Over the Line Read online

  “Sorry, Liam, forget that one.”

  “But there’s Jackie,” I said.

  “She’ll freak.”

  “Best to tell her though,” I insisted, knowing it would be madness to keep it from Megan’s agent.

  “Okay,” Mimi said. “I’ll tell her you’ve vetoed doing anything until after the trial.”

  “Against your better judgment?”

  “Yes, and if the journalist phones, he’ll be a missed call.”

  3

  Facing The Press

  The narrow corridors underneath the Alexander Stadium in Birmingham aren’t the best place for a meeting, but we didn’t have much choice. Other athletes were using the changing rooms, thousands of spectators were milling around outside, and the media was waiting for us in a room upstairs.

  By the time I got there, Mimi was already giving Megan a hard time. “This is a fucking nightmare,” she was saying. “Deep shit, Meg. Why the fuck did you flounce off like that? And knock a frigging photographer over? Don’t you get it? If they didn’t think there was anything in this ‘Will’ thing before, they’re bound to start wondering after that performance.”

  Megan’s formidable five-ten frame winced, like a dart had landed in her chest. She looked along the corridor, right through me, to see if anyone was coming and then leaned forward to within an inch of Mimi’s face. “And what the fuck’s it got to do with you? What do you know about Will – or jack-shit for that matter?” she said, her voice menacing but brittle.

  Mimi threw her arms in the air and turned to me with a theatrical throw of her head. “Who doesn’t know about Will? What do you think Twitter is darling, a secret frigging society?”

  Tom rolled up at this point, looking nervously from Megan to Mimi; probably anxious his winning lottery ticket might be at risk.

  “Where’s Jackie?” I said as a starter.

  “God knows! Hobnobbing with some sponsors, I expect,” said Mimi. I arched an eyebrow. “Okay, I know, it’s her job to hobnob with sponsors.”

  “It pays the bills,” I said.

  I turned to Megan, who had taken half a step back, but who was still pumped up and glaring at Mimi. I was fuming about Megan’s tantrum on the track as much as Mimi, but this was no place for a scene. I waited for her to calm down and make eye contact.

  “Good recovery,” I told her when she finally switched her gaze to me. The praise seemed to surprise her, and she relaxed her shoulders fractionally and threw me a smile – the first for days. “Mind you,” I added, trying to sound cheery, “it was your worst start ever. You sprang up like a jack-in-a-box. I’ve never seen you do that before. You really had to stretch for the first hurdle, didn’t you?”

  Meg nodded, but Mimi was looking at me, bemused, like I was making small talk while our world was in turmoil.

  “Still, you didn’t panic,” I pressed on. “Your hurdling was a bit untidy over the second and third, but then you got into a rhythm and looked fine. Very smooth.”

  “I don’t want to do the press conference,” Megan said.

  Mimi threw her hands up again and turned away and then back again, shaking her head. I guessed it wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

  “I told you we should have spoken to her about this before today,” she said to me. “Now we don’t have time to work out our line.”

  “She’s ill,” I said. “That’s our line.” I nodded towards Tom. “Tom’s going to take her home. She’s under the weather. That’s why she had a poor start. That’s why she walked off and got annoyed with that photographer. No press conference. Simple.”

  “Annoyed with a photographer?” Mimi said. “Are you kidding? She practically knocked him flat. We can’t act as if nothing’s happened. ‘Under the weather’? You’re kidding, right?”

  Not for the first time, I thought Mimi was more worried about pleasing the journalists than anything else, but what did I know? I’d never had an athlete who warranted her own PR adviser before.

  Mimi sensed what I was thinking. “Liam, they’re sitting up there waiting for Meg, and if she doesn’t turn up, that will be the story. The headlines will be ‘Meg does a runner’.”

  “Why not stick to ‘Meg legs it?’” I laughed at my own joke, but no one joined me.

