Philip Kerr - Hand of God

Ten minutes later we were inside Nataliya’s apartment and nosing around her belongings which, for me at least, felt oddly transgressive. Charlie didn’t look remotely bothered by what we were doing although we both wore latex gloves and it wasn’t for the sake of appearances: Mr Prezerakou had stayed downstairs in his shop but the cops already had my fingerprints and it wouldn’t have done for them to have discovered my dabs all over Nataliya’s flat.

Everything was neat and tidy and furnished with that Ligne Roset sort of stuff that people on the continent seem to think is smart and contemporary. There was a large, signed Terry O’Neill photograph of Faye Dunaway lounging by the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel that prompted me to think that Nataliya might reasonably have supposed she resembled the Oscar-winning actress. Otherwise the place spoke of a person who loved reading and not films — there was no TV and her shelves were groaning under the weight of books in Greek, Russian and English. Her closet was full of designer labels and in her tiny bathroom was a make-up trolley that could have supplied a large girls’ school.

Charlie had found her passport in the door of a small desk.

‘She was Ukrainian,’ he said. ‘Born Kiev 1989.’

He handed it to me and I placed it on the kitchen table before I stepped onto the balcony and looked out at the rooftops of the surrounding buildings; with their numerous water tanks, washing lines and satellite dishes it was not a particularly inspiring view but it was a typical one.

On the balcony itself was a yoga mat and a number of carefully arranged weights, including some kettlebells, and I wondered if Nataliya’s murderer had helped himself to one of these to tie to her feet before dropping her into the nearby marina. I took a picture of them with my iPhone camera. Meanwhile, Charlie had found her handbag — or at least the bag she had probably been using on the night of her death; I had a vague idea that it matched the one I’d seen her carrying on the CCTV footage Varouxis had shown me of her visiting Bekim Develi in his bungalow at the Astir Palace hotel. Like everything else it was designer-made and expensive.

Charlie emptied the contents onto the kitchen table beside the passport and we both sat down to go through these. There was a make-up bag, a purse containing a thousand euros in new one hundred notes, credit and identity cards, a driving licence, a mobile phone, a small scented candle, some eyedrops, some earrings, some shoe clips, a bunch of keys, a picture of a man we took to be Boutzikos, several condoms, some lubricating gel, a pair of handcuffs, a vibrator, some antiseptic hand gel, a packet of wet wipes, a change of underwear, a pair of stay-up stockings. The pharmaceuticals were, said Charlie, more interesting: four epinephrine auto-injectors, a bottle of ceftriaxone and a bottle of flunitrazepam.

I took a picture of everything — including the passport and licence — on my iPhone.

‘It looks as if she was allergic to something,’ I said, taking one of the auto-injectors out of its box. It hadn’t been used. None of them had.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Charlie. ‘Epinephrine is a vasodilator. A lot of hookers in Greece use epinephrine as a fast-acting substitute for Viagra when clients can’t get it up. It’s just adrenalin after all. And unlike cocaine, epinephrine won’t get a girl busted if a cop finds it in her possession.’

‘What is ceftriaxone?’ I asked.

‘That’s her just-in-case,’ he said.

‘Just in case of what?’

‘Just in case of gonorrhoea. A lot of VD is penicillin resistant in Greece, so they prescribe ceftriaxone. Or azithromycin. If you can get it. Looks like she wasn’t about to take that chance.’

‘And Levonelle?’ I asked examining a small pharmaceutical box with Greek writing. ‘What does that cure?’

‘Unwanted babies. It’s the morning-after pill.’

‘And the flunitrazepam?’ I emptied out some little blue and white tablets on the palm of my hand. ‘That’s a sedative, isn’t it? For depression.’

Charlie laughed. ‘If you could read Greek you would see that the trade name for flunitrazepam is printed on the box, also. This is Rohypnol. The so-called date-rape drug. A lot of hookers slip it into the drinks of their more badly behaved clients. No, this little girl looks like she was prepared for anything.’

‘Except the thing that happened. She wasn’t prepared for that.’

‘No, I guess not.’

Charlie swept everything back into Nataliya’s handbag. ‘No one is ever prepared for a trip to see Persephone,’ he said.

I picked up Nataliya’s iPhone 4, which was in a neat little plastic case with a gold chain that made it look like a girl’s evening bag, took off one of my latex gloves and tapped the screen. The battery was in the red but there was enough juice left in the thing to see that, like my own phone, a security code was needed to access its contents.

‘We need to get into this,’ I said. ‘We can use it to find out who she saw that night. So we’ll keep it for a little while. At least until Monday when our lawyer will have to tell the police about this place.’

‘Then we’d better take the handbag as well,’ said Charlie. ‘Otherwise that detective will think it looks strange. We can always bribe some Roma people to hand it in to your lawyer for the reward when you’re done with it. They can say they found it in a wheelie bin on the marina.’ He shook his head. ‘He’ll think it looks strange anyway when the apothecary downstairs tells him about the police having been here already. But cops in Greece are used to other cops doing a bit of freelance work. He’ll know it was you, of course; or someone you paid to do it.’ He looked at his watch. ‘So we’d better get you back to the game and your alibi for this afternoon.’

As I put the phone in my pocket, Charlie added: ‘But as to how you’re going to get past that code, your guess is as good as mine. I don’t know anyone who can break into these things.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I know just the man.’

About a minute after I took my seat again Panathinaikos scored the only goal of the match. It wasn’t a great goal; the OFI back four defended like they were wearing ankle weights and the goalkeeper managed to go the wrong way even though the forward in the green shirt had already telegraphed where he was planning to kick the ball. But none of that stopped the crowd from partying like it was 1999: a huge green firework exploded at the Gate 13 end, so loud it had every one of the London City players and staff — myself included — ducking down like a missile had been fired into the stadium by an Apache helicopter.

‘Christ’s arse,’ yelled Simon. ‘What the fuck was that?’

A cloud of green smoke drifted across the pitch, turning everything in the stadium opaque and, for a minute, it looked as if we were at the bottom of the sea, like those drowned sailors from the Battle of Salamis.

‘I think that was just the beautiful game, as celebrated by Zorba the Greek,’ I said.

‘Makes you wonder how they kicked off back here when they won Euro 2004. I tell you what, if I could speak Greek they’d think I was fucking Plato. Each one of those Greeks thought that someone else was going to make the tackle. Four players in the box and not one of them marking his man. Whenever another team get anywhere near our box, you know what I want? I want our back four to die in a ditch to defend those eighteen yards. That’s the way you used to defend and it’s the way I used to defend. It takes heart to play football like that, boss. And those lads just didn’t have it. Look at them: all those fucking tattoos they have on their bodies. There’s only one tattoo, only one slogan that should be inked on every great centre back’s chest: ¡No pasarán! They shall not pass. That’s what I’d have tattooed on me if I was a defender today.’