I left the body and went back to the woman sitting in the chair. Her sobbing had abated. She was standing erect, motionless, and with her hands covering her face.
‘What happened?’ I asked her. She didn’t answer but simply continued standing there in the same position. ‘Inspector Haritos. Tell me what happened.’
She slowly took her hands from her face and looked at me. She took a deep breath and tried to find where to start. ‘We were playing, pushing each other into the pool,’ she said after a while. ‘You know the game at parties.’
I had seen it in some Hollywood films, but it was no time for games. ‘And then what?’
‘Apostolos suddenly appeared. He was wet and we thought that in all the hullabaloo he had dived in too. But he was wet with… paraffin…’ She began sobbing again and could barely whisper. ‘He went over there where he is now and waved to us as if saying goodbye. Then…’ She was unable to continue as she broke into sobs. ‘Then he took a lighter from his pocket and set fire to his clothes.’
I let her calm down a little from the sobbing. ‘Did no one think of dowsing him with water?’
‘No. We all froze. The flames engulfed him in less than a few seconds. We watched him leaping and screaming, but we didn’t dare approach him. When he finally collapsed on the grass, we came round and began looking for buckets and hosepipes. There was no hosepipe anywhere. Some people who ran into the house found a bucket. They filled it with water from the pool and threw it over him, but it was too late.’
‘Where’s his wife?’
‘He doesn’t have a wife, he’s divorced. Rena, the girl he lives… lived with, is in shock and they took her upstairs.’
People reacted as they always do in such cases. As soon as they see someone taking charge, they feel reassured and leave. I let her go to Fanis, who was standing beside the pool watching me.
‘He burnt like candle.’
At my words he was struck by awe. ‘All right, it’s one thing to commit suicide. But in such a horrible way? Why?’
‘I don’t know. Tell the ambulance to come and get him. And go into the house to find his girl. Her name’s Rena. See what state she’s in and do something to bring her round, because I need to talk to her.’
He turned and quickly walked away, while I looked around me. As I had lost the race with the inevitable, all I could do was investigate whether there were any similarities with the other two suicides. At first sight, Vakirtzis’s suicide differed on two counts. Firstly, the biography accompanying the suicide hadn’t been sent to a publisher but had come directly to me. That meant that whoever was hiding behind the pseudonym Logaras knew that I was investigating the suicides. Consequently, it was someone belonging to the circle of the three men and quite probably someone who knew me or knew who I had interrogated. Secondly, this was the only suicide that had taken place before an audience, but not on TV. Suddenly, Andreadis emerged from a group of people.
‘Terrible tragedy,’ he said on seeing me. ‘Terrible tragedy.’
‘Did you see it?’
‘Everyone saw it. It happened right before our eyes.’
‘Did you talk to him at all tonight?’
‘We exchanged a few words, that’s all. I greeted him when I arrived and wished him all the best for his name day, but then we didn’t bump into each other again.’
‘How did he seem to you?’
He thought about it for a moment. ‘As always, cordial and jocular. “You know how I feel about you, Kyriakos,” he said to me, “but I’m never going to see you in power.”’
Did he mean that he wouldn’t see him in power because his party would never win the elections or because he would commit suicide? Most probably the latter.
‘I didn’t expect to see you again under such unpleasant circumstances,’ Andreadis said to me.
‘It was these unpleasant circumstances that I was trying to prevent when I visited you.’
He looked at me astounded. ‘Do you think Vakirtzis’s suicide is in some way connected with the suicides of Favieros and Stefanakos?’
‘Of that I’m certain. What I don’t know is when the circle will close or whether there will be any more suicides.’
He looked at me worried, almost panic-stricken, but I had neither the means nor the time to reassure him.
At the other side of the pool I saw a TV crew and a redhead getting interviews from the guests with the cameraman behind her, rather like a pageboy holding the bride’s dress. So there’s TV coverage, I thought to myself. The crew belonged to the same channel that had broadcast live the two previous suicides. I found it strange that only its crew should be there. I took hold of her arm and pulled her to one side. She was surprised to see me before her.
‘Inspector, you’re better. Are you back on duty?’ she asked me.
I left her question unanswered for obvious reasons. ‘How did you come to be here? Is it usual for you to cover parties thrown by your colleagues?’
‘No, but we received a phone call to send a crew to Vakirtzis’s party because there would be surprises. At first, the director thought it was probably just the grapevine, but then he changed his mind and told me to get a crew together and come just in case.’
‘I want a cassette with the interviews you’ve taken.’
‘Of course, I’ll drop it in at your office tomorrow.’
‘No, not at my office. I don’t want it going astray. Send it to the Superintendent’s office and I’ll pick it up from there.’
I left her to go and see Rena. I was hoping that Fanis had managed to bring her round so that I could question her. So, in the first two suicides, Logaras had arranged a TV spectacle. In the third, as he wanted to provide a spectacle in the countryside, he had ensured there would be TV coverage. But how did he know when Vakirtzis would commit suicide? How was he so sure about the day and time? I was thinking all this over as I climbed the steps to the terrace and I came to the conclusion that it was only in the present case that he had taken a risk. In the first two cases, he had taken care in advance to send the biographies to two different publishers and had relied on their astuteness to publish them immediately after the suicides, as had indeed happened. With the third case, however, he had taken a risk. Not with the TV channel. If Vakirtzis hadn’t committed suicide, they would simply have taken it to be a farce. But what would have happened if the biography had come into my hands and Vakirtzis hadn’t already committed suicide? Wouldn’t I have tried to prevent it? For him to have sent me the biography meant that he knew I was investigating the suicides, consequently I wouldn’t have sat with folded arms waiting for the inevitable to happen. So why, then, had he sent me the biography approximately an hour before the suicide with the certainty that I would fail to prevent it? How could he have been so sure? Unless he had agreed with Vakirtzis himself on the day and time. How did he have such a tight hold over them? What did he have on them? The question would remain pending until I could find out how and with what he was blackmailing them.
I asked one of the girls wandering around like a sleepwalker on the ground floor of the house where Rena’s room was. She pointed to a staircase leading from the vast ground-floor sitting room to the first floor. As I was going up, I bumped into Petroulakis, the Prime Minister’s adviser. We came face-to-face halfway up the stairs. The way he looked at me suggested he was expecting me to pay him my respects. However, I thought that following Vakirtzis’s suicide, he would most likely fall into disfavour and I decided not even to return the slight nod of the head he directed towards me. I turned my head away in time and continued climbing the stairs.