The line on the second page said Sully had bought my debt.

Not a share of it. All of it.

That administration change that cost us 10 points when I had picked a team, £400,000 to start with, the one I’d been feeding £16,667 into on the last day of every month since summer like a furnace that eats houses, until it stood now, seven payments in, at a shade over £283,000.

He’d gone to whoever held it, offered them a clean exit on a bad book, and bought the lot, and now the man who wants my ground is the man I owe every penny to, and there’s a clause in a loan like that, there always is, that says miss one payment and the whole £283,000 that’s left falls due at once.

The next one is due on the last day of this month. Nine days.

That’s the door I never locked. In 40 years and two goes at this life it had genuinely never crossed my mind, because in the life you haven’t read this club was already dead by now and Sully just waited for the carcass.

I changed that. I kept it alive. And a living club that owes £283,000 to the one man who wants it dead is a different kind of trapped than a dead one, and I did that, with my own two clever hands, by winning.

So here is a thing I have to tell you straight, because I’ve told you everything else. My gift failed me. The one advantage I came back with, the only edge a dead man gets, and it had a hole in it exactly the shape of a patient man doing a new thing because I’d made the old thing impossible.

I sat in a cold office and understood, properly, for the first time since a Tuesday morning in June, that I cannot see all of it any more. I have changed too much. I’m half blind now, same as everybody, and I have nine days.

Carbery took it better than I did, which is what you pay a solicitor for.

"He can’t take the ground, Sam." He tapped the 1923 deed, the one Eliza Pargeter signed for a town she’d never meet. "Try to sell it to satisfy the debt and it reverts to the people. He knows that. He’s read it, he’s not a fool. So he doesn’t want the ground off the back of this. He wants the club dead, so the ground stops being a football ground, so the covenant’s own trigger does his job for him and hands him a disused field to make his case on in March. He doesn’t need to beat the deed. He needs to beat you. Miss the payment, lose the club, and the ground dies of its own accord in your hands."

"Then we don’t miss the payment."

He looked at me the way a man looks at another man who is one bad month from broke. "It’s £16,667, on Tuesday week. Where is it?"

And for the first time all season, I had an answer to that question, and it was the strangest sentence of my life to say out loud in a portacabin.

"In a corner of the internet. I just have to get it out without setting fire to it."

I’ll not pretend the next nine days were dignified.

The beans had woken on the 9th, ticked past a dollar, 37,000 of them worth 23-odd grand on a screen, and any fool would say that’s £16,667 with change and go for a pint.

But the whole market for the thing in February 2011 is a few hundred men and a website in Tokyo, and if I dump even a few thousand pounds of it at once the price folds under me like wet cardboard, and I need it to keep climbing all the way to a summer I’m relying on.

So I sold it the way you’d bleed a radiator, a hiss at a time, a few hundred quid a day, tap, tap into an order book that flinched every time I touched it, ding of each little sale landing in Tokyo, watching the number wobble and hating every keystroke.

It got me most of the way. It did not get me all of it.

Which is when the town did the thing I will never, as long as I live, be able to repay.

Word got out, the way it does, that the club needed money fast and wouldn’t say why. And on the Sunday the supporters’ trust, 500 names that Sully’s own aggression had frightened into existence back in the autumn, held a meeting in the Anchor that spilled out onto Marsh Road, and they didn’t ask me what it was for.

Bald Tony put £20 in a bucket, clunk of a note-wrapped pound coin on a bed of coppers, and Murat carried it round the kiosk queue, rattle of it, "come on, dig deep, it’s the gaffer’s club." Raj drove his cab for free all week and tipped the takings in.

Ted, the old boy who’d begged me not to leave, put in a tenner folded so small I had to unpick it, and said, "It’s not much, son." It was everything he had on him. A docker organised a sponsored anything.

There was a raffle for a signed Vardy shirt that Vardy signed 40 of so nobody went without. They raised £3,140 in six days for a cause nobody had explained to them, because a man in a good suit had frightened them and I hadn’t, and you do not, it turns out, need to tell this town the whole truth to get them to stand in the cold with a bucket for you.

On the Tuesday, the last day of the month, I moved the money, and I did it with Maureen stood at my shoulder because a man should not be alone for a thing like that. The beans I’d bled out of Tokyo a hiss at a time.

The bucket the town filled. The last of the raffle. £16,667 exactly, into the account of the man who wants my club in the ground. Maureen read the sort code back to me twice while I keyed it, because you do not fat-finger this. My thumb sat on the button a second longer than it needed to.

Enter.

The little wheel spun. Maureen didn’t breathe.

And then it cleared, gone, out the door, and the furnace ate it, and the clause that would have dropped £283,000 on my head stayed shut, click, like a trap sprung on nothing. Sully’s fast door swung into a wall. Maureen sat down on the spare chair like her knees had quit, and said "well" to the middle distance, and I have never loved that word more.

The book fell from £283,000 to £266,000 that afternoon. It falls that far every last day of the month I’m alive to pay it. The summer, when the beans are a proper fortune, swallows the rest in an afternoon, and then this club will owe no man a penny for the first time in its life.

Then I rang him. You have to, with a man like that. You have to let him hear it’s shut.

"Ray."

"Sam." The voice you’d trust to sell you a house. Unbothered. "I take it my money arrived."

"On time. It’ll be on time next month and the one after and every one after that, so I want to save us both the postage. You bought the back end of a £400,000 loan, £283,000 and change, to catch me missing a payment. I’m not going to miss one. Not now. You’ve made yourself the well-paid creditor of a club that’s going to clear its debt to the day, and when it’s clear you’ll have spent a fortune and a favour to end up with exactly nothing, because the deed you’ve read as well as I have won’t let you have the grass either way. You didn’t find a faster door, Ray. You paid the best part of £300,000 for a longer wall."

A pause. The wrong length of pause. And then he laughed, softly, a genuinely warm laugh, the worst sound he’s ever made down a phone.

"You’re better at this than your file said, Sam. I’ll give you that. I’ll see you on the 14th of March."

And he hung up first, click, which told me the March thing is real, and coming, and that a patient man who’s just lost a fast hand does not stop being patient. But that’s a problem for a chairman in a fortnight. I had a smaller, larger one to attend to first.