Philip Kerr: January Window

That was typical of João Zarco. The man was always good copy, although sometimes he said too much; even he would have conceded that. Sometimes he said too much and people kicked back. Literally. In a now infamous interview on Sky Sports, Zarco described the Irish football pundit and former player-manager, Ronan Reilly — who was sitting alongside him at the time — as ‘a piece of crap’ and ‘someone who couldn’t run a train set let alone a football team’. Reilly replied that Zarco had the biggest mouth in football and that one day the Portuguese would put his foot in his mouth, and if that didn’t happen then Reilly would gladly oblige with his own foot. A week or two later, at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year after-party in the ExCel Arena, the two traded punches and kicks and had to be separated by security staff. But not everyone Zarco criticised publicly was able to fight back like Ronan Reilly.

Take Lionel Sharp, who refereed a UEFA match we played against Juventus last October — an away tie that City lost. Interviewed on ITV after our 1–0 defeat, Zarco half suggested that Juventus — who are not without form in the skulduggery department — had ‘influenced’ Sharp at half time to give a penalty in the second half. Sharp was subsequently the subject of a lot of vicious trolling on Twitter, which caused him to take a fatal overdose of sleeping tablets.

Love him or loathe him, João Zarco was always interesting.

After a hard training session at Hangman’s Wood I have an ice bath and a sports massage, but a good sports massage given by the club’s full-time masseur, Jimmy Gregg, is always excruciatingly painful. Jimmy has fingers like fire-tongs. That’s why they call it a sports massage: because you have to be a bloody good sport to endure that level of pain without punching Jimmy in the face. And the older I get the more painful it is. Much as I try to behave like a Spartan and stoically take the pain without a sound, I always squeal like a frightened guinea pig. Everyone does. And because footballers will gamble on anything, bets are often taken among the lads on who can endure thirty minutes on the table without uttering a groan or a moan; until now no one has come through the experience without uttering a sound. Jimmy takes pride in his work. I don’t think there’s anyone who would disagree with me when I say that there are occasions when the massage seems worse than the training session. Perhaps that’s why they call Jimmy’s treatment room the London Dungeon.

So sometimes when I get home and before I go to bed, Sonja sets up a massage table in my bathroom, puts on a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes, a little white tunic that doesn’t quite cover her stocking-tops and tiny G-string, and plays the rub-joint whore, with the happy ending included. She has wonderful, light fingers and has fully mastered the technique of touching without quite touching, if you know what I mean. But if the caressing touch of her hands is magical — and it is — it can’t begin to compare with her sweet and loving mouth; she likes to drink a very cold martini before putting my cock in her mouth, and the combination of the alcohol, her lips and her teeth is nothing short of transfiguring. Christ ascending into heaven could not have felt better than I feel as she waits patiently for my ejaculations to end in her mouth, and she always swallows every last drop as if it’s the most expensive Manuka honey.

‘Now that’s what I call therapy,’ I said as I climbed down off the table and stepped into the shower beside her. ‘If they ever put that on the National Health the whole of fucking Romania will be living here.’

After that I slept like a hibernating bear. My iPhone started ringing, just before midnight.

Normally I switch off my phone at night and put the landline on answer-machine; sports reporters think nothing of ringing you up at all hours to ask you this or that. That was before Twitter, mind. Nowadays the press are lazier and just use player tweets for all the ‘tributes were being paid’ quotes they could ever need. But during the January window I tend to pick up the phone at all hours, in case it’s related to a transfer. Players’ agents are more nocturnal than their clients, as befits their vampire-like nature. Some of the best deals I’ve helped make have been as a result of midnight negotiations.

I have individual ring tones for different people, of course. Viktor Sokolnikov has the Red Army singing a famous Russian folk song called ‘Kalinka’. Zarco’s is the Clash song ‘London Calling’. Sonja has the Pointer Sisters’ ‘I’m So Excited’. But this time it was none of these. The Stranglers song ‘Peaches’ meant that it was Maurice McShane, after Ian McShane who was in Sexy Beast ; Maurice was City’s life-coach and fixer and the club’s first line of defence in any off-the-field crisis. It was his job to help our overpaid and often naïve players do everything from open an offshore bank account to pay off some skank who they’d knocked up. This meant that Maurice was one of the busiest men at the training ground. Players tend to bring problems to the coach that they wouldn’t dream of mentioning to the manager; only now they bring them to Maurice, who sometimes — if the matter is serious — brings them back to me. It had been my idea to hire Maurice; I’d met him in the nick and in the five months we’d been together at City we’d already seen off several scandals. I won’t go into these right now. Suffice to say that we never did anything illegal. Just stuff that kept some of our stupid fuck-head players out of the newspapers, for one thing or another.

I went into the bathroom, closed the door, and sat down on the toilet. I think this is what they call multi-tasking. There were several texts from a variety of sports reporters asking me to call them but these I ignored, for the moment; better to get it from the horse’s mouth, I thought, already imagining some scandal involving Ayrton Taylor, mouthing off to a newspaper perhaps. Or getting himself into trouble with another player’s wife, again; he wasn’t such an example of good sportsmanship when it came to shagging someone else’s missus.

‘What’s up, Maurice?’

‘I thought you should know, as soon as possible,’ said Maurice. ‘A pal who works for the Met has just given me the heads-up on this. And I think you ought to prepare yourself for a shock. The police have found a body hanging from the railings along Wembley Way.’ He paused. ‘It’s Drenno. He’s only gone and hanged himself.’

‘Oh, fuck, no,’ I said. ‘The stupid, stupid bastard.’

We were silent for several seconds.

‘You know his wife is in the same hospital as Didier,’ said Maurice.

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Drenno beat her up quite badly.’

‘Christ. Has she been told?’

‘Yes. The press are there. And given your high-profile friendship it’s safe to imagine that they’ll be outside your flat before very long.’

‘Like a pack of vultures,’ I said. ‘To pick over the entrails.’

‘That’s what generally happens in these situations.’

‘Look, I’ll tweet something,’ I said. ‘And release a statement to the City press office at Silvertown Dock. And to Arsenal. Fuck. He was here, you know. The day before yesterday. Pissed as usual.’

‘Do you want me to tell the police?’

‘No, I’ll do it. But find out who’s heading up the inquiry, will you? And text me a number? I don’t want to explain myself more than once to these bastards.’

‘They’re bound to ask. So I’ll ask: was he suicidal when you saw him?’

‘No more so than usual.’ I sighed because then I remembered what he’d said. ‘But he did say something about making one last headline at Wembley. But I had no idea — Jesus, so that’s what he meant. Oh God. The stupid bastard.’