Beneath the stone, p.23
Beneath The Stone, page 23
“So, let’s go with your theory, shall we? The unfortunate Mr Hedinger falls silently to his death at around nine pm. Pandelís was not there at this point, so it was just you and Eléni talking. His death was presumably instantaneous as well as silent, or you would have heard him suffering. You then continue chatting away happily. Pandelís arrives after half an hour and the three of you chat for a further hour and a half. Am I right?”
“Eléni went to rest and pack at about ten, I think, but otherwise, yes, that’s it.”
“Did it get cold, as the evening wore on?”
She looked at him, not understanding, “No, it was a warm night, very still.”
“So, the windows and door remained open.”
“Yes.”
“And did you hear anything else between nine and eleven? People moving around, vehicles?”
“Nothing I recall.”
“Which is more surprising still, Roúla. So, your theory has the silent man’s body just lying there dead, at the bottom of the wall, throughout two hours of family chit-chat.”
“I suppose he must have been. Ghastly thought.”
“Do you have the witness statement to hand by any chance, Déspina?”
She did, as he knew, and he nodded at her to read from it.
“After I walked up from the cemetery, I met the hooded man again at the sheep barn and I saw what looked like a body, wrapped in black plastic and leaning against the side of the barn. It would have been about twenty past ten.”
“This is from the sworn statement of a man who helped dispose of Lukas’s body,” said Nick. “So now we have a body in two places – or two bodies. How do you explain that?”
“Well, I can’t obviously. He must be lying about the timing or they must have been extremely quiet removing the man’s body.”
“Why do you say they?”
“I’d have thought it would take two, especially if it needed to be done quietly.”
Nick looked at her for a long moment before continuing.
“So, to summarise, a fit young man falls from your wall for no apparent reason. He falls in silence and lands in silence, though the fall is severe enough to kill him outright. Then his body and all but one of the pieces of his shattered camera are removed by one or more persons unknown while you and your brother are chatting less than twenty-five metres away with windows and door open on what you described as a still night.”
Nick threw a sceptical look at Déspina, who looked like there was a very bad taste in her mouth. He went on:
“Perhaps we could trouble young Lachlan for those refreshments? And then you might like to clear your remaining appointments for the day and try again, Roúla. Your story is a total fabrication and you know it.”
Roúla gave him a look that said: How dare you, you arrogant prick? She seemed about to say something but then turned and flounced out of the meeting room.
“I didn’t know the camera shattered,” said Déspina. “Did we find some plastic shards or something?”
“Just a touch of artistic licence,” said Nick with a smirk. “The camera is in its case at the bottom of the sea.”
They found the toilets next to the lift, thanks to Lachlan, who was embarrassed at his failure to bring the promised tea and assured them this would be rectified forthwith. On the way back, Nick saw Roúla standing at her office window, facing away from him. She was holding a phone, her other hand gripping the desk. Even from six metres, he could see the bloodless white around her knuckles.
“We’re a bit off-piste here,” said Lachlan, finding Nick staring out of the window. He laid down the tray and came over. Nick bit his lip as he slipped the phone back into his pocket.
“We’re not quite in Gray’s Inn and we’re not quite in Lincoln’s Inn but handy for both and prices aren’t quite so insane here,” he said with a conspiratorial grin.
Nick was looking across the road at a substantial five-storey building in pale yellow brick with stone-framed windows and a pillared portico.
“It’s a fine-looking building.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Must be magnificent inside,” said Déspina.
“Er … no. Not really. It’s just serviced offices now. Very smart and modern, mind you. The building was gutted a while ago, but they kept the façade. Rents for squillions, no doubt. That’s modern London for you.”
Faintly disillusioned, they turned back to the table where Lachlan set out cups and saucers and a plate of expensive-looking biscuits, some wrapped in gold or silver foil.
“I’ve brought milk,” he said, “but would you prefer lemon?”
Déspina smiled and shook her head.
“Milk’s fine,” said Nick, and Lachlan manoeuvred his way past them, almost colliding with Roúla on his way out. She closed the door from the outside and spoke with Lachlan for a couple of minutes before entering.
“Can I pour you some tea?” asked Nick.
“I won’t, thank you,” said Roúla.
The teaspoon clinked repeatedly as Nick stirred his tea. Seconds passed. He seemed to be enjoying the ritual. Déspina was about to speak when Nick’s knee nudged her thigh. Finally, he laid down the spoon and unwrapped a chocolate biscuit.
