"It's charged," his mother said.
She didn't say hello. He could hear the kitchen around her. The fridge that hummed louder than it should. The tap that dripped once every few seconds no matter how hard you turned it. A dog barking somewhere down the lane, the brown one that belonged to Mr Henry's nephew and barked at everything after dark, including the moon.
"Where are you?"
"At the table." A pause. "I have it in front of me. It's sitting by the salt."
He could see it. The plastic tablecloth with the yellow flowers, worn white at the corners where elbows had rested on it for twenty years. The salt in its glass shaker with the dented lid. The blue phone lying beside it like something that had crawled in from the yard.
"Mama, you don't have to read them."
"I've already read them. I read them all again. Twice." Her voice was steady, but it was a made steadiness, the way a table is steady when you've folded a piece of cardboard under one leg. "Forty one messages. The first one is from the September. You were fourteen. The last one is from the March after."
"Forty one."
"I counted."
He hadn't known there were that many. He had remembered them as a handful, a few dozen at most, short and sharp and perfectly timed. Forty one. Spread across six months. He did the sum without meaning to. More than one a week. Every week. For half a year.
Across the kitchen table in Knowle, Nicole was watching him. She had pulled her chair round so she was sitting beside him instead of opposite, and she had her hand on his knee under the table, and she wasn't moving it.
"You want me to read you some?" his mother asked.
He thought about it. He thought about hearing those words in her voice. The words he had carried around for years in a man's voice, a voice he had never actually heard say them, only read them, and yet had heard all the same, clipped and pleasant and English.
"Read me the dates," he said. "Just the dates. Not the words."
So she did. She read them slowly, one after another, the date and the time. The fourteenth of September, nine forty two at night. The twentieth of September, ten past ten. On and on. Most of them late. Most of them on match days, an hour or two after the final whistle at Cornwall, timed for when a boy would be lying in bed with his legs aching and his head still full of the game.
He sat and listened and his mother's voice went on, flat and careful, and somewhere around the twenty fifth date he realised that Nicole had started writing them down on the back of a supermarket receipt with a pencil she had found in the fruit bowl.
When his mother got to the end she stopped.
"There's one more," she said.
"You said forty one."
"Forty one you read. There's one you didn't." He heard the phone being picked up, turned over. "It's still got the little envelope on it. Closed. The last one. It came the night you blocked him. The same night. Eleven minutes before."
He didn't say anything. He couldn't.
He remembered that night. Sitting on the bed with the Nokia in his hand. Going through the menus. Finding the number. He remembered there had been a message waiting, the little envelope flashing in the corner of the screen, and he remembered seeing it and not opening it, because he knew who it was from, and he had gone straight past it into the settings and found Block and pressed it before he could change his mind. He had never opened it. He had forgotten it existed.
"I didn't read that one," his mother said. "When I found the phone. All those years ago. I read the others but I left that one closed. It felt like yours." A pause. "You want me to open it now?"
Nicole's hand had gone still on his knee.
"Yeah," he said. "Open it."
He heard the buttons. The old click of them, that little plastic sound. He heard his mother breathe in.
Then she read it, slowly, in her own voice, every word separate, as if she was reading something off a gravestone.
"Disappointing. I had high hopes for this file. They never really close, you know. IC."
The kitchen in Knowle was very quiet. The rain had stopped. He could hear a drip from the gutter outside, falling onto the stone step by the back door.
"That's what he sent you," his mother said. "When you were fifteen. That's what he sent my son."
"I never read it."
"I know you didn't. Thank God you didn't."
He put his hand over his mouth. Under the table, Nicole squeezed his knee hard enough to hurt.
"I called the number," his mother said.
"Mama. No."
"Before I called you. I sat down and I dialled it on my own phone, and I held it to my ear, and I waited." She made a short sound that might have been a laugh if anything about this had been funny. "A woman's voice. A recording. The number you have dialled is not in service. That's all. He's long gone from that number."
"You shouldn't have done that."
