Authors: Philip Kerr
‘Have another drink. You look as though you need it.’
I waved the waiter over and ordered two glasses of champagne.
‘Look, all I want is to get my team back to London. I don’t want to hurt anyone or cause them to lose their job. Least of all you. I can see you’re a nice girl, but I need to know what you know. So. Tell me about it. Tell me everything you know and then you’ll never hear about this again.’
‘I want to know why you’re asking.’
‘All right. If it makes you feel any better. I figure Valentina introduced Bekim to the escort girl now lying in the chiller cabinet at the Laiko General Hospital. She and Bekim had a little party in his room at the Astir Palace Hotel on the night before he died. As yet that girl remains unidentified. And I’m assuming Valentina can name her.’ I paused. ‘Look, you can talk to me or you can talk to the police. It’s your choice. Just remember, I don’t bite like they do.’
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.’
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.
‘I won’t perform an actual autopsy,’ she had explained on the telephone, earlier that day. ‘But from what I understand I might not need to. Wear an old shirt and bring a clean one to wear home because we can’t be seen in scrubs or white coats. That will give the game away.’
Spiros, the mortuary orderly I’d met earlier, had called Eva Pyromaglou at home and given her my phone number. It seemed that he was going be there, too, if only to keep a lookout.
There was an outdoor restaurant under the orange trees next to the Greek church with the many roofs, and it was there I’d arranged to meet her. She was sitting alone, a copy of Sir Alex Ferguson’s autobiography on the table to identify her. It was Mr Pyromaglou’s copy apparently. I certainly couldn’t have imagined his wife enjoying it. Mind you, I can’t imagine anyone actually
enjoying
it. That book tried to settle more family business than the last fifteen minutes of
The Godfather
and you don’t have to be Roy Keane or Steven Gerrard to feel that way about it. Reading the book, I learned that Fergie has always collected Kennedy assassination documents and artefacts and it struck me as a little odd that he even had a copy of Kennedy’s autopsy. Then again I was hardly one to talk; meeting Dr Pyromaglou like this was more than a bit weird – like something out of an old Frankenstein movie – in which she and I were planning to interfere with a young woman’s corpse at the stroke of midnight.
The doctor was in her forties with very pale skin, an almond-shaped face, long auburn hair and worry-lines on her forehead. She wore a hospital pass on a bead-chain around her neck, heavy-framed glasses, a black polo shirt, jeans and a pair of sensible shoes, and looked as if she’d been conceived and born in a library. We shook hands.
There was still half an hour before the new shift came on duty so we ordered some coffee.
‘I know you’ve seen a dead body before,’ she said. ‘Spiros told me that you were okay with that. But looking at a body is different from what I intend doing. I shall probably need your assistance to take some swabs and perhaps to cut her a bit. So if you’re sensitive to the sight of blood then you’d better say so now. I don’t want you fainting while we’re in there.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ I said bravely. ‘When you’ve played football alongside Martin Keown you get used to the sight of blood.’
It was a joke, but she didn’t laugh. I brandished the two whisky miniatures I’d brought from the hotel and then drank one immediately. ‘Anyway, I brought some courage from home.’
‘We’ll be working in quite a tight space,’ she said. ‘Did you bring a clean shirt, just in case of accident?’
I indicated a plastic bag by my leg.
‘Thank you for helping me, doctor,’ I said. ‘And her. The girl in the drawer, I mean. The police seem to be taking their time about everything.’
‘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.
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.