‘That everyone has their ups and downs.’
‘How long before his suicide did all this take place?’
‘About two weeks before.’
Suddenly, I thought of a question that I should have asked Favieros’s secretary, too.
‘Do you recall whether during that two-week period he received any phone calls that may have upset him?’
‘A Member of Parliament gets phone calls in his office from people he knows very well or people he doesn’t know at all, Inspector. So I can’t tell you with certainty whether some unknown caller had upset him. But I don’t remember anything of the sort.’
‘Did you happen to notice any other change in his behaviour?’
I deliberately left my question vague, not wanting to mention the computer and perhaps influence her, but she replied categorically.
‘No.’
‘Did Mr Stefanakos have a computer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he spend a long time at his computer?’
She laughed involuntarily. ‘Loukas spent countless hours at his computer, Inspector. That’s why he had a laptop so he could take it around with him. He wrote everything on his computer, from his speeches and the results of his research into various topics to the notes he kept concerning the various requests of his voters. Consequently, I can’t tell you whether he had been spending more time at his computer given that he always had it on in front of him.’
That was encouraging. If Stefanakos recorded everything on his computer, we might possibly find some evidence that would give us a lead.
‘Where is his computer now?’
‘In the office.’ She gestured towards Stefanakos’s office.
‘May I take it with me?’ She looked at me hesitantly. ‘I’ve spoken to Mrs Stathatos.’
‘I know.’
‘As soon as we’re done with it, I’ll have it returned to you.’
She thought for a moment and then shrugged. ‘Why not? It can’t do any harm.’
She went into Stefanakos’s office to fetch the computer and left the door open. I glanced inside the office and suddenly, flashing before my eyes, I saw the scene from the TV: the nails on the door on which Stefanakos had impaled himself. The TV presenter had said that the interview had taken place in Stefanakos’s office, but this door bore no resemblance to the other.
‘Excuse me, but did the interview Stefanakos gave on the night of his suicide take place in this office?’
‘Do you think I’d still be here if it had taken place here?’ She regained her composure immediately and added more calmly and politely: ‘No, Loukas had another office on the floor below the offices of Starad in Vikela Street.’
I put the computer on the back seat of the Mirafiori and then sat for a moment behind the wheel to collect my thoughts. Favieros and Stefanakos had both exhibited the same two-sided behaviour. The foreign workers swore by Favieros, who helped them, but, as well as helping them, he made a pile of money on the side through the houses and flats that he sold them at bloated prices. As for Stefanakos, his voters sent flowers to his office to honour his memory, but he offered them only crumbs while using all the means at his disposal to make sure his wife’s businesses got preferential treatment.
Suddenly an idea came into my mind, but instead of filling me with delight, it sent a shiver through me. What if the suicides had no connection with scandals? What if someone knew what Favieros, Stefanakos and Vakirtzis were up to behind the scenes and decided to punish them in order to render justice?
‘Computer: n.
Of course, I didn’t expect to find in Dimitrakos’s Lexicon, published in 1954, the contemporary sense of the word ‘computer’. Besides, the first ‘computers’ that circulated in Greece were actually calculators. When the real computers arrived, we didn’t call them computers but rather ‘calculators’. In other words, there was neither rhyme nor reason to it. Anyhow, it seemed to me that the first sense of the word given by Dimitrakos, ‘clerk subordinate to an accountant’, was closer to the modern computer. Nine times out of ten, I encountered it as an assistant accountant at the chemist, at the garage, at the service station and so on. ‘The computer is the cleverest moron you’ll ever meet,’ I’d once heard from one of the forensics experts. ‘It all depends how you use it.’ Because I knew how I’d use it, I kept it at a distance so as not to have a moron getting under my feet.
In any case, Dimitrakos had provided me with a sense of the word that suited Vakirtzis, ‘intellectual, thinking person who computes or calculates’. At least so it seemed at first sight.
Koula, with the help of her cousin, Spyros, had been trying to find the businesses owned or jointly owned by Vakirtzis in the Ministry of Trade records, but they still hadn’t come up with anything. I got them to stop because in the meantime I had brought home Stefanakos’s computer and I wanted them to search through that first.
I was sitting in the kitchen on hot coals, trying to contain my impatience by thumbing through Dimitrakos while they were doing a first search of Stefanakos’s computer. The kitchen stank of vinegar because Adriani was cooking okra and she was of the opinion that if you first soaked them in vinegar, they didn’t turn ‘gooey’.
I looked up from the dictionary at the sound of Koula’s footsteps as she came looking for me to inform me of the results of the search. Her cousin had pushed the screen belonging to Koula’s computer to one side and was bent over Stefanakos’s laptop.
‘You explain, Spyros. You’re better at it than I am.’
Spyros didn’t even bother to look up from the screen. ‘Well, he had a cleaning program.’
‘What program?’
‘Cleaning.’
All his answers were abrupt and he kept his eyes glued to the screen. I found it irritating, but I restrained myself because I didn’t want to upset Koula and also because he was helping on a voluntary basis.
‘Listen, when I hear the words cleaning program, my mind goes straight to the housecleaning,’ I said calmly. ‘Can you spell it out for me?’
He lifted his head for the first time and stared at me with an expression somewhere between surprise and contempt. But he saw Koula standing beside me and bit his lip so as not to come out with anything rude.
‘When you delete something from the computer, it’s not permanently deleted,’ he explained to me slowly and patiently. ‘It remains on the hard disk and there are various ways that you can retrieve it. There are some programs, however, that clean the disk and permanently delete what’s written on it. You can run them when you want or you can programme them to start up on their own. When one of these programs is installed, you can retrieve what hasn’t been deleted on the disk before it starts up again.’
‘And Stefanakos had one of these programs on his computer?’
‘Yes, and it was set to clean the disk every three days.’
‘So you’re telling me that with the frequency that it ran, we won’t find anything?’
‘Looks like it.’
Disappointed, I turned to Koula. ‘Zilch!’
She didn’t appear to share my disappointment because she grinned. ‘Not exactly. We did come up with a few things that may be of interest.’
‘Such as?’
‘The good thing about Stefanakos is that he kept notes on everything. Read for yourself.’
She pressed a few keys and a series of squares with notes opened up before me. It reminded me in reverse of the boxes of Ethnos cigarettes, on which my father would note down what he had to do. Every so often, he’d
