Hand of God

  ‘Look, I wasn’t lying to you this morning,’ I said when I called. ‘There really isn’t anything on his phone or his laptop. If there was, I’d have told you. We’re keen to get home, remember?’

  ‘All right. Say for the sake of argument I believe you. How did he contact this girl?’

  ‘There could have been a hundred different ways. Perhaps they spoke on the phone in London. Or he used the computer in his office there. Or maybe he called the girl with someone else’s mobile phone while he was here in Athens. Or phoned from the lobby. Perhaps he used a web-based email service that didn’t even show up on his computer. Like Hushmail.’

  ‘Hushmail?’

  ‘It offers authenticated, encrypted messages in both directions. Just the thing for a promiscuous man with a nosy girlfriend back in London.’

  ‘Yes, I take your point. Okay, I’ll ring you back when I’ve found someone who speaks Russian. Thanks for letting me know.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘This reward you’re posting for information. Please keep me informed if you discover anything. Anything at all.’

  He sighed and I almost felt sorry for him until I remembered that he was the bastard keeping my team in Greece.

  ‘Of course. Right away.’

  When Varouxis had hung up I tried calling Valentina but she wasn’t answering her phone so I sent her an email and a text asking her to contact me urgently. I had a shrewd idea that the dead girl might be known to her; that something had prevented Valentina herself from going to Bekim’s bungalow at the hotel, and that the dead girl had gone in her place. I couldn’t imagine that Bekim would have settled for second best so I decided that the dead girl, whoever she was, must have been a beauty like Valentina otherwise Valentina would never have sent her along to Bekim.

  But by the afternoon I must have called Valentina at least a dozen times and left as many texts without receiving a reply. This was quite the opposite of how she had behaved when last I’d been in Athens and I was forced to admit the possibility that Valentina knew she herself had escaped the other girl’s Plenty O’Toole fate and, in fear of her life, was now lying low. I didn’t blame her for that but without an address this all seemed to stymie my plan to steal a march on the Athens police. I could hardly follow up on my lead without the cooperation of the lead herself. Yet I was still reluctant to hand over her name and number to Chief Inspector Varouxis. It wasn’t just that I had little wish for my own behaviour to come out in public, or that I was trying to look out for Valentina or Bekim, but if the police were as right-wing as Dr Christodoulakis had said they were, I didn’t want the cops brushing the whole thing under the carpet and suggesting to the press that because Bekim and Valentina were both Russian this was nothing to do with Greeks.

  Without much of a clue how else my so-called investigation was to proceed, I had Vik’s driver take me to Piraeus and the Marina Zea where Varouxis said the girl’s body had been found. I was already regretting my own arrogance in imagining that just because I knew something the cops didn’t, I could perhaps solve the dead girl’s murder. The main road took us close to the Karaiskakis Stadium and, next to this, the Metropolitan Hospital where Bekim had died. I hadn’t really looked at the hospital before; it was a strangely modern building constructed of blue glass and looked more like a Ladbrokes casino than what was supposed to be the best private hospital in Greece. It was hard to think of Bekim dying in a place like that.

  Marina Zea was a large harbour full of expensive Tupperware boats and overlooked by a hillside encrusted with numerous beige-coloured apartment buildings of mostly poor quality. The police were still in evidence on the furthest side of the marina and it was not yet permitted for anyone to go there, so I amused myself walking around and looking at the floating palaces, the largest and most opulent of which was a modestly named vessel called Monsieur Croesus, and which I seemed to recognise, although I have no interest in boats. One floating apartment building looks much like another and to me spending tens of millions of pounds on something like a yacht always seemed the height of folly; boats sink, after all.

  I walked on a bit. I don’t know what I was looking for beyond a sense of how difficult it would be to bring a girl here and drop her into the water with a weight tied to her feet. At night, I decided, it would not be difficult at all. There was ample parking; of course, if she’d been on a boat it would have been even easier. I chucked a couple of stones into the water to test the depth and stirred up a little school of quite reasonable-sized fish; these, I supposed, were gavroi – the shit-eating fish to which our liaison from Panathinaikos had compared the players and supporters of Olympiacos.

