Page 147 of Knottingley Ever After
Rémi, with the small dry look of a man handing a hand-grenade to a colleague who has, in two seasons of cohabitation, demonstrated his pin-pulling competence, hands the laptop over.
Matteo takes it onto his own lap.
“Give him,” Jude observes, mildly, “nine minutes.”
“Seven,” Matteo corrects, fingers already moving.
While Matteo works, Jude does what the captain always does in a room full of half-information, which is to fill the small ambient air with the rest of the data he has been carrying around all afternoon and not, until this exact moment, deployed.
“The coach who pushed Coach Declan out,” Jude says, “the one who currently runs O’Shea’s old town squad. His name is Garrett Sloane.”
“Garrett Sloane,” I repeat. “Why do I know that name.”
“Because you have, on a Saturday morning of every winter of your adult life, watched at least one nationally-broadcasted senior-tier game in which Sloane’s name has appeared in the small scrolling bottom-of-the-screen text as the head scout or assistant coaching consultant of one of the two rosters on screen. Sloane is, in the small private metric of the senior-coaching circuit, the top scouter in the country. They call him a villain. Not, frankly, without reason. His training methods are described, by the men who have been through them, as professionally brutal. But when Sloane picks a player, that player soars. Every man and woman he has selected in the past fifteen years has, statistically, reached at least a national championship final. His door is the door.”
“And?”
“Coach Declan,” Jude says, evenly, “was one of Sloane’s.”
Silence.
Rémi looks up from his careful index-fingering of the trackpad. “If Coach Declan was scouted by Sloane,” he says, the slow careful screw-driving cadence of a man laying out the precise structural inconsistency of the data, “then why would Coach Declan be the one telling Vance that Iris was not, in fact, interested.”
“Exactly,” Jude says.
I, in the middle of the bed, in my borrowed sleep T-shirt of Matteo’s and the small dignified pair of pink shorts I packed forsleeping in, tilt my head back against the headboard and try, with limited success, to do the small inner accounting.
If Coach Declan was Sloane’s, and Sloane and his upper-administrative friends ran the men who set Saoirse up, then Coach Declan telling Vance I wasn’t interested was —
“Okay,” Matteo announces, lifting the laptop screen and turning it so the three of us can see. “I have, on a small private archive accessible through the back end of an old league press portal my father’s lawyer’s firm still has credentials for, located the following.”
On the screen, a second photograph.
Saoirse Boyne again. In a different outfit. Black blazer over the home jersey of the same squad, the precise small unguarded grin of a woman about to sign her first senior-tier representation contract. Beside her, holding the corresponding press copy of the contract, his polished iron-grey hair half a shade darker than its current iteration, his tie the precise red of a man who knows precisely what red is going to do in any photograph, is Marcus Vance.
The headline above the photograph reads, in the precise large heavy sans-serif of a sports-business outlet hyping the small upcoming year:
FIRST OMEGA GOALIE ON THE HORIZON?
And below the photograph:
Vance Athletic Group signs prospect Saoirse Boyne in landmark deal.
“Oh,” I whisper.
“Mm,” Matteo agrees. “Three months later, she went through the ice on Sloane’s outdoor rink.”
Sloane’s outdoor rink.
Of course it was.
“When,” I ask, quietly, “did she die.”
Matteo glances at his screen. “October nineteenth. Six years and one month ago.”
I close my eyes for a small careful beat.
“That is the day,” I say, “Coach Declan disappeared.”