“Well?” said Roúla.
“I’m sorry. We were waiting for you, Roúla.”
“To do what, exactly?”
“To tell us the truth.”
She blinked several times, then picked up a pencil and started drawing geometric shapes on a yellow, legal notepad. Finally, she looked up.
“I just spoke with my brother, Pandelís. He’s checked in after a few days’ break and discovered the police want to speak to him again. So, he’s arranging to see Sergeant Samarákis in the morning.”
“Good.”
“I’d like to make a formal statement now, Mr Fisher. Would that be in order?”
“Sure. We can do that.”
He nodded to Déspina and she took the recording device from her briefcase and laid it on the table, just as Nick’s phone beeped. He cursed quietly and excused himself, left the meeting room and called the number back. He returned in less than two minutes.
“Sorry about that. Please go ahead, Roúla.”
“I’m afraid I may have put a slant on things which is not wholly accurate,” she said carefully.
“Putting a slant. Is that the same thing as telling a lie?”
“Perhaps I could just make the statement?”
Nick shrugged, then nodded at Déspina who activated the recording and went through the preamble before inviting Roúla to begin.
“Mum and I – I’m sorry, Aunt Eléni and I – were enjoying a glass of wine at her house in Kardánes and talking quietly. It was beginning to get dark, just before nine pm, I think, when we heard a noise. There was a scuffing sound and then someone cried out. We looked at each other and knew we must do something but, as you know, Mum’s quite frai—”
“Shall we just call her Eléni?” said Nick.
“Sorry, Eléni is frail. So, I told her to stay there while I checked. The sound seemed to come from the garden wall, but I couldn’t see anything. I was relieved, for a moment, but then I went through the gate and saw. A young man was lying at the base of the wall and I knew he must be dead right away. He wasn’t moving, didn’t seem to be breathing. His neck was at a very strange angle and it’s rocky there. He must have hit his head, and the wall is high, at this point.”
“Did you check his pulse, try first aid of any sort?”
“I didn’t want to touch him. But I was sure it was pointless, anyway.”
“Did you go for help, Roúla?”
“I was in a panic. And I couldn’t think of anyone who could help. There’s no doctor in the village, anyway.”
“You could have called someone,” said Nick.
“So, what did you do next?” asked Déspina.
“I told Eléni and right away she said, ‘Call Pandelís. He’ll know what to do’. She has more faith in him than me. It’s like she sees him as the grown-up and me as the child. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s a gender thing or because he has a family. Anyway, I was in no fit state to argue, so I made the call. He came right away and was with us inside half an hour.”
“And no-one came down the alley, in the meantime?”
“I doubt it very much. It’s not lit, and no-one ever comes down it at night. Hardly anyone outside the family ever uses it. I checked on the body a couple of times but there were no signs of life.”
“You didn’t try to move it?”
“Pandelís said not to touch anything till he got there.”
“Why didn’t you call the police instead of Pandelís?” asked Déspina.
“I honestly don’t know. I was confused. The young man was clearly dead, anyway. We could call the police later. It would make no difference to anything.”
“And then Pandelís arrived?”
“Yes, and right away he said: ‘It’s okay, I have a plan’. I remember Eléni looked at me knowingly, like her faith in him was fully justified, and I felt sick. Then he looked at the body and said: ‘We have to get him moved, away from us, away from our land’. ‘Why not just call the police?’ I said. ‘Are you mad?’ he said. ‘Just think, for a minute. This boy is obviously not Greek. So, a foreigner dies in suspicious circumstances on our land. There’ll be police, forensics, the world’s press, news cameras crawling all over the place for weeks. A nightmare. And, if there’s anything wrong with the wall, we’ll be liable, and you know it’s falling down at the other end. We could find ourselves being sued by a big insurance company. It could wipe us out. And they’ll be lifting stones, digging into our private lives. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to see Mum put through all that. It could kill her. And what about you – your job, Roúla? This could get in the way, hold you back for months, even leave a stain on your character. Which you can’t afford. It’s not our fault he chose to trespass here and got himself killed. Why should we have to go through all that, risk all that? The boy’s dead. He doesn’t care. And I have a number. Someone who will come and take the body away.’