  “Liam, shut up! If she doesn’t turn up, they’ll have a field day – they’ll shred her reputation,” Mimi said, with a terse nod in Megan’s direction. “We may not like the paparazzi but that guy was one of their own. They’ll close ranks.”

  Megan straightened up again, her spiky hair seeming spikier, her broad shoulders bulging inside her tracksuit. She was six inches taller than Mimi and at least twenty times stronger. Anything physical would be over in seconds. Mimi stepped back. She’s feisty but not stupid.

  “I’m telling you now,” Megan said, her eyes narrowing and fixing on Mimi. “This is really pissing me off. I’m sick of people talking about me like I’m not here. And I don’t give a shit about the media. They can say what they like. I don’t have to answer to them.”

  “But that goes with...” Mimi started to say.

  “Yes, yes, I know it goes with the territory, darling. But not today. Like Liam says, I’m ill.” She looked at Tom, who was wearing his hangdog expression. “And we’re going.”

  Tom reacted instantly, turning to go. If he raced like that, he might win more often. They were both already a couple of yards down the corridor before we could say anything.

  Mimi looked at me, shrugging. “So, it looks like she isn’t doing the press conference then.”

  “I will,” I said.

  ***

  “Liam who?” You could tell the journalists weren’t impressed when they realised it was just me and a UK Athletics official sitting on the platform in the media centre.

  I knew a few of them quite well – the ones who’d been on the circuit for years and the ex-athletes who were making a media career for themselves. But such was the soaring interest in Megan, most of the faces were not familiar at all. In less than 18 months, she’d gone from being a footnote on the sports pages to appearing on magazine covers, quiz panels and chat shows. Last year, in the build-up to the World Championships in Beijing, her fitness somehow became a national concern after one tabloid published a shot of her thighs from a bad angle and quoted a self-appointed expert saying ‘Megan’s leaden legs needed toning up’. I was fuming, but Mimi told me to keep my mouth shut. She said there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t make matters worse. And she may have been right because I would have ranted about dumb journalists driving female athletes to anorexia yet ignoring the lard on the bellies of top class rugby players, which might have made me feel better, but wasn’t going to help Meg. She kept a dignified silence and promptly ran the best time in the world that year.

  So it was understandable that Mimi was white with anxiety as she stood at the back, Meg’s reputation in my hands and me at the mercy of fifty or so journalists. She had taken the precaution of checking with a friendly media contact that the photographer wasn’t hurt, but the image of him splayed on the ground was bound to be on everyone’s minds, and all over Twitter.

  I smiled and nodded ingratiatingly at the sea of faces as the press woman from UK Athletics introduced me. Sonia Kerslake was an old friend. We had been in the British team together way back, and it was reassuring having her sitting next to me at the top table.

  “Megan’s under the weather,” she said to a ripple of groans and knowing laughs, “and her coach Liam McCarthy has kindly stepped-in to answer any questions you have.”

  The room fell silent and people wriggled in their seats. No one wanted to go first. I scanned the faces, wondering if the photographer had been stirring things and if anyone from Newport was there with a killer question about a dead friend of Meg. Some of the journalists were bowing their heads, making out they had a something to write in their notebook, like kids trying to avoid answering a teacher’s question. There was a lot of doodling going on in that room. Mimi shot me
a look as if to say ‘wait for it’.

  “They’re a quiet lot today,” Sonia said with a nervous chuckle.

  “We’re lost for words,” one of the journalists said. “We weren’t expecting any wrestling.”

  Sonia ignored him. “So Liam,” she said, “you’ve spoken to Meg. How was she after the race – how did she feel about her performance?”

  “Not so good and very good,” I said, trying to lighten things a little. “Not so good because she’s got a cold or a bug of some kind. Nothing serious, but the race took a lot out of her and I told her to go back to the hotel and get some rest. And very good, because she’s done the job – she’s qualified for the team. It takes talent to win comfortably when you’re sick and you didn’t get a good start.”

  “About the start,” said a grey-haired man I vaguely recognised as one of the hard-core athletics specialists. “That’s a recurring problem isn’t it? Her start let her down in Beijing last year too.”

