Dead Ball by Tom Palmer (best novels in english .TXT) 📗

for the trip so far, but once they were on the minor road, Danny noticed a quiet descend over the coach.

‘We’re nearly there, I think,’ Holt said. ‘Look. That’ll be it.’

Danny looked.

The house they were approaching was huge. He thought they were going to someone’s country cottage. But this was more like the stately home he saw on the hills every time his mum drove them along the M1. It looked like a castle. And had dozens of chimneys. There must have been over a hundred rooms, easy.

‘Does someone actually live here?’

Holt nodded.

The coaches drove slowly through open fields. Danny noticed a small group of deer feeding in a dip. Then more groups of deer. There were actually hundreds.

Holt was staring at a lake, a massive lake, hundreds of wild birds suddenly lifting from its surface.

‘This is amazing,’ Danny said. ‘Are we going in there?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Is it going to be posh?’ Danny asked, looking down at his jeans and T-shirt.

‘It is.’

Danny nodded. He hated posh. Normally.

But just this once he thought it’d be interesting to see what this sort of posh was really like. It was the chance of a lifetime.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF PARTY

This was not the kind of party Danny was used to. Nothing like the one he had been to two days earlier in England. There were no champagne fountains there. No waiters dressed head to foot in white. No skinned, dead animal being roasted over an open fire.

And – added to that – Danny could not get his head round the fact that he was standing with the England football team in a huge room with a ceiling painted with figures and animals. A room that was more like a church than a house. It felt like a dream. That was the only way Danny could find to describe to himself how he felt.

He stood back from the crowd and began to film. This would impress Charlotte. He made sure he got in a couple of players. Ones even Charlotte would recognize. Peter Day. She’d know him. Tall. Always smiling. Everybody liked Peter Day.

The more Danny looked, the more amazing the room seemed.

Long gold curtains hung from the ceiling, draped across the room like the sails of ships.

A table over thirty metres long offered hundreds of dishes. Fish. Meats. Vegetables. And dozens of small pastry shapes.

As well as champagne, you could drink any one of hundreds of selections at the bar. Beers. Wines. Spirits. Cocktails.

Danny stopped filming and asked the waitress if she could find him a Coke. She was not much older than he was. She smiled.

‘I try,’ she said.

She came back two minutes later with a glass of Coke on a silver tray.

‘Spasiba,’ Danny said.

The waitress smiled again, then left Danny to gaze around the room.

There were statues of bulls and people banging tambourines. Some of them naked. And oil paintings of people eating grapes. It was a strange place. A very strange place.

Danny finished his film, turned his back and sent it off to Charlotte.

Five minutes later a man got up to speak on a platform at the front of the hall. His audience turned to stare at him immediately.

Danny noticed a pair of men watching the people as the man stood, their hands clasped together at the front, wires coiling down from their ears into their shirts. They wore matching suits.

This was clearly the man who’d put the reception on. One of the richest men in the world. This was Dmitri Tupolev, the Russian oligarch.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ the man said in what seemed like perfect English to Danny. ‘I welcome you humbly to my home.’

He was about fifty years old. But he could have passed for forty. He was tall and fit. His skin was bronzed. His hair black. And his clothes – a suit and a pink tie – were so smart Danny assumed they must have been made to fit him. He wondered if he was one of those rich people he’d heard about who only ever wore clothes once before replacing them.

Danny observed as the men in suits began to applaud. The applause spread – and continued for a minute. Danny felt obliged to join in, as did Holt. It was like some cheesy game show. The suits warming the audience up.

‘We come together two days before my beloved Russia are playing your England football team for a place in the World Cup finals,’ Tupolev said, once the applause had died down. ‘It will be a fair game, of course.’

Danny frowned. That was a strange thing to say. Why would he say that? Weren’t all games fair?

Tupolev continued. ‘I wish to welcome your England team players, the Football Association and the ladies and gentlemen of the English mass media. You are all welcome to enjoy the delights we have on offer here.’

Danny was already becoming bored by the speech. Why didn’t he just get to the point? Blah, blah, blah…

As the man went on – speaking, but saying nothing that meant anything – Danny wondered if the game would be fair. What had Tupolev meant? Why would you say that? No one ever said that. It was just a given. And his mind started running away with itself, like it always did.

Maybe this reception was a ruse, Danny thought. To get all the England players together and drug or poison them. So Russia could win. Danny watched England players tucking into plates laden with the food that had been offered to them. Danny had heard that the England team took their own food when they were playing away. Even their own cooks.

And then Danny noticed Matt McGee.

McGee stood out because he was the only person not looking at Tupolev making his boring speech. Apart from Danny. In fact, McGee was watching the door at the side of the hall. Danny moved back a few paces so he could see more. And he was shocked to see McGee suddenly leaving.

Moments later, McGee was followed by the