“There are too many ways of breaking a footballer’s leg. Too many, that is, from the footballer’s point of view. Others may find the freedom of choice encouraging.”
Third Division Athletic has been an unlucky club for ages, but things are about to get much worse. Danny Matson, Athletic’s top scorer, is out for the season after a scuffle inexplicably leaves him with a ruptured Achilles tendon. The team’s manager, Jimmy Lister, is convinced that someone is intentionally kicking the team while it’s down, and he hires Nick Duffy to get to the bottom of it.
Duffy has always been a worrier. He frets about his weight, about his burgeoning relationship with constable Carol Lucas, about his promiscuity with both men and women, and about the AIDS epidemic sweeping through London. This latest case gives him an opportunity to focus his attention elsewhere, on a list of suspects ranging from trophy-hungry supporters to hardcore skinheads bent on whitewashing England.
Dan Kavanagh was born in County Sligo, Ireland, in 1946. After an uncompromising adolescence, he left Ireland when he was nineteen and roamed the world. He has been an entertainment officer on a Japanese supertanker, a waiter on roller skates at a drive-in eatery in Tucson, and a bouncer in a gay bar in San Francisco. He boasts of having flown light planes on the Colombian cocaine route, but all that is known for certain is that he was once a baggage handler at Toronto International Airport. He lives in Islington, North London, and works in jobs that (with mild paranoia) he declines to specify.