  It was a hot, sticky afternoon. Some of the city’s ubiquitous, mostly Roma, garbage pickers were going through the wheelie bins and open skips on the marina. Several boys were diving in and out of the harbour, and climbing on the guy ropes of another, untended boat. It looked more fun than picking garbage and I almost envied the boys their carefree pastime until I remembered that it had been some boys diving in the harbour who’d found the dead girl’s body. Which gave me an idea.

  They were about eleven or twelve years old, tanned and skinny, the very image of urchins, as if they had been truly dredged off the sea floor.

  ‘Speak English?’ I asked one of them.

  He shook his sleek black head.

  I went back to the car and fetched my driver to translate and when I came back I asked the boys if it had been them who’d found the dead girl’s body.

  Two of the boys looked at each other and then nodded.

  Holding up two twenty-euro notes I sat down on the wall of the harbour and asked them to tell me what they’d seen, in as much detail as they could remember. The two boys sat beside me and I handed over the cash, while the others looked on and listened as my driver, Charilaos, squatted behind us and translated what was said and offered around his cigarettes, which helped almost as much as the money.

  ‘It was yesterday morning when they found her,’ he said. ‘Maybe ten o’clock in the morning. She was on the Koumoundourou side of the harbour, where the police are now, in about four metres of water.’

  ‘Was it near to any boat in particular and if so which one?’

  ‘Between two boats,’ said Charilaos. ‘Both for sale, as it happened. And the owners were not aboard. They know this because they went aboard each boat to try and get help.’

  ‘Tell me what she looked like, this girl.’

  ‘A very pretty girl with long blonde hair and wearing a dark blue dress. The water isn’t very clear as you can see and but for the blue dress they might have found her earlier. She gave them quite a shock.’

  One of the boys looked embarrassed as he spoke again.

  ‘But she wasn’t wearing any knickers, he says. Her dress was floating under her arms.’

  ‘Were her hands tied?’

  The same boy spoke again and then Charilaos said, ‘No, her hands were floating in the water, above her head. It was only her feet that were tied to a big orange weight. Of the type you see in a gym.’

  ‘Any gag?’

  ‘No gag.’

  ‘Was she wearing shoes?’

  ‘No. No shoes.’

  I took out my notebook and asked the boy to draw a picture of what the weight looked like and he drew what looked to me like a kettlebell. I nodded.

  ‘Were there any other injuries on her body that they saw?’ I asked. ‘Cuts, bruises, any blood?’

  ‘No,’ Charilaos translated, ‘but the fishes were feeding on her private parts.’

  ‘No bumps on her head? No cuts on her hands?’

  ‘The boys says her hands were very nice. Her nails, too. Like her toenails. I think he means she had a manicure.’

  ‘What colour?’ I asked.

  ‘They think purple.’

  ‘Any jewellery?’

  The boys looked a bit shifty.

  ‘He insists she wasn’t wearing any jewellery,’ said Charilaos, ‘but I don’t believ
e him. For sure they stole it.’

  ‘Forget it. Anything else that might distinguish or identify her?’

  One of the boys said something and Charilaos asked him to repeat it.

  ‘Tatouáz,’ was the word he used.

  ‘She had a tattoo,’ said Charilaos.

  ‘What kind of a tattoo?’ I asked. ‘And where?’

  ‘On her shoulder. A sort of geometrical design, in black. It sounds to me like he means a lavýrinthos. You know? Like the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.’

  ‘A labyrinth?’

  ‘That’s right. About the size of a teacup.’

  ‘Did he tell that to the police?’

  Charilaos laughed. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the police were offering forty euros in cash. Besides, people in Athens, in Piraeus—’

  ‘I know. They hate the police.’

  Our walk back to the car took us past Monsieur Croesus again and this time I was surprised to see someone I knew standing on one of the upper decks; not only that but someone who recognised me, which was perhaps more unusual. It was Cooper Lybrand, the hedgie. He wasn’t wearing the white suit any more but he still looked like a cunt.

