The Verdict Page 12

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.

  The man went away a few moments later.

  Swayne saw my curious look.

  ‘Cities are like the devil,’ he said. ‘They speak in many tongues. It’s always good to know a few of them.’

  Then we heard someone pissing in the toilet, behind the wall Swayne was propped up against.

  ‘Have you been to the crime scene?’ Swayne asked.

  ‘The hotel?’

  ‘The room itself. Suite 18.’

  ‘Of course not. It’s restricted.’

  ‘Only if you don’t belong there,’ Swayne said.

  ‘Breaking and entering’s a crime,’ I said.

  ‘Who said anything about breaking and entering?’

  ‘You’re just going to walk in?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘That’s impersonating a police officer, which is a crime.’

  ‘Only if you identify yourself as such,’ Swayne said. ‘If somebody mistakes you for one that’s their bad judgement. What have you got to lose? And don’t say your job, ’cause that’s already gone.’

  If he hadn’t told me about Adolf and KRP’s machinations, I’d have refused on the spot. But I was falling through layers of self-belief. And part of me was curious as hell to see where VJ had killed Evelyn Bates, where it had all gone down.

  ‘It’s another thing I do. Another of my bespoke services. View the scene while it’s still live. Take my own pictures. You’d be surprised what coppers miss. Or choose not to see.’

  ‘When are yo
u thinking of going?’

  ‘Now,’ he said.

  ‘How are you going to get in?’

  ‘That’s the easy part,’ Swayne smiled. He picked up a medium-sized black rucksack from the floor. ‘You already look like a cop. You carry yourself like one – that certain whiff of moral rectitude, that walk like you were born with a stick up your arse. It’s as right as your suit. Cheap, but well looked after. A cop’s suit. Only your shoes need shining.’

  ‘I cleaned them this morning,’ I said.

  ‘Cops’ shoes are always spotless. They gleam. Like mirrors. So they can admire themselves from on high,’ Swayne said. ‘There’s a shiner down the road. Shall we?’

  17

  I slipped the plastic covers over my gleaming DMs and wondered why the hell I’d bothered getting them polished. The covers were the disposable kind – white and opaque, with elasticated openings – and they went all the way up to my ankles.

  Swayne snapped on his latex gloves and handed me a pair. He noticed me frowning at my feet.

  ‘You build a character from the ground up, don’t you know?’ he whispered. ‘Fundamental rules of acting.’

  We were on the twelfth-floor corridor of the Blenheim-Strand, close to Suite 18. The door had been wedged open a crack, but I couldn’t hear any sound coming from the inside.

  We’d had no trouble getting in. The suite was located in the part of the hotel known as the Chimney – the sixteen-storey tinted glass tower that rose out of the middle of the building and housed all the upmarket rooms, starting with the superior, then deluxe, before moving on up to the suite variants and the penthouse.

  The last two were served by an exclusive lift that could only be accessed by a guest’s keycard. We’d got around that problem by taking the fire escape. I’d expected to find police at the doors to the twelfth floor, but their only presence was a nominal strip of blue-and-white barrier tape stuck across the entrance.

  ‘Nervous?’ Swayne whispered.

  Nervous? No. I was terrified.

  Here I was, about to break the law. Why and what for? I was just a clerk, a nobody with a notebook. But Swayne had goaded me into it – and it hadn’t occurred to me to say no. Adolf would’ve come here without hesitation. No way was I going to wimp out where she hadn’t feared to tread.

  Yet that wasn’t quite the only reason. I was curious too. I wanted to see where the crime had happened; gain some kind of perspective on what VJ had done.

  ‘No,’ I said, glancing at the door. ‘You?’

  Swayne grinned and it was a perturbing sight, a leer so wide the ends of his mouth almost touched the far corners of his eyes. And there was a cruelty to his mirth, as if he’d just watched someone he hated go down in flames on a freezing cold day and was warming his hands on the pyre.

  He was a totally different entity now. Something had fully awoken in him. He’d shrugged off his defeatism and lethargy, and whatever powers he needed to do his job had come off the sidelines and manifested themselves. Only his unpleasantness remained, but I suppose he needed that to do the things he did.

  We were about to go in. Swayne checked his camera. I looked up and then down the long curving corridor. There was no one coming.

  ‘Follow my lead,’ Swayne said, handing me his rucksack. ‘And walk with purpose.’

  We’d barely got inside when we were ambushed by a very familiar smell. We had the same reaction. We froze. For a few seconds our senses kicked our brains into freefall. We forgot where we were, who we were meant to be, and what we were supposed to be doing.

  Stale booze in a closed, warm space. Sticky-sweet, rancid, pungent, welcoming. The smell of pubs. The smell of drinking. The smell of trouble.

  We should have been ready for it. If Swayne had read the file, he would have known about the overturned minibar in the middle of the room, and the minor lake its smashed contents had made on the carpet. As for me, I’d forgotten all about it – one of those important minor details that slipped between bigger ones.

  The stink took me back to my old Stevenage haunt, the Griffin. As a kid I’d walked past it at lunchtime and seen the hardened drinkers sitting inside, alone, pints on the tables, cigarettes on the go. That had been me a few years later. The midday boozer. Four drinks in and I’d feel better. Five to seven and I’d feel good. Then the demons would come-a-knocking and I’d let them all in.

