Zamanis shrugged. ‘Perhaps, but of what significance is that? If you’re looking to their common past and common struggles, forget it. After a certain point, each of them went their own way and, if it ever happened that they had a conflict of interest, you can be sure that solidarity and common struggles would have counted for nothing. Each of them would have looked to his own interests.’
Two irrational scenarios unfolded before me: three friends and comrades with a common past. The two of them – Favieros and Stefanakos – remained associates, while the third was blackmailing them in various ways in order to exploit them. The public life of the first two could explain their suicides. The third had gone a step further than just blackmail and had coerced them into committing suicide. That might have held up if the third hadn’t committed suicide too. If it was murder, it might be the case that the first two had come to the end of their tether and had killed or had had someone else kill the third. But it wasn’t murder, it was suicide. And the first two had committed suicide before the third. I couldn’t work it out, and there was no point in my thinking about all that in Zamanis’s office, so I got up to leave. This time he held out his hand.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said. ‘If it’s as you say, then I hope with all my heart that you find the person who forced Jason into suicide. However, without wanting to disappoint you, I doubt very much that you’ll succeed.’
I shook his hand, without saying anything. I didn’t need his doubt too. My own was more than enough. As I was crossing the bridge of sighs, my pager, that I had started carrying around again, beeped. It was Ghikas’s number. I called him from the phone in reception.
‘Koula phoned me. Go straightaway to Vakirtzis’s house in Vranas. She’s found something that she thinks may be important.’
Koula and Spyros had gone that morning to take a look at Vakirtzis’s computer, after Ghikas had arranged it. I glanced at my watch. It was almost noon. I reflected that with the heat and the traffic I’d be well and truly sizzled by the time I got to Vranas, but I didn’t have the luxury to wait till the sun went down.
To go from the First Cemetery to Vranas at midday is not the easiest thing in the world. I racked my brains trying to decide which was the shortest way, but there was only one: from Kifissias Avenue to the new Athens ring road. It’s easy to say, but not at all easy to do, because the journey from Vassileos Konstantinou Avenue to Kifissias Avenue is an ordeal in the sweltering heat. At the section in Psychiko where the new flyover was being built, I ran into an endless traffic jam. While crawling along I passed the time reading the billboards:
The journey to the junction at Spata was, relatively speaking, a delight, but from the moment I turned into Marathonos Avenue, I left paradise behind and entered hell once more. In total, I had been driving for over two hours and by the time I reached Vakirtzis’s three-story villa at Vranas, all I wanted to do was jump fully-clothed into the swimming pool. I resisted the temptation and climbed the steps leading to the terrace. It was baking quietly and tidily, with its swing seats and tables beneath umbrellas. There were no signs of the turmoil from the night on which Vakirtzis had committed suicide. It was as if it had never happened.
I walked into the sitting room and came upon a chubby woman of about forty, wearing a T-shirt and white shorts. Her hair was dyed auburn and her shorts revealed legs that would have been the envy of any footballer or even wrestlers.
‘What do you want?’ she asked as though talking to a house-to-house salesman.
‘Inspector Haritos.’
My name must have rung a bell with her, because she came out with a ready smile. ‘Ah, yes, Inspector. I’m Charoula Vakirtzis, Apostolos’s er … widow.’
She took me by surprise, because I knew that Vakirtzis was separated. As her appearance had nothing of the look of the distraught widow, I dispensed with the condolences.
‘From what I understood, Apostolos Vakirtzis was separated,’ I said, more to needle her and see how she would react.
‘Yes, we were living separately, but we weren’t divorced.’ She stressed this last phrase in order to justify the legality of her presence there. ‘As I’m sure you can understand, as soon as I heard the tragic news, I rushed straight over. Besides, Apostolos has no family and someone had to tidy the place up.’
In other words, not only am I here legally, but I am also his legal heir, given that he didn’t get a divorce. The more time went on, the more she was starting to get on my nerves.
‘On the day of the incident, I spoke to a young woman …’
‘Ah, his little floozy!’ She cut in. ‘The slut got her things together and took off when she heard I was returning. She’d had plenty out of him. Eventually the freebies come to an end.’
‘Where are my assistants?’
‘On the third floor, in Apostolos’s study.’
I took to my heels, not out of fear but so as not to lose my temper with her. I climbed the stairs and in one breath reached the third floor, where Apostolos Vakirtzis had his study. Koula was kneeling down in front of the desk. She had opened the second drawer and was searching through the cassettes that I had seen on the night of the suicide. Spyros’s eyes were still glued to the screen.
‘Why did you call me urgently?’ I asked Koula, who jumped to her feet as soon as she saw me.
She didn’t reply, but went over to the desk, took a pile of papers and handed them to me without a word. I took one look at them and almost dropped them. In my hands, I was holding Vakirtzis’s biography, the same copy that Logaras had sent to me.
It took me a moment to recover from the shock and think more clearly. So before sending the biography to me, Logaras had already sent it to Vakirtzis. Evidently, this had been part of the plan, but why? I had been taken aback and couldn’t think straight. I decided to leave it for later and asked them whether they’d found anything on the computer.
‘The guy simply had it for show,’ Spyros cut in. ‘At most, he played the odd game of patience or surfed the internet once in a blue moon.’
‘Why do you say that?’ I asked him. ‘Because he didn’t have a cleaning program?’
He turned round and gave me an ironic look. ‘Not just because of that. When you turn on a computer, you can tell straightaway whether it’s still set up as it was in the shop or whether it’s been changed because it’s been used. This one is like it was delivered this morning!’
‘Did you come up with any other information?’
‘No, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t any.’
He’d got me confused again and the way my head was spinning at that moment, I was ready to give him a clout round the ear. ‘Spell it out for me slowly, will you, because I’m not with you.’
‘Sometimes messages are sent to a computer together with a little program that automatically deletes them after a short while. Then there are others that come with a program that automatically returns them to their sender. So if there were any messages with programs like that attached, we won’t find them.’
‘And the biography? Why wasn’t that deleted or returned?’
He shrugged. ‘How should I know? Maybe they left it longer because the guy would need time to read it.’
I gradually started to understand what it was he was trying to explain to me. Logaras had sent other stuff to Vakirtzis too, but only for him to read. Once he had read them, they would be deleted or returned. He’d left the biography longer because it would take time to read it but also because it would be published in any case so there was no point in deleting it.
As there was no hope of our finding anything else on the computer, I turned my attention to more prosaic
