The Verdict (13 page)

Next were photographs of her dress, a crumpled pile of shiny green fabric on the floor by the bed, directly below her hand. Both her shoes were at the foot of the bed, green patent leather stilettos. One was upright, the other on its side, its heel snapped off at the stem.

Next were close-ups of her face, with and without the hair veiling her features; zoom-ins on her blood-speckled eyes, the cloudy bruising to her neck and throat, the lipstick smeared like the shaft of a tick across her left cheek, her torn earlobe and the hooped earring on the mattress.

And then I saw something that completely threw me, that didn’t make sense.

A picture that didn’t belong there.

I checked the log sticker on the back, and cross-referenced it with the evidence manifest. Case number, scene letter, picture number and a brief description of the object in the photograph.

3375908/A/34
– Chocolate.
 

A diamond-shaped chocolate piece wrapped in a royal-blue wrapper with ‘Marquis’ printed across it in gold cursive script.

I went back to the very first photograph. I looked at the sandbag arrangement of pillows behind Evelyn’s body. They were easy to ignore, given the context, but there was a piece of Marquis chocolate on the middle and last stack of pillows, placed right in the centre.

Room service had turned the bed down while VJ had been out.

But then I noticed something else.

The pillows hadn’t been moved at all. And the sheets under and around Evelyn were barely disturbed.

I went to the last photograph. It was the bed after the body had been moved. The space had been outlined in bright-red chalk.

Which meant…

Jesus.
 

‘Ready?’ Swayne said as he came out of the bathroom.

I beckoned him over and pointed to the pillows in the photo.

‘She wasn’t killed here,’ I said. ‘She was killed next door. He carried her in here afterwards, stripped her and laid her down on the mattress. And he did it very gently. He didn’t drop her or dump her. See the chocolates on here? They were on the bed before she was murdered. He was careful.’

‘So?’

‘It was like she was posed, or put here deliberately.’

In other words: this wasn’t manslaughter or even a run-of-the-mill murder. There was something twisted about it. Fetishistic, ritualistic…

‘You know what differentiates successful people from failures?’ Swayne asked. ‘Successful people mind their own business. Failures mind everyone’s business
but
their own. I fetch, you carry – remember?’

I opened my mouth to ask him if he thought he defined success, but we heard voices coming from the lounge.

I went over to the door and looked through the gap.

Fuck.
 

DCI Reid and Franco Carnavale had walked into the suite. They too were wearing latex gloves and overshoes.

And they were heading straight for the bedroom.

The forensics team had stopped what they were doing. One of them spoke to DCI Reid. I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

Carnavale turned towards the window and didn’t move for a moment. That view had him hooked. He started walking towards it, almost involuntarily, as if he were being reeled in.

‘Gimme the file – bag – phone,’ Swayne said behind me.

I handed him everything.

He started leafing through the file, as he walked towards the bathroom.

Reid finished chatting to forensics and called to Carnavale. He came away from the window, reluctantly.

I turned and looked at Swayne. He was standing by the bathroom door with the phone to his ear.

The pair were making a beeline for the bedroom, crossing the lounge, their eyes fixed on the gap I was observing them from.

Then I heard a ringtone. A pounding funky piano riff, all lower keys. I recognised the theme from
Police Woman
, a forgettable American TV series from the 1970s. I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so damn scared. Reid and Carnavale were but fifteen feet from the door.

Reid stopped, swore under her breath and took out her phone. She glanced at the screen and answered.

I heard Swayne mumbling behind me.

‘DCI Reid?’

‘Yes?’ she said outside.

‘This is the Deputy Commissioner’s office,’ Swayne said. ‘He’d like a word. Are you alone?’

‘Um… no. Give me a moment,’ she said, looking around her, first at Carnavale, then behind her at the forensics team. She held up an index finger to Carnavale, mouthed something to him, and then turned and started walking away. She passed the forensics team and then left the suite.

I heard her voice on my phone.

‘Can you hold?’ Swayne said. ‘He’ll be on the line shortly.’

Swayne came quickly back to the door.

Carnavale had sauntered off back to the window.

Swayne handed me a small white plastic bundle.

‘Put it on,’ he said. It was a forensics coverall.

I was going to question the wisdom of what we were doing, but Swayne was already pulling his suit on over his legs.

I dragged the coverall on, pulling the hood over my head.

Swayne dropped the file in his rucksack and gave me my muted phone.

‘Keep it on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

He opened the door and we stepped out of the bedroom.

Carnavale was by the window, admiring the view, his gloved hands folded behind his back. He didn’t turn round as we passed him.

I kept my head down as we walked. The forensics team were engrossed in their individual tasks.

We reached the front door. Swayne opened it, looked left and then right.

He slipped out into the corridor. I followed.