“‘Who?’ I asked. ‘You don’t need to know,’ he said. ‘It’s someone nearby. Someone we can trust.’ ‘It needs to be,’ I said, ‘because we’re laying ourselves wide open here’. Well, I don’t think he’d thought of that angle, but he said: ‘Whatever you’re afraid of, it’s not going to happen, Roúla; it’s family’. ‘How much will it cost?’ I asked. ‘Five thousand, I reckon. Half each?’ ‘Five thousand euros, to move a body a few hundred metres?’ I said, ‘and that’s the family rate?’ ‘It might be a bit more involved than that and it’s not our family, Roúla,’ he said.”
“What did you understand him to mean by that?” asked Déspina.
“That it was her family. Geórgia’s. She’s from the village too, originally. Pandelís married his childhood sweetheart. And her brother – he’s dead now – married Aléxia.”
“Aléxia?”
“Katzatákis.”
Nick raised a hand to his forehead.
“Hold on, let me get this clear. Geórgia is your brother Pandelís’s wife. Her brother is – or rather was – the missing father in the Katzatákis clan, so he would have been the father of Andréas, Theo and Gregór …”
“Meaning those guys are Geórgia’s nephews,” finished Déspina.
“Jesus, these bloody families!” said Nick.
“Makes sense, though,” said Déspina. “She put forward someone to sort out the problem. Someone she knew very well and thought she could trust because he was family.”
“Trust, at a price. All right, we’ll go with it. Please go on, Roúla.”
“I’m not a dishonest person, Mr Fisher, so I wasn’t comfortable with this. Nor am I a wealthy one. My particular branch of the law is not highly paid and my living expenses here are high, so two thousand, five hundred euros is a significant amount of money to me – and I was afraid the final bill would be more, knowing Pandelís. But he made a good argument. What would it matter to the dead man – or indeed anyone else – if the body were found in a different place? And we’d be off the hook then. So, I agreed.”
“Off the hook,” said Nick. “An interesting choice of phrase.”
“I meant, we’d be able to avoid involvement, attention, litigation. All those points Pandelís made so forcefully.”
“So, what happened next?”
“He just took charge. Everything happened very quickly. He texted this person, then disappeared for a while. Perhaps fifteen minutes later, he went off to meet him. At least, I assume it was a him. After a while, he was back, alone. He made sure Eléni was shut inside, then asked for my help. He reversed the car down the alley. We wrapped the body in black plastic bin bags and put it in the back of the car along with his stuff – there was a man bag and a camera bag and the camera itself. It wasn’t shattered, Mr Fisher. You have that wrong, though I suppose it might have been chipped, I didn’t notice. Then we drove up to the top road and carried the body and the two bags over to a concrete building with a corrugated iron door. After that, he drove us back around the corner and told me to wait.”
“What was he doing?”
“I imagine he was going back to strike a deal with this person.”
“What was he wearing?”
“I have no idea. Usual stuff – jeans and a top of some sort, I should think.”
“Nothing different.”
“Not that I recall.”
“Was he carrying anything?”
“I do remember a shoulder bag.”
“What size bag?”
She made a frame with her hands.
“About so, maybe forty or fifty centimetres by thirty or forty. Like a satchel.”
“Had you seen the bag before?”
“I don’t think so, apart from earlier. He had it when he went to meet this person.”
“Did you see what was inside at any point or did he tell you what was inside?”
“No. I assumed it was the money.”
“He didn’t ask you for money?”
“We’d agreed to share the cost, but he came up with the cash. When he confirmed that it cost him five thousand, I transferred half to his account.”
“His normal bank account?”
“I assumed so. He just gave me the codes.”
“Did it surprise you that he could come up with that sort of money, in cash, at the drop of a hat?”
“Not really. He often uses cash in his business.”
“As an estate agent?”
“Yes. When he’s negotiating to buy plots of land. It oils the wheels, he says.”
“And reduces the tax due?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“So, how long before he returned to the car?”
“Less than fifteen minutes, I think.”
“And then what?”
“That was it. We drove home, he checked the garden and the lane with a torch in case we’d missed anything, then hosed down where the body had been. Then we shared a rakí before he took Eléni back to Roussospíti.”
“Was Eléni aware of what was going on?”
“Absolutely not. I said a young man was hurt, but he’d be okay. We’d taken him to the clinic at Spíli.”
“And then you enjoyed a celebratory drink and went to bed, knowing your little problem was solved,” said Nick, with a sneer.
“The drink was to settle our nerves, Mr Fisher. It was a very stressful experience.”
