Hand of God (27 page)

‘And what do you think?’

‘I heard she said the other guy worked for the United Nations because he was wearing a UN T-shirt or something like that. That’s why the cops discounted her evidence. After all, who wears a UN T-shirt? And what kind of UN worker goes around raping and murdering people? They’re supposed to stop that kind of thing, not take part in it.’

‘I guess you’re right.’

‘But you know, if there was another guy, then they’ll catch up with him sooner or later. After all, if you do that kind of thing once, you’ll almost certainly do it again.’

‘Unless he already has.’

We turned onto Leoforos Alexandras. Some of our players hadn’t yet seen the stadium and they were surprised at how dilapidated it looked.

‘It’s not exactly Stamford Bridge,’ said Xavi Alonso. ‘Or Silvertown Dock.’

‘It looks ready for demolition,’ observed someone else.

Ayrton Taylor had the SP on why this was:

‘In fact,’ he explained, ‘it was supposed to have been demolished more than a decade ago. Panathinaikos moved out of Leoforos in 1984 to play in the new Olympic Stadium. But they had to move back here in 2000 while renovations to bring the place in line with UEFA requirements took place. Cut a long story short, the money ran out and now they’re stuck here for the foreseeable future.’

‘It’s just like I was saying,’ said Gary. ‘The country is fucked.’

‘And to think people in Britain are still bellyaching about the cuts,’ said someone else. ‘They don’t know how well off they are.’

‘Come to Greece and then vote Tory,’ said Ayrton. ‘Makes perfect sense to me.’

Antonis Venizelos, our liaison from Panathinaikos, greeted us at the main entrance. He wore a short-sleeved green shirt and a green and white tie; with all the hair on his arms he looked like an Iranian surgeon.

He handed out some tickets, lit a menthol cigarette and we trooped after him and into the ground.

‘So,’ I said, making polite conversation, ‘the other team. OFI. Where are they from?’

‘The island of Crete,’ he said, ‘where English whores go on holiday to get laid by a nice Greek boy.’

‘I’m sure that’s not the only reason,’ said Simon, stiffly.

‘English whores and sand monkeys.’

‘Sand monkeys?’ I frowned. ‘Who or what are they?’

‘The island of Crete is where all the illegals from Libya and Egypt make for on their cargo boats.’ Venizelos shrugged. ‘It’s a real problem for them and for us and the EU does nothing about it. As long as they stay out of Germany and France no one gives a damn. Every week our coastguard has to rescue boatloads of them. Just the other day they picked up 408 in one boat. That’s 408 people we’re now going to have to look after. In my opinion we should have let those bastards drown. Then maybe someone would help us to do something about it.’

The crowd began to applaud as they saw us take our seats and Venizelos left us. The stadium may have been falling down but our welcome was holding up; and the pitch looked to be in excellent condition.

‘I’m glad he’s gone,’ said Simon. ‘For a man who smokes menthols he says some very sour things. Sometimes I’ve half a mind to stick one on him, boss.’

‘Don’t do that, for Christ’s sake. These are the only friends in Greece we have.’

‘You do know he’s a bloody Nazi, a member of the far-right Golden Dawn? At least that’s what he told me.’

‘Lots of people are, I think. They’ve got eighteen seats in the parliament.’

‘That doesn’t mean they’re right.’

‘No, of course it doesn’t.’ I looked at my watch. ‘Listen, I’ve got to go somewhere, and I probably won’t be back in my seat until the end of the match. It suits me for the cops to think I’m here for the next hundred and five minutes. So don’t worry. I’m not about to disappear, like Zarco.’

‘Where are you going, boss?’

‘It’s probably best I don’t tell you,’ I said. ‘Just enjoy the game. And if anyone asks you later on, I was here all the time.’

Simon nodded. ‘Right you are, boss. And remember what I said: be careful.’

I went out of the south entrance where, outside the official Panathinaikos store, Charlie was waiting in the Range Rover. We drove fast and west for a while before turning south in the direction of Piraeus.

‘I never thought I’d hear myself say this,’ said Charlie, ‘but it’s a pity you weren’t watching Olympiacos. It’d be nearer and we’d have more time.’