"Why? What was he going to do? Come to Montego Bay?" Her voice rose for the first time, just a little, and then came back down. "I'm not a fool, Armani. I wanted to know. If he had answered, I would have put the phone down and called you. I wasn't going to talk to him. I don't have anything to say to that man that he would understand."
He believed her. He had never once in his life known her to say something she didn't mean.
"So what now?" she said. "You tell me. You have people over there. Big club. Lawyers. Whatever you have. What do they do with this?"
He looked at Nicole. Nicole looked back at him.
"I don't know yet," he said. "I'll find out tomorrow. Can you keep it safe till then?"
"It's been safe in that drawer for eleven years," his mother said. "It can be safe in my handbag for one more night."
He went into Bodymoor Heath early on Friday, before the treatment room opened, and sat in the car park with the engine off and the phone in his hand and tried to work out who to tell.
The manager was the wrong person. The manager had a Premier League run in and a squad to keep together and nothing he could do about a man by a fence in Small Heath. Deon was the wrong person, or at least not the first person. Deon would want to know, and Deon would be calm and clever about it, but Deon's job was contracts and clubs and release clauses, and this was not that.
In the end he went to the woman who ran player care, Joanne, who had sorted out his car insurance when he arrived and found Nicole a dentist and once, memorably, got a man out of the barn's chimney who had been sent to clean it and got stuck. He knocked on her door at twenty past eight. She looked up from her desk and saw his face and stopped typing.
"Sit down," she said. "What's happened?"
He told her as little as he could. A boy at a school visit. A man claiming to be an agent. A card. Something from his own past that might be connected. He didn't say Croft's name. He didn't say anything about boots or purses or his mother's kitchen.
Joanne listened without interrupting. When he finished she picked up her phone and pressed one button.
"Graham. Have you got twenty minutes? I'm sending Armani Wilson down to you." She listened. "No, he's fine. It's not a club thing. It's a safeguarding thing. Yes. Now, please."
She put the phone down.
"Graham Pryce," she said. "Head of safeguarding. Twenty six years with West Midlands Police before he came here. Most of it in child protection." She looked at him steadily. "He's the right person. Go and tell him everything you didn't just tell me."
Graham Pryce's office was at the end of a corridor Armani had walked past a hundred times and never gone down. It was small and tidy and had no football in it at all. No signed shirts, no framed photographs of famous nights. A desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, a window that looked out onto the car park, and on the wall a calendar from a garden centre in Sutton Coldfield, still turned to March.
Graham was in his late fifties, broad and grey, with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and the slow, patient manner of a man who had sat across a table from a great many people while they told him the worst thing that had ever happened to them. He shook Armani's hand and sat down and took a notebook out of his drawer, a proper paper one, and uncapped a pen.
"Start wherever you want," he said. "There's no wrong place."
Armani started in Montego Bay.
It took a long time. Longer than with Nicole, because Graham kept stopping him, gently, to ask for things. Dates. Names of places. What exactly the man had said, word for word, if he could remember. Whether the man had ever met him alone. Whether the man had ever touched him. No. Never. He was careful. Whether the man had ever asked for money directly. No. He just made it so I thought I needed to spend it. Graham wrote all of it down in small neat handwriting and didn't look up except when Armani stopped talking, and then he would look up and wait, and Armani would find that he could go on.
When he got to the school in Aston, Graham's pen stopped moving.
"Which school?"
Armani told him. Graham wrote it down and drew a box around it.
"And the boy said Small Heath. A Sunday league tournament. Under fifteens."
"That's what Mr Adeyemi told me."
"And the man asked about the boy's mother. And his boots."
"Yes."
Graham put the pen down. He took his reading glasses off his forehead and folded them and set them on the desk and looked out of the window for a moment at the car park, where a groundsman was hosing down the wheels of a tractor.
"Mr Wilson," he said. "I'm going to tell you something, and I want you to understand that I'm telling you because you've brought me something real, not because I'm trying to frighten you."
"Okay."