“What did you imagine was going to happen to the body?”
“I left it to Pandelís. I assumed it would be moved again, but not too far. Somewhere not connected with us where it could soon be found.”
“Do you know what actually happened?”
“Pandelís told me it was found at sea. That’s all I know.”
“There’s rather more to it than that, I’m afraid. Lukas’s body was cut into ten pieces with a chainsaw, then placed in rubble sacks inside six black, plastic bags, each of which was dumped in a different location in the sea, off Triópetra. One of the bags was ripped, enabling the headless, limbless torso to escape and be found by a young couple snorkelling on the first day of their holiday; a ghastly image that will haunt them forever. His family cannot begin to understand who could do this to their gentle, sweet-natured boy, or why. This torments them every living minute and will forever blight their lives. You can add that to your two thousand, five hundred euros, Roúla. That was the true price of avoiding inconvenience.”
Her mouth was slightly open, her eyes wide, a great weight slowly settling on her shoulders. Then she closed her eyes as if trying to shut out the picture of the mutilated body.
“I didn’t know. I had no idea that would happen, I swear. I am so, so sorry.”
Nick signalled to Déspina and she ended the recording:
He stood and went to the window.
“You’re a lawyer, Roúla. You know you can’t just lie to the police if it’s convenient to do so. There are consequences, be it for wasting police time or perverting the course of justice. I’m not sure what Greek law says on this, but, in the UK, you can be sent to prison for up to six months. I wouldn’t be surprised if Greek penalties are worse.”
He moved across the room and leaned over her, hands on the table.
“Wouldn’t look so good on the CV, would it? And six months or more in a Greek jail would not be a pleasant experience for a sensitive, educated woman such as yourself, Roúla. They’re not your kind of people in there.
“We’re going to leave you to reflect overnight. I’m not convinced you’ve told us the whole truth, so be in no doubt. If that proves to be the case, the police will use the harshest penalties available to them.
“You might be thinking of calling your brother this evening. Don’t bother. He’ll have been taken into custody by now. It’ll be interesting to see how his version of the story compares to yours. We might need to compare notes in the morning. Nine o’clock sharp. I suggest you clear your diary for a further half-day, at least.”
He placed his card on the table.
“In the meantime, if your memory comes flooding back, feel free to call me.
“Great biscuits, by the way,” he added, grabbing another of the foil-coated ones as they gathered the recording device with their papers and left.
“Eléni went to rest and pack at about ten, I think, but otherwise, yes, that’s it.”
“Did it get cold, as the evening wore on?”
She looked at him, not understanding, “No, it was a warm night, very still.”
“So, the windows and door remained open.”
“Yes.”
“And did you hear anything else between nine and eleven? People moving around, vehicles?”
“Nothing I recall.”
“Which is more surprising still, Roúla. So, your theory has the silent man’s body just lying there dead, at the bottom of the wall, throughout two hours of family chit-chat.”
“I suppose he must have been. Ghastly thought.”
“Do you have the witness statement to hand by any chance, Déspina?”
She did, as he knew, and he nodded at her to read from it.
“After I walked up from the cemetery, I met the hooded man again at the sheep barn and I saw what looked like a body, wrapped in black plastic and leaning against the side of the barn. It would have been about twenty past ten.”
“This is from the sworn statement of a man who helped dispose of Lukas’s body,” said Nick. “So now we have a body in two places – or two bodies. How do you explain that?”
“Well, I can’t obviously. He must be lying about the timing or they must have been extremely quiet removing the man’s body.”
“Why do you say they?”
“I’d have thought it would take two, especially if it needed to be done quietly.”
Nick looked at her for a long moment before continuing.
“So, to summarise, a fit young man falls from your wall for no apparent reason. He falls in silence and lands in silence, though the fall is severe enough to kill him outright. Then his body and all but one of the pieces of his shattered camera are removed by one or more persons unknown while you and your brother are chatting less than twenty-five metres away with windows and door open on what you described as a still night.”
Nick threw a sceptical look at Déspina, who looked like there was a very bad taste in her mouth. He went on:
“Perhaps we could trouble young Lachlan for those refreshments? And then you might like to clear your remaining appointments for the day and try again, Roúla. Your story is a total fabrication and you know it.”
Roúla gave him a look that said: How dare you, you arrogant prick? She seemed about to say something but then turned and flounced out of the meeting room.
