Forty-One

  ‘How did they find out?’ he asked, hoarsely.

  Chaz Baker sat on a couch in his temporary home, with his face buried in his hands. Skinner thought that he might be sobbing, but his eyes were dry when he showed them again, sunken, with dark shadows below.

  ‘All it took,’ Alex told him, ‘was for one smart guy to look at the DNA profiles of you and Annette and to reach an obvious conclusion. The rest was basic police work. The question is, Mr Baker, how did you find out?’

  ‘From Annie,’ he replied. ‘In February, after we’d all settled in at Merrytown. She told me at that first meeting in the café at Chatelherault. She was edgy all through the meal, but eventually she came out with it. “Chaz,” she said, “you’re my brother.” Just like that.’

  ‘How did you react?’

  ‘You can’t imagine.’

  ‘Actually I can, but tell me anyway.’

  ‘I thought she was crazy. I thought she was trying to screw some more money out of me for Paco. I thought there was some sort of a pitch coming. I told her flat out that I didn’t believe her. “Look at your skin colour,” I said, “and look at mine.” She smiled at that, and told me that although her birth mother was from Sri Lanka, her father was English. And then she went into her bag and showed me the paper that proved it. My old man, the stupid old bastard, fathered a child with a fifteen-year-old girl he met in a club where his band was playing. When she told him, you know what he did? He fucked off to South Africa.’

  ‘Where you visited him in June,’ Skinner said.

  ‘Too right I did. Then I wished I hadn’t. I made the big mistake of telling him who his daughter had grown up to become, and he got all excited. He said he’d come back home to claim her. I told him I’d cut him off at the fucking knees if he did that, and that if I heard from anyone that he’d breathed a word about it I’d go straight to the Metropolitan Police and shop him.’

  ‘A quarter of a century on they might not have been interested.’

  ‘Oh no? What about all them ancient disc jockeys they keep hauling into court.’

  ‘Fair point,’ Alex conceded.

  ‘Anyway,’ Baker continued, ‘when I realised she was telling the truth, all sorts of stuff fell into place.’

  ‘For example?’

  ‘For example, Cisco Serra. The guy’s one of the top agents. Players hammer at his door wanting him to take them on, and players are where the money is for agents, not managers. Yet Cisco approached me, and asked if he could work with me. One thing I am is a realist; I don’t have a huge ego and I know my place in the pecking order. Plus, I wasn’t exactly a hot property at the time. I was locked into a court case with the owner of the French club I managed, with a fair chance that I’d lose it. Frenchman versus Englishman in a French court? Who would you back?’

  ‘I’d usually back the guy who can afford the best lawyers,’ Skinner murmured.

  ‘That wouldn’t have been me, mate,’ Baker shot back at him. ‘Anyway when Cisco pitched himself to me, first thing I said was, “Why?” He said that he thought I was an interesting bloke, and a bit of a challenge, given my circumstances. So I thought, “Why the ’ell not?” and I signed with him. A few weeks later he tells me that this Russian guy Rogozin that I’ve never heard of, he’s paid off the Frenchman and he’s giving me a three-year contract at Merrytown.’

  He paused, glancing at his interrogators. ‘First thing I said to him was, “Where’s Merrytown?” Cisco says it’s in Scotland, and I said, “Fucking Scotland?” but he pointed out rightly that it got me off a very sharp hook, the money was decent and the Russian was signing good players, with Paco Fonter at the head of the queue. I’d have done it anyway, but Paco was the icing on the cake. He’s far and away the best player I’ve ever worked with: he’s not Ronaldo, not Messi, but very, very good.’

  Picking up a bottle of water that sat at his feet he took a drink, and then continued. ‘What I didn’t know then, ’cos Cisco never said, was that Paco had insisted on me going to the club as part of his deal. I didn’t know either that Cisco approached me because Paco told him to. And I certainly didn’t know Paco did that because Annie asked him. It all went back to her, everything, after she found out about her and me being half-brother and half-sister.’

  ‘She took you under her wing?’ Alex said, quietly.

  ‘And then some.’

  ‘What about her birth mother? Keshini? Did she look for her?’

