The Verdict Read online

  ‘Pepe Regan,’ she said.

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘The Chelsea player.’

  ‘Pass,’ I said. I didn’t follow any sport – especially not football. ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘He’s alleged to have assaulted a bouncer.’

  I’d read about that in yesterday’s Standard. Regan hadn’t just beaten up said bouncer, he’d pissed on him afterwards too. That was this year. Last year he’d shagged his best mate’s wife, got her pregnant and was now denying the kid was his. The year before that he’d wrapped £350,000’s worth of Porsche around a lamp-post outside a school. The same month he’d also been charged with racially abusing the goalkeeper of an opposing team. He’d called him a ‘snowflake bitch’. He’d been acquitted when his defence team had successfully argued that the comment had been directed at the cold weather not the keeper: ‘It’s a snowflake, bitch.’ Then, as now, he was represented by KRP.

  Adolf’s phone rang.

  ‘Hi babe!’ she beamed.

  ‘Babe’ was Adolf’s fiancé, Kev Dorset. Kev had recently landed his dream job, as a reporter for the Daily Chronicle. Except he was in a precarious position, because they’d started him as they did all their new reporters, on a twenty-four-hour contract. If he didn’t come up with the goods, he was out on his ear without ceremony. He called Adolf every day at roughly the same time to tell her he hadn’t got the chop. She’d congratulate him and tell him how good he was. If I hadn’t known her better, I would have found her loyalty and devotion quite touching.

  They made a very odd couple, Kev and Adolf. Kev was six foot five, Adolf almost one and a half feet shorter in heels, a midget manqué in flats.

  I went to the kitchen to get my sandwich.

  I brought the Tupperware container back to my desk and took out my sandwich. It was a wholemeal bap with a tinned tuna, pesto, lemon juice and caper mix. It was layered between lettuce, cucumber, onions, tomato and spinach. I watched Adolf’s eyes widen as she said sweet nothing-kins to the poor bastard who’d agreed to marry her next year.

  I took my first bite, savouring the clash of pesto and capers, and brought up the contacts database on my monitor. I tapped in Andy Swayne’s name.

  Adolf finished her call and I sensed her looking in my direction.

  I dialled Swayne’s number. The phone started ringing.

  Adolf came over to my desk, picked up the other half of my sandwich and took a big bite, eyeballing me as she chewed, daring me to say something, knowing full well I wouldn’t. Then she turned and looked over at the juniors’ section, standing on tiptoe and holding up my half-bap, her trophy. She was showing it to Iain, her main ally.

  ‘This is so nice. Much better than yesterday’s,’ she said, without looking at me.

  This had been going on since the start of my second week at the company, when Adolf helped herself to half a sandwich I’d left on my desk when typing up my trial notes. I reached for it and it was gone. I looked around, on the floor, under my desk, and then I saw Adolf in her chair, looking at me defiantly, munching.

  I’d immediately clocked what she was up to, trying to provoke a confrontation, luring me into her comfort zone. So I didn’t say anything. I simply closed the empty container and went back to work.

  The next day, she did it again. I’d left the half-sandwich in exactly the same place. This time she didn’t wait until my back was turned. She got out of her chair, came over, took it and bit into it.

  It was a crude and very blatant power play. By taking half of what was mine, she was asserting her authority, showing me who was boss. It was also a test to see how I’d react, whether I was aggressive or passive, a fighter or a flea.

  Now she thought she had my number. When we’d last had anything close to a civil conversation, she told me she had a degree in psychology from some flyblown university I’d never heard of. In other words, she was a failed shrink.

  What Adolf didn’t know, and hadn’t actually considered – today, or any day since she’d officially declared hostilities open by eating my sandwich – was that I’d spat in the tuna mix. In fact, the only time in the last two and a half months Adolf hadn’t ingested my flob was the first time she’d helped herself to my food. I had thought of spiking one half of the sandwich with a volcanic dose of Scotch Bonnet pepper, elephant laxative or worse, and be done with her once and for all, but why ruin a perfectly good sandwich? So this was better. My secret, my laugh on her.

