Hand of God

  ‘They’re only quick when it’s a matter of cracking heads.’

  ‘Spiros told me about your son. I’m sorry. Is he all right?’

  ‘As well as can be expected. But thank you for asking.’

  That never sounds good, so I didn’t ask more.

  ‘Please understand that nothing is going to be written down tonight,’ she insisted. ‘At least not by me. Is that quite clear?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You won’t be able to rely on what we find in a court of law because what we’re doing is illegal. And another thing, I’m helping you, Mr Manson, not the police. This is a private matter between you and me. I figure that if everyone else in this country can work off the books then so can I.’

  ‘Sure, I understand.’

  ‘Do you have something for me?’ she said.

  I handed over a hotel envelope containing five hundred euros.

  She nodded. ‘If someone speaks to you just answer them in English and then they’ll know for sure you’re not breaking the strike.’

  I nodded. ‘What’s the strike about, anyway?’

  ‘Money,’ she said. ‘There isn’t any. At least not for Greek public services.’

  ‘So I gather.’

  ‘There seems to be plenty for footballers, however. Even here in Athens.’

  I drank my coffee silently; it’s never a good idea to try to justify the salaries in football to anyone, least of all those in the medical profession. And it was a good job that before I could try, my iPhone chimed: Maurice had emailed me a link to an article in the Independent that said Viktor Sokolnikov was planning to fire me at the end of the season. I wasn’t worried by this; no one ever reads the Independent.

  ‘If it was just picking a team I’d hardly be here now, would I?’

  Eva Pyromaglou nodded down at the grimly smiling face on the cover of her book. ‘I certainly couldn’t see him turning policeman to solve a crime.’

  She looked at her watch. ‘Come on,’ she said briskly. ‘It’s time we were moving.’ She picked up her phone and quickly texted Spiros, to let him know we were on our way.

  35

  Laiko General Hospital was as dark as a church inside and almost as quiet. The hospital had a policy of switching off most of the lights at night, to save money on electricity.

  ‘That’s also in our favour,’ she said, leading the way through dim corridors. ‘But you should be careful where you’re walking. You wouldn’t want to have an accident in a Greek public hospital.’

  I smiled; I was starting to like Eva.

  Spiros was waiting for us around the next corner. He wasn’t alone. Under a sheet on a trolley in front of him was the body of a woman and you didn’t have to be a detective to work that out; her breasts stood up like a couple of sandcastles on a beach.

  ‘This way,’ he said and, pushing the trolley ahead, he led us along another dim corridor and through the open doors of a large and brightly lit elevator. Inside, he turned a key quickly, to operate the car, and then stepped outside, leaving Eva and me alone with the dead body. She pressed one of the buttons, the doors slid shut and the lift started to move. Almost immediately she turned the key again and the elevator stopped between floors, with a jerk.

  As she threw back the sheet covering the dead girl’s body it was now plain to me that she was planning to examine the body right there, in the lift.

  ‘Pity,’ she said. ‘She was very beautiful.’

  ‘You’re going to look at her in here?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. In here we can be sure not to be disturbed. Spiros will text me when it’s safe to bring the car back down.’

  ‘Why do I get the feeling you’ve done this before?’

  ‘In the elevator? No, you’re the first; and I hope the last. I can’t afford for this strike to go on much longer. It might even get violent, too. Towards the end strikes in Greece always become bloody-minded. You certainly wouldn’t want to get caught in the middle of that.’

  ‘Now you tell me.’

  In a bag between the body’s feet was everything Eva would need: scalpels, swabs, scissors, evidence bags, suture needles, antiseptic hand gel and latex gloves. She put the bag on the floor and then proceeded to examine the girl’s body, meticulously, as if searching her flesh for the smallest blemish. For a while I let her work in silence, admiring the care and respect with which she treated the cadaver.

