of us!’ said Gerry. Trust him to make me look a tit in front of them all.
‘Great to have you back, gaffer,’ Rodway said through a mouthful of caramel éclair. (It was a bit rude that they’d all cracked on with the buffet before I’d arrived, but I thought better of saying anything.) ‘Hasn’t Gillian done you proud with the spread?’
‘Gillian made all this?’ I asked, astonished. I reflected again on what she had said a few moments earlier. Maybe, just maybe, she really was on my side after all.
‘Hidden talents I guess!’ Rodway said. ‘We’re all just so glad to see you home.’
‘And you,’ I said, trying to blink back the tears that I could feel welling behind my eyes. ‘All of you. It’s fantastic to have your support at a time like this. My name’s been dragged through the mud this past week.’
‘I’d have loved to have seen the look on old Leigh’s face when you broke the news to him,’ Gerry said with a delighted cackle.
Leigh had turned a worrying shade of grey when I called him and Brody back in and put the blindingly obvious fact to him: if the attack on the Alliance arsenal the night before had been as a result of someone leaking those plans to the L’zuhl, how on Earth could it have possibly been me? The meeting in which Leigh and the Alliance had made their plans to move ships to Adelphi Six had been on Tuesday night. I’d been in the nick since lunchtime on Monday. I was exonerated. Leigh was completely unapologetic (apart from when he begrudgingly apologised to me as I was released) and looked more worried about the fact that his work in catching the spy would have to continue than about my own welfare. Typical. Always thinking about himself.
‘Serves them all right for making up this whole spy nonsense in the first place,’ Gerry said.
‘No, I’ve changed my mind on that part at least,’ I corrected him. ‘I did initially believe it was all a ruse, a plot to undermine the football club, but having heard what I did during my interrogation, I’m sure it’s the real deal. I’m just glad they can rule me out.’
‘Wow,’ said Gribble, my lanky centre-half, so tall that his hair was scraping the ceiling, his neck at an awkward angle. ‘Who would want to sell us out to the L’zuhl like that?’
‘Not me, that’s the main thing,’ I reiterated. Still, my realisation that the spy was real had somewhat dampened my mood. I’d been utterly convinced it was a ploy to get at me. Now I had to face up to the reality that my football club had in actuality been chucked on the scrapheap for legitimate reasons.
‘That really is it, then,’ Gerry said glumly, picking a strawberry from a cheesecake on the table. ‘If the spy is legit, we’re not getting our funding back.’
Later, as Gerry showed an appalled Gillian his taser battle scars, Rodway came over and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper.
‘Gaffer,’ he said. ‘Are we still on for… for the plan we discussed? About getting out of here to move to that new club? Once the lockdown is lifted, I mean.’
This was something to which I’d been giving a great deal of thought myself during my incarceration – and seeing my lads huddled in the kitchen of my tiny flat to welcome me home had only confirmed and vindicated the decision I had privately made. (A decision which, by the way, was in no way influenced by the fact that Moyesie’s team had secured an emphatic midweek win in Galactic League D during my time inside and his job was suddenly less precarious than it had been.)
‘Palangonia is our home, Rodway,’ I said. ‘We can’t walk away from what we’ve built here.’
‘But—’
‘I’ll admit I got carried away and perhaps spoke to you about it when I should have still been weighing up my options. But it’s the coward’s way out. We have to stay. We have to stand and fight.’
‘I do admire your dedication, Kevin, I really do,’ Gillian said, wandering over. ‘But while this spy is at large, there’s no prospect of the club’s funding being restored. And, as you’ve witnessed for yourself first-hand, the guards have nothing to go on. He, or she, is out there somewhere. But they clearly have no idea where to start looking. The bottom line is, short of you going out and finding that spy yourself, Palangonia FC is not coming back any time soon.’
In a flash, a light bulb was suddenly illuminated above my head.
‘That still playing up, is it?’ Gerry said, squinting at the ceiling. ‘Mine does that sometimes. I’ll see if I can get someone in to fix that for you.’
‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Gillian, you’re a genius.’
‘Am I?’ she said, bemused. ‘That’s not exactly the tune you’ve been singing this past year, I must say.’
‘I’m going to save Palangonia FC. And if it helps win this stupid war at the same time, then so much the better.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Gerry said blankly.
‘First thing tomorrow,’ I said, ‘I’m going out into the Compound. And I’m not coming back home until I catch that bloody spy myself.’
TO THE LIBRARY
At dawn, I rose quickly and, after a handful of stale crisps from the half-eaten buffet in the kitchen (which no bugger had stayed behind to help me clear up, by the way), I headed out. It wasn’t the most nutritious breakfast given the big day I had ahead of me, but then again Gary Lineker has been contractually obliged to eat Walkers crisps for every meal since 1995 and look at him. The man’s an Adonis.
I went down to the ground floor of Accommodation Block 8-B. The blocks were a proper Upstairs, Downstairs arrangement – the bigger-name celebrities and important public figures were housed in the swanky upper floors and even had a special lift that bypassed the riff-raff on the lower floors. The hierarchical system was disgraceful and I wanted no part of it. Having said that, I was on the twenty-second floor of sixty in Block 8-B and it was my life’s quest to get myself moved higher up. No disrespect to people like Jimmy Carr or Michael Portillo, but do they really outrank a genuine public servant like Kevin Keegan? Exactly.
With a spring in my step for the task ahead, I headed to the Compound Square.
*
‘Right then,’ Gerry said as we sipped the hot chocolates he’d bought from the Costa on the corner. I noticed that he’d added marshmallows to his and not mine. I’d remember that. ‘Where do we start?’
‘To catch a spy,’ I said, trying to sound like I had the first clue what I was talking about, ‘you have to think like a spy.’
‘Agreed,’ Gerry said. ‘So how does a spy think?’
‘Dunno,’ I said eventually.
‘Sorry we’re late!’ came a voice from behind us.
‘All right, Rodway?’ Gerry said. ‘Not often we see you up and about this early.’
My