  Swayne’s phone rang into double figures before he answered.

  ‘Swayne.’

  ‘Hello, my name’s Terry Flynt,’ I said. ‘I’m a —’ I saw Adolf looking at me, listening as she chewed, pretending to work. ‘I’m a clerk at KRP.’

  ‘April Fool’s two weeks away. Christmas was last year. And I no longer count my birthdays,’ was the response. His voice was deep and croaky.

  I thought he was pissed. Then I realised he was kidding.

  ‘This isn’t a joke,’ I said.

  ‘Flynt, did you say your name was?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must be new.’

  ‘I started a few months ago. Why?’

  ‘Herr Kopf dispensed of my services last century.’

  ‘He’s reconsidered,’ I said.

  ‘Well, he’s either desperate – which I doubt – or he’s got a very tricky trial coming up,’ he laughed. I wondered how far he and Kopf went back.

  ‘Can we meet up to talk the case over?’

  ‘You can give me the details right now, if you want.’

  ‘Our client’s going to be charged with murder.’

  ‘You mean Vernon James?’ Swayne asked.

  ‘As you know, we never reveal a client’s name until the investigator has signed our confidentiality agreement.’ I smiled. ‘Are you free on Monday?’

  Swayne laughed and the laugh provoked a cough which ended in a retch and spit. I glanced over at Adolf. She’d finished her tuna, pesto and flob special.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Where do you want to meet?’

  ‘The Cedars of Lebanon café on Edgware Road,’ he said. ‘Say, two o’clock?’

  ‘See you then,’ I said.

  13

  Back home.

  After everyone was sound asleep, I crept into the spare room.

  I sat on the trunk and read the newspapers I’d bought this morning.

  The broadsheet pieces read like obituaries, the first fistfuls of dirt landing on his reputation. VJ’s arrest was being presented as a definitive full stop to a life already behind him. Guilt is always assumed by the media, hoped for, pushed. It makes a good story, a perfect narrative; the rise and fall, who goes up must come down – or be brought down. Success can only defy the laws of gravity so long.

  I should at least have been satisfied with what was happening to him. But I wasn’t. No matter the evidence, I didn’t believe he’d killed on purpose. It had been an accident. Surely.

  Then again…

  This was the same person who’d accused me of stealing his diary, out of the blue. Like that. No proof. No motive. No basis in past behaviour. His word against mine. His absolute certainty of my guilt over my claims of innocence.

  I can’t think of anyone else who’d take it.

  Where had that come from? Totally out of character, totally unexpected, yet said with utter conviction. Maybe the diary had been the start of something going bad in him, just as it had been for me – but for different reasons.

  Was that really it? Or was he always on this path?

  Rodney’s murder…

  Maybe Quinlan had been right, maybe VJ had killed him.

  As I put the scrapbook away, my fingers brushed against the jiffy bag that held the matriculation photo. Suddenly I had the urge to look at it again, a need riding the back of a powerful impulse.

  I took out the envelope and ran my fingernail along the edge of the seal. It was loose, but not quite open. The glue had dried and came away in flakes on my fingers. Still, there wa
s no way I could get at the contents without ripping up the packaging.

  I hadn’t seen the photo in a long time, more than a decade. Couldn’t face it. Too many bad associations, triggers and tripwires.

  But I couldn’t do much about my memory of it. Four rows of fresh-faced undergraduates and postgraduates, assembled on tiered benches and chairs in Sidney Sussex courtyard. Everyone in gowns, some in first or second formal suits; most smiling. I was in the bottom right of the first row. VJ was next to me, smiling, confident, chin up. My eyes were closed. I’d blinked at the very moment the shutter clicked. I was smiling, though. Happily, sincerely.

  Mum said I look pissed in the picture, but I wasn’t. I was happy because something had happened right before the photo was taken. As we were taking our places…

  My mobile was ringing outside the door, loud enough to wake everyone up. It was in my coat, hanging in the hallway. I could tell from the designated ringtone – the theme from Tales of the Unexpected – it was Janet.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘They’ve charged him with murder,’ Janet said, quelling a yawn. She’d gone back to Charing Cross after our meeting with Kopf. It was almost midnight now.