‘Can’t be helped. But if we miss full time it won’t really matter that much. The important thing is that we’ve given the cops the slip again.’

Charlie glanced in his mirror as if just making sure and then nodded.

Dimitrakopoulou was the north street on a little square of neat gardens with tall trees and a playground where several children were having noisy fun on the swings under the watchful eyes of their mothers.

Charlie got out of the car and fetched an old blue police sweatshirt and matching baseball cap from a plastic bag in the boot.

‘I brought these from home,’ he said, putting on the sweatshirt and the hat. ‘They wouldn’t convince a real policeman, of course, but for anyone else they’ll do fine. Let me do the talking. And don’t speak to anyone. It’s probably best if you seem bad-tempered and overworked and keep your sunglasses on; that way, you’ll look like a real detective.’

Nataliya Matviyenko’s apartment was on the top floor of an ochre-coloured building with so many green canvas canopies shielding its several balconies from the strong afternoon sun it looked like it was under sail. There was a pharmacy on the ground floor that, according to the plastic clock on the door, was about to close for the afternoon and, next to the pharmacy, a modern glass door with several bell buttons.

‘There’s a Nataliya Boutzikos here,’ said Charlie, ‘but no Nataliya Matviyenko.’

‘Has to be her,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think?’

Charlie nodded and rang the bell; it was always possible someone else lived in the same apartment – Mr Boutzikos, perhaps – but there was no answer.

‘Now what?’ I asked.

‘Now we wait for the cavalry.’

‘Holy shit,’ I said. A police car was coming slowly along Dimitrakopoulou with its blue light on.

‘Relax,’ he said. ‘This is them now. The cavalry, I mean. These guys are nothing to do with the GADA. They’re friends of mine. I put a call in to the Piraeus Police for a squad car to turn up and make things look a bit more convincing, at least for the benefit of people who live around here. They’ll keep watch for us while we break into her flat. Have you got a couple of twenties?’

I gave him four tens and watched as Charlie went over and leaned into the driver’s window. I didn’t see him hand over the money but I suppose he must have done because the police in the car switched off their blue light, lit up a couple of cigarettes and settled down to wait for us to do what we wanted to do. Charlie returned to the door as the pharmacist came out of his shop, still wearing a crisp white coat, and curious to know why the police were in his neighbourhood.

Charlie started talking to him and, after a while, the pharmacist went inside the shop again. In an effort to contain my nerves I took out my phone, checked the recent calls list and then rang Francisco Carmona, from Orientafute.

‘Frank? It’s Scott. Sorry I couldn’t talk earlier.’

‘That’s okay, Scott. I’m used to people pretending they don’t know me.’

‘I was a bit taken aback to discover you’re coming to Athens, Frank. When I called you before it was because I wanted to speak to you about a player at another club. Someone you represent. Hörst Daxenberger, from Hertha.’

‘You’re looking to replace Bekim Develi?’

‘That’s right. Why don’t you cancel your flight to Athens and get on a flight to Berlin and see how much that German lad wants to come and play in London instead of trying to upset some of my players with some of that Orientafute bullshit.’

‘It’s not your players I’m interested in, Scott. It’s you. You’re the reason I was coming to Athens. I want to represent you. From what I hear, you might need an agent.’

Charlie came back from the police car.

‘Look, I can’t talk now. Just speak to that German lad and find out if he’s interested.’

I finished the call and looked at Charlie.

‘That’s a stroke of luck,’ said Charlie. ‘Mr Prezerakou is Nataliya’s landlord and he’s gone to fetch some keys for us. I told him we were looking for illegal immigrants and naturally he’s only too keen to help. No one around here likes illegals. He hasn’t seen her in days but that’s not unusual at this time of year. He says she often goes on vacations to Corfu. Apparently, she’s a good tenant and always pays her rent on time and he insists he saw all of her paperwork before he rented her the apartment. Originally, the apartment was rented to her husband, Mr Boutzikos, but he’s working in London now and Nataliya manages the place herself.’

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.’