Final Whistle - Episode 1

Roy Bennett, a former soccer star, dies in a car explosion after attending the PFA Awards. The event was successful in raising money for NHS charities. Roy was known for his success in football and his celebrity status. He had a troubled past, struggling with alcohol and drug addiction. Despite his fame, he was described as lonely. The explosion leaves everyone in shock, but miraculously, no one else is injured. The protagonist, Alex Carter, is interviewed by the police about Roy's death. Alex reflects on his friendship with Roy and the loss of his wife. Final Whistle by J. Jackson Bentley EPISODE 1 It was no surprise to me that Roy Bennett died young, that I had expected. It was, however, a shock to see him blown to pieces before my very eyes. He, along with the rest of the footballing family present tonight, had been attending the PFA Awards after a torrid year for world football. Unable to complete the 2019-20 season, as we all would have wished, due to the coronavirus pandemic, there had been some doubt as to whether the PFA Awards would be celebrated at all. Luckily, common sense prevailed, and by nominating NHS charities as the beneficiary of the event, most opposition was quelled. Early in the evening's proceedings there was even a special award for the Liverpool player who had started a movement amongst players to take a cut in salary to pay backroom club staff who otherwise would have been furloughed and potentially financially disadvantaged. As it was, the event was a huge success, and tens of thousands of pounds had been raised for our NHS Heroes, a group of dedicated workers that professional footballers relied on heavily, even in the good times. At midnight the event drew to a close. I walked out onto the sidewalk from the hotel lobby with a group of friends, talking and laughing. It was cool and fresh compared to the overly warm and humid air of the ballroom. Roy appeared on the hotel steps and descended to the sidewalk. He smiled warmly and squeezed my shoulder as he walked by. It was an unusually affectionate gesture for a man often described as distant, and even cold, to those outside the game. Good night, Alex, take care, he said. His easy, friendly manner warmed me as it did every footballer he ever mentored. I smiled and touched his arm as he departed. I watched him as he crossed the road to his parked car. Often heavily criticized by the press for being drunk at this time of night, the former soccer star had shown great willpower by drinking nothing stronger than Perrier. He opened the door to the shiny silver BMW X5 Hybrid, which bore his personal number plate, and climbed inside. I raised my hand in salute to the apparently robust but secretly fragile figure. If I am being honest, I felt sorry for him. He always seemed to have a thousand admirers, yet he was still the loneliest man I knew. Roy Bennett smiled and waved. As he pressed the engine start button, he blew himself up. The blast was at the same time deafening and yet curiously muffled. The harsh, thunderous explosion I might have expected simply did not happen. An invisible wave of immense pressure forced me back against the wall, forcing air into my face. My nostrils flared and my cheeks puffed out until they became painful. Then, as quickly as the air hit me, it was sucked away again, and I felt my lungs voiding as if I had suddenly found myself in a vacuum. Gasping for breath I watched as the car lifted and rocked on its destroyed tires before settling down onto its still shiny wheel rims. The SUV's formerly clear windows were now blackened and bulbous, ballooned out by the forces present within the saloon. Surprisingly, only the windscreen itself was blown out entirely, and it lay frosted and misshapen on the bonnet, like some dead reptile with a long tail of neoprene. Within the space of a second the scene transformed from chaos and noise to a surreal and eerie quiet, which was so unnatural in the city that it unnerved me. Breath was coming more easily now, and people started to look at each other in puzzlement, but only after first checking themselves for signs of injury, miraculously, or so it seemed then, no one else was injured. Most of us stood frozen to the spot. I tried to move, but my body refused to obey the messages being sent from my brain. Brian, the doorman, was first to the car. He looked inside and slowly removed the smart grey and red overcoat so prevalent among London's commissionaires. The old soldier laid his tailored coat gently, perhaps even reverently, over the driver's side of the windscreen and shook his head from side to side. Brian had served in Iraq and had seen carnage and dismemberment before, and so he stood guard over the wretched scene. He was determined to prevent others from seeing what was left of Roy, and thereby suffering the same vivid nightmares that had plagued his sleeping hours. Within minutes, sirens sounded in the