"I sit on a working group with the Birmingham County FA. Grassroots safeguarding. We meet once a month in a very depressing room in a leisure centre in Edgbaston and we go through the reports that have come in from the clubs." He turned the pen over in his fingers. "Since September we've had two reports. Two clubs. One in Erdington, one in Hodge Hill. A man at the side of the pitch after under fourteens and under fifteens matches. Approaching boys. Claiming to be connected to an agency. Talking about trials abroad. Asking about the boys' families. Older white man, grey hair, well spoken." He looked at Armani. "Nobody got a name. Nobody kept a card. The boys' parents were suspicious, told him to go away, and he went. So there was nothing to follow up. We sent out a general alert to the clubs in the area. And then nothing happened. And you know how it is. Nothing happening becomes the thing you're busy with."
Armani sat very still.
"Now," Graham said. "Small Heath is between Erdington and Hodge Hill. Not far from either. And you're the first person who's walked into a room with me and said a phrase this man uses." He tapped the notebook. "Building a file. That's not much. But it's the first thing we've had that's more than a description."
"What about the phone?"
Graham leaned back in his chair. "The phone's the interesting part. And the difficult part. I'm going to be honest with you."
"Please."
"What happened to you happened in Jamaica, eleven years ago, when you were a minor. That's a different jurisdiction. Nobody in this building or at West Midlands Police can do anything about it directly. Grooming, in the way we'd use the word, is hard to prove even when it's recent and local, and the man was careful, by the sound of it. He never asked for money. He never met you alone." He held up a hand before Armani could speak. "I'm not saying it wasn't what it was. I'm telling you what a lawyer will say."
"Then what's the phone for?"
"The phone is for identification," Graham said. "If what's happening in Birmingham now is the same man, then that phone tells us who he is. A phone number registered somewhere, once, to someone. A pattern of language. Initials. Times. The way he writes. If we ever get close to this man here, if a club gets his name, if a parent keeps a card, then that phone is the thing that turns him from a stranger at a fence into somebody with a history." He paused. "And a history is what a prosecutor needs. Not for what he did to you. For what he's doing now."
Armani looked at the garden centre calendar on the wall. March. A photograph of daffodils in a terracotta pot.
"So I need the phone here," Graham said. "Physically. Not photographs. Not screenshots. The actual handset. If it ever matters, someone will ask who's touched it and where it's been, and the answer needs to be as short as possible."
"I'll get it couriered."
"That's fine. Use a proper service, tracked, signed for. I'll give you an address."
His mother said no.
"That phone is not going in a box with a stranger," she said, that night, on the phone. "It's not going in an envelope. It's not going on a plane by itself in the dark under somebody's suitcases."
"Mama, it's a proper courier. Tracked. They do it every day."
"I don't care what they do every day. They don't do this every day." He could hear the tap dripping. "I'm bringing it."
He had been lying on the sofa in the barn with his leg up on a cushion and an ice pack strapped to his hip. He sat up so fast the ice pack slid off onto the floor.
"You're what?"
"I'm bringing it. I'll put it in my handbag and I'll get on the plane and I'll give it to your man myself. Into his hand."
"Mama. You hate flying."
"I hate a lot of things. I still do them."
"What about work?"
"I have nine days of holiday I haven't taken since before Kofi passed. Mrs Bryan can give them to me or she can find another woman to fold her sheets." A pause. "And my visa is still good. You remember? The one you got me last year. For Christmas. That I never used."
He remembered. He had sorted it out in the autumn, months before Kofi died, a surprise, a UK visitor visa and a ticket to Birmingham so she could have her first English Christmas in the barn with the beams and the fire and the frost on the fields. And then Kofi had died, and his mother had stayed in Montego Bay with Beverly and the flowers and the casseroles, and the ticket had been cancelled, and nobody had mentioned it since.
"It's still good till the autumn," she said. "I checked."
Nicole had come in from the kitchen and was standing in the doorway. He looked at her. She had heard enough to understand. She raised her eyebrows. He shook his head slightly, not no but I don't know what to do with this woman, and Nicole smiled for the first time in two days.
"When?" he said into the phone.
"There's a flight on Thursday. Kingston to Gatwick. Then the train to Birmingham. I looked."
"I'll book it. Not the train. I'll send a car."