“I didn’t know the camera shattered,” said Déspina. “Did we find some plastic shards or something?”
“Just a touch of artistic licence,” said Nick with a smirk. “The camera is in its case at the bottom of the sea.”
They found the toilets next to the lift, thanks to Lachlan, who was embarrassed at his failure to bring the promised tea and assured them this would be rectified forthwith. On the way back, Nick saw Roúla standing at her office window, facing away from him. She was holding a phone, her other hand gripping the desk. Even from six metres, he could see the bloodless white around her knuckles.
“We’re a bit off-piste here,” said Lachlan, finding Nick staring out of the window. He laid down the tray and came over. Nick bit his lip as he slipped the phone back into his pocket.
“We’re not quite in Gray’s Inn and we’re not quite in Lincoln’s Inn but handy for both and prices aren’t quite so insane here,” he said with a conspiratorial grin.
Nick was looking across the road at a substantial five-storey building in pale yellow brick with stone-framed windows and a pillared portico.
“It’s a fine-looking building.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Must be magnificent inside,” said Déspina.
“Er … no. Not really. It’s just serviced offices now. Very smart and modern, mind you. The building was gutted a while ago, but they kept the façade. Rents for squillions, no doubt. That’s modern London for you.”
Faintly disillusioned, they turned back to the table where Lachlan set out cups and saucers and a plate of expensive-looking biscuits, some wrapped in gold or silver foil.
“I’ve brought milk,” he said, “but would you prefer lemon?”
Déspina smiled and shook her head.
“Milk’s fine,” said Nick, and Lachlan manoeuvred his way past them, almost colliding with Roúla on his way out. She closed the door from the outside and spoke with Lachlan for a couple of minutes before entering.
“Can I pour you some tea?” asked Nick.
“I won’t, thank you,” said Roúla.
The teaspoon clinked repeatedly as Nick stirred his tea. Seconds passed. He seemed to be enjoying the ritual. Déspina was about to speak when Nick’s knee nudged her thigh. Finally, he laid down the spoon and unwrapped a chocolate biscuit.
“Well?” said Roúla.
“I’m sorry. We were waiting for you, Roúla.”
“To do what, exactly?”
“To tell us the truth.”
She blinked several times, then picked up a pencil and started drawing geometric shapes on a yellow, legal notepad. Finally, she looked up.
“I just spoke with my brother, Pandelís. He’s checked in after a few days’ break and discovered the police want to speak to him again. So, he’s arranging to see Sergeant Samarákis in the morning.”
“Good.”
“I’d like to make a formal statement now, Mr Fisher. Would that be in order?”
“Sure. We can do that.”
He nodded to Déspina and she took the recording device from her briefcase and laid it on the table, just as Nick’s phone beeped. He cursed quietly and excused himself, left the meeting room and called the number back. He returned in less than two minutes.
“Sorry about that. Please go ahead, Roúla.”
“I’m afraid I may have put a slant on things which is not wholly accurate,” she said carefully.
“Putting a slant. Is that the same thing as telling a lie?”
“Perhaps I could just make the statement?”
Nick shrugged, then nodded at Déspina who activated the recording and went through the preamble before inviting Roúla to begin.
“Mum and I – I’m sorry, Aunt Eléni and I – were enjoying a glass of wine at her house in Kardánes and talking quietly. It was beginning to get dark, just before nine pm, I think, when we heard a noise. There was a scuffing sound and then someone cried out. We looked at each other and knew we must do something but, as you know, Mum’s quite frai—”
“Shall we just call her Eléni?” said Nick.
“Sorry, Eléni is frail. So, I told her to stay there while I checked. The sound seemed to come from the garden wall, but I couldn’t see anything. I was relieved, for a moment, but then I went through the gate and saw. A young man was lying at the base of the wall and I knew he must be dead right away. He wasn’t moving, didn’t seem to be breathing. His neck was at a very strange angle and it’s rocky there. He must have hit his head, and the wall is high, at this point.”
“Did you check his pulse, try first aid of any sort?”
“I didn’t want to touch him. But I was sure it was pointless, anyway.”
“Did you go for help, Roúla?”
“I was in a panic. And I couldn’t think of anyone who could help. There’s no doctor in the village, anyway.”
“You could have called someone,” said Nick.
“So, what did you do next?” asked Déspina.