  This was comfortable territory for me. “Yes it did. It nearly cost her the race. When you make a poor start, the danger is you try too hard to catch up and then everything goes wrong. You’re tense, you lose your technique, and it’s a downward spiral. The good thing about today was she had a poor start but didn’t lose her composure.”

  “Yes, but there was no real pressure,” a female ex-athlete was quick to say.

  “There’s always pressure,” I said. “But, I agree, her start is an area we need to work on. You don’t want that to happen in the final in Rio.”

  The ball was rolling now. A few hands went up, and I had a run of questions about her preparations for Rio: who she saw as the main threat and whether or not she was going to run in the sprint relay. This last one was tricky from a coaching point of view. Megan was the fastest British woman over a flat 100m as well as the hurdles, but I didn’t want her to be distracted by relay training. I wasn’t going to say that though. I didn’t want to annoy Sonia or make Meg look arrogant.

  “If the selectors choose her, I’m sure she’ll seriously consider it,” I said, catching a reassuring nod from Mimi out of the corner of my eye.

  “But she might have other things on her mind,” a male voice said abruptly from the back. His face was almost completely hidden by the people in front, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t one of the regular athletics reporters

  About half the room looked round. I calculated, in that seemingly long moment, they were the ones who hadn’t heard properly or were surprised by the tone of the question. The other half weren’t curious because they already knew what he meant – or knew enough to guess.

  “Not sure what you mean?” I said. My voice had an edge to it and each word seemed to echo. Mimi had told me beforehand not to sound jumpy if, or when, the question came. But I was pretty sure I sounded as shifty as hell. I definitely felt shifty. And yet, why should I be? After all, I still didn’t really know what this was all about.

  Sonia looked at the guy as if to say, ‘come on, then’.

  “Haven’t you seen the Argus website today?” he said, holding up a printout. A few of the journalists smirked as if they saw a funny side in the assumption that my day might not be complete without reading the Argus.

  I could just about read the headline: ‘Police to question Olympic star’. I hadn’t seen it before, and I looked across at Mimi helplessly wondering why the hell she hadn’t checked their website again - before we walked into that room. I could tell she was wondering the same thing.

  “I’ve had a busy day. I was going to catch up on all the papers later,” I said.

  That earned me a couple of laughs. Sonia was fidgeting. I wasn’t sure what she had known in advance. She was obviously not at all comfortable now.

  “Look,” I said, thinking I should take the initiative. “I’ve come here to talk about athletics. That’s personal, and I’m sure Megan will deal with it in the right way. The main thing is she shouldn’t have any distractions in the final weeks before Rio.”

  As the words came out, I sensed the absurdity of them. Some people must have been thinking ‘that’s not the main thing at all’. Others must have thought ‘you’ll be lucky’.

  “So Megan will be talking to the police, then?’ said the Argus reporter.

  “This is bound to be a distraction, isn’t it?” another journalist added.

  “Is this why she’s under the weather?” sneered a third.

  I turned to Sonia with a helpless, ‘save me here – for old time’s sake’ look.

  “I think Liam’s made the position clear,” she obliged. “He’s here to answer questions on Megan athletics-wise. If there’s nothing else on that, we’ll leave it there.”

  As she stood up, everyone seems to surge forward, surrounding me – pens and notepads or microphones in hand. One said: “Liam, what’s going on? You’re her coach, you should know.” But the other questions were scrambled together and sounded like a chant in which a handful of words kept recurring: Megan, drugs, death, police. It wasn’t a great combination just a few weeks before what I was hoping would be the high point of Meg’s career, not to mention mine.

  I felt a hand grabbing at my forearm, pulling me through the crowd. I went with it, following Mimi’s bobbing head as she burrowed her way through the scrum.

  4

  Door-stepped

  “That went well,” I said, feebly toying with humour again to hide how rattled I was. We were threading our way through the VIP car park, looking for Mimi’s soft-top something-or-another. The wind had dropped and a relentless drizzle was soaking the cars and us.