"I can take a train."
"Mama. Please. Let me send a car."
She made a small noise of complaint, the one she always made when he spent money on her, but she didn't argue.
"Thursday," she said. "And then I'll see your season finish. And I'll see this famous barn. And I'll see this famous apple tree that Nicole is always sending me pictures of." A pause. "And I'll put that phone into your man's hand myself."
"Okay."
"Okay." Her voice softened. "How is the hip?"
"Better. Rhian says I can run on grass Monday."
"Then run on grass Monday," his mother said. "And be sensible."
He missed Newcastle.
It was a Saturday lunchtime kick off at Villa Park and he watched it from a seat in the directors' box with a coat over his legs and a cushion behind his back, next to Matty Cash, who was suspended for five yellow cards and spent the whole ninety minutes muttering about the referee who had given him the fifth one in a different match three weeks ago.
It was strange, watching from up there. Everything looked slower. He could see the shapes of the game in a way he never could on the pitch, the gaps opening and closing like lungs, and he kept seeing things before they happened. A run that wasn't made. A pass that should have gone right instead of left. He leaned forward in his seat with his elbows on his knees and his fingers pressed together and Cash looked at him sideways after about twenty minutes and said, "You look like a manager."
"I feel like a fan."
"Same thing. Managers are just fans who got lucky."
Tom Ashby started on the right. The nineteen year old from the academy, the one who had come on for him in Paris and been beaten by Mendes for the winner. He was nervous for the first fifteen minutes, giving the ball away, hiding a little, the way Armani remembered hiding at Brentford. Then in the twenty sixth minute he took on Tino Livramento on the outside and beat him, actually beat him, a burst of speed down the touchline and a cross that Watkins headed just wide, and the Holte End roared, and Armani found himself on his feet shouting yes, yes, that's it before he knew he had stood up.
Ashby looked up toward the directors' box after that. Just once, quickly, as if checking whether anybody had seen. Armani lifted his arm. He didn't know if Ashby could see him from that distance. It didn't matter.
One one. Woltemade scored for Newcastle in the first half. Rogers equalised in the second. A point. Fourth place still in their hands with four to play.
On Monday, Rhian let him run.
It was a bright cold morning, the sky that hard pale blue that only came in spring, and the grass on the far pitch at Bodymoor Heath had been cut short and was still wet from the sprinklers. She stood on the touchline with a clipboard and a stopwatch and a face that gave nothing away.
"Fifty percent," she said. "Four lengths. Then we look."
He ran at fifty percent. It felt like walking. It felt like being let out of a box. The air was cold in his chest and the grass went by under his feet and the hip was there, he could feel it, but it was quiet, a faint ache at the top of the thigh like a bruise that was nearly finished.
"Seventy," Rhian said, after four.
He ran at seventy. The hip noticed. It didn't complain. It just noticed.
"How's that?"
"Two out of ten."
She looked at him over her glasses.
"Honest," he said. "Two. Maybe three."
She made a note. "Tomorrow, eighty. Wednesday, we try some turns. If it holds, you're on the bench for Brighton on Saturday. Not to play. To be on the bench."
"And if it holds after that?"
"Then we talk about Fulham," Rhian said. "And we talk about the last day. And not before."
He walked back toward the building with his boots in his hand and the grass cold through his socks. Two matches left after Brighton. Fulham away. Then the last day, at home, at Villa Park. Against West Ham.
A hundred and eighty minutes. If he was sensible. If it held.
Fourteen.
Beverly called on Sunday as always, and for once she didn't start in the middle of things.
"Your mother told me," she said.
"I thought she might."
"She came round to the house. I'm back in the house now, did she tell you? Three weeks early. I couldn't stand the boxes any more. She came round on Friday night with a pot of soup and she sat at my kitchen table and she told me all of it." A pause. "I didn't know, Armani. About that man. When you were boys. Kofi never told me."
"He knew?"
"He must have known. You two never had a secret from each other in your life." Beverly breathed out. "But he never told me. Not once. Not even after. He kept it for you."
