"The flats." He brightened, and it was real, that was the maddening thing, the man genuinely lit up.

"Two hundred and forty homes, Sam. Two hundred and forty families who can’t get on the ladder anywhere near London, given a chance. Forty of them affordable, that’s in the planning. Local jobs to build it, eighteen months of work for lads round here who haven’t had a steady wage since the docks went. A doctor’s surgery. A Tesco, yeah, all right, everyone laughs at the Tesco, but try buying a pint of milk round here after six."

He spread his hands. "That’s not burying anything. That’s the future. I’m not the villain in this. I’m the only one being honest with you."

And the horrible thing, the thing that sat cold in my stomach, was that half of it was true. He wasn’t lying about the housing. He wasn’t lying about the jobs. If I hadn’t been standing there with sixteen years of the future in my head and my dad’s hand still warm on the back of my neck, I might even have nodded along.

"You finished?" said Maureen.

"Maureen, I’m trying to help you. The offer to the trust still stands. We rehome the memorabilia properly, museum cabinet in the lobby of the development, little plaque, ’on this site once stood,’ all of it. Tasteful. I’ll even name the access road after the club. Tilbrook Way." He said it like he was handing her the crown jewels.

"Tilbrook Way," Maureen repeated, flat as the estuary.

"It’s a nice gesture."

"It’s a road, Ray. For your flats. Through the middle of my football club."

Sully sighed, the sigh of a reasonable man worn down by unreasonable people, and checked his beautiful watch.

"The creditors meet a week on Friday," he said, and just like that the warmth was gone and the businessman was standing there in its place, hard and clean as a new kerbstone.

"The liquidator wants the best return for the people this club owes money to. Real people, by the way, the brewery, the laundry firm, the physio who hasn’t been paid since March. My offer clears them. Every penny. It is, and I say this kindly, the only serious offer on the table, because it is the only offer that turns twelve acres of dying grass into something worth having."

He looked at me when he said the next bit. Right at me. "Unless somebody’s planning to walk into that room with four hundred thousand pounds and a better idea. And I don’t see anybody, do you?"

Silence. Clank went the padlock in the wind. Caw went the gull.

"I do, actually," I said.

Sully blinked. "Sorry?"

"You asked if anybody was planning to walk into that room with a better idea." I took a step towards him, and I don’t know where it came from, the steadiness in my voice, except that it came from sixteen years and a dead dad and a system made of white light. "I am."

For a moment he just stared at me. Then his face did something complicated, amusement and irritation and a flash of something that might even have been pity, all fighting it out, and he laughed again, but it wasn’t the warm one this time.

"And what is it you do, Sam Mercer?"

I thought about lying. Then I thought, no. Let him have it. Let him remember it.

"Right now? I’m between jobs," I said. "Last week I was folding tracksuits in a sports shop."

Ray Sully looked at me, a skint twenty-four-year-old in trainers with a hole starting in the toe, stood at the gates of a dead club next to a sixty-four-year-old woman with a bin bag, and he smiled the smile you give a child who’s told you he’s going to be an astronaut.

The exact smile Maureen had given me ninety seconds before. The smile I was, I realised, going to spend a very long time wiping off a very long line of faces.

"Oi."

Raj had been vibrating with the effort of keeping his mouth shut, and he finally lost the fight with it.

He stepped up level with me, this minicab driver in a zip-up fleece squaring off against a man who could buy his whole street with the change in his coat. "You don’t know him, mate. I’ve known him since we were seven. I’d not stand there grinning if I were you."

Sully turned the smile on Raj for a moment, mild, amused, the way you’d look at a small dog having a go at your ankle. And Raj, God love every inch of him, held it. Chin up. Didn’t blink. Didn’t budge an inch off my shoulder.

"A week on Friday," Sully said gently, getting back into his Range Rover. "Bring your better idea, son. And bring a chequebook, because ideas don’t clear a brewery’s debt. Maureen, always a pleasure. Think about the road."

The door shut with that heavy expensive thunk that cheap doors never make. The engine purred. And the black Range Rover rolled back down the lane the way it had come, unhurried, certain, a man going home to a hot dinner having ticked a thing off a list.

Raj was still stood at my shoulder, exactly where he’d planted himself the second that Range Rover rolled up the lane, and now he was staring after it with his mouth hanging open and the cab keys still gripped in his fist.

"Sam," he said. "Sam. Did you just... did you just tell a property millionaire, to his actual face, that you’re going to outbid him? On a football club?"

"Bit, yeah."

"With what, though?" His voice climbed about an octave.

"Mate. With what? You won nine grand and you went and sank two of it into invisible internet pizza money! You’ve got, what, seven grand and a hole in your trainer! That bloke’s got a watch worth more than your flat! He had a Range Rover!"

"I’m aware of the Range Rover, Raj."

"You haven’t got four hundred grand!"

"No," I agreed. "I have not got four hundred grand."

"Then what in the name of God are you..." And then he stopped dead, because he looked at my face, and whatever was on it shut him right up. His eyes went narrow.

"...No. No, I know that face. I’ve seen that face before. That’s the Switzerland face. The last time you pulled that face I walked out of a bookies with six hundred and eighty quid and a nervous twitch." He jabbed a finger at me, half furious, half delighted, all Raj. "What do you know, Sam? Eh? What do you know that he doesn’t?"

I clapped him on the shoulder, thump. "Give us a few days," I said. "And I’ll show you."

Maureen let out a long breath beside me.

"Well," she said. "Now you’ve met Ray."

"Now I’ve met Ray."

"He’s not even wrong, that’s the worst of it. The brewery, the physio, all of it, that’s real, those are real people he’s promising to pay." She rubbed her face with both hands, suddenly looking every one of her sixty-four years.

"Nine days, love. They decide in nine days. And he’s right about the other thing an’ all. Nobody’s walking in there with four hundred grand. So unless you’ve got it stuffed down them trainers..."

I looked down the empty lane where the Range Rover had gone. Then up at the wonky T, holding on, holding on, the way it had been holding on my whole life.

I had the thick end of seven grand and a wallet full of beans that wouldn’t be worth a thing for months.

I did not have four hundred thousand pounds.

But I had something Ray Sully didn’t have, something nobody in that creditors’ meeting was going to have, and standing there in the wind it started, slowly, to take shape in my head, cold and clear and beautiful.

I had a hundred and three years of this club’s history in my head and in a shoebox in my flat.

And somewhere in all that history, in a town this old, on land this valuable, by the water, given over to a football club a hundred years ago when land by the water was given over to working men and not sold to the highest bidder, there had to be a reason it had stayed a football club for a hundred and three years and not become flats long, long ago.

There had to be a catch. There was always a catch.

And I was very, very good at catches.

"Maureen," I said slowly. "That office of yours. With the hockey stick. How far back do the club’s records go?"

She frowned at me. "All the way, love. Cellar’s full of it. Minute books, deeds, the lot, going back to the Ark. Why?"

I smiled. Properly, this time. The first real one since I’d parked.

"Because Ray Sully’s going to walk into that room a week on Friday," I said, "thinking he’s already won. And I think me, you, and a hundred and three years of paperwork are going to ruin his entire day."