Mateo was renting a four-bedroom detached house in Essex. This was the official home Mateo kept to maintain his public life, and it was a modest house without the faux-Elizabethan exterior some celebrities opted for. Julian parked his car in front of the garage door and traipsed along the walkway, turning left just before the front door and going round the building. Tony watched curiously as Julian returned with Mateo’s keys in hand.
‘We’re very close,’ Julian said preemptively.
The door let out a sinister creak as the agent and manager stepped inside.
‘Mateo? ¡Mateo mi amigo! ¡Hola soy Julian! ¿Qué pasa?’ Julian regurgitated the entirety of his español to an indifferent audience of walls and windows. As they entered the lounge Tony spotted some red stains on the beige carpet and froze in his tracks. He couldn’t discern whether it was blood or not. Julian ignored him and kept walking, following the red trail across the lounge. Near the border between the lounge and kitchen, the carcass of a shattered wine glass lay lifeless before them. On the countertop was a bottle of Rioja. It was empty. Next to it was another wine glass, intact, with dried-up residue of the Tempranillo that had occupied the glass. The counter stool nearest to the wine bottle had been knocked over.
‘What do you make of it Watson?’ Julian asked. He was rather enjoying himself.
‘Don’t fool around. Do you think we should call the police?’
Julian scoffed and kept poking around. ‘If you want to give the press a field day by all means. But really, so he’s out of touch for a few hours. Why do you want to speak to him so badly?’
Tony couldn’t mention the whole backstory concerning the lotus pendant. ‘I’m just concerned about the boy.’
Julian didn’t listen and moved on into Mateo’s bedroom. It was in total disarray: ruffled bedsheets, open drawers, clothes sprawled all over the floor. Then, out of the corner of his eye Julian caught sight of a laptop whose edges jutted out just barely from underneath the bed. He snapped his fingers and extracted the computer, sitting down on the bed to flip open the device.
‘What are you doing?’ Tony asked when he entered the room.
‘Just hold on for a minute will you? You want to know where he is? That’s what I’m trying to find out.’
Tony watched anxiously as Julian punched in a code to unlock Mateo’s screen. The screen jiggled violently and rejected him. Julian took another shot but the screen jiggled again. Julian groaned.
‘You know what you’re doing?’
‘Just hold on,’ Julian sighed and tapped again on the keyboard. The screen flashed as Mateo’s desktop screen emerged. ‘Bingo.’
Tony’s eyes grew wide. ‘What did you do?’
‘123456,’ Julian answered matter-of-factly, ‘he’s not very creative.’
Julian sifted through the folders for several minutes but found nothing. Next, he clicked on the Chrome browser tab and went through Mateo’s web history. There were some tabloid articles on transfer gossip and multiple news articles about the pitch invasion on Sunday. Julian kept scrolling down until he hovered the mouse pointer over a Google map search.
‘This looks odd.’
Tony squinted to read out loud the search entry. ‘Lady Paint. What on earth is it?’
‘It’s a nail salon. And the search date was yesterday, at 11:53PM. Doesn’t this look suspicious to you?’
‘You think he went?’
‘No gaffer, I think he was bored out of his mind and fancied some red nails.’
‘Drop it Julian. What should we do?’
‘Well you’re the one that wants answers.’
It was a quiet ride. Julian looked ahead, eyes shrouded in his Oakleys and glued to the windscreen. Tony recognised the streets of Hackney, and before long Julian was parking. He took off his sunglasses and motioned for Tony to get out. When their feet hit the cobblestone Tony thought about his arthritis and how the day was turning into an unexpectedly dynamic one. He watched Julian walk off, lacking in his stride the composure of only an hour ago.
They walked not too long and stopped in front of Lady Paint, a shoddy nail salon at the end of the street. Red curtains behind the glass window obstructed their view and only the Open sign on the door was visible from where they stood. Julian opened the door and they entered a room with three desks on each side of them. Two of the desks had customers, a silver-haired woman who looked easily Tony’s senior and a middle-aged blonde who was complaining about the lack of variety in the shop’s acrylic palette. The customers took no notice of their male counterparts but the Vietnamese manicurists did. One of the idle manicurists, who looked the youngest, got up and approached them.