  ‘What about the manslaughter plea?’

  ‘No go. He insists he’s innocent,’ she said. ‘Not that it would’ve made any difference anyway. The police have got a very strong case for murder, Terry. There’ve been new developments.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘More witnesses have come forward. A waiter called Rudy Saks says he took a bottle of champagne up to the suite after midnight. He saw Evelyn Bates in the room with Vernon.’

  That sounded like an open and shut case to me.

  ‘And he’s still saying he didn’t do it?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t taken this sodding thing.’

  ‘We haven’t even started working on it yet,’ I said.

  ‘Come on…’ she said.

  ‘Which magistrates’ is he going to?’

  ‘Westminster,’ she said. ‘Meet me there on Monday at 8 a.m.’

  We said our goodbyes and I ended the call.

  On Monday VJ would have his first moment in court, where he’d state his name and officially enter his plea to the charges.

  And on Monday I’d surely come face to face with him.

  14

  70 Horseferry Road, the building that used to house Westminster Magistrates’ Court, was dreary going-on drab. Skirted by a broad pavement and nudged a little further back from the road than its neighbours, it was half a dozen floors of functional redbrick rectangle with no discernible entrance and small, dark, dirty windows too high up to see through. Only the large royal crest moulded into the front wall hinted at the building’s higher purpose; but the design was buried under so many layers of white paint it had as good as disappeared, suggesting that the pale wall was either all that remained of a grander structure that had once stood in its place, or that the building itself had been started from loftier blueprints, only to be downgraded a quarter of the way in, to the car park manqué it was now.

  Yet Westminster Magistrates’ was – arguably – the most famous court of its kind in the land. Its eight courtrooms played host to virtually every high-profile, media-intensive case spat the way of the judicial system, from ruptured terrorist cells to transgressing celebrities of every alphabetical grade.

  Janet and I sat together in the waiting area on the third floor, killing time until our case was called. We were due in Court 2 and we were running late. This was the nature of the game, a big part of the process – the hanging around, waiting for things you had no control or influence over to happen, to take their course.

  The hallway was a cheerless, striplit, utilitarian stretch of dull black marble floor and mint-green perforated metal benches set out like rolls of particularly obnoxious carpet.

  Today the press were out in force, all here for VJ. TV, papers, radio, internet, sitting around and waiting, like us.

  Lawyers milled about, making phone calls, conferring with colleagues, cops and court staff; or else they chatted to witnesses or to the family and friends of defendants. All conversations were whispered or muttered. No voices were raised. Like church without God or religion.

  Meanwhile VJ was sat downstairs, in one of the basement cells. He hadn’t seen daylight or felt the sun on his face or breathed fresh air in at least forty-eight hours. He’d simply exchanged one subterranean hole for another. I knew what was going through his mind. Same as everyone else in his position – fear, disbelief, incomprehension.

  I kept myself busy reading the copy of the disclosure file Janet had handed me when we’d met outside the courtroom earlier this morning. This was a big deal. Clerks didn’t usually get to see any of it, unless absolutely necessary, to clarify a point or crosscheck a reference. I’d been fully integrated into the case at ground level.

  The file was slender. Five witness statements, police interview notes, an autopsy report and photographs.

  I started with the photographs. Not the victim’s, but VJ’s. Police mugshots, his face against a plain pale-yellow background, bathed in harsh light. His expression was neutral to downcast, his eyes both wired and dazed. It was the face I remembered; that of the friend I’d grown up with. Seeing it set off a mix of conflicting emotions, a warmth of recognition coupled with an immediate, corrective anger. I wanted to help him, but mostly hang him.

  His lower lip was split in the middle and swollen, as if he’d been punched. Scratchmarks on his cheek were visible in the front-view photo, and clearer still on the profile shot. In the next image they had enlarged the injuries: a trio of abrasions that started as deep gouges on his upper cheekbone and ran down, thinning and breaking into dotted lines before stopping just above his lower jaw.

