The Verdict (11 page)

‘The defendant has been charged with the murder of Evelyn Bates on the night of March 16th, 2011.

‘The facts are these. Evelyn’s body was found in the bedroom of Suite 18, in the Blenheim-Strand hotel. The defendant was a guest at the hotel, staying in the same suite. The autopsy report confirms that Evelyn was strangled. No object of death has been recovered from the scene – no noose, no cord, or anything of the kind. Circular bruise patterns around her neck indicate that her murderer used his bare hands to asphyxiate her.’

Carnavale went on to outline the prosecution’s case. The lie VJ had told DCI Reid about having a wild party in his suite, how he didn’t initially deny that Evelyn was the woman he’d been with, the fact that he’d fled the scene. Next, he detailed the witness statements – six in all now. Every one of them had seen Evelyn with the defendant, and every one of them had identified her from the post-mortem photograph they were shown.

Hearing it all again, in court, from another party, in a stranger’s voice, made the case seem utterly indefensible. I didn’t have a clue how we were going to play this. And we hadn’t even had the science yet – toxicology, DNA, hair and fibre, fingerprints.

When he’d finished, Carnavale sat down. He’d been very good, I had to give him that. He had no one to impress here, but he’d impressed me.

The magistrates conferred. Their mouths moved, but they made no sound. Janet flipped through her notebook. I kept my head in the same position, completely turned away from the dock. My upper back was starting to ache from the strain of maintaining the same posture.

The senior magistrate cleared his throat.

‘The trial date is set for July 4th, at the Old Bailey,’ he said. ‘Because of the seriousness of the charge, and taking into account the fact that the defendant poses a significant flight risk, I’m going to remand him in custody at Belmarsh until the start of his trial.’

Belmarsh. Inmates past and present referred to it as ‘Hellmarsh’.

I heard the door of the dock being opened and VJ walking out to a heavy jingle of chains. I was sorely tempted to turn around then, but I stayed put. A drop of sweat ran down the middle of my forehead and fell on my pad with a solid
tak
. I looked at it soaking into the paper, spreading out. I worried that the notes I’d taken would be ruined, unreadable, but then I realised that the page I was staring at was blank. I’d been so busy listening and worrying and hiding that I hadn’t written a damn thing.

‘The court will rise,’ the magistrate said, standing up, indicating that the proceedings were over.

I hadn’t heard the door close, although I knew VJ had left the dock, otherwise the magistrate wouldn’t have called time.

I turned around slowly. The dock was empty, but I could hear the chains following him down the stairs as he was led back to a cell to get ready to be transferred to the next.

I stood on the pavement opposite the court and watched as they drove him away to prison in a white van with blacked-out portholes; one of those long cattle trucks that housed half a dozen prisoners in separate boxes little bigger than gym lockers.

There was a small crowd of photographers by the back exit. The van slowed and then stopped to wait for a break in the traffic that had clogged up the road. TV reporters were already filming their two-minute accounts of the proceedings that would get played on repeat on the news channels later in the day. They’d describe what VJ had worn, what he’d said and whether he’d been bailed or remanded, and then they’d cut to the scene I was watching now.

The photographers rushed the van. They did the window bob and weave, pushing and shoving and jostling each other to get their camera lenses right up against each black pane. Today they had it really easy. The van wasn’t going anywhere because of the traffic blockade. Plenty to go around.

The TV news crews just kept on filming the van as it pulled on to the road and rolled away.

I took the Tube from Westminster to Bond Street, and walked down Oxford Street to Marble Arch.

While we’d been in court the day had steadily brightened up, and a preview of summer hit me like a sharp slap. Sharp light, blue sky, warmth. All in one. I stood on the pavement for a moment blinking, disorientated, feeling like time had jumped forward a few months.

The small parks by the arch were full of office workers enjoying the last dozen minutes of their lunch breaks. Shirts undone, sleeves rolled up, shoes off, bovine smiles.