“I told Eléni and right away she said, ‘Call Pandelís. He’ll know what to do’. She has more faith in him than me. It’s like she sees him as the grown-up and me as the child. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s a gender thing or because he has a family. Anyway, I was in no fit state to argue, so I made the call. He came right away and was with us inside half an hour.”
“And no-one came down the alley, in the meantime?”
“I doubt it very much. It’s not lit, and no-one ever comes down it at night. Hardly anyone outside the family ever uses it. I checked on the body a couple of times but there were no signs of life.”
“You didn’t try to move it?”
“Pandelís said not to touch anything till he got there.”
“Why didn’t you call the police instead of Pandelís?” asked Déspina.
“I honestly don’t know. I was confused. The young man was clearly dead, anyway. We could call the police later. It would make no difference to anything.”
“And then Pandelís arrived?”
“Yes, and right away he said: ‘It’s okay, I have a plan’. I remember Eléni looked at me knowingly, like her faith in him was fully justified, and I felt sick. Then he looked at the body and said: ‘We have to get him moved, away from us, away from our land’. ‘Why not just call the police?’ I said. ‘Are you mad?’ he said. ‘Just think, for a minute. This boy is obviously not Greek. So, a foreigner dies in suspicious circumstances on our land. There’ll be police, forensics, the world’s press, news cameras crawling all over the place for weeks. A nightmare. And, if there’s anything wrong with the wall, we’ll be liable, and you know it’s falling down at the other end. We could find ourselves being sued by a big insurance company. It could wipe us out. And they’ll be lifting stones, digging into our private lives. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to see Mum put through all that. It could kill her. And what about you – your job, Roúla? This could get in the way, hold you back for months, even leave a stain on your character. Which you can’t afford. It’s not our fault he chose to trespass here and got himself killed. Why should we have to go through all that, risk all that? The boy’s dead. He doesn’t care. And I have a number. Someone who will come and take the body away.’
“‘Who?’ I asked. ‘You don’t need to know,’ he said. ‘It’s someone nearby. Someone we can trust.’ ‘It needs to be,’ I said, ‘because we’re laying ourselves wide open here’. Well, I don’t think he’d thought of that angle, but he said: ‘Whatever you’re afraid of, it’s not going to happen, Roúla; it’s family’. ‘How much will it cost?’ I asked. ‘Five thousand, I reckon. Half each?’ ‘Five thousand euros, to move a body a few hundred metres?’ I said, ‘and that’s the family rate?’ ‘It might be a bit more involved than that and it’s not our family, Roúla,’ he said.”
“What did you understand him to mean by that?” asked Déspina.
“That it was her family. Geórgia’s. She’s from the village too, originally. Pandelís married his childhood sweetheart. And her brother – he’s dead now – married Aléxia.”
“Aléxia?”
“Katzatákis.”
Nick raised a hand to his forehead.
“Hold on, let me get this clear. Geórgia is your brother Pandelís’s wife. Her brother is – or rather was – the missing father in the Katzatákis clan, so he would have been the father of Andréas, Theo and Gregór …”
“Meaning those guys are Geórgia’s nephews,” finished Déspina.
“Jesus, these bloody families!” said Nick.
“Makes sense, though,” said Déspina. “She put forward someone to sort out the problem. Someone she knew very well and thought she could trust because he was family.”
“Trust, at a price. All right, we’ll go with it. Please go on, Roúla.”
“I’m not a dishonest person, Mr Fisher, so I wasn’t comfortable with this. Nor am I a wealthy one. My particular branch of the law is not highly paid and my living expenses here are high, so two thousand, five hundred euros is a significant amount of money to me – and I was afraid the final bill would be more, knowing Pandelís. But he made a good argument. What would it matter to the dead man – or indeed anyone else – if the body were found in a different place? And we’d be off the hook then. So, I agreed.”
“Off the hook,” said Nick. “An interesting choice of phrase.”
“I meant, we’d be able to avoid involvement, attention, litigation. All those points Pandelís made so forcefully.”
“So, what happened next?”
“He just took charge. Everything happened very quickly. He texted this person, then disappeared for a while. Perhaps fifteen minutes later, he went off to meet him. At least, I assume it was a him. After a while, he was back, alone. He made sure Eléni was shut inside, then asked for my help. He reversed the car down the alley. We wrapped the body in black plastic bin bags and put it in the back of the car along with his stuff – there was a man bag and a camera bag and the camera itself. It wasn’t shattered, Mr Fisher. You have that wrong, though I suppose it might have been chipped, I didn’t notice. Then we drove up to the top road and carried the body and the two bags over to a concrete building with a corrugated iron door. After that, he drove us back around the corner and told me to wait.”