DCI Reid was standing to the right of the door, facing the window with the phone to her ear. She glanced briefly at our white forms, but made no eye contact. I kept my mobile hidden loosely in my hand.

We walked as normally as possible. I wanted to speed up, but didn’t. I stayed in step with Swayne, who was almost sauntering.

We reached the fire escape.

Swayne opened the door.

A uniformed cop was sitting on the stairs opposite us.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked me.

Again I completely froze up and lost the power of speech.

‘Have you got a key for the lift?’ Swayne asked quickly, his tone more subservient than before. ‘We’ve only got the one for the whole team.’

The cop sighed and tutted, but he got up and led us back out into the corridor.

We walked down a short stretch until we came to the lift. He took the card out of his breast pocket and swiped the side of a keypad.

Swayne thanked him. The cop went away without a word.

We waited for the lift to come. I looked at the phone. DCI Reid was still connected.

‘I blocked your number,’ Swayne said.

The lift pinged and the doors opened. We headed down without saying a word, keeping our heads lowered because of the CCTV camera in the corner of the lift. Swayne hummed the theme from
Police Woman
under his breath, then he did his wet laugh.

We changed in the toilets and Swayne stuffed everything back in his rucksack.

Five minutes later we were back outside, walking away from the hotel.

‘Now
that
was close.’ Swayne grinned his crooked railtrack smile.

I didn’t say anything. I speeded up to a near jog, needing to get as far away from the hotel as possible, half-expecting to hear a police siren coming our way.

Swayne was keeping up. He was revelling in the buzz, energised.

‘Exhilarating.’

No, it
wasn’t
. We’d almost got caught.

But I didn’t regret going:

What I’d seen hadn’t proved guilt, yet it had certainly cleared away some of my doubts.

I didn’t say anything to Swayne. He didn’t care, so it would have been a waste of breath.

We were on the Embankment now, walking up towards Waterloo Bridge. It was after four. Traffic was getting heavier.

‘Turned you on, didn’t it?’ Swayne almost shouted.

‘No,’ I said. Then I thought of Adolf doing this. ‘I bet that never happened with Bella.’

‘Why would it?’

‘You told me you took her to crime scenes.’

‘I never said
that
.’ Swayne smiled.

‘But…’

I thought back to what he’d
actually
said in the café. And, of course, he’d said no such thing. He hadn’t even suggested it. He hadn’t even said he’d
worked
with Adolf.

Swayne looked at me, smirking, eyes twinkling. He’d read my thoughts as clearly as if they were ticker-taping across my forehead. I wanted to punch him.

Then I remembered my phone. I hadn’t ended the call. It was in my pocket, on mute. I took it out. DCI Reid was still holding.

I put her out of her misery and turned it off.

When I looked up Swayne had vanished.

‘Daddy, you’re on TV!’ Amy said, almost jumping up from her seat.

We’d finished dinner and were watching the news, all of us bunched together on the sofa.

There was a short report on VJ’s appearance at Westminster Magistrates’. It showed his arrival – in the prison van, the crowd of photographers jostling each other, camera flashes bouncing off the glass – and then cut away to a young male reporter, standing outside the court building, describing the little that had happened inside. The last details were spoken off-camera, his voice overlaid on a shot of the van driving off down Horseferry Road.

Ray rewound to the moment where the van started moving away down the road. The camera pulled back and he paused the TV, right at my split-second cameo.

I was standing on the pavement with three other people I’d never noticed, a gawker among gawkers. Except I was looking straight at the camera and through the screen, probably watching the photographers rushing to get a shot of the real vehicle that was ferrying VJ to Belmarsh.

Amy clapped and Ray smiled.

‘Who was in the truck, Daddy?’ Amy asked.

Ray answered before I could.

‘Vernon James,’ he said.

I was shocked to hear him say that name. Any parent would have been proud that their child was so attentive and focused. But not me, not about this. A chill went down my neck and back. It was, for a horrible moment, as if all the hatred I’d nurtured and stoked over the years had somehow jumped from me to my son, like a terrible virus.

After we’d put the kids to bed, we did the dishes. Karen washed and I dried and stacked.

I asked her about her day, but she knew from the way I was ‘hmming’ and ‘yeahing’ along to her rundown that I was only being polite and waiting to talk about mine, so she cut to the chase and popped the question.

‘How’d it go?’

I told her everything in order – the court, Swayne, the CPS file I’d brought home, how I’d be getting fired after the trial and breaking into the crime scene…

‘What were you thinking, Terry – doing that?’ she said, after I’d finished telling her about our two close shaves.

‘I wasn’t thinking at all.’

‘Why d’you do it?’

I wasn’t going to tell her the truth.

‘I wanted to be sure,’ I said.

‘Of what?’

‘His guilt.’