  ‘Hi there,’ he said. ‘What brings you down here?’

  ‘Curiosity,’ I said. ‘They fished a dead girl out of the water on the other side of the marina. Apparently she spent the night with one of our players. So now we’re forbidden to leave Athens. I just wanted to take a look at the spot for myself.’

  ‘I heard about that,’ he said. ‘And about Bekim. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I thought you were staying on Viktor’s boat,’ I said.

  ‘I was. But I had some business with the guy who owns this one. Gustave Haak. And now here I am. We only docked here an hour ago so I guess that puts us in the clear, huh?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I’d invite you on board but it’s not my boat. Gustave is a very private person.’

  ‘Who says I am?’

  Another head appeared on deck. Older and taller than Cooper Lybrand, he had a full head of longish grey hair, a face like a hawk and almost invisible glasses.

  ‘Gustave. This is Scott Manson. He manages Vik’s football club.’

  ‘Of course, I know who Scott Manson is,’ said Gustave Haak. ‘Do you take me for an idiot? Forgive our manners, Mr Manson, and please come aboard. We’re just about to have a glass of wine.’

  I looked at my watch. ‘All right. As a matter of fact I could use a drink.’

  I told Charilaos I’d see him back at the car and went aboard.

  By this time, Cooper Lybrand had told Haak what I was doing in Marina Zea and Haak was full of questions about the dead girl, most of which I was unable to answer.

  ‘But you’re quite right to come down here and take a look for yourself,’ he said, ushering me into a spectacular drawing room that looked like it had been designed by a man with no children: everything was white. ‘I find that the best, most original ideas come to me when I’m not behind a desk. It’s the same when I’m investigating a company with a view to taking it over. You have to have good intel to know what the right move is going to be. Without that, you have nothing.’ He smiled and waved at one of the many cartoonish blondes wearing very fetching white uniforms – which is to say they were all wearing white swimsuits and white sneakers.

  ‘Will you have some of this excellent German Riesling, Mr Manson?’

  ‘Thanks, I will.’

  One of the blondes handed me a glass of liquid gold while Haak continued talking.

  ‘I love the game of football,’ he declared. ‘And the thing I appreciate about football managers is that, unlike most managers in most businesses, you always know what they do. They manage football teams. And they’re either good or they’re bad. Most companies are full of managers who do nothing. No, that’s not quite true. Most of them fuck things up, which is worse than doing nothing. I spend most of my time trying to find out who they are so that I can fire them. As soon as you do, the value of the company always goes up. It’s uncanny. Anyway, that’s my job, Mr Manson. The elimination of managers who are redundant in all but name.’

  He was Dutch, I think, because his accent reminded me of Ruud Gullitt. Fortunately for him he had a better haircut.

  ‘Vik tells me that you’re a good manager, Mr Manson. But do you think it’s wise to get involved in this? Wouldn’t it be better to leave things to the police?’

  ‘Have you met the police here in Attica, Mr Haak?’

  ‘No, I can’t say that I have.’

  ‘The way I see it, Mr Haak, I can do one of two things in a situation like this. I can look to see if I can do anything, anything at all to help sort it out; or I can do nothing. I’m generally the kind of person who likes to do something, even if that something turns out to be not very much. For all I know that might push me into the category of manager you don’t like, the kind who fucks things up. But, you know, I never mind fucking up just as long as I learn something. In that respect at least I’m just like the police. They fuck up all the time and it never seems to deter them.’

  ‘Good for you,’ he said. ‘And now because I’m a Dutchman, let’s talk about something more important. Let’s talk football.’

  25

  Back at the Grande Bretagne I had a light dinner on my own in the Winter Garden restaurant next to Alexander’s Bar and contemplated my next move. The only people calling or texting me were journalists and someone called Anna Loverdos from the Hellenic Football Federation – the Greek equivalent of the FA – offering her assistance, as well as several other managers sympathising with London City’s plight, including José Mourinho, which struck me as a little out of character.