  Next were front, side and back photographs of his upper body. He had a large dark bruise on his belly, consistent with a punch or a hard blow from a blunt object. There were pinprick wounds and small gashes on his back and shoulders. His left palm and fingers had small nicks and cuts on them, some fine and straight, others curved and deep. If I didn’t know differently, I would have said he’d been the victim of a low-key assault or in a semi-serious car crash.

  Then I turned to the crime-scene photos.

  The hotel suite’s lounge area. The minibar – the biggest I’d ever seen – in the centre of the photograph, leaked contents soaked into the carpet, blossoming up and out and across like a dark mushroom cloud. The bar was suspended, half off the ground, in mid-tilt, held in place by its flex, plug and socket. Its double doors were flung open, and its contents were piled up in front of it, smashed. There was a lot more broken glass on the floor – including VJ’s Ethical Person of the Year award, broken in half, the capital ‘E’ on its side and inverted, so it looked like an ‘F’ with a fang-shaped stem. White on black numbered plastic evidence markers had been placed everywhere.

  I looked for a list corresponding to the markers, but I didn’t find one in the file. Typical brinkmanship. Although it wasn’t allowed, it was common practice for the police and prosecution to withhold key evidence from the defence until very close to the trial start date, so the defence would have very little time to prepare a rebuttal.

  There were no photographs of the bedroom, only one of the victim.

  She stared through the picture with open eyes, which were as good as painted on. Their whites bore the tell-tale signs of the manner of her murder – petechial haemorrhages, small red spots where the capillaries had burst as the asphyxiated blood stagnated in her facial area because it couldn’t flow back to her heart. There was no hint of pain in her expression, even though she must have been in agony as his hands closed around her neck, and she’d realised she was about to die. Her face had the waxen quality of corpses in the first eight to twelve hours of death, and with the curly blonde hair framing her face, she looked like a plump doll – albeit a doll with lipstick smeared past her parted lips and dark marks across her c
heeks, where the mascara had run with the last tears she’d cried.

  On the back was her name, written in blue biro.

  Evelyn Bates.

  I turned to the autopsy report. It confirmed that she’d died by strangulation, and that the killer used his hands, because the sides and back of her neck, as well as her throat, bore ‘finger-shaped’ bruises. And her killer had been strong, because there were petechiae in her mouth too.

  I went back to the photograph of VJ’s torso. The autopsy report listed Evelyn’s weight at 152 pounds, and her height as five foot four. VJ was six foot two and weighed 187 pounds.

  We’d been typical front-desk swots at school, strong of mind, puny in body. We’d been useless at sports. We’d played football twice a week with our class in a local playing field, where we’d be put in goal or defence because of our size. So we’d spent the next hour or so shivering and talking. VJ had since made up for his lack of athleticism. He looked after himself. His body was lean and muscular. He’d become strong enough to kill Evelyn.

  I closed the file and looked up and saw Franco Carnavale. He was sat opposite us, staring at Janet, his small, clear blue eyes the colour of ice cubes floating in a chilly swimming pool. I don’t know how long he’d been there. He wore a low-watt smile dipped end to end in smugness. He had a surprisingly youthful face for a man close to fifty, his skin scored with only the lightest of lines. He looked like he’d never been in a fight and whatever dangers he’d faced, he’d evaded or bullshat his way out of.

  Then I noticed a flashing in the corner of my left eye. I turned slightly and saw that it was the light catching Carnavale’s pinkie ring. He was tapping his little finger on the empty seat next to him – except the seat wasn’t quite empty. He’d put a file there – a manila file, just like the one I had in my hands. Except his was twice as thick as mine.

  I knew why he was smirking. He had a big head start on us. He knew things about the case we didn’t. The police had handed him everything they had so far. He’d shared as little of it as possible with us – just the stuff he intended to base his argument on today. He was under no obligation to do any more than that, and he wouldn’t. That’s the way things are. The trials may be fair, but the system isn’t. It’s geared towards putting people away. Better to be a prosecutor than a defender.