She sighed, wearily.
‘What you’ve got to understand,’ she said, ‘is that it’s not unusual for FIFA and UEFA officials to solicit the company of girls in Athens. I just do what I’m told, right? As it was explained to me — and I won’t say by who — the important thing is to look after our VIP guests and to keep them out of trouble. Looking after our VIP guests means shepherding them away from the hookers on Omonia Square. Frankly, it’s dangerous down there. There are lots of drug addicts and homeless people. The police have been cracking down. In Sofokleous Street there are over three hundred brothels and many of the girls have HIV. A decision was taken to steer our more important sporting guests away from these places and to introduce them to high-quality girls. I decided to recruit one girl to handle everything for me: Valentina. She was perfect for the role. Whenever there’s a FIFA official or a top footballer in town, I have her contact him. If it’s a FIFA official we pay her. If it’s a footballer, then we let her negotiate her own fee. Sometimes she looks after the VIP herself but just as often she recruits someone else to take care of them. I suppose it was Valentina who provided Bekim with a girl. I know she liked him, and normally she looked after him herself, but on this occasion she must have been busy so she found someone else for him. I don’t know who that was. But Valentina’s real name is Svetlana Yaroshinskaya and originally she is from Odessa, in the Ukraine. I think she was originally an art student. She’s got a flat somewhere in Athens; I don’t know where. I used to Skype her when I wanted to speak to her. Her Skype address is SvetYaro99. But she hasn’t been online of late. And she hasn’t returned any of my calls. Which is unusual.’
The waiter came back with the champagne. I wrote down the Skype address and had Anna check it.
‘Was she — was Svetlana the only girl you had any dealings with?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
I took out my iPhone, tapped the Photos app, and called up the pictures of the dead girl’s tattoo I’d taken at Laiko General Hospital.
‘What about this tattoo? It’s not quite Lisbeth Salander’s dragon, I know, but it’s still quite distinctive, I think. No?’
‘No. Look,’ she said nervously, ‘you’re not going to mention my name, are you? No one cares about the police very much. But I’d rather my name didn’t appear in the newspapers. Especially the ones back home. My mum lives back in Liverpool these days.’
‘FIFA officials accepting free sex from high-class call girls?’ I shook my head. ‘Where’s the story there? I should think most people think that happens all the time.’ I swiped the screen to the next photograph, a picture of the dead girl’s face. ‘Have you seen her? It’s not a good likeness, but under the circumstances...’
‘No, I’ve never seen her,’ said Anna.
‘Take another look.’
‘I don’t know her. What’s up with her anyway? She looks like she’s asleep.’
‘Didn’t I say? She’s dead. That’s what’s up with her. This is the girl who was found drowned in Marina Zea. The one who screwed Bekim Develi.’
Anna’s jaw dropped and her eyes filled with tears.
I drank some of the champagne, stood up and tossed a fifty onto the table in front of her.
‘That’s for the drinks.’ I peeled off another twenty. ‘And there’s a little something for your time, Anna.’
‘You fucking bastard.’
I grinned. ‘We’ll make a real football fan out of you yet, love.’
34
That night I didn’t go to dinner on The Lady Ruslana. There wasn’t time. Besides, I wasn’t hungry and I knew I wouldn’t be good company, not in view of what I had planned for later on that Friday evening. The discussion with Vik and Phil about buying Hörst Daxenberger to replace Bekim Develi was going to have to wait. This was one of those rare occasions when the dead take precedence over the living.
As soon as I left Anna Loverdos I Skyped the number she’d given me, without an answer; then I called our lawyer Dr Christodoulou on her mobile and found her still in the office at nine o’clock.
‘Working late?’
‘Unsurprisingly, the reward notices we posted around Piraeus have generated a very large response,’ she said. ‘It’s going to take us all night to separate any genuine leads from the time-wasters.’
I told myself she was probably used to that; in Greece, wasting time seems to be a national pastime. And I didn’t feel sorry for her; lawyers love work and not because they love work per se but because the more they do the more fees their clients pay.
‘I hate to add to your workload,’ I lied, ‘but I’d like you to check out a name and see what it throws up: real name is Svetlana Yaroshinskaya, goes by the working name of Valentina. She’s a high-class escort. Possibly a friend of the murdered girl. Born in Odessa. I’ve got a Skype number, a mobile number and an email address. See what you can find out about her. Criminal record. Tax number. Bra size. Everything.’
‘All right. I’ll see what I can do. Anything else?’
‘Not yet but watch this space.’
I didn’t tell Dr Christodoulou where I was about to go. A descent into the underworld is always best kept secret. I was beginning to realise that you have to be a bit of a pilgrim to solve a crime; you must first say to yourself what you would know and then do what you have to do, though all may be against it. Not to mention anyone to whom you’ve behaved like a fucking bastard. I shouldn’t have shown the pictures of the dead girl to Anna Loverdos; that had been rough of me. Yet a little part of me said it was right that she should share in some of the guilt I was feeling. It was men like me who’d fucked and murdered the girl in the mortuary at Laiko General Hospital; but it was a woman like Anna who’d helped to bring that situation about.
I took a shower to freshen up and clear my head, and put on an old T-shirt. I snatched up a handful of cash and a couple of whisky miniatures, and went downstairs to the hotel basement. I felt bad about leaving Charlie in the car out front but I needed a decoy and I didn’t think my police escort would be so easily lost again. It’s surprising how quickly cops learn things.
Having found my way through a few dingy, humid corridors and featureless passageways, I emerged through an anonymous door at the back of the Grande Bretagne onto Voukourestiou where the evening heat hit me like a big warm sponge. From there I walked a short way west onto Stadiou, and caught a taxi that took me around the square, then north, past the beleaguered Greek parliament building where a mixture of tourists and demonstrators were watching the Evzones — a ceremonial unit of Greek light infantry — changing guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier.
Tombs and their morbid contents were very much on my mind but this didn’t stop a smile spreading on my face as I watched some of the floodlit ceremony from the back seat of my taxi. The changing of the guard in any country is always a ridiculous piece of nonsense; in Greece, it reaches a new level of absurdity: with their pom-pom shoes, white party dresses, big moustaches and tasselled red hats, the Evzones themselves resemble the clowns from some obscure Balkan circus, but all this is as nothing compared to the farcical drill which makes the poor soldiers that carry out this clockwork pantomime look as though they work at the Ministry for Silly Walks.
I arrived in St Thomas’s Square, close by Laiko General Hospital, not long before eleven o’clock. Dr Pyromaglou had said that she would come and take a look at the body with me as close to midnight as possible when there were fewer people around in the hospital, to try to avoid being accused of breaking the strike.