  Baker nodded. ‘She traced her, then wished she hadn’t. Her parents sent her back to Sri Lanka after Annie was born and given up for adoption. She died there, during the civil war against the Tamils. She was working in a hospital that was shelled by government forces; she was killed. Her name’s on a list of casualties compiled by Amnesty International.’

  He frowned. ‘She traced her grandparents too: the Gunawardenas. They’re in their seventies and still living in South London.’

  ‘Did she get in touch?’

  His expression grew even darker. ‘She did in a way,’ he said. ‘They ran a dry-cleaning business. When she found out what had happened to her mother, Annie bought the shop that they rented and terminated their lease.’

  ‘That’s pretty serious payback. Did they know who was doing it?’ Skinner asked.

  ‘Not as far as I know. I think she bought it through a pension fund she’d established.’

  ‘Whose idea was it to keep your relationship secret?’

  ‘It was mutual. Annie reckoned that if it came out that the whole Crazy Horse thing was a fantasy made up by her agent, they’d both look foolish and her career would be damaged. As for me, I didn’t want to be known as the son of a paedophile.’

  ‘How long have you been in touch with your father?’

  ‘I was never out of touch. He didn’t run off and leave Mum and me penniless; he was a session musician, but he had steady work and made good money. Even after he left the country he supported us without having to be chased by the CSA or anything like that. When I was twelve I was offered a place in a football academy, but there was an up-front cost; you had to contribute to your training, and provide most of your own kit. Dad stumped up the cash without a murmur.’

  ‘Do you visit him often in Durban?’ Alex asked.

  ‘I try to get out there once a year; more often than not I make it. Dad’s well known out there; he’s one of the top two or three jazz guitarists in the country.’

  ‘But you were angry when you found out about Annette?’

  Baker sighed. ‘Yeah, I was hard on him. I’d never have shopped him to the Met though; that was just a threat. It wasn’t needed either. As soon as I explained that him showing up out of the blue would be bad for Annie, he got the message and dropped the idea.’

  ‘He must know about her death by now,’ Skinner said. ‘Has he been in touch?’

  ‘The other way around. I called him on Sunday, and told him what had happened. He was gutted, poor old bloke. He’d just got used to the idea of having a daughter, now she’s gone. We had this idea, Annie and me, that I’d take her out to Durban next summer, so they could meet.’

  ‘Does Paco know?’ he asked.

  ‘Definitely not,’ Baker declared. ‘Annie would have told him, but I asked her not to, for footballing reasons rather than personal. I’m Paco’s boss; I’d rather not be his brother-in-law as well, not when we’ve the other connection.’

  ‘And Lita?’

  ‘You got to be fucking joking, mate. I couldn’t dump a secret like that on her.’

  ‘So,’ Alex interjected, filling a silence as it developed, ‘it looks as if your relationship was the secret that was referred to in Annette’s text. Why would she suddenly want to bring it into the open?’

  Her client shook his head. ‘I’ve got no idea, honestly, not the faintest, not a Scooby.’ He looked at her. ‘Is it important?’

  ‘The prosecution may suggest to the jury that you killed her to prevent her from doing that.’

  ‘Why would I want to do that?’ he challenged.

  ‘To protect your father from possible prosecution, and from career damage; it might be suggested that you didn’t get the Merrytown job on your own merits, but as part of the Paco deal.’

  ‘I wouldn’t fancy either of those,’ he conceded, ‘but I wouldn’t kill her over it.’

  ‘There is a way of countering the Crown,’ she added. ‘It could be damaging if it came out in court, but if we pre-empted that and released the story ourselves before the trial, it wouldn’t have any viability as a possible motive.’

  ‘But Dad will be in the shit if we release it.’

  ‘It’s going to come out anyway, Chaz. You can’t stop that.’

  ‘What about Annie’s reputation? Sirena’s Crazy Horse legend and all that?’

  ‘That too; it’ll be revealed in court.’

  ‘Are you saying to me we should come clean about everything?’