‘Yes?’ she asked, with neither a smile nor a frown.
‘Hullo, could we…get our nails done?’ Julian hastily replied.
The girl’s chin rotated anti-clockwise about 30 degrees. ‘Nails?’
‘Or perhaps something else. A massage?’
‘Massage?’
‘Yes. You know,’ Julian grinned.
‘No massage,’ she did not return the grin and started to turn around.
‘Excuse me. Sorry. Therapeutic skin care?’
Julian’s shot in the dark seemed to be the Open Sesame as the girl turned back toward them. ‘Appointment?’
‘No. I don’t think so. But please. Ma’am.’
The honorific appendix was perchance another functioning magic word as the girl nodded, still without twitching any of her facial muscles, and retreated behind the opaque bead curtain at the back end of the room. Within moments she returned with a stocky Vietnamese man who looked to be in his forties. His hair was slicked back and his mis-dyed paisley shirt was tucked into trousers that were a size too large for him.
‘Good afternoon. You wanted the special skin care?’ he asked with a thick accent and an unctuous smile. The middle-aged blonde shot a glance at him but turned back immediately as a new layer of carmine red started to land on her ring finger nail.
‘Yes. Please. Sir,’ Julian made sure to include the successful appendix once again. With his lips frozen in that smile, the Vietnamese man motioned for them to follow him to the back of the store.
Once they passed the bead curtain they found themselves in a dark room that looked like an office. Presumably it was where the stocky man kept his accounting books and manicure money. Against the far wall, three monitors displayed live cryptocurrency charts and an offshore betting exchange, while a Telegram channel scrolled Vietnamese messages in a sidebar — the real business behind the manicure money. But Julian and Tony were taken aback when the man stood in front of an innocent bookshelf, ran his index finger along a row of books, stopped, then pulled one out. A low mechanic hum emanated from a space beyond the bookshelf and the bookshelf quickly swiveled out to confess to the existence of a secret stairway. From where they stood the level below was not visible, but a red fluorescent light spilled out weakly onto their feet.
No words were exchanged but none were needed. The three men swiftly entered the darkness and followed the stairway down, their ears picking up a swoosh behind them as the bookshelf resumed its original position. At the bottom of the stairway a musty hall opened up to their left. On each side of the hall were doors. With the dim lighting it was difficult to identify how many rooms there were, but it was definitely a two-digit tally.
The stocky man stopped at the second door on the right. He showed the men in and started to close the door.
‘Wait. I want to talk!’ Julian whispered.
‘You don’t talk to me. You will talk to her,’ the man whispered as he shut the door.
Julian and Tony exchanged looks then took in the sight before them. A cramped seedy room with flickering red light featured two rotting mattresses and some tissues on a tiny bedside table. Before they could fully unfold their imagination about the history of those mattresses, the door clicked open and a Vietnamese woman wrapped in some kind of traditional robe - though trimmed short and cut out at the sides - presented herself defeatedly. Although the room wasn’t very bright, they could spot the lines of grief carved across her forehead. She took a moment to eye the both of them, then held up two fingers to determine whether she should bring another compatriot in. Tony reached out and lowered her hand.
‘No girls. We just want to ask about a friend,’ Tony said, shaking his head.
‘No girls?’ she looked puzzled.
‘No. We’re here about a man.’
‘Ah. Man!’ With that she made an even faster exit than her predecessor and shut the door on them.
They didn’t have to wait too long before the door opened again. This time it was a well-built, shirtless boy who looked to be in his late teens or early twenties. He knelt down on the ground and started pulling out various tools of his trade.
‘Whoa, whoa whoa. Stop right there,’ Julian commanded. The boy looked just as puzzled as the girl.
‘Can you bring your manager? Your boss,’ Tony added.
‘Boss?’ he cringed at the word.
‘No, don’t need to worry it’s perfectly all right,’ Julian continued, speaking slowly and holding up both his hands in a surrendering gesture. ‘We’re looking for a friend. A man from Spain.’
‘Spain?’
‘Yes Spain.’