I crossed over on to Edgware Road and headed to meet Andy Swayne.

He’d told me he’d be in a Lebanese place called the Cedars, but almost every restaurant and café down Edgware Road was Lebanese. No surprise. Lebanese refugees had settled in the area in the mid to late 1970s, when they’d fled their country’s bloody and ruinous civil war.

The first third of the road was all scaffolding and shop signs with Arab subtitles. The newsagents sold nothing but Arab dailies displayed in racks; there were Arab food stores, banks, book and record shops, and a video rental place that had more VHS tapes than DVDs. It was like the internet had never happened. And it was all the better for it. There was a low-key vibrancy here, a sense of community, of a home away from home.

No sign of a place called the Cedars of Lebanon. I cursed myself for not thinking to look it up before I’d gone to court. Cursed myself even more for not asking Swayne if he had a mobile.

After the Connaught Street junction, the Middle Eastern influence petered out and Edgware Road became a concrete funnel of interchangeable household names, with pubs, betting shops and fast food places wedged in-between.

And it was somewhere here that I passed the Cedars of Lebanon. It was next to a tired and empty-looking newsagent’s displaying dusty fruit and wilted flowers outside. I might have missed it altogether, if it hadn’t been for the Lebanese flag painted in the middle of the window.

Swayne was already there, a tall, thin man in a light-blue shirt, maroon tie and steel-rimmed glasses, sat deep in a far corner, back to the wall. He was the only customer in the café. We made eye contact and he gave me a slight nod.

The place was sombre and poky, a dead-ending corridor that had been reclaimed, roofed over and reinvented. It reeked like a mound of ripe dishcloths. I couldn’t imagine anyone coming here more than once unless they owned it or had a fetish for one-star eateries.

To the right of the door was a counter, pastries arranged on trays, no more than four or five on each. They looked pale and dry, except for a couple of baklavas that were as good as drowned in congealed brown syrup. A tubby man with glasses and thick stubble stood behind the counter, following me in with a wary look, his mouth caught between a smile and a scowl.

I introduced myself to Swayne and held out my hand.

‘You’re a bit old to be a clerk at KRP, aren’t you?’ he said, looking me up and down.

I’d heard far worse alternatives to ‘Hello’, but I hadn’t expected hostility from him. I kept my surprise in check, pulled out a stool and sat down.

Swayne was in his seventies and looked it. His short grey hair was thinning all over and the scalp below was spattered with liver spots. He had a vulpine face with a skin tone that ranged from cloudy red to semi-translucent, like raw meat wrapped in greaseproof paper.

Even if I hadn’t been told, I’d have known he was an alcoholic. Like the drunks they start out as, alcoholics come in two varieties – sweet or sour. Swayne was meanness personified. He had the look of someone who wakes up every morning and realises that that’s the best he’s going to feel all day, and decides to hate his every conscious minute in return.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘Sorry?’

‘To drink.’

‘I’m fine for now,’ I said.

‘Suit yourself.’

He crossed his arms and sat back. I noticed he was wearing a brand-new shirt that he hadn’t bothered to iron. It had those just-out-of-the-packet vertical and horizontal creases across the chest and arms.

‘How long have you been at KRP?’ he asked. His voice was slightly raspy, like he was recovering from a cold. And I heard the remnants of a Geordie accent in his pronunciation.

‘Four months.’

‘How are you finding it?’

‘OK,’ I said.

He sniggered. Or at least I thought he did. His shoulders spasmed, and he smiled and creased his face into a thousand furrows, yet the sound he made was more like a wet sneeze that had got stuck between his palate and nose and was fighting to get out.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘That wasn’t a laugh,’ he said.

I was getting annoyed. He was the drowning man you risk your life saving, only for him to cuss you out for messing up his suicide bid. If it had been up to me I’d have told him to sod off, but it wasn’t and I couldn’t.