  ‘I’m looking for bruises,’ she murmured. ‘Needle marks, abrasions, cuts, scratches, anything.’ After several more minutes she shook her head. ‘But there’s not a mark on her.’

  ‘To my eye she looks like she was pregnant,’ I said, helpfully.

  ‘No, that’s not pregnant.’ Eva grunted. ‘You say she drowned? In Marina Zea?’

  ‘That’s what the cops told me.’

  ‘Then we’d better make quite sure. Ordinarily I would just cut her open and see what’s in her lungs but we can’t do that. This is not a post-mortem, after all. However, a little superficial cutting will be permissible. Help me turn her onto her stomach, with her head hanging over the edge of the trolley.’

  We rolled her over and Eva fetched a cardboard tray from her carrier bag that she positioned under the dead girl’s lower jaw.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘I want you to lean across her body, with all your weight. But I suppose I ought to warn you first that with all the gas that’s built up inside her, it’s possible she might misbehave. But I’m looking for any seawater that might be left inside her lungs.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’

  When Eva was ready I leaned across the dead girl’s back and, at first, nothing happened.

  ‘Harder, man. You can’t hurt her now. Do it like you’re a sports physio. Take your feet off the ground. Come on. Really let her have it.’

  I did as I was told and a few seconds later, a loud and very smelly fart emanated from the cadaver’s nether regions.

  ‘Whatever happened to silent witness?’ I said, turning my face in the opposite direction.

  Finally, a trickle of liquid slid out of the cadaver’s mouth and into the cardboard tray. Eva transferred this to a bottle which she placed in her carrier bag.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now let’s turn her onto her back again.’

  We wrestled her over and then I stood back from the trolley, panting a little. It was getting very warm and malodorous in the elevator car. I was already glad I was wearing an old T-shirt.

  ‘What’s next?’

  ‘We take a closer look at those tits, of course. Just look at them.’

  ‘I did. I am. It’s hard not to look at them when they’re like that. I imagine they looked rather better when she was walking around. Maybe a little more natural.’

  ‘That’s your opinion.’ Eva laid out her instruments at the foot of the trolley, as neatly as she was able.

  ‘But they do stand to attention, don’t they? Much more than yesterday, I think.’

  ‘When silicon becomes cold it hardens a bit. Sometimes it gets smaller.’

  ‘I know the feeling.’

  Eva picked up a scalpel and then took hold of the dead girl’s breast and moved it from side to side, as if judging where to cut.

  ‘At least this one’s still got her nipples,’ she murmured. ‘That’s something, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, I heard about that. Hannibal Leventis, wasn’t it? The Athenian bus driver who murdered those other girls?’

  ‘You’re well informed.’

  ‘Not by the police, I’m not.’

  ‘Believe me, this is a very different box of cakes.’

  ‘You sound like you have some knowledge of those cases.’

  ‘I do. It was me who sectioned them.’

  ‘There was talk of Leventis having an accomplice, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Yes, there was. And he did, I think. But the police decided Leventis acted alone. Because that’s what Leventis said. And it suited them to believe him.’

  ‘I see.’

&
nbsp; ‘All right, now pay attention. This is what you’ve paid for. You see this almost invisible scar here, under the breast? That’s where the breast implant went in; and it’s where we’re going to take it out again.’

  ‘We are? Why?’

  ‘Has that phone of yours got a voice memo app?’

  ‘Her tits are big but I don’t think it was them that made her sink to the bottom of the marina. It was a large weight tied to her feet.’ I fumbled the phone from my pocket, and tapped the app.

  ‘With any luck this little girl’s tits will tell us her full name and address. So you’d better start recording.’

  I winced a little as Eva sliced the flesh deep along the scar under the breast and then pulled out her implant.

  ‘Doesn’t this count as invasive?’ I asked.

  ‘It may sound like splitting hairs to you but no, it doesn’t, because we’re going in and out through an existing scar. Everything will look like it was before. More or less.’

  Wiping the implant with a length of paper towel she turned it over like a jellyfish and palped it for a moment.

