The Verdict (12 page)

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 you 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?’

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.

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.

Why the hell hadn’t Swayne 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’. Another 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.

Someone coughed behind us.

I turned round and found myself looking at one of the forensics officers, who was staring right back at me. He had round rimless glasses and a snubby nose. His mouth was open, in surprise. He straightened up a little, his eyes narrowing and brow contorting.

I’d managed to keep to the calm side of nervous up until now. Swayne’s confidence, his sureness, had bolstered my own.

But now it hit me.

Panic… fear.

Panic…

Fear.

We looked at each other across the room, the real deal and the impostor. I froze up.

Swayne stepped on my toes with his heel.
Keep it together.

‘Anything new?’ Swayne asked the man, in an officious, impatient tone that bordered on the snappy, and had just the right amount of volume to carry across the room. The other forensics people stopped what they were doing and looked our way. They all had the same look. Trying to place us, work out how senior we were.

I didn’t move.

‘Uh… yes,’ the man said to Swayne, nervously, wilting before perceived authority. ‘Found some… um… hair on the side of the couch.’

‘How much longer are you going to be?’ Swayne asked.

‘Few hours yet. We’ll be done tonight.’

‘As you were,’ Swayne said.

‘Yes, sir,’ the man said and went back to work. The others followed suit.

We headed for the bedroom. Swayne in the lead. I could see him grinning that big ugly beam of his.

Swayne pushed the door shut behind us, leaving it open a crack.

‘That was close,’ I whispered.

‘No, it
wasn’t
,’ he snorted. He took out his camera and started snapping away.

If the suite had consisted of the bedroom alone, it still would have been the biggest hotel room I’d ever set foot in. Evelyn Bates had been murdered in the lap of luxury.

The bed where her body had been found dominated the room; two king-sizers rolled into one, its heavy wooden frame bolstered by an arching padded headboard, which was a radiant white, like a movie screen showing a close-up of a blank piece of paper. Forensics had removed all the sheets and pillowcases, exposing the dense slab of memory foam that was the mattress.

In keeping with the lounge’s theme, the rest of the furniture was elegant but kept to a minimum, boosting the sense of space instead of filling it. The bed was flanked by glass-topped cabinets, which had a phone, lamp and alarm clock on each. A flatscreen TV faced the bed, its borders painted the same grey-stone tones as the walls, which made the screen appear indented. To the left was a dressing table and chair.

Swayne opened up the walk-in closet. There was a wall safe at the very back, the door open. He photographed it once.

Then we went into the en suite bathroom, which was gleaming and echoey. The glasses were still sealed in plastic, the towels folded and plumped up, and none of the complimentary toiletries had been used.

‘Didn’t even wash his hands afterwards,’ Swayne said.

I went back into the bedroom and took out the crime-scene pictures. They were numbered and arranged in the order they’d been taken.

I glanced from the photographs to the mattress, mentally juxtaposing the printed images on to the reality before me.

The first few showed Evelyn Bates as the hotel maid had found her – face up on a huge bed, naked, one arm drooped over the mattress, the other flung across the middle of the bed, palm out. Her head was partly propped up on the edge of the pillows.

There was something deeply sad about the way she’d been laid out here; whole, yet broken, like a shopfront mannequin no one had any use for. She was on the left side of the bed, nearest the door. She would have been the first thing everyone saw when they walked in. If she’d been alive, she’d have scrambled to cover up her nakedness before a stranger. She couldn’t now. But she’d been accorded a minor dignity in the way her mussed-up hair fell over much of her face, making enough of a mystery of her features.