Close to Death

Adam had won all twenty-two games in the first round and so far had seen off seventeen of his opponents in the second, although he had been pleasantly surprised by the abilities of these American amateurs. One of them – a man called Frank (no surnames were being used) – had managed to shatter his kingside pawn structure and he had been lucky to engineer a passed pawn for the endgame. Moving now to the next screen, he saw that Frank had pulled back a bishop, only making his position worse. Surely he could see that there were five moves to mate against any defence? The other contests were also drawing to a close and, at the current rate of play, he calculated that in eighteen minutes it would all be over. Theoretically, it didn’t matter if he lost or drew; the fee he was being paid would stay the same. But Adam had decided that he wanted to make a clean sweep: forty-six games, forty-six wins. However well they had played, these people were amateurs. They should have expected nothing less.

He advanced a rook on one screen (leaving it en prise . . . would Dean be unwise enough to take the bait?), put Charmaine in check (mate in three) and was just focusing on the next game, about to make his move, when he heard the gate opening outside his house.

Riverview Close was set back from the main road, connected to it by a narrow drive that ran through an archway with an electronic gate controlling who came in and out. Adam Strauss’s house was right next to this entrance and although he couldn’t hear the gate from his bedroom, which was on the other side, he was quite close to it here. Even as the mechanism whirred into action, it was accompanied by a blast of pop music cutting through the air like a blade through grey silk. ‘So we danced all night to the best song ever . . .’ The lyrics were so loud they were echoing in the room and, for a brief moment, Strauss froze, his index finger hanging over the trackpad. He knew the car. He knew the driver. It was so typical. Only one man could be as gauche, as inconsiderate as this.

He looked up at the screen and even as he felt the cool touch of the plastic against his finger, he saw to his dismay that he had allowed his hand to fall. He had accidentally pressed the key and selected the wrong piece! The next move had been clear in his head: ♘xf2. It was so obvious, it could have been signposted in neon. But somehow he had managed to highlight the king standing next to the knight and the rules dictated that there could be no going back. He had to reposition the king on a legal square, although he saw at once that any move involving that piece would destroy his game. In that tiny second of non-concentration, he had ruined everything. It was over!

And so it proved. A tiny part of him had hoped that his opponent – Wayne – unable to believe his good luck, would come to the conclusion that Adam had laid some deep and impenetrable trap and would make a mistake of his own. Wayne was not a strong player. His opening had been standard, his middle game confused and he had stumbled into an endgame that should have been over in no more than six moves. But when, after completing another circuit, Adam returned to the game, he saw that Wayne had advanced his rook (♜d4), closing in for the kill. With a flicker of annoyance, he resigned.

Forty-five wins. One defeat. Somewhere in Santa Barbara he could imagine a schoolteacher or an accountant, or worse still a teenager, whooping it up. Wayne Nobody had just outmanoeuvred the man who had once beaten Kasparov and Spassky. On the thirty-eighth move. In a game that had been Adam’s for the taking.

Fifteen minutes later, sitting there, utterly still, he heard a movement behind him. Teri, his wife, had come into the room, making no sound, her bare feet soft on the carpet. She laid a gentle hand on his shoulder but didn’t speak until he looked up and she knew that the tournament had ended.

‘How did it go?’ she asked.

‘Did you hear the car?’ he asked back.

She nodded. ‘It woke me up.’ She glanced at the blank screens. ‘What happened?’

‘I lost focus. I threw a game away.’

Teri walked over to the front window and looked out. She saw that lights had come on in the big house on the far side of the close. A bright green sports car was parked outside the front door, its roof still down. For a moment, she didn’t speak. She knew exactly what was going on inside her husband’s head. She also knew that it was twenty past four and time to get back to bed. ‘Just one game?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘You won all the others . . .’

‘Yes.’ He sounded irritable. Far from victorious.

‘Of course it’s annoying, Adam.’ She was talking quickly, not allowing him to interrupt. ‘But it’s not important at all. It wasn’t over the board and it won’t be reported.’ She smiled and held out a hand. ‘Why don’t you come up and get some sleep? You’ll have forgotten the whole thing by tomorrow.’