  ‘It’s already more softer and more pliable just from the heat of my hand. And this is just what I was hoping for. On the back surface of the implant you will see an imprint that contains the name of the manufacturer, the style and size, as well as a serial number. When the device was placed, a copy of this serial number and the other details were sent back to the manufacturer so that it can be tracked for quality assurance and research purposes. This particular implant was made by Mentor. All I have to do is telephone Mentor in the morning and they’ll tell me what I need to know.’ She read out the serial number and the device size into the mike on my iPhone. ‘And that’s it. Unless we’re very unlucky we should be able to identify this girl in less than twenty-four hours.’

  Eva replaced the implant device and quickly stitched up the dead girl’s breast again.

  ‘Jesus, it’s as simple as that?’

  ‘Mmm-hmm. After Spiros told me about her tits, I had an idea that we could do this. These days, implant devices are as good a means of identification as the microchip in a cat or a dog.’

  ‘Brilliant.’

  Having finished her suture, Eva covered the stitching with a layer of body butter and then some foundation colour. By the time she’d finished the stitches were more or less invisible.

  ‘Impressive,’ I said.

  Eva took a sample of blood from the girl’s arm using a syringe.

  ‘Do I need the voice memo any more?’

  ‘No, you can switch that thing off. But we’ve not finished yet, Mr Manson. I’ll do some blood work on her at home to determine what drugs and alcohol were in her system at the time of death.’

  ‘Right.’ I put the phone back in my pocket.

  ‘I shall also need to take some swabs from her vagina, mouth and anus. If there’s any that doesn’t match her own blood type it will give us a useful means of identifying who she had sex with. And perhaps her killer. If killer there was. I must say there’s no evidence to say that this girl put up much of a struggle. I’ve seen more violent-looking cot deaths.’

  ‘Perhaps she was drugged after all.’

  ‘If we find anything on the swabs it will enable us to eliminate players in your team. Of course, to do that we’ll need to take samples from them, too. Including you, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The sooner we eliminate you the better, I think, Mr Manson.’

  I helped her bag the swabs; she also took a lock of the hair on the girl’s head and a few strands of her pubic hair.

  According to Eva Pyromaglou, our post-mortem lite had been successful.

  ‘What happens now?’ I asked.

  ‘Now we hope the elevator starts when we turn the key. I’d hate to be trapped in here all night.’

  Right on cue, the corpse farted again.

  ‘I see what you mean.’

  Eva was about to cover her with the sheet when I stopped her.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, looking at the dead girl’s face. ‘The police sketch doesn’t look anything like her; and the photo I took before doesn’t look right. Her eyes are closed. Nobody looks like themselves in a picture when they have their eyes closed. Do you think you could open them?’

  ‘I can do better than that,’ said Eva.

  She produced her make-up bag again and in just a few minutes, with a little bit of foundation, eyeshadow, mascara, blusher and lipstick, she had transformed the dead girl into a real person; she even sprayed her open staring eyes with some Optrex Actimist to bring a little brightness back to them.

  ‘Fantastic,’ I said, and took several pictures on my iPhone.

  ‘No.’ Eva shook her head. ‘I think I was a bit too heavy-handed with the blusher. I’ve made her look like... like a whore.’

  ‘No, she’s not that bad. Not that bad at all.’ I looked at the picture I’d taken on my iPhone and frowned. ‘It’s strange but now that you’ve tarted her up a bit, she looks exactly like my ex-wife.’

  36

  Reading the sports pages on my iPad and watching Football Focus on BBC World, I felt like a fish out of water. I’d have given anything to be back in London preparing for our big game with Chelsea. I always liked going to Stamford Bridge, especially in August. Chelsea always feels special in summer. I guess that’s why I live there.

