Hand of God

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.

‘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.