  ‘The more I think about it,’ she admitted, ‘the more I realise that I am. It wouldn’t be simply tactical. It wouldn’t only be about taking a weapon away from the Crown. We would be planting a question in the minds of the jury. Is this man such a monster that he would actually kill his own sister? Reasonable doubt, Mr Baker; that’s what our defence is all about. And such a doubt, in the minds of the fifteen ordinary people who will make up your jury, will be a very large one indeed.’

  He sat silent for a minute and more, shifting in his chair as he wrestled with his dilemma. ‘If I agreed,’ he murmured, finally, ‘how would we do it? I’m not allowed to talk to the media. Would you hold a press conference?’

  ‘Hell no, the Law Society would crucify me for that.’

  ‘But they couldn’t touch me,’ her father said. ‘I have access to the media, at editor level. The information we’re talking about here is all in the public domain, birth records and such, and I’m not an officer of the court, so if I give it to my contact, there would be no comeback for you or for Alex.’ He paused. ‘But if you agree to me doing that, I would want to give, no, I’d insist, that we give advance warning to Paco Fonter.’

  ‘Okay, but why?’

  ‘Because there’s every chance the police will tell him, as soon as they’ve interviewed you. And because morally it’s the right thing to do. I’m seeing Paco this afternoon. Do I have your permission to tell him about you and Annette, even without a decision to take the story to the media?’

  ‘I should tell him myself,’ Baker said.

  ‘The sheriff would slam you straight inside if you spoke to him. Besides, the way things stand at the moment he might kill you before you got a word out.’

  ‘Okay,’ he sighed, ‘go ahead.’

  ‘Thanks. This has been a very interesting meeting, Chaz. It’s given me a lot to chew over. Not least . . . and I keep coming back to this man . . . the role of Dimitri Rogozin in all this. What you’re telling me is that your becoming a client of Cisco Serra and then your move to Merrytown were orchestrated by Annette Bordeaux, so that she could have her husband and her half-brother in one place.’

  ‘It seems that way,’ Baker agreed.

  ‘But hold on: part of that plan depended on you being bought out of your legal dispute in France, by Dimitri Rogozin. How much money are we talking about here, Chaz, what was the settlement figure?’

  ‘I don’t know the final amount,’ the manager replied, ‘but the Frenchman was suing me for two million euro plus costs.’

  ‘Two million!’ Skinner whistled. ‘That’s a big bag of cash in any situation. And with respect, Chaz, Merrytown is only Merrytown and you ain’t Jose Mourinho.’

  Forty-Two

  ‘No,’ Paco Fonter said. ‘I had no idea of this.’ A trickle of sweat ran from his forehead and down a furrow in his cheek. It looked like a tear.

  ‘Did your wife ever talk about her early life?’ Skinner asked.

  The footballer rose from the large, complicated, exercise machine; he wore cycling shorts and a sleeveless red vest, on which damp patches showed. He had insisted that they meet in the gym of the Norton House Hotel. ‘I can’t play just now, but I can keep myself fit. I need to hurt myself just now.’

  All through Skinner’s story of his wife’s secret past and her relationship with the man who was accused of killing her he had been pressing weight, an impressive hundred kilos, over and over again.

  ‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘She told me about her parents in the first month after we met. She loved them, and what happened, it hurt her very badly. I could see it in her eyes when she talked about them; her mother dying and her father no longer believing in God, and killing himself with whisky.’

  ‘She told you she was adopted?’

  ‘Yes, I knew that.’

  ‘Did she ever talk about her birth parents?’

  Fonter shook his head as he seated himself at another machine and adjusted the weights, selecting eighty kilos. ‘No, she didn’t. I asked her if she had ever tried to trace her real mother, but she brushed me off. I saw that it upset her so I left it alone.’ He paused. ‘She was killed, you said?’

  ‘Yes, in the civil war in Sri Lanka, after her parents sent her home.’

  ‘And she really did that to them, her . . . abuelos ?’ he exclaimed, reverting to Spanish for the lack of the word in English. ‘She threw them out of their shop and killed their business?’

  ‘That’s what she told Chaz. You’ll find it among her assets, I’m sure, when you wind up her estate.’