“What was he doing?”
“I imagine he was going back to strike a deal with this person.”
“What was he wearing?”
“I have no idea. Usual stuff – jeans and a top of some sort, I should think.”
“Nothing different.”
“Not that I recall.”
“Was he carrying anything?”
“I do remember a shoulder bag.”
“What size bag?”
She made a frame with her hands.
“About so, maybe forty or fifty centimetres by thirty or forty. Like a satchel.”
“Had you seen the bag before?”
“I don’t think so, apart from earlier. He had it when he went to meet this person.”
“Did you see what was inside at any point or did he tell you what was inside?”
“No. I assumed it was the money.”
“He didn’t ask you for money?”
“We’d agreed to share the cost, but he came up with the cash. When he confirmed that it cost him five thousand, I transferred half to his account.”
“His normal bank account?”
“I assumed so. He just gave me the codes.”
“Did it surprise you that he could come up with that sort of money, in cash, at the drop of a hat?”
“Not really. He often uses cash in his business.”
“As an estate agent?”
“Yes. When he’s negotiating to buy plots of land. It oils the wheels, he says.”
“And reduces the tax due?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“So, how long before he returned to the car?”
“Less than fifteen minutes, I think.”
“And then what?”
“That was it. We drove home, he checked the garden and the lane with a torch in case we’d missed anything, then hosed down where the body had been. Then we shared a rakí before he took Eléni back to Roussospíti.”
“Was Eléni aware of what was going on?”
“Absolutely not. I said a young man was hurt, but he’d be okay. We’d taken him to the clinic at Spíli.”
“And then you enjoyed a celebratory drink and went to bed, knowing your little problem was solved,” said Nick, with a sneer.
“The drink was to settle our nerves, Mr Fisher. It was a very stressful experience.”
“What did you imagine was going to happen to the body?”
“I left it to Pandelís. I assumed it would be moved again, but not too far. Somewhere not connected with us where it could soon be found.”
“Do you know what actually happened?”
“Pandelís told me it was found at sea. That’s all I know.”
“There’s rather more to it than that, I’m afraid. Lukas’s body was cut into ten pieces with a chainsaw, then placed in rubble sacks inside six black, plastic bags, each of which was dumped in a different location in the sea, off Triópetra. One of the bags was ripped, enabling the headless, limbless torso to escape and be found by a young couple snorkelling on the first day of their holiday; a ghastly image that will haunt them forever. His family cannot begin to understand who could do this to their gentle, sweet-natured boy, or why. This torments them every living minute and will forever blight their lives. You can add that to your two thousand, five hundred euros, Roúla. That was the true price of avoiding inconvenience.”
Her mouth was slightly open, her eyes wide, a great weight slowly settling on her shoulders. Then she closed her eyes as if trying to shut out the picture of the mutilated body.
“I didn’t know. I had no idea that would happen, I swear. I am so, so sorry.”
Nick signalled to Déspina and she ended the recording:
He stood and went to the window.
“You’re a lawyer, Roúla. You know you can’t just lie to the police if it’s convenient to do so. There are consequences, be it for wasting police time or perverting the course of justice. I’m not sure what Greek law says on this, but, in the UK, you can be sent to prison for up to six months. I wouldn’t be surprised if Greek penalties are worse.”
He moved across the room and leaned over her, hands on the table.
“Wouldn’t look so good on the CV, would it? And six months or more in a Greek jail would not be a pleasant experience for a sensitive, educated woman such as yourself, Roúla. They’re not your kind of people in there.
“We’re going to leave you to reflect overnight. I’m not convinced you’ve told us the whole truth, so be in no doubt. If that proves to be the case, the police will use the harshest penalties available to them.
“You might be thinking of calling your brother this evening. Don’t bother. He’ll have been taken into custody by now. It’ll be interesting to see how his version of the story compares to yours. We might need to compare notes in the morning. Nine o’clock sharp. I suggest you clear your diary for a further half-day, at least.”
He placed his card on the table.
“In the meantime, if your memory comes flooding back, feel free to call me.
“Great biscuits, by the way,” he added, grabbing another of the foil-coated ones as they gathered the recording device with their papers and left.
