Philip Kerr - Hand of God

Wiping the implant with a length of paper towel she turned it over like a jellyfish and palped it for a moment.

‘It’s already more softer and more pliable just from the heat of my hand. And this is just what I was hoping for. On the back surface of the implant you will see an imprint that contains the name of the manufacturer, the style and size, as well as a serial number. When the device was placed, a copy of this serial number and the other details were sent back to the manufacturer so that it can be tracked for quality assurance and research purposes. This particular implant was made by Mentor. All I have to do is telephone Mentor in the morning and they’ll tell me what I need to know.’ She read out the serial number and the device size into the mike on my iPhone. ‘And that’s it. Unless we’re very unlucky we should be able to identify this girl in less than twenty-four hours.’

Eva replaced the implant device and quickly stitched up the dead girl’s breast again.

‘Jesus, it’s as simple as that?’

‘Mmm-hmm. After Spiros told me about her tits, I had an idea that we could do this. These days, implant devices are as good a means of identification as the microchip in a cat or a dog.’

‘Brilliant.’

Having finished her suture, Eva covered the stitching with a layer of body butter and then some foundation colour. By the time she’d finished the stitches were more or less invisible.

‘Impressive,’ I said.

Eva took a sample of blood from the girl’s arm using a syringe.

‘Do I need the voice memo any more?’

‘No, you can switch that thing off. But we’ve not finished yet, Mr Manson. I’ll do some blood work on her at home to determine what drugs and alcohol were in her system at the time of death.’

‘Right.’ I put the phone back in my pocket.

‘I shall also need to take some swabs from her vagina, mouth and anus. If there’s any that doesn’t match her own blood type it will give us a useful means of identifying who she had sex with. And perhaps her killer. If killer there was. I must say there’s no evidence to say that this girl put up much of a struggle. I’ve seen more violent-looking cot deaths.’

‘Perhaps she was drugged after all.’

‘If we find anything on the swabs it will enable us to eliminate players in your team. Of course, to do that we’ll need to take samples from them, too. Including you, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘The sooner we eliminate you the better, I think, Mr Manson.’

I helped her bag the swabs; she also took a lock of the hair on the girl’s head and a few strands of her pubic hair.

According to Eva Pyromaglou, our post-mortem lite had been successful.

‘What happens now?’ I asked.

‘Now we hope the elevator starts when we turn the key. I’d hate to be trapped in here all night.’

Right on cue, the corpse farted again.

‘I see what you mean.’

Eva was about to cover her with the sheet when I stopped her.

‘Wait,’ I said, looking at the dead girl’s face. ‘The police sketch doesn’t look anything like her; and the photo I took before doesn’t look right. Her eyes are closed. Nobody looks like themselves in a picture when they have their eyes closed. Do you think you could open them?’

‘I can do better than that,’ said Eva.

She produced her make-up bag again and in just a few minutes, with a little bit of foundation, eyeshadow, mascara, blusher and lipstick, she had transformed the dead girl into a real person; she even sprayed her open staring eyes with some Optrex Actimist to bring a little brightness back to them.

‘Fantastic,’ I said, and took several pictures on my iPhone.

‘No.’ Eva shook her head. ‘I think I was a bit too heavy-handed with the blusher. I’ve made her look like... like a whore.’

‘No, she’s not that bad. Not that bad at all.’ I looked at the picture I’d taken on my iPhone and frowned. ‘It’s strange but now that you’ve tarted her up a bit, she looks exactly like my ex-wife.’

Reading the sports pages on my iPad and watching Football Focus on BBC World, I felt like a fish out of water. I’d have given anything to be back in London preparing for our big game with Chelsea. I always liked going to Stamford Bridge, especially in August. Chelsea always feels special in summer. I guess that’s why I live there.

Would we have beaten the Blues? At the beginning of the season, when your whole team is fit, anything is possible; for the same reason it’s the newly promoted teams, like Leicester City, that you have to watch out for. It’s only as the season wears on that beating the top sides becomes progressively more difficult. If, like the Blues, you’ve got a team composed of twenty-five international players, then it stands to reason you’re going to be in the running for a top-four spot at the end of the season. It also stands to reason that if you have a squad like that and you’re not top four then you’re going to get the sack.

It was very early in the season for a manager to get the sack but according to the papers, that’s what had happened to an old mate of mine. Nick Broomhouse had been manager at Leeds United for just two months and, after a dismal start to the season that saw them losing 6–0 to newly promoted Wolves and then 5–0 to Huddersfield, the new club chairman and owner declared he had no confidence in the manager. The match against Huddersfield was one of those derby matches that any Leeds manager just has to win. My guess is that he was just looking for an excuse to be rid of the previous owner’s man. I had my own problems, of course, but these didn’t stop me from sending a text offering my sympathies to poor old Broomhouse.

Of course, any manager always expects to get the sack, the way a burglar probably expects to get caught and go to prison. It’s hardwired into your psyche that the sack is an occupational hazard; probably it’s one of the reasons some of us are paid so much in the first place. But the money is never sufficient compensation for having your team taken away from you at a moment’s notice. It hasn’t happened to me, yet, but I don’t doubt that my turn will come. Sometimes football management is just revolving doors. A six-year contract like mine would make some managers feel safe. Not me. A guy as wealthy as Viktor Sokolnikov would hardly notice paying five million quid to get rid of me. I’m not quite as cheap as chips to a man like Vik, but I’m something pretty close to it.

I was still musing upon my own disposability when Louise rang from my flat in Chelsea. We proceeded to have one of our more typically playful conversations, the way two people do when they think they might be in love but don’t want to admit it before the other has.

‘I miss you,’ she said, plaintively.

‘I miss you, too,’ I said.

‘I’m lying in your big bed, naked, with all the newspapers, and wishing you were here.’

‘As long as it’s just the newspapers you’re in bed with, then that’s okay.’

‘I just want you to know exactly what you’re missing here, Scott.’

‘Believe me, I know. For one thing there’s that game against Chelsea. Not to mention some big bonuses if we’d beaten the bastards. Which we could have done. Even without Bekim.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I know what you meant, darling. But since you were teasing me, I thought I’d tease you back.’ I laughed. ‘That’s why football was invented: to make women believe that we don’t think about sex all the time.’

‘Does it work?’

‘Sure. For exactly forty-five minutes. Until half time when we can start thinking about sex again, for just fifteen minutes.’

‘Don’t you ever think about me during the match? Not once?’