  The footballer pulled on the levers above his head, drawing them down to the level of his shoulders; the weights rose up in their cradle. ‘She must have been very angry with them, to do that,’ he said, as he lowered them. ‘Annie was a kind lady, a very gentle lady. She had no cruelty in her.’ He repeated the exercise, smoothly, with no apparent effort, then did it again, and again. Skinner was impressed; of all the machines in the gym he used in Gullane, that was the one he hated most.

  ‘How did she feel about her father?’ he asked, resting after ten repetitions.

  ‘I don’t know. Chaz didn’t say. But he did hope that she would go to South Africa with him, to meet him.’

  ‘I need to talk to him,’ Fonter said. ‘He knew things about my wife that I did not. Can you help me?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Skinner answered, frankly. ‘His bail conditions wouldn’t allow it.’ He hesitated for a moment, then asked, ‘If you did meet him, how would you feel, looking at him, knowing that he’s charged with killing your wife?’

  ‘Good question,’ the footballer murmured, as he increased the weight on the machine by five kilos. He launched into another series of exercises; he did fifteen repetitions, straining over the last two or three. ‘When the police told me, last Sunday, that the boss was accused, at first I refused to believe. Then when finally I did, I wanted to kill him. Not any more. Now I want to ask him if it is true. If he tells me it is, then maybe I want to kill him again. But right now, no. I am confused, sir, and that is the truth.’

  ‘What do you feel, Paco? What does your gut tell you? Do you think Chaz did it?’

  ‘I ask myself that a thousand times,’ he replied, wiping his face with the towel draped round his neck, ‘and each time I think I believe it a little less. What you tell me now, that he and Annie have the same father, that makes a difference. Now I say no, I do not believe. But who? Who else?’

  ‘If I knew that,’ Skinner said, ‘he’d be locked up already. But I don’t. Your wife was murdered in an apartment that is pretty much impregnable. Chaz Baker was there at the time, and there’s no direct evidence that anyone else was. So . . . Did Annette, Annie, have a problem with anyone, in her business life or personally?

  ‘No,’ Fonter protested, ‘for sure no. Annie was lovely, and everybody loved her.’

  ‘Somebody didn’t; that’s self-evident. How about you, Paco? Is there anyone in the world who’d want to hurt you so badly?’

  ‘There’s a crazy man in Spain gave me trouble when I played there. I scored three against his brother’s team and because of the way I celebrated, he went loco. He got on Twitter and he sent me bad messages, threats, you know.’

  ‘He was a troll.’

  ‘Exactly, that’s the word. Things got so bad with him that he waited outside my house one night with a gun. It only shot little white pellets but to me it looked real, until I realised it wasn’t. He scared me, it’s true. I took it from him and I gave him a beating. One of my neighbours saw the whole thing and called the cops. They arrived and they gave him a beating too, then took him away. I never heard from him again. There are wild people about football, Mr Skinner, people who are not cool, but usually they are also very dumb.’ He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I can think of nobody who hates me so much they would kill my Annie.’

  ‘Without implying anything,’ he continued, ‘how are your relationships with people within the club? I know that Chaz respects you, but how about the rest? I assume that you’re the highest earner there, the best paid player.’

  Fonter nodded, as he added five more kilos to the weight load, then took hold of the levers.

  ‘How do the other guys feel about that? Is anyone openly jealous?’

  He had to wait for an answer, as the man punished himself on the machine, pushing himself to the limit of his strength, snarling as he completed a set of twenty pulls. The last left him red faced, with cord-like veins standing out on his arms. Skinner retrieved the water bottle that lay at his feet and handed it to him.

  ‘Thank you,’ he gasped, then took a long drink. ‘There are always players within football clubs,’ he said, ‘who think they should be paid more money, but they blame their agents, not the teammates who are more fortunate than they are.’

  ‘So you get on with all your teammates,’ Skinner suggested.

  ‘I did not say that,’ the player corrected him. ‘I don’t like the American, Flowers. He’s arrogant, and he’s not as good a player as he thinks he is. Also he doesn’t pass to me when he should. But what I do not like the most is the way he treats Alice, the physio; she’s his girlfriend, but maybe you know that by now.’ Skinner nodded. ‘He disrespects her.’