  Swayne was in that zone too. Only it was hitting him harder, I could tell. I’d just had a drink problem – as in a problem with it; as in I couldn’t drink too much otherwise I went crazy and blacked out. Swayne had had it worse. He was an alcoholic. A dependant. He was an addict. He couldn’t function without the stuff. And he’d only recently gone on the wagon. Learned to live again. So this was a serious test for him.

  I saw him standing there confused for an instant, almost dizzy, trying to pick the past from the present.

  But his pride must have slapped him out of his stupor, because he shook it off fast.

  He took a short breath through his mouth, and then nodded in the direction of the living room.

  We carried on in.

  It was a shockingly big space, the size of my entire flat and the one next door combined, maybe even bigger still – and that was without the bedroom, which was at the opposite end.

  Two thousand a night – and this wasn’t even the biggest suite.

  Acres of thick khaki-toned carpet, towering, natural stone walls, and a vast ceiling garnished with a crystal chandelier, looming brilliantly over the centre of the room. And then there was the view from the floor-to-ceiling window, which added another dimension to the immensity of the suite, making it seem more expansive, almost limitless: south London between the Blackfriars and Hungerford Bridges; mile after mile after mile of charred blacks and seared browns and sooty greys, ending in the green fields and hills of Surrey, just about visible on the horizon.

  I looked away and back to the room. After the busy, crowded city view, the interior seemed empty.

  What furniture there was, was arranged in three individual groupings with plenty of empty space in-between. The only thing on the left side of the room, facing the window, was a long and wide cream leather couch, no doubt meant for contemplating the vista. At the far end of the room, to the right, was a desk the size of a grand piano, equipped with an orthopaedic chair, footrest and green banker’s lamp.

  The crime scene was in the middle of the room.

  We headed towards it.

  I heard sound – a light scraping. Or was it a rustling? Or a bit of both?

  And then, in the lounge area, I saw…

  People.

  Cops!

  Three forensics officers in white boiler suits were working around the coffee table and couch. They were on their knees, their backs to us.

  They hadn’t seen us.

  I stopped.

  They weren’t supposed to be here.

  We weren’t supposed to be here.

  Why the hell hadn’t Swayne thought of this?

  Why hadn’t I thought of this?

  It wasn’t too late. They hadn’t noticed us. We could slip out.

  I started turning, but Swayne grabbed my arm. He shook his head. I rolled my eyes and nodded at the scene in the middle of the room – the live crime scene we were trespassing on.

  He shook his head again and pointed forward.

  We weren’t backing out. We were going in.

  He hadn’t let go of my arm, and his grip was tight and stronger than his puny, booze-corroded frame implied.

  ‘I lead, you follow,’ he whispered.

  We moved into the room, heading left, towards the window.

  I kept my eyes on the cops. In their all-in-one white coveralls, with their hoods up over their hair and their attention focused on minutiae, they were hermetically sealed off from the outside. One was sweeping small quantities of broken glass into a white dustpan, sifting through it, and dumping it into one of two plastic containers, marked ‘A’ and ‘B’. Anot
her was shining a small torch into the gaps between the couch cushions, and scraping it with a glass wand. The last was dusting the side of the upturned minibar for fingerprints.

  The minibar was the scene’s centrepiece, almost another body. Practically the size of a horizontal family freezer, and originally concealed in a faux mahogany cupboard, it was no longer suspended in mid-topple. Now it was safely upright, on its base. But the double doors had been left open and the contents were piled in pieces on the carpet. The leakage had spread out in a broad, rusty-brown circle, almost the same shade as week-old blood.

  Number markings had been placed around the area, but these were different from the ones in the photographs I’d seen – black on yellow as opposed to black on white.

  This was another sweep. They were either looking for something else – something they’d missed – or gathering corroborative evidence, backing up theories.

  A thick aura of desperation hovered about the scene. It would have taken considerable strength to tip over the minibar, but if a person was being attacked and fighting for their life, adrenalin kicked in and sometimes made up for physical shortcomings. VJ had said Fabia had used the fridge as a weapon. It didn’t seem that way from here. The skewed angle of the bar suggested the fridge had been used defensively, possibly as a shield to block an assailant’s advance.

  The rest of the area was oddly tidy. The long L-shaped couch was perfectly aligned. The coffee table and its lavish display of now arid lilies and orchids were intact. Also on the table was an unopened bottle of champagne, still in its bucket, and two glasses.

  The damage wasn’t in fact as extensive as the pictures had suggested. The vastness of the space made it seem even smaller, confined, close to trivial.

  We’d given the forensics trio a wide berth, staying close to the window as we edged our way towards the bedroom. I had the manila file in my hand, stuffed with some of the scene photographs and the manifest of logged evidence.

  I stayed close to Swayne, behind him, as he’d instructed. He had his camera out, and was taking pictures as fast as he could, barely pausing to look at the screen. All the while we were edging towards the bedroom.

  As we got within reach of the steps, I noticed that a wide area of the carpet had been cordoned off with police tape, marking a rough triangle. There were three markers on the ground, one placed near a large stain. And, circumscribing the stain, and the areas above and below it, was an outline – a bright-red chalk outline, in the shape of a body.