’

‘Dead right,’ said Tommy. The lights came up. ‘Well? What do you think?’

Guy glanced at me.

Mandrill were charging thirty thousand pounds plus one per cent of our equity. At this stage in Ninetyminutes’ life thirty thousand was a lot of money. But a well-designed website was vital. I nodded to Guy. ‘OK with me.’

‘What do you think, Owen?’

‘Cotton candy. It’s, like, pink fluffy cotton candy.’

‘But do you think they understand the technical stuff?’

‘It’s like I always say. No one understands the technical stuff in this country.’

‘Well, thanks for not calling them morons, Owen,’ Guy said, flashing a reassuring smile at Tommy and his team.

‘No problem.’

‘Gaz?’

‘I like it. I think it’s cool.’

Guy smiled. ‘So do I. Tommy, we’ve got a deal.’

Saturday came. We all worked in the morning, but Guy told me I had a mystery meeting in the afternoon. We took the tube to Sloane Square and then grabbed a cab.

‘Stamford Bridge,’ said Guy, as we climbed in.

I smiled. ‘I didn’t realize you still went.’

‘Every home game, when I’m in London,’ said Guy. ‘And I intend to keep going. It is the point, after all.’

‘That’s true.’

As a small boy my loyalties had fixed on Derby County, and I had stuck with them until university, making the trip up from Northamptonshire a couple of times a year to see a game. But once I started working, there never seemed to be the time. My interest in the game, both as a player and a spectator, had quietly slipped out of my life, unnoticed. The last time I had been to a football match was seven years before, with Guy.

Then Stamford Bridge had been undergoing major improvements. There was still some work in progress, but I was amazed by the transformation. The ground was reached through the glitzy ‘Chelsea Village’ full of shops and bars. There were some families in the horde of people thronging the ground, but there were also some pretty frightening individuals. Thugs perhaps, but thugs with cash. Money was changing hands everywhere. I looked at my ticket. Twenty-five pounds. Extortionate. As we filed into the all-seater stadium and sat down in the warm spring sunshine with thirty-four thousand other people, all of whom were shelling out at least that much for their Saturday afternoon entertainment, I began to see that there really was a lot of money in football.

The Blues were playing Leicester City. Within ten minutes of the kick-off I had forgotten all about websites and money, and was urging them on with the rest of the crowd. I cheered after half an hour when Gianfranco Zola calmly lobbed the ball over the Leicester goalkeeper. I cheered some more when an own goal from a Leicester defender put Chelsea two up. And then I felt the agitation and frustration boil up inside me as Leicester pulled back first one and then two goals in the last ten minutes.

The draw at home had put paid to Chelsea’s hopes of winning the Premier League that season, and Guy was fuming. But it had been a great game to watch and, as I fought my way home on London’s creaking transport system, I couldn’t help smiling to myself. This was going to be fun.

July 1987, Côte D’Azur, France

I leaned against the car door as the Alfa Romeo Spider took the hairpin bend fast. Too fast. Dominique was an aggressive driver. She had told me not to worry, she knew the road well, and it was some comfort to know that she had torn along this stretch many times before without killing herself.

It was impossible to believe. Here I was, sitting in the passenger seat of a sports car, a beautiful blonde beside me, the Mediterranean below, the sun above, the air rushing past as we careered down the Corniche. It was one of those moments I wanted to freeze into my memory so that back in my grey life in grey England it would always be within reach, ready for me to take out and enjoy.

And I had made love for the first time.

I felt like punching the air and letting out a whoop of victory. But with Dominique beside me I had to keep cool. Even so, I couldn’t prevent a grin creeping across my face.

Dominique saw. ‘Ça va?’

‘Ça va bien.’