distance, getting ever louder and ever closer. I sat on a hard, but allegedly padded plastic chair in an interview room in the famous West End Metropolitan Police Station. I was finalizing my brief, factual statement on the death of my long-standing friend. The interview room was brightly lit and was painted and carpeted in calming pastel shades. If it had been designed to be peaceful and soothing, it wasn't working on me. A complete absence of windows gave the room a claustrophobic atmosphere, enhanced by the stale body odors that had insidiously pervaded the furnishings and consequently hung heavily in the air. The heady perfume of the air freshener did little to mask the smell of despair I felt just being here. The cheap veneer that covered the desktop was pockmarked with tiny craters of melted plastic where cigarettes had carelessly or maliciously been stubbed out on it in the days when smoking inside was allowed. In my mind, this was not a place to be spending the early hours of the morning, especially when the evening had begun in so celebratory a fashion. I looked at my watch, a twenty-pound Christmas gift from my daughter that meant more to me than my Rolex. It was almost two in the morning. My statement had outlined the important parts of the Roy Bennett story, but it left out so much of the man to whom I was once a close friend, trying to concentrate I cast my mind back to the early evening of yesterday. I constantly had to remind myself that the whole grisly incident had taken place only a few hours ago. Having been voted footballer of the year in the previous year, I was assigned a privileged seat at the top table, away from my teammates. Sitting amongst the men who run football, both the famous and the blandly anonymous, I had listened to, and laughed at, the after-dinner remarks of former soccer wild man Roy Bennett. Roy Bennett was a child of the seventies, but his era was undoubtedly the late nineties and early millennium. In his prime he had been adored by screaming teenage girls with an intensity usually reserved for pop stars. An idol to those who avidly supported football, he was equally familiar to those with no interest in the game whatsoever. Roy was a celebrity. With his handsome features and his long hair styled to perfection, he played his stylish and skillful soccer alongside those other icons of his time, Wayne Rooney, John Terry and Frank Lampard. Unquestionably talented, he was sought after both on and off the pitch. He gained increasing stardom in the world of men's fashion in an era before wags were footballers' favourite fashion accessories. Roy Bennett was famous and celebrated, and his face regularly appeared on lifestyle magazines and tabloid newspapers, as if to confirm it. Overpaid, and only tolerated by his directors because of his precocious talent, he was seldom seen without an attractive media influencer on his arm. In desperation his club chairman tried to buy his loyalty by partnering with him in a local wine bar. It proved to be a poor decision. Within days of opening, Bennett's was considered the in place to be for bloggers and celebrities everywhere, and Roy could regularly be found there propping up the bar, even on the nights before a big match. Soon Roy was concentrating more on his social life than on his career. Missed training sessions became the rule rather than the exception and eventually he walked out on his much-loved club, just before he was thrown out. Roy then spent some time playing in the US, first embracing, and then fighting alcohol addiction. After regaining his form, he tried to make a top-level comeback with a loan spell in Italy, but sadly it ended when a sympathetic judge encouraged him to enter a drug rehabilitation center for treatment after a street fight. Over the intervening years Roy played in sports aid charity matches and his friends' testimonials. Even during his outcast years, he was always able to attract a large, if curious crowd. Now rehabilitated, he was back amongst his peers and was sought after as a self-deprecating and entertaining after-dinner speaker. As he finished speaking last night, the gathered good and great of soccer stood and gave him a warm ovation. Roy grinned widely at their approbation and made modest but insincere remarks about the inadequacy of his presentation. He saw me clapping and smiled. When the clamor died down he sought me out. Alex Carter, as I live and breathe, how are you? Very well thank you Roy, I replied. He paused and appeared to be searching for a word or a phrase. He found it and blurted it out. I was devastated to hear about Vicky. He reached out and touched my arm in a compassionate show of sorrow. I looked directly at him and was deeply touched. There was real distress behind the clear steel grey eyes. It was Roy who had introduced me to my late wife almost ten years previously. It was also Roy who persuaded me that I should continue to pursue her, even