Armani was sitting under the apple tree. The blossom was almost gone now. The petals that were left on the branches had gone brown at the edges and the ones on the grass had been rained into the earth. In their place, if you looked closely, you could see the beginnings of something else, small hard green swellings at the base of each flower, too small yet to be anything.
"Your mother's flying on Thursday," Beverly said. "She told me that too. She's never been on a plane by herself in her life. She was more frightened telling me about the plane than she was telling me about the man."
"She'll be alright."
"She'll be alright because she's your mother," Beverly said. "That woman could walk through a hurricane holding a pot of rice and not spill any." She was quiet for a moment. "You look after her when she's there."
"I will."
"And you look after yourself. I'm not having anything happen to you. Not now." Her voice caught, very slightly. "I've had enough happen."
Graham called on Tuesday evening.
Armani was in the kitchen. Nicole was out, at a site meeting in Leamington that had overrun. He was standing at the counter chopping an onion badly, his eyes streaming, and he wiped his hands on a tea towel and answered with the phone pinned between his ear and his shoulder.
"Mr Wilson. Are you somewhere you can talk?"
"Yeah. Go ahead."
"I had a call this afternoon from the welfare officer at a club in Kingstanding. Under thirteens. They played on Sunday morning and after the match a man approached one of the fathers. Not the boy. The father. Older, grey hair, well dressed. Said he had been watching the lad for some weeks and was building..." Graham paused. "Well. You know what he said."
The knife was still in Armani's hand. He put it down on the chopping board very carefully.
"The father was suspicious," Graham said. "He's a bus driver. Not a football man. He said something about it didn't smell right, the way the man talked, too smooth. He told the man he'd think about it. And then he went home and told the club, because our alert had gone round in September and his wife had read it out to him."
"Did the man give him a card?"
"He did," Graham said. "And the father kept it."
The kitchen was very quiet. The tap was not dripping. That was the tap at home. This tap was new and it didn't drip, and for some reason that was the only thing Armani could think about for a moment, the silence where the dripping should have been.
"Have you seen it?"
"Not yet. The welfare officer's bringing it to me tomorrow. In a sandwich bag, which is the best we can hope for." Graham's voice was very even. "I'm telling you because you asked me to keep you informed. And because there may come a point where I need you to look at something and tell me if you recognise it."
"The name."
"Possibly the name. Possibly the card itself. The style of it. Whether it matches what you remember." A pause. "Mr Wilson, I want you to understand that it may not be him. It may be a completely different man. There are more people doing this than anyone wants to believe."
"I understand."
"But if it is," Graham said, "then your mother is bringing the other half of it across the ocean on Thursday. And that's quite something."
Armani stood at the counter. Outside the kitchen window the light was going. The apple tree was a dark shape against a grey sky, its branches bare of blossom now, holding onto those small green swellings that weren't anything yet.
"I'll call you tomorrow afternoon," Graham said. "After I've seen it."
"Okay."
"Get some sleep."
He hung up.
Armani stood there for a long time. The onion was half chopped on the board. His eyes were still streaming. He couldn't tell any more whether it was the onion.
He picked up the knife and finished chopping it, slowly, carefully, every piece the same size, the way his mother had taught him in the kitchen in Montego Bay when he was nine and too short to see over the counter without standing on the upturned bucket. Then he put the pieces in the pan and turned on the heat and stood over them while they softened, stirring, not thinking, just watching them go from white to clear to gold.
When Nicole came home at nine the kitchen smelled of onions and garlic and thyme and he was standing at the stove with a wooden spoon in his hand, and she put her bag down on the table and looked at him and said, "What?"
"Graham called."
She came across the kitchen and stood beside him at the stove.
"A dad in Kingstanding kept a card," he said.
Nicole didn't say anything. She took the wooden spoon out of his hand and stirred the pan once, and then gave it back to him, and stood there with her shoulder against his while the onions went on cooking.
Tomorrow, Graham would see the card.
Thursday, his mother would land at Gatwick with a blue phone in her handbag.
The apple tree outside held its small green swellings in the dark and waited, the way it always waited, for whatever came next.