Philip Kerr - Hand of God

‘Tell me you’re not going to sweep this shit off the beach, Vik,’ I said.

Kojo grinned; he could read the runes of what was about to happen even if I couldn’t. ‘Yes, Vik, go on,’ he said. ‘Tell him that friendship means more to you than dollars and cents.’

‘Maybe Kojo didn’t mean to kill Bekim, Vik,’ I said, ‘but in my book this bastard did something almost as bad: he helped to bring about the death of your best friend, for profit. A man I knew and admired a great deal. He should be punished. Justice needs to run its course with him.’

Vik turned away from the window and grimaced.

‘Don’t be a fool, Scott,’ he said. ‘Frankly I’m a little surprised to hear you of all people talk about justice. There’s only the law and we both know what that’s worth in Greece today. It takes authority to make law and I’m afraid that authority — real authority — has ceased to have any meaning in this country. Take a look out of that window. The Olympiacos fans are now attacking the riot police with Molotov cocktails. But is anyone surprised? When even the courts and the lawyers are on strike there’s certain to be disorder and chaos and anarchy in plentiful supply. You can read it painted on the walls. You can smell it burning in the air. And you can see it washing your windscreen at the traffic lights. Why argue about that? We both know I’m right.

‘So. Here’s what’s going to happen. Kojo, you and I still have a contract of employment and a watertight non-disclosure agreement. You’ll continue to be paid by me, but I don’t ever expect to see you again. And certainly not at my football club, or any other club for that matter. I expect you to disappear, Kojo. Go somewhere you can really use that fly-whisk — somewhere in Africa would be good, I think — and draw your salary. But don’t ever think of working in football again. And always remember this: my arm is long; but my memory is even longer.’

Kojo stood up. ‘What about my things on the boat? My laptop? My clothes?’

‘I’ll have my ship’s captain bring your luggage to shore at the Astir Palace tomorrow morning at eight o’clock. Now get out.’

Kojo Ironsi picked up his fly-whisk and smiled. ‘Congratulations, Scott,’ he said. ‘You won tonight. Then again, maybe you didn’t win anything. Like the man once said, a game is not won until it’s lost.’

After Kojo had gone there was a longish silence, mostly from me since I didn’t know what to say although I now knew exactly what I had to do.

‘Four — nil,’ said Phil, eventually. ‘Incredible.’

He looked at me and then at Vik. ‘What about Scott?’ he asked. ‘I believe he has the same kind of non-disclosure agreement in his own contract, if he bothers to read it.’

‘Scott Manson?’ Vik spoke my name as if he was trying it out to see how loyal it still sounded in that room. ‘I don’t know, Phil. It’s really up to him, isn’t it? He’s been very clever. Maybe he’s too clever for football. Perhaps that’s his problem as a manager. But really, there’s not much hard evidence here. If you ask me, that cop Varouxis will be satisfied with the suicide of the girl and the name of that other guy. The one who murdered those hookers back in 2008, or whenever Scott said it was.’

‘The Hannibal murders,’ supplied Phil.

‘Precisely. Him. And that’s a good collar, I’d have thought — solving an unsolved crime that no one even knew was unsolved. Every policeman dreams of doing something like that. Yes, he’ll have to make do with that. Because I certainly didn’t hear any confession from Kojo. Did you?’

Phil shook his head. ‘No. Nothing at all.’

Vik thought for a moment and then wagged a finger at me. ‘Everything else we’ve heard here tonight is just speculation,’ he continued. ‘The girl — Nataliya — committed suicide; we knew that already from that unsent email we found on her iPhone. And now that the police know that they can hardly keep us here any longer. But we’ll probably never discover who poisoned Bekim Develi. You might almost say it was the hand of God. That’s how the insurance companies describe these things, isn’t it?’

‘I think that’s called an act of God,’ said Phil.

‘Yes,’ admitted Vik, ‘you’re right. It’s slightly different in Russian, of course. But better the hand of God than the hand of an innocent child, don’t you think? After all, I’m sure Scott here wouldn’t like it to become known that it was a little child’s hand that was used by unscrupulous, greedy men as a murder weapon in this case. Imagine what it would be like to be that child; to go through life knowing that you were the person who killed Bekim Develi. No, that’s not a cross that any child should ever have to bear. Wouldn’t you agree, Scott?’

I sighed a deep sigh and unzipped my tracksuit top; I was feeling hot from all my exertions; and not just those, perhaps. I was maybe a little sick, too, only this had nothing to do with heat, or smacking Kojo around the room. Having just qualified for the next round I should have been feeling on top of the world. Instead I wanted to find a hole and crawl into it.

I picked up the bottle of Krug, drank from the bottle for a second in a way I calculated was insulting to them both, burped loudly and then shook my head. ‘The trouble with rich people...’

Vik groaned as if he’d heard this lecture before; and very likely he had.

‘Be careful,’ he said, ‘you’re not exactly poor, Scott.’

‘No, I’m not. And you are quite right to remind me of that fact, Vik. I guess that’s the difference between your kind of money and mine. You see, I’ve never really had to deal with the idea that, under the right circumstances, there might be absolutely nothing I wouldn’t do and nobody whose face I wouldn’t step on to keep a hold of that money, or to accumulate even more. Does that make any sense to either of you? No, I didn’t think it would somehow.’

I nodded at them both.

‘You’ll have my written resignation in the morning, gentlemen. But right now I’m going to say goodbye to my team before spending the rest of the evening with my girlfriend.’

Even when you’re winning and on top you never know when the whistle may blow. Just ask Roberto Di Matteo, the caretaker manager of Chelsea who steered the club to a memorable double in 2012, and was promptly sacked following a mildly shaky start to the 2012–13 season. Or Vincent Del Bosque who got the bullet from Real Madrid just forty-eight hours after they won La Liga in 2003. Now that was harsh. Success in football rarely breeds more success, merely great expectations; and like the story goes, great expectations are often disappointed.

Already I had a few grey hairs on my head where none had existed before and that was after just seven months in charge — one less than Di Matteo. The fact is, after a week of combining football management with amateur detective work I was knackered and looking forward to a good rest.

Of course, most football managers get the sack or leave because another club makes them an offer they can’t refuse; but it’s perhaps rare for a manager to walk away from a club having just secured qualification for the next round of Champions League football, and the English press were all over the story like a colony of ants when Louise and I flew back to Heathrow’s Terminal Five without the rest of the team. And not just that story, either.

To my girlfriend’s credit she hadn’t ever repeated what she’d told me on Vik’s boat when I seemed to be on the verge of finding out exactly what had happened to Bekim Develi: nothing in this world gets solved the way you think it should — the way it ought to be solved. But she was right. It doesn’t. I felt absolutely no satisfaction in having discovered how Bekim Develi had been killed and who had been behind it; and I could never have predicted that solving the case could feel so utterly pointless. Most of the time I wondered why I’d ever bothered. She got that right, too.