Local Legend: Death bonded them. Life divided them. by Paul Trembling

Author:Paul Trembling
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782642787
Publisher: Lion Hudson
Published: 2019-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

“Everybody says that football is ‘a game of two halves’. But not everyone plans their strategy with that in mind. Adi, however, always does.”

Graham Deeson, match report in The Echo

It was good to see Adi looking happy, but there was obviously more to tell, and I didn’t think that this was going to be “happy ever after”. I started to point out the most obvious fly in the ointment.

“But Lonza…”

Adi cut me off with a wave of his stick. “Sure, Lonza thought he had it sorted. The fix was in. Not through me, of course. I was the patsy, the fall guy. And I guess he knew that I’d never agree to throw a match anyway. But the evening before the game, Hans Van Hoorn came to have a quiet word with me. Seems that Handy Jack had been round to see him, and had made him an offer. If Hans saw to it that the CSS lost to Real, and preferably lost big, then he’d get to go back home with a significant cash-in-hand bonus. Now Hans is a straight arrow, not a dishonest bone in his body, and he told Jack straight out that he’d have nothing to do with it. Jack just shrugged, and told him that if he didn’t he’d go home with two broken legs, at a minimum.”

“Carrot and stick,” I commented.

“Carrot and baseball bat most likely,” Adi said. “That being Jack’s tool of choice. So Hans said yes, but first chance he got he slipped off to see me.

“Of course, I knew straight away that Lonza wouldn’t be putting all his rotten eggs into one basket. If he’d had a go at Hans, then he’d probably also had a word with José Santos – and from what I knew of José, he wasn’t above taking a backhander. And there were a couple of the others who I thought would be especially vulnerable to that sort of pressure. So Hans and I put our heads together, had a bit of a think, and came up with a plan.

“We’d hired a big stadium – the home ground for LA Galaxy – and Lonza had laid everything on to make a big spectacle of it. Cheerleaders, fireworks, a marching band – the whole kit and caboodle. The stadium was packed, the TV cameras were there, and Lonza had booked himself a big corporate box, where he planned to sit and watch me go down the pan while he raked in some big bucks.

“Of course, I didn’t need for that to happen. So just before the players went out, I changed the starting line-up. I pulled Hans out, and made sure that all those I had suspicions about were in.”

Sam frowned. “Wasn’t that the wrong way to go about it? I’d have thought that you’d pull Santos and anyone else you didn’t trust.”

Adi gave him a sly look. “And let Lonza know that I was on to him? No, he wasn’t going to find that out until it was too late to stop it.

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