  Would we have beaten the Blues? At the beginning of the season, when your whole team is fit, anything is possible; for the same reason it’s the newly promoted teams, like Leicester City, that you have to watch out for. It’s only as the season wears on that beating the top sides becomes progressively more difficult. If, like the Blues, you’ve got a team composed of twenty-five international players, then it stands to reason you’re going to be in the running for a top-four spot at the end of the season. It also stands to reason that if you have a squad like that and you’re not top four then you’re going to get the sack.

  It was very early in the season for a manager to get the sack but according to the papers, that’s what had happened to an old mate of mine. Nick Broomhouse had been manager at Leeds United for just two months and, after a dismal start to the season that saw them losing 6–0 to newly promoted Wolves and then 5–0 to Huddersfield, the new club chairman and owner declared he had no confidence in the manager. The match against Huddersfield was one of those derby matches that any Leeds manager just has to win. My guess is that he was just looking for an excuse to be rid of the previous owner’s man. I had my own problems, of course, but these didn’t stop me from sending a text offering my sympathies to poor old Broomhouse.

  Of course, any manager always expects to get the sack, the way a burglar probably expects to get caught and go to prison. It’s hardwired into your psyche that the sack is an occupational hazard; probably it’s one of the reasons some of us are paid so much in the first place. But the money is never sufficient compensation for having your team taken away from you at a moment’s notice. It hasn’t happened to me, yet, but I don’t doubt that my turn will come. Sometimes football management is just revolving doors. A six-year contract like mine would make some managers feel safe. Not me. A guy as wealthy as Viktor Sokolnikov would hardly notice paying five million quid to get rid of me. I’m not quite as cheap as chips to a man like Vik, but I’m something pretty close to it.

  I was still musing upon my own disposability when Louise rang from my flat in Chelsea. We proceeded to have one of our more typically playful conversations, the way two people do when they think they might be in love but don’t want to admit it before the other has.

  ‘I miss you,’ she said, plaintively.

  ‘I miss you, too,’ I said.

  ‘I’m lying in your big bed, naked, with all the newspapers, and wishing you were here.’

  ‘As long as it’s just the newspapers you’re in bed with, then that’s okay.’

  ‘I just want you to know exactly what you’re missing here, Scott.’

  ‘Believ
e me, I know. For one thing there’s that game against Chelsea. Not to mention some big bonuses if we’d beaten the bastards. Which we could have done. Even without Bekim.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I know what you meant, darling. But since you were teasing me, I thought I’d tease you back.’ I laughed. ‘That’s why football was invented: to make women believe that we don’t think about sex all the time.’

  ‘Does it work?’

  ‘Sure. For exactly forty-five minutes. Until half time when we can start thinking about sex again, for just fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Don’t you ever think about me during the match? Not once?’

  ‘Maybe once or twice.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘But that’s only until your own side scores. Putting three past Man U, when Fergie’s in the stands with a face like a slapped arse. That’s better than sex in any manager’s book.’

  ‘It’s not in your book.’

  ‘You read it?’

  ‘There are ten copies on your bookshelf. I could hardly avoid it.’

  ‘But you only read the one, right?’

  ‘Funny. I read it thinking it might give me an insight into you.’

  ‘You certainly won’t get anything like that from my book.’

  ‘You think not?’

  ‘You want insights into my way of thinking? Read the match-day programme.’

  ‘I can tell you wrote it, Scott. The book, I mean. Some of the phraseology...’

  ‘Of course I wrote it. Who do you think I am? Wayne Rooney?’

  ‘It told me a lot that I didn’t know.’

  ‘That’s what Wayne said.’

  ‘It told me that you have a habit of getting yourself into scrapes. That maybe I should fly out to Athens. That you needed me to keep you out of trouble.’

  ‘That was in the book?’

  ‘To keep you company in the royal suite.’

  ‘I’d like that, too. So, see if you can get a flight. Why not? I’ll start running the bath. It’s a big one.’

  ‘All right, I will. I won’t cramp your style? There must be a lot of Greek girls dying to go to bed with you.’