  I watched a guy talking to a girl in the bar at the same table where I’d first met Valentina and after a while I knew I recognised the barman serving them as the same one who’d served us. After I charged my dinner to Vik’s suite, I went and sat at the bar under the sceptical eye of Alexander the Great who knew a thing or two about murder himself having connived at the death of his own father, Philip.

  The guy with the girl at my old table was working hard to seem like a regular sort; he was from Australia, one of those impeccably casual, sockless types, with stubble that never seems to grow beyond a certain uniform length. But I figured he was on the wrong side of five feet six inches and while he was doing his best to seem relaxed, he wasn’t. Short guys are always bustling around like terriers to make up for their lack of inches; it’s fine if you’re Messi or Maradona but for most guys it’s a problem. Especially when they’re with a girl as tall as this one was; she looked like a Trojan prince’s wet dream with beanstalk legs, plenty of big black hair, and a bow mouth that was probably too big for Cupid but looked just right for me.

  The barman came over and I ordered a Macallan 1973. At three hundred and ten euros a glass that got his attention; and it was his attention I wanted more than I wanted the Scotch. When he brought the bill, I put four crisp one hundred euro bills into the maroon leather folder and told him to keep the change. As he reached for the folder I covered it with my hand.

  ‘Maybe you remember me?’

  He shook his head. ‘Sorry, sir, I don’t.’

  ‘I was here a few weeks ago when Olympiacos played the German side, Hertha FC. I was in here with a girl. A Russian girl. Blonde. She wore a tweed minidress and Louboutin high heels. Her name is Valentina and I got the feeling you certainly remembered her from another time. On the Richter scale I would say she was at least an eight point nine. The kind of girl that causes major structural damage, even to earthquake-resistant wallets and credit cards. You remember her?’

  I removed my hand from the folder, sat back on the stool and sipped some of the Scotch. The barman was looking at the folder and trying to work out if a ninety euro tip was more than he was making in salary that evening; we both knew it was.

  ‘Come on. Aloysius Alzheimer would remember a girl like that.’
>
  With a pimp moustache, a dinner-plate waist and a Derby winner’s teeth, the barman looked like Freddy Mercury. He took the folder and laid it under the counter. ‘Valentina? Yes. I remember her. I wouldn’t say she’s a regular in this bar, but maybe once or twice a month she comes in here.’

  ‘With a different guy?’

  ‘Not every time. But always with someone like you. A foreigner with plenty of money.’

  ‘A working girl.’

  He shrugged. ‘This is Greece, sir. Any work is good work, nowadays. Who can afford to be proud about such things? Look at me: I used to be a university lecturer, in Chemistry. Now I mix cocktails for fifteen hundred euros a month. For fifteen hundred euros a night, who knows what I would do? But a poutána she was not. The doorman would never have allowed her in here. Excuse me for one minute, please.’

  He went away to make some drinks for a few minutes and then came back.

  ‘Did you ever see her with Bekim Develi, the footballer?’

  ‘I liked him,’ said the barman. ‘And now that he’s dead I wouldn’t like to cause his family any distress. He was almost as good a tipper as you are.’

  ‘I’m his family,’ I said. ‘As good as. I’m the manager of London City. My boss, Viktor Sokolnikov, is renting the royal suite. You might say we’re trying to do a bit of damage limitation. Damage to Bekim’s reputation, that is. The whole team is stuck in Athens until the police have satisfied themselves that there’s no connection between Bekim and the death of another working girl.’

  ‘This was in the newspaper, yes, I know.’

  ‘We don’t know this girl’s name, yet. But perhaps she was a friend of Valentina’s. That’s what I’m trying to find out. Another hair-salon blonde with a labyrinth tattoo on her shoulder. I figure the best way of us getting home is to prove that Bekim had nothing to do with her death, but we can only do that if we can identify her. And to do that I need to find Valentina. Valentina and the dead girl – they both had Bekim in common, you see.’