‘Now, this case we talked about yesterday… This is what we have so far,’ I said, pulling out a copy of the disclosure file.

He took what I handed him and quickly flicked past each page with barely a glance. Then he screwed the lot up in his fist, scrunching and compacting the paper until it all disappeared under his fingers. He kneaded and squeezed it tight, his forearm shaking with the effort, before opening his hand out and letting the tight paper ball he’d made of the legal documents roll off his palm and on to the table.

For a blank moment all I could do was watch the ball expand and loosen, popping and crackling as it did, like a huge piece of popcorn.

Then I looked up at him. His face was the same, still channelling vinegar and bile and God knows how many million grudges and resentments.

I was almost grateful for his behaviour. Now I had all the excuse I needed not to use him. As I unravelled and then flattened the paper, I was already thinking of which investigator I’d put on the case.

I slipped the pages back in my bag.

‘Thanks for your time,’ I said.

I stood up and started for the door.

‘You might want to take this with you, boy wonder,’ he said behind me.

I heard something heavy thud on the table. I turned around. A thick A4 manila file was lying there.

I knew what it was, but he told me anyway.

‘That’s what
they
have so far. The CPS disclosure file for Case No. 3375908. Everything to date on
L’Affaire James
.’

‘How d’you get it?’

‘The investigators you usually use can’t and won’t go to the places I can. That’s why Sid sprung me from the gulag,’ he said.

Right up until then, I’d thought I had some leeway as to whether or not I worked with Swayne. That was how Kopf had sold it to me – or, rather, to Janet. But that wasn’t the case at all. I was stuck with this odious twat whether I liked it or not.

I went back to the table and opened the file. It was divided into two parts – what the CPS had already given us, and everything they hadn’t. Our material took up under a quarter of the file. The rest comprised a lot more – crime-scene photographs, additional witness statements, complete transcripts of each of VJ’s police interviews, and an inventory of materials taken from the crime scene that ran to ten pages.

‘I can’t take this,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘It’s illegal.’

‘There’s nothing there you won’t be getting all or part of eventually. Think of it as a head start. A levelling of the field.’

‘It’s stolen property,’ I said.

‘It was a gift,’ he said. ‘I asked and I received.’

‘It’s
still
stolen property.’

He sighed. ‘You obviously don’t know your place in the scheme of things, so let me enlighten you. I fetch, you carry. You’re just a gopher here – at best,’ Swayne said. ‘If you’ve got ethical issues about any of this, you’re in the wrong profession. And
definitely
with the wrong firm.’

I understood straight away. Janet and Kopf knew Swayne would give me the file, but they couldn’t legally know I had it, or that I’d even seen it. I couldn’t take the file back to the office. I was going to have to keep it at home, where I’d study it, comparing what the prosecution had given us against what they hadn’t. I’d feed the information back to Janet unofficially – and not in writing. We’d then be able to work out what their case was going to be; who they were going to call as witnesses, what evidence they were going to present, what the narrative would be. This was gold dust. It was also a major violation of ethics, the kind of thing that could get a lawyer disbarred.

I took the file and put it in my bag.

He held out his hand.

‘I’m Andy Swayne.’

‘Terry Flynt.’ We shook. Swayne’s grip was strong, his skin tough. He may have been an alcoholic, but there was an implacable hardness to him, a cold core no amount of self-medication could warm, let alone melt.

‘You’ll need a bigger bag, because there’ll be more where that came from,’ he said.

‘Is that how you operate?’ I asked.

‘It’s one of the things I do,’ he answered.

A proactive investigator, I thought. That was a first.

‘What’s the worst thing you’ve heard about me?’ he asked.

‘That you used to be the best at what you did,’ I said. I could’ve mentioned the burglary Janet had brought up in the meeting, but I really didn’t want to know.

‘Why’s that so bad?’

‘Nothing worse than living in your own shadow,’ I said.

He considered that a moment. Then seemed to file it away.