  “We need a plan,” Mimi said.

  “A few facts would be a start,” I suggested.

  “That always helps,” a voice added from behind us; the body it came from bumping into us as we stopped to see who it was.

  My fuse had burnt out in the press conference, and none of it was left to stop me exploding. I grabbed the Argus journalist by his jacket collar.

  “Chris Williamson,” he said brightly as if we were meeting for the first time at a dinner party.

  I pulled him towards me so that my chest – which is fairly chiselled for a forty-something – was pushing up into his chin. I was ready to throw him across the nearest car bonnet, and he was looking strangely smug as if he was enjoying the whole thing. Mimi was quick to intervene.

  “Chris, I’m Mimi. I think we spoke the other day,” she said, holding out one hand to him and pulling me back with the other.

  The adrenalin was still pumping, but my saner senses prevailed. Tempted though I was, I realised Meg’s coach beating a journalist up would not help matters at this point. I released my grip and stepped back as he made a show of straightening his jacket.

  “What’s this all about then?” Mimi continued.

  “I was hoping you were going to tell me.”

  Mimi shot him a look as if to say, ‘do you think I was born yesterday?’ And she wasn’t. I’ve never asked but I’d put her in her mid-thirties. I’d gathered from her endless stock of outrageous stories – always prefaced by “you really mustn’t tell anyone this” – that she’d worked not only with sports people but also with actors, comics, writers and celebrities for years, spending as much time keeping them out of the media as getting them in.

  “You’ve seen the piece?” he asked.

  Mimi shook her head. We’d headed straight for the car from the press conference and were planning to look at it back at the hotel.

  “We’re reporting that the police have reopened their investigation into the death of Matt Davies and that Megan will be part of their inquiry.” He furrowed his brow slightly as if asking Mimi for a reaction, but she was unmoved, looking at him levelly as if to say ‘so what?’

  Williamson persevered. “Matt Davies died two years ago of a drugs overdose at a house party.”

  “We know this,” I said, “so what’s your point?”

  “When the police arrived, the only person there was Will Driscoll, and he was Meg
an’s boyfriend at the time – that’s my point,” he said, his mouth beginning to curl into a smirk.

  I was conscious that I was still glaring at him like an intruder threatening my home. I tried to calm myself. He turned to Mimi.

  “And Matt’s mother is claiming that Driscoll was dishing out the drugs,” he added.

  “Right,” Mimi said, irritably. “So, Megan should be more careful picking her boyfriends. But she dumped him. What’s the story?”

  “My police sources say they’re going to question her,” Williamson said.

  “Why would they want to do that?” Mimi asked.

  “That’s where I thought you could enlighten me.”

  Mimi’s deadpan face finally twitched, anger surfacing. “Look, I’m sure the police are just being thorough,” she said. “But that’s it. Megan’s been living in London for the last two years. She has a partner. They’re engaged. Will’s yesterday’s news as far as she’s concerned.”

  Williamson’s smirk morphed into a derisive laugh. “That’s not what I hear,” he said.

  Mimi looked at me helplessly, wiping tiny drops of drizzle from her cheek with the back of her hand.

  I had nothing to offer. I was still processing the implication of his last statement, my ignorance of what was going on in Megan’s life becoming apparent.

  I spotted Mimi’s soft-top in the next row and began moving towards it.

  “Let’s go, Mimi,” I said.

  We turned our backs on Williamson and headed for the car.

  “And there’s one more thing,” Williamson shouted. “Will’s a rugby player. Or was a rugby player. Talented. A junior international. But it all came to a sorry end when he was done for drugs. Steroids. Tested positive.”

  I was pulling the car door open as he said the ‘S’ word. Things were bad enough. I hadn’t imagined they could get worse. I stopped myself from turning round and ducked into the car. I didn’t want him to have the pleasure of seeing the blood drain from my face.