‘Oh! Luong.’
‘What? No, Mateo.’
‘Yes, he come see Luong.’
‘Who’s Luong?’
‘Luong. He work. Like me,’ the half-naked boy explained and pointed at his tool box. Julian squirmed in both discomfort and shock. ‘Come again?’
‘Man from Spain, he come see Luong.’
‘A man? A Vietnamese man like you? Are you sure you understand what I’m saying?’
Unable to comprehend the longer sentence, the boy just blinked and shut down. Julian tried again.
‘Spain man, he come, he see man? Here? He...’ Julian pointed to the mattress and gestured with his hands. The boy stood silently and shrugged. Frustrated by the unresponsive face in front of him, Julian opened the door and poked his head out, looking left and right to see if anyone else was around. Not a soul was in sight.
‘All right, could - you - go - back,’ Julian made sure to point his finger in the direction he wanted him to go. ‘And - find - your - boss. Boss - come – here,’ Julian pointed at the ground beneath him. The boy nodded unconvincingly and left.
Minutes later the stocky man returned with the unctuous smile photoshopped off his face.
‘You don’t want girls and you don’t want boys?’
‘Listen. Sir. I think your girls - and boys - are the cream of the crop. The finest this generation has to offer. Unfortunately we’re not here for that today. May come back some other time, but today we’re looking for a friend by the name of Mateo.’
‘Mateo?’
‘Right. Oh maybe it’s not Mateo, I don’t know what his name really is, but a well-built man in his late 20s. Wondering if he’s come by for anything...’
‘You are looking for the Spanish boy?’ His face twisted so rapidly they wondered whether it wasn’t a spasm. They also noted then that the man was armed with a World War II style revolver he was wearing on his gun belt, an accessory he most certainly reserved for clients of his subterranean business.
‘Er, if you’re looking for him we don’t know where he is either.’
‘Who sent you!’ The man’s right hand reached for the grip of his gun.
‘Nobody,’ Julian held up his hands. ‘Absolutely nobody. We’re his landlords and this wanker’s not paid his rent. We’re just trying to collect what’s ours.’
‘How did you get here?’
‘We just found a note scribbled with this address in his house. Now, we’re terribly sorry for any confusion and we’d like to get going.’
The man looked them up and down with a piercing gaze as he made up his mind. Tony and Julian were relieved when he let out a sigh and took his hands off the firearm.
‘If you’re not a customer, get out.’
They didn’t need any further encouragement. Julian and Tony rushed upstairs, where they found the bookshelf door open, and hurried out on to the street.
‘Are you damn out of your mind?’ shouted an enraged Tony. ‘Are you trying to get me killed?’
‘Tony calm down and shut up. Just keep walking - they could be watching.’
Julian kept his head down and marched to the car. It was only when the snap of the car lock announced security that Tony’s senses switched back on. The whole ordeal had not taken very long but it felt like an eternity, and Tony was just starting to piece together the facts.
‘Julian, do you think...’
‘It’s what it looks like, isn’t it? I mean, it would explain a lot of things, such as why Mateo always kept to himself. First time I took him to a club with five girls, he left after 10 minutes. Said he had to go to the loo. Guess he meant the one at the nail shop,’ Julian snickered.
‘Good Lord. So he is...’
‘Gay. Looks like it. Statistically it’s not a surprise. I’m sure there are loads more in the closet.’
Tony was astounded – not by the realization itself but by how long it had taken him to notice. But his managerial mind immediately gravitated to the practical aspect of the problem. Having a gay player in his team would cause a gigantic rift in the dressing room. There were key players who were notorious homophobes and he’d heard them frequently launch downright invectives on gay men. It was evident that a public coming-out would most certainly turn the club into a bedlam while the press would have a field day.
For the player, it was also professional suicide. Tony instantly saw it all pan out: endorsements cut off, involuntary retirement, hate crimes, threats, paparazzis and unwanted media spotlight blazing everywhere. What Mateo stood to lose was too much, and it effectively inhibited him from going to the authorities.
‘So we can’t call Scotland Yard?’ Tony asked.
‘I won’t even answer that,’ Julian replied.