Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 24: Deed?

I needed the deed itself.

The actual, original, signed, sealed and witnessed 1923 deed of gift, with the covenant written on it in black and white.

And the deed was not in the cellar. The deed had never been in the cellar. The minute book stated, in a neat dead hand gone ninety years cold, exactly where the deed had been lodged for safekeeping in November 1923.

And as I read the where, my laugh dried up in my throat.

"Raj," I said slowly, my eyes still on the page. "How do you fancy a trip into town tomorrow?"

"Why? Sam. Why have you gone all quiet and frightening? Where’s the deed?"

I turned the minute book round so he could see, and pointed at the line, the neat dead copperplate of a secretary ninety years in his grave.

Resolved: that the Deed of Gift pertaining to the Marsh Road ground, together with the covenant thereon, be lodged for safekeeping with Messrs Carbery and Sons, Solicitors, of 14 High Street, this 9th day of November 1923.

"Carbery and Sons," I said. "High Street. Tomorrow we find out if they still exist. And if they do, we find out whether a hundred-year-old law firm holds onto a hundred-year-old bit of paper."

They existed.

Just about.

The brass plaque by the door had gone green, and the second "and Sons" had clearly died out decades ago, but there it still was, wedged between a vape shop and a Greggs on Tilbrook High Street: CARBERY and SON, SOLICITORS, EST. 1881.

A little bell went ting over the door, and inside it smelled of furniture polish and quiet money and about a century of other people’s troubles.

The man who came out from the back was about a hundred himself, stooped, immaculate, a half-moon pair of glasses on a chain and a cardigan you could have lost a fist in. The panel drifted up over him, and I’m glad it did, because it stopped me being impatient with him.

---

Name: Edwin Carbery ·

Age: 81

"Player": N/A Fourth and final Carbery. Forgets where he’s left his tea. Has not forgotten a single clause of a single deed in fifty-six years of practice. Sharper than the lot of you. Be polite.

---

"Marsh Road," he said, when I’d explained, and his cloudy eyes did something behind the half-moon glasses, a little flare, like a pilot light catching.

"The football ground. The Pargeter gift." He smiled, a small dry private smile. "You know, I rather wondered if anyone would ever come and ask about that. My grandfather always said it was the most interesting thing in the whole strongroom. Sit. Sit, sit. Sandra will do tea. Sandra!"

It took him forty minutes and a great deal of muttering and one alarming moment on a library ladder that took ten years off my life, wobble, but Edwin Carbery found it. He laid it on the green leather of his desk the way you’d lay down a sleeping baby.

Thick cream parchment, folded in three, soft as cloth at the creases, a wax seal gone the colour of dried blood, and the ink, brown with age but clear as the day it was written.

This Indenture, made the ninth day of November 1923, between Mrs Eliza Pargeter, widow, of Tilbrook...

"Her husband owned the barge works," said Carbery softly, watching me read.

"He died in the first war. She gave the field to the town in his memory. Twelve acres of good riverside land, and she could have sold it for a king’s ransom even then." He tapped the page with one trembling, immaculate finger. "But read on, young man. Read what she did instead. It’s rather marvellous."

I read on. And my heart started going like a drum.

The land was given to the people of Tilbrook to be used for the playing of association football and for public recreation, and for no other purpose whatsoever, in perpetuity. And should it ever cease to be so used, should anyone ever try to build upon it or sell it for gain, the land was not to pass to any buyer, nor any council, nor any developer.

It was to revert, in full, to the people of the town. To be held in trust. For ever.

Eliza Pargeter, eighty-seven years dead, had reached out of her grave and put her hand flat on the chest of every Ray Sully who would ever come sniffing, and said: no. Not this one. This one is theirs.

"You can’t build on it," I breathed.

"You cannot so much as put up a hot dog van without the town’s say-so," said Edwin Carbery, with enormous satisfaction.

"It is, if I may say, the single most beautiful piece of drafting in this entire building. Cast iron. My grandfather checked it twice a decade for sixty years out of sheer professional admiration."

The pilot light in his eyes burned bright now. "It would take an Act of Parliament and the agreement of the entire town to shift it. That land will be a football pitch when you and I are both long gone, young man, whether the rich men like it or not."

I could have wept. I could have danced old Edwin Carbery round his dusty office. I had it. The weapon.

The thing that turned twelve acres of priceless development land into twelve acres worth, to a man like Sully, of absolutely nothing at all. Walk into that creditors’ meeting, lay this on the table, and his bid didn’t just lose. It vanished. You can’t pay millions for land you can never, ever build on.

I had Tilbrook Town.

"I’ll need a certified copy," I said, hardly trusting my voice. "For Friday. Can you do that?"

"Of course." Carbery began, with maddening slowness, to write out a receipt. Then he paused, pen hovering, and frowned at the deed, and frowned at me, and said the thing that turned my blood to ice water.

"You’re the second, you know."

"...Sorry?"

"The second to ask after the Marsh Road title this month." He peered at me over the half-moons, mild as milk, with no idea what he was doing to my insides.

"Some very polished young people. Lawyers, I should think, the expensive sort. A fortnight ago, perhaps three weeks. Acting for a development company. They examined this exact deed for the better part of an afternoon."

He clicked his tongue. "Didn’t say thank you, and one of them put a coffee cup down on an 1890s conveyance. But they were very, very thorough."

The bell over the door seemed to go very far away. Ting.

Sully knew.

Of course Sully knew. He was a man who measured centre circles and asked secretaries for keys and did not, ever, walk into a room he hadn’t already checked for exits. He’d known about Eliza Pargeter and her cast-iron covenant for three whole weeks. He’d read it sitting in this very chair. And he had filed his bid anyway. Smiling. Certain.

Which meant the deed wasn’t a bomb he didn’t see coming.

It meant he already had a way round it.

"Raj," I said quietly, rolling the certified copy into its tube with hands that had gone very steady and very cold. "He knows. He’s known the whole time."

"So... that’s bad?"

"It’s very bad." I looked out of Carbery’s little window, down the High Street, at the people going about their Tuesday with no idea their town was about to be fought over. "It means a man a hundred times richer than me has had three weeks to plan for the exact card I’m about to play. And I’ve got four days to work out what he’s going to do about it."

Four days. To get inside a man like Ray Sully’s head.

I smiled, then. I couldn’t help it. Because God help me, after sixteen years of folding tracksuits, I had finally, finally found a game worth playing.

"Come on," I said. "I need to think. And you need to drive me past that ground one more time."