‘Sure, I’ll be careful.’
‘I was going to fly back to London for the day,’ said Vik, ‘to see Alex. But under the circumstances I think I’ll stick around. Besides, I still have some business here in Greece. With Gustave Haak and Cooper Lybrand.’
‘And Kojo?’ said Phil. ‘Did you make a decision?’
‘Let’s not discuss that now.’
‘As you wish.’
‘I like this idea, Scott. You playing the sleuth again. You know, after the way you found out what happened to Zarco while the Metropolitan Police were still playing with their whistles, I thought about this a lot. I mean, the way you worked out what had really happened. And I said to myself, maybe it’s true, perhaps to be an effective manager you have to be a little bit like a detective: able to look at men, read them like paperbacks, and find the clues as to who they really are and not who they seem to be. But most of all I think they both have to be patient. That’s what I mean. And Scott is a very patient man.’
‘A few months behind bars will do that to anyone,’ I said. ‘All you’ve got in the nick is patience.’
‘Well, don’t worry,’ said Phil, ‘if you can’t find out who killed her, then you can always do what every other manager does: you can blame the referee.’
24
‘I think it’s only fair you should know what I’m looking for,’ explained Vik as he scrolled through Bekim’s Inbox and Sent file in the suite at the Grande Bretagne. ‘I wanted to buy the penthouse at One Hyde Park and I didn’t want my wife to know about it. So, Bekim agreed to be a cut-out and to purchase the penthouse using his own company.’
‘It’s really none of my business,’ I said.
‘Yes, it is,’ said Vik, ‘when we might be erasing something on a computer the police are about to examine forensically. People go to prison for this kind of thing. And since you’ve been in prison, you have a right to know what the hell I’m doing here.’
‘Lying to the police isn’t a crime,’ I said. ‘Not in my book. No more than it’s a crime to tell your wife that her bum really doesn’t look big.’
Vik grinned. ‘She asked you, too, huh?’
As things turned out, Vik didn’t have to erase any of the emails and messages from Bekim’s computer or on his iPhone because he found nothing that looked as if it might expose something confidential.
Not that I would have known if there had been anything compromising. Half of Bekim’s emails were written in Cyrillic which meant that after Vik had gone I felt obliged to telephone Chief Inspector Varouxis and inform him of this, so that he might bring someone with him who spoke, and more importantly read, Russian.
‘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.