Philip Kerr - Hand of God

‘Actually, I don’t mind Varouxis all that much. He’s only doing his job. But then so am I. Looking after my players, dead or alive, is what this job is about. At least, that’s the way I see it. And while I don’t see Varouxis taking cash from a tabloid, I can’t say the same for any of the people who work for him. If you’re a Greek cop a bit of extra money would come in handy, I bet. Premier League footballer scores home and away and everywhere in between. That’s the kind of story the English papers would love to run.’

‘All the same,’ said Phil, ‘I still think you were a bit sharp with him.’

‘As a matter of fact, Phil,’ said Vik, ‘it was me who told Scott to deny the cops access to Bekim’s iPhone and his laptop until I’ve seen if he had any emails from me. You see, a few months ago Bekim bought some property in Knightsbridge on my behalf I’d rather no one knew about.’

‘Sorry,’ said Phil. ‘I didn’t realise.’

‘As soon as Pete Scriven has brought them over from the team hotel in Vouliagmeni I intend to erase anything there that might connect me with the Knightsbridge deal. With Scott watching, of course. I wouldn’t like either of you to think I’m up to no good here.’

‘Of course not,’ said Phil.

‘The thing is, though,’ added Vik, ‘Scott is right. Bekim always did like escort girls a little too much for his own good. It’s probably best we try to keep a lid on that as well, if we can.’

Phil shrugged. ‘All right. I get that, too. But what I don’t get is why the cops are making such a fuss about this. I should have thought that getting murdered was an occupational hazard for a prostitute. I mean, that’s the risk you run when you go with a man you’ve never met before, isn’t it?’

‘That’s no reason to write her off, Phil,’ said Vik. ‘She was a human being, after all.’

‘I wasn’t writing her off so much as making a comment on the Greek police. Why are they taking the death of one little tart so seriously? There are thousands of tarts in this city. Since the recession hit Greece back in 2009, it’s about the only growth profession there’s been in this bloody country.’

‘It sounds a lot like you’re writing her off,’ said Vik. ‘Look, Phil, she might have been a prostitute but murder is murder and the death of a prostitute creates its own peculiar, not to say lurid, sensation. Dropping a beautiful girl in the harbour with a weight tied around her feet is just the sort of dramatic detail than the newspapers love.’

‘I don’t think she was a prostitute,’ I said. ‘More like a high-class escort. It’s splitting hairs perhaps but I think that’s something different from a common prostitute. Bekim may have been many things, but he was extremely picky when it came to women. My guess is that she was expensive and probably quite picky herself. For a girl like that I should think the chances of a client bumping her off are quite slim, really. All of which means she ought to be easier to identify.’

Vik laughed. ‘I must say, you sound remarkably expert about this sort of thing, Scott. It makes me wonder what you get up to in your private life.’

‘Maybe Scott thinks he could find out who killed her,’ said Phil. ‘After all, he does have some form in this area. As an amateur sleuth, I mean.’

‘Maybe I could,’ I said. ‘Maybe I should try, in any case. For the sake of Bekim.’

Why not, I thought; following my previous trip to Athens I was actually possessed of a significant line of potential inquiry although it wasn’t one I wanted to share with the police or anyone else. Valentina didn’t deserve that; and nor did Bekim Develi. I didn’t know how much Bekim’s girlfriend knew about the dead girl’s connection with him, but I had a shrewd idea that there would have been plenty of speculation about it on Twitter. This would hardly have helped her state of mind and might even have been the reason why she’d taken too much cocaine.

‘At the very least I might be able to accelerate the police inquiry. The Greeks don’t look like they’re in any great hurry to get this case solved, in spite of what they said back there. And if the cops are half as unpopular as Dr Christodoulakis said they were, local people might be a bit slow coming forward with information. They might need some help.’

‘What about team discipline?’ said Phil. ‘And next week’s match?’

‘Simon can take charge of the training sessions,’ I said. ‘If they’re training at eight in the morning to avoid the heat then they can hardly be out late at night. He’ll soon find out if anyone’s been breaking the curfew. And if they have, well, no one’s better at handing out bollockings than him.’

‘If you do decide to play cop then make sure you do it discreetly,’ said Phil. ‘Pissing off the Met is one thing. Pissing these Greek coppers off is something else. From what I’ve seen of them on the telly they’re not exactly known for their tolerance. They like cracking skulls.’

‘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.’

‘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?’