when I was ready to give up, if nothing else I owed Roy Bennett a debt of gratitude that I could never repay. I owed him for the nine years of exquisite joy I had enjoyed with my lovely wife. I'm fine now, I lied as I found my voice. After eight months, the trauma of my loss was almost as great as the day she passed away and left me alone. Counseling had helped, as had getting on with my life. But every now and then a stray memory would pierce my soul like a sharp knife and the pain and sadness would encapsulate me like a shroud until I was strong enough to cast it off once more. We talked for a while, recollecting the days when I was the apprentice responsible for cleaning his boots. We recalled the dark days when, dropped from the youth team, I wanted to give it all up only to find this so-called prima donna spending hour after hour coaching me until I regained my confidence and my place in the team. We worked our way back to the present and Roy promised that he would soon repay the thousand pounds he had borrowed some months before. I believed him. He always paid me back before asking to borrow twice as much next time. The president of the F.A. was beckoning him and so we shook hands. As we parted I wished him luck with his after-dinner speaking career and all the best for the future, not knowing that he had no future at all. I watched my mentor and teenage hero as he made great play of refusing his check only to allow himself to be persuaded before taking it greedily and tucking it safely into his embarrassingly empty wallet. I could see how a person might become frustrated with Roy. I could even understand how he could antagonize others with his constantly broken promises. But how could anyone kill this sporting Peter Pan whose only real crime was to refuse to grow up and behave like an adult? I was shaken from my nostalgic reverie by the interview room door being opened. The gangly young detective who entered almost had to bow his head to get through the doorway before taking his place at the seat opposite. He was sitting down in front of me when he spoke. Apparently it was an improvised explosive device, he said, stating the obvious. In terrorist terms it was very small but it was placed directly under the driver's seat. He took the papers I had in front of me on the desk. Let me read your statement out to you and if you are happy with it you can go, he continued. The next ten minutes were spent reading and editing my statement and once I had signed and initialed where instructed, the young detective rose, effectively dismissing me. I felt that I needed the answer to the question that burned inside of me and so I asked, who did this and why? I heard the pleading tone in my own voice. The young man sat down, looked at me kindly, smiled weakly and shrugged his shoulders. We don't really know but it's rumored that he had reneged on some pretty heavy debts. Debt collectors don't kill people, I responded. These ones do, he said solemnly. Mr. Bennett had large sums outstanding with some pretty nasty loan sharks but where would a loan shark get the expertise to blow someone up with an IED? He looked at me, clearly wondering how much I should know. Listen, since the fall of ISIS, the terrorist bombers' hard-earned skills have been made all but redundant. They simply don't know how to do anything else and the Cobra team think that some of them may be selling their skills on the open market. There was a period of silence as I absorbed the information. Roy's loan shark may not have been paid on time but by killing him they have guaranteed that they won't get paid at all, I said, still puzzled. Perhaps not, he whispered, but when the word gets around, a lot of their other customers will be keen to pay up as soon as they can. I stood up. I was finished here. It was a dark and different world and I was a stranger in it. It was a world where men callously took a human life and extinguished it just to set an example. I felt a growing revulsion for the men who loved money more than life. The young detective held out his hand, I shook it and walked out of the room into a long grey corridor. I numbly glanced at the coat hanging over my arm and decided to wear it for the short walk to the hotel. As I was slipping it on, I caught sight of a grey-haired man staring at me from the office opposite. His face was strained and taut with concentration, he wore a bright check over v-neck t-shirt and bore all the signs of someone who had just been dragged out of bed, he saw me looking and then slowly closed the venetian blinds until I could no longer see into the room. Stepping out from the overheated police building, the cold night air chilled me. I pulled my coat tightly around me, as much for comfort as for warmth. There was a black BMW X5 parked on the far side of the road and I shuddered as I was reminded of my old friend Roy. My eyes began to fill with tears, perhaps it was the cold.