Without Qualification

The car that collected Iris Calder from the station at 9:14 on a Monday morning was a silver Passat with a footwell full of parking tickets and a man named Speakman behind the wheel who did not once turn his head. He was junior to the practitioners, she understood, sent because a taxi would have looked like an expense and expenses were the whole trouble now.

“They’re keen to move,” he said, once, at the lights on Stadium Way. “There’s a clock on it.”

“There always is,” Iris said.

The ground rose out of the terraces the way these grounds always did, too large for the streets that fed it, a steel-and-glass thing set down among two-up-two-downs and a chip shop with steamed windows. Floodlight pylons. A club shop with the shutter half-down. Somebody had already peeled the sponsor’s name from the East Stand, and the pale ghost of the letters showed against the weathered cladding, brighter than the rest.

Inside, the corridor smelled of floor polish and cold fried onions from a kiosk that hadn’t been cleaned since the last home match. Her shoes squeaked on the rubberised runner. A cabinet of trophies caught the strip-lights; behind the glass, a tarnished cup from 1968 sat on a shelf that hadn’t been dusted.

The boardroom was on the second floor, past a photograph wall of managers going grey and then going bald in sequence. Two men and a laminated folder were waiting for her.

“Ms Calder.” The taller one put out a hand. Grey suit, a lanyard, the smoothed manner of a man who delivered bad news for a living and had learned not to flinch. “I’m the intended office-holder. This is my colleague, Callum Brierley. Thank you for coming at short notice.”

“You filed the notice of intention,” Iris said. It wasn’t a question. She’d read the docket on the train.