‘What do you know about the James case?’ I asked him.

‘Only what I’ve seen on TV.’

‘You haven’t read the file?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m a snoop, not a lawyer. And, besides, I really don’t give a fuck.’

In that respect he was no different from any other investigator, just more upfront about it. The best investigators are the ones who remain aloof from what doesn’t concern them; they locate the pixel but ignore the picture.

‘Do you work with Bella Hogan?’ he asked.

‘We share an office,’ I said.

Swayne read between the lines and smirked.

‘I guess her time is almost at hand.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘The degree, the promotion.’

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ I said.

Swayne grinned and I saw the uneven grey stumps he had for teeth.

‘You mean Janet hasn’t given you that little talk of hers? About how you’re her favourite, the best clerk in the company – words to that effect?’

I didn’t say anything, but I felt myself blush and he had his answer.

‘I worked for KRP for close to thirty years, on and off. They always pull the same crap on people they’re going to get rid of,’ he said.

I went cold inside. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I don’t know why they do it,’ Swayne continued.

‘What
are
you talking about?’ I said.

‘Did Janet drop a big hint about promoting you after this trial?’

Again, I said nothing.

‘Won’t happen,’ he said, looking at me.

‘Why not?’

‘Look at yourself. You’re too old to be a lawyer – especially one of theirs. By the time you start practising you’ll be what – early forties? Your peer group’ll be fifteen years younger. Their bosses will be your age. You’ll be a lightweight who looks like a heavyweight. Who wants that?’

‘Are you saying I’m going to get
fired
?’

‘Yup.’

‘When?’

‘When this trial’s over. Probably after sentencing,’ he said.

‘
Sentencing?
The trial hasn’t even started,’ I said.

‘Please! There’s only one possible verdict here. It’s open and shut. And, anyway, what can you do about it? You’re a
clerk
,
for fuck’s sake. Which barrister are they using?’

‘Christine Devereaux.’

Swayne laughed out loud this time, but it was hollow and joyless, an echo of a laugh coming from a deep dark place.

‘They’re sparing no expense to lose this one, are they? You think I’m over the hill? She’s all the way at the bottom. They gave you a loser, Terry, because they want to lose you.’

But they
hadn’t
given it to me. Janet had called Adolf’s desk, long after Adolf had gone home.

Or was that simply how I was seeing things? I thought back to that day. Adolf had left work early to go to the dentist. Janet had been in the office then, so she’d known Adolf was out. And I’d stayed late, as was my habit. Therefore Janet
knew
I was going to pick up the phone when she called.

But if that was true, and they were planning to fire me, why had Kopf tried to get me off the case? Or had he been bluffing?

I didn’t trust Swayne. And I didn’t want to believe him. Yet, for all I knew, he could have been telling the truth. He had an axe to grind after all.

‘I just thought they were interested in promoting the best person for the job,’ I said.

‘Oh they are. But that’s not you.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I know Bella. She’s their kind of person. Hungry, ambitious, no feelings,’ he said. ‘If I’d handed her that file just now, she’d have taken it with both hands and no questions – and definitely no complaints.’

I said nothing.

Why had he told me what he had? It didn’t have anything to do with me or my welfare, that was for sure. But there was an element of self-projection to it. He was bitter at Kopf and the company for firing him, and was letting me know the kind of people I was working for. Maybe they’d fooled him like they’d fooled me, hinted at his indispensability one day and kicked him out the next. I was now curious as to what had happened, but I didn’t want to ask him yet.

The man who’d been behind the counter walked over to our table. He smiled at us and said something in Arabic. I was about to tell him I didn’t understand, but Swayne replied – in Arabic. This led to a short conversation between the two of them, the patter quickfire and guttural. For the second time in the twenty minutes I’d known him, Swayne had surprised me – only this time it was pleasant, or as pleasant as things could be around someone with the personality of an irate viper caged in barbed wire.