‘Thanks for calling me, Sara. It’s a long shot, I know, but I wondered if there was a possibility that her death might be connected with what happened to you and a number of other woman in Athens only a few years ago. You see the woman who died this week was a prostitute and it struck me as a little odd that the police didn’t mention that the other women who were murdered were also prostitutes. Nor did they think to mention that there might be a football connection; Thanos Leventis drove a bus for the Panathinaikos football team, didn’t he?’
She listened patiently while I stumbled around my explanation like a flat-footed drunk. I tried to explain, with all the diplomacy of the England rugby team, that there was no suggestion that she herself was a prostitute; no more was I comfortable asking her about what had happened, but even on Skype she could see this and tried to put me at my ease. Then she told me her story clearly and patiently and it was several minutes before I realised that a slight tremor had crept into her voice. When she got to the end of her harrowing account she swallowed an egg and I saw her hands were shaking.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That can’t have been easy for you.’
‘It wasn’t,’ she said. ‘But I’ve decided that it’s only by talking about it that I will ever get justice.’
‘Why do you think the police didn’t believe what you said — that there were two men who attacked you?’
‘For one thing, they had a confession from Thanos Leventis. And what’s more Leventis said he had acted alone. I don’t think they wanted to risk anything to mess up his story. For another, I’d been beaten to the point of unconsciousness and it was several days before I was thinking straight again. I was in shock, of course, which meant I contradicted myself during the initial interview. But they had already decided I was unreliable as a witness. By the time they caught Leventis I was back in England, and no one was much interested in what I had to say. I called the police a few times and reminded them that there was another man but they didn’t seem to care very much. That’s when I called the Greek newspapers and told them. But I think most people were happy to sweep it all under the carpet and forget about it. And let’s face it, this was when the Greek economy was collapsing around everyone’s ears. There were riots in the streets as people tried and failed to get their money out of banks. The newspapers had bigger fish to fry. The police didn’t even ask me to attend the trial as a witness. It was all over before I knew it and I didn’t even get a chance to confront Thanos Leventis in court.’
She wiped the corner of an eye with a handkerchief.
‘I’m sorry to make you talk about this again, Sara.’
‘Don’t be,’ she said firmly. ‘If there’s any chance that what you’re doing might help to catch this man then you have my thanks, Mr Manson.’
‘Can you give me a description? Of the second man.’
‘Yes. He was older than Leventis. In his late thirties, I should say. Tall, with dark hair and a very hairy body, like a lot of Greeks. I know that because he made me perform oral sex on him. I do remember that he had very sweet breath, like he’d been eating mints.’ She laughed. ‘Not like a Greek at all, if you know what I mean.’
‘Oh, I do. I do.’
‘And here’s the bit I think made the police think I was deluded; it was like he had three eyebrows.’
‘Three eyebrows?’
‘At least that’s how it seemed to me.’
‘Would you recognise him again?’
‘I think so. Yes, I’m sure I would.’
‘What was he wearing?’
‘Jeans and a T-shirt, with a sort of UN logo on it. Again, I’m not sure about that. Sort of... sort of like a wreath made of olive branches? Except that it wasn’t a map of the world within the branches, but it looked more like a sort of labyrinth.’
‘A labyrinth?’
‘Like the one in the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. Only I don’t think this one was as complicated as that. I sometimes think that’s the key to everything, not metaphorically, but in reality. If I could work out what that sign meant it would help me find the man who raped me. Not Leventis. Because the truth is, Leventis couldn’t get it up, if you’ll pardon my French. That’s why he knocked me out. And that’s why I’m alive today. Because they thought I was already dead. They dumped me in the harbour and the water was so cold that I woke up. But when they left I’m sure they thought I was already dead.’
‘They dumped you in the harbour? I didn’t know that. Where, exactly?’
‘I’m not sure exactly. Somewhere in Piraeus, I suppose. The actual assault took place on a piece of waste ground next to a football stadium. Which wasn’t very far away from the harbour, because that’s where I’d been walking when I was attacked. I do remember that the people who fished me out took me into the lobby of a nearby hotel.’
‘Can you remember the name of the hotel?’
‘Yes, it was the Hotel Delfini. They were very nice to me, and called the police. From there they took me to the Metropolitan Hospital, which was right next door to the stadium where I’d been attacked. I could see it from my hospital bed. Only it wasn’t the one where Panathinaikos play; it was the other Athens team that plays there: Olympiacos. Yes, I remember now; that was the other football connection. Besides the fact that the driver of the coach worked for Panathinaikos.’
‘What day of the week did the attack take place, Sara?’
‘It was a Saturday night in September.’
‘And would you happen to remember if there’d been a football game that day?’
‘No, I don’t. But it was the last Saturday in September, so you could probably find out.’
After we finished our Skype conversation I called up Google Maps and saw that the Karaiskakis Stadium where Olympiacos played was exactly 3.5 kilometres from the Hotel Delfini in Marina Zea; and there was a large patch of waste ground immediately to the southwest of the ground, on the Piraeus side. Given where she’d been dumped after the attack, it was beginning to look like a real possibility that Nataliya’s death might be connected with the attack on Sara Gill and others. In view of the racism of the Greeks, had she been attacked because she was Asian? The Greek newspapers were often reporting attacks on Romas and Pakistanis by the far-right Golden Dawn organisation. And I knew from my own experience that a dark skin was enough to bring hatred and contempt down on your head. I was equally intrigued by Sara’s description of the logo on her attacker’s T-shirt: the word labyrinth had of course reminded me of the tattoo on Nataliya’s left shoulder. Was this a connection, too?
Absently I stared at Bekim Develi’s belongings laid out on the bungalow floor, thinking about Sara Gill’s closing remark. At the back of my head, a half-perceived thought began to gain clarity. After a moment or two I realised that perhaps the key that I’d been looking for was staring me in the face. I bent down and picked it off the floor.
It was the key not to a suitcase, or a car, or a hotel room, or a left-luggage locker, but to Bekim’s house on the island of Paros.
42
The next day I caught the lunchtime flight to Paros aboard a DHC-8-100, a propeller plane with more vibrations than the Beach Boys and none of them good. Paros was just one of a group of islands known as the Cyclades which, from the air, resembled a betting slip torn up and its pieces scattered on a bright blue carpet. Paros wasn’t the smallest island of the group although you could have been forgiven for thinking that it might have been when you saw the tiny airport with its postage stamp of a runway.