He told his secretary to hold all calls then took some blank pieces of paper and went to work.
Two hours later he looked down in frustration at several pages of notes. The task had seemed straightforward enough – he’d begun with the people in the office who had greatest ease of access to the cargo manifests. First was his own secretary, Elena, whom he relied on and trusted completely. She knew everything that went on in the office and could see any papers she chose. But he felt sure she was completely loyal, and there was also the simple fact – he felt guilty even thinking it – that she was very stupid.
Which still might have made her someone’s dupe, except that everything about her history suggested she would never have been exposed to anyone with links to a band of North African crooks. She was from a remote part of the upper Peloponnese, and had grown up in near-poverty on a goat farm. When she’d left school, Elena had scraped together enough money to enrol in a correspondence secretarial course and had then taken a bus to Athens to find a job. She lived a simple and pious life, fuelled by her devotion to the Greek Orthodox Church and her duty to her ageing parents, to whom she sent a quarter of her monthly pay check without fail. Berger just couldn’t see it.
Other candidates with access to the manifests included Katherine Ball. She was so English that again he found it difficult to imagine her involvement in an African-based conspiracy to rob UCSO, but unlike Elena she was very clever, and seemingly nerveless. They might have had an awkward relationship – she worked for Blakey in London, and when she visited Athens was clearly his emissary – but she never challenged Berger’s authority. He liked her; she was quick-witted and amusing, and in any case she had been back in London when Maria was murdered.
Of the likely candidates, this left Alex Limonides, since as the office accountant it was he who – until the arrival of Maria Galanos – had been responsible for drawing up each shipment’s manifest. But the fact that he would be the obvious suspect seemed to make it less likely that he was involved. And he was the greyest of grey men – so utterly correct in his behaviour that it was impossible to imagine him leading a secret life. There was too the air of ineffable sadness about him since the death of his wife, to whom he’d been devoted. All in all, in Berger’s assessment, it didn’t add up to the remotest likelihood that Limonides was a threat.
There were others on the staff to consider, though none with an easy way to get at the manifests or even to know when shipments were scheduled. Only one of these stood out, the Frenchwoman, Claude Rameau, and Berger had to admit to himself that she figured in his calculations chiefly because he disliked her so much.
She was Parisian, Sorbonne-educated, attractive despite her unfeminine appearance – she stuffed her blonde hair under a beret, and usually wore baggy trousers and men’s shirts, though she had been known to dress smartly when meeting potential donors. Claude held strong views – about the perfidy of George W. Bush, the endemic corruption in most aid agencies, the uselessness of the UN, and even about the operations of UCSO itself – and she was prepared to air them to everyone, from the newest recruit to the most august trustee on the charity’s board.
Rameau had made it a condition of her accepting employment with them that she should report only to UCSO’s overall head, David Blakey. Berger had wanted to resist this as it made her an anomaly in the Athens office, which was her base, but Blakey was so keen to get her on the staff he had accepted her proviso. This made for a very difficult working relationship with Berger and she had become something of a thorn in his side. Je m’en fiche, her rude way of saying she didn’t give a fig, characterised Claude’s dealings both with him and with the logistical people – Limonides, who had the unenviable task of vetting her expenses, and Elena, whose job it was to make sure that air tickets, appropriate currencies and complex itineraries were all in order for her non-stop travelling. If perhaps too much to expect gratitude from Claude Rameau for these labours on her behalf, it would still have been good to have received something other than her manifest disdain.
He sensed that Rameau’s political views were extremely left-wing, or more accurately anarchic, and that conventional views of what constituted a criminal act would not apply in her case. Berger wouldn’t put any form of extreme behaviour past her, except perhaps murder. He tried to ignore his strong personal dislike of the woman but had learned to trust his instincts after so many years when they had proved to be life-savers, so he put Rameau at the top of his suspect list. But he did it rather half-heartedly. What after all would induce her to side with people stealing aid intended to improve the lot of the Third World?
