Майкл Ридпат - Fatal Error

I sighed, angry rather than embarrassed. Hoyle noticed.

‘Sorry. You were young, she was beautiful, and she was using you. Tony knew that. But I’m sure he didn’t murder her. I’ve spoken to him many times over the years about her death and, while I wouldn’t expect him to admit it to me, I’m sure I’d be able to tell if he had killed her.’

Hoyle sipped his coffee thoughtfully. ‘Tony Jourdan was much more than a client. He was my friend. We met when we were students together. He was one of the reasons I moved out to Monte Carlo. We’ve been through a lot together over the years, ups and downs. I was very sorry when he died. Very sorry.’

He put down his cup. ‘Now, I really must find a taxi.’ With a heave, he pulled himself to his feet and left me hunched over my cooling cup of coffee.

We closed a deal with Orchestra Ventures in record time. Orchestra bought out Tony Jourdan’s trust for four million pounds, twice his initial investment, and put in a further ten million. They ended up with seventy per cent of the company, leaving plenty for the management and employees. The board changed, of course. Orchestra found us a new chairman, Derek Silverman. He was a trim grey-haired businessman of about fifty. He had already made several million pounds from a management buyout of a marketing business that had been funded by one of Orchestra’s partners. More importantly, he was chairman of a Premier League club. Henry also joined the board as Orchestra’s representative and Patrick Hoyle was booted off.

Guy suggested Ingrid as a third executive director. She had made herself an indispensable member of the team and both Guy and I valued her judgement more by the day. Henry liked her, so she was in. Her only difficulty was with Mel. They were cool towards each other, but professional, and they did their best to keep out of each other’s way.

With the deal done and the ten million in the bank, we hit the ground running. There was plenty to spend it on. More office space: we took over the floor below. More staff, especially more journalists. Advertising. Gearing up the on-line retailing. Henry didn’t mind this profligacy. In the upside-down world of internet valuations, the more you spent on getting a website established, the more it was worth. So spend, spend, spend.

It worked. Visitor numbers to the website rose strongly as the season got under way. In the month of September we logged over four hundred thousand visitors and nearly three million page impressions. There were other soccer websites out there, but we were eating into their market share. Gaz’s stuff was just better. The site looked more attractive. It was quick, easy and fun to use. Guy began to sign up a network of partnerships with everyone from the leading search engines, to internet service providers, to online newspapers, to special-interest sites like ours. We signed a deal with Westbourne, one of the largest bookmakers in the country, for on-line soccer betting. It became popular immediately, and even generated a revenue stream.

We needed to generate dozens of stories a day for the site: transfer and injury news, gossip, opinion, and, of course, match reports. This required an ever-growing band of journalists, each controlling a network of freelances and contacts within the club system. We put television screens on the walls and, more importantly, installed software that allowed the journalists to watch video or listen to radio commentary live on their computers.

Gaz came up with a high-profile scoop: the signing of one of Brazil’s top strikers by a major Premier League club for twenty-five million pounds. The club denied it and for two days it looked as if we had got things badly wrong. The tabloids ridiculed us, but Gaz was confident. Sure enough, the story was confirmed. Later, Gaz told me his source was the fourteen-year-old son of one of the club’s directors, who was an enthusiastic fan of our site.

With all this activity, there was scarcely time to think. And when there was time, I thought about Ninetyminutes. I didn’t hear any more from the police, nor did I discuss Tony’s death with Guy. But Patrick Hoyle’s words rankled. I tried to push them out of my mind, but they kept returning.

It was too convenient.

One morning I phoned the office to say I wouldn’t be coming in until the afternoon. Guy sounded a little surprised, especially when I told him I was going flying. He knew I hadn’t been since I had started working at Ninetyminutes nearly six months before.

It was a sunny day in early October, with a fresh breeze to blow away any autumnal mist or London smog. It felt good to be at the controls of an aeroplane again, alone, a couple of thousand feet above the ground, with England stretching out like a carpet of green, gold and brown beneath me. I flew over the Hampshire downs to one of my favourite airfields, Bembridge on the Isle of Wight, and walked the mile or so up the steep hill to the cliff tops above Whitecliff Bay.

It was cool up there in the breeze, but it was quiet and it was a long way from Ninetyminutes. I was hoping the distance would give me some perspective.

It did.

For the first time I faced up to the question I had been avoiding. Had Guy killed his father?

On the face of it, it was possible. Ninetyminutes had meant everything to Guy and his father had threatened to take it away. Tony had a hold over Guy that was difficult for me to understand, but it was powerful and I knew Guy wanted to break free from it. The police had certainly thought of Guy as a suspect. Owen had stood by him, provided him with an alibi, but then Owen had always stood by Guy.

But I had spoken to Guy on the day of the funeral. He had seemed genuinely upset about his father’s death. That was the thing with Guy. We were close. He could lay open his emotions to me. Over the last few months I had seen him in the good times and the bad. He trusted me with his feelings.

But he had also been a professional actor once. Could I really trust him?

I remembered when these same thoughts had invaded my mind, on Mull, when Mel had told me about Guy arranging to pay off Abdulatif. Both Patrick and Mel had seemed to suggest that Guy had done this to protect himself. That he had killed Dominique.

There was one other loose end. The footprint Guy had left outside Dominique’s window the night she died. I had never received a satisfactory answer from him on that. I knew he hadn’t put it there when the two of us had gone to bed. So how had it got there?

And then Abdulatif had himself been murdered. By Guy?

Had Guy really killed three people over the last thirteen years? That went against everything I knew about him, against the trust and friendship we had built up over the previous six months, and against everything I had put into Ninetyminutes. Unless I was able to put my doubts about Guy behind me, they would undermine everything.

I stared out over the sea. A fat ferryboat inbound from France was charging towards a sleek warship. It looked from my vantage point as if they were going to collide, but they passed each other without noise or fuss: it was only as they overlapped that I realized the warship was a couple of miles further away.

The trouble was, the doubts weren’t going away.

Until I knew for sure whether Guy was involved in these deaths, I wouldn’t be able to trust him. If I didn’t trust him, we couldn’t work together. If we couldn’t work together, ninetyminutes.com would fall apart.

But this wasn’t just about Ninetyminutes. Guy’s friendship was vital to me. If I was ever to do something interesting or unconventional with my life, to become more than just a bean-counting accountant, it would be because of Guy.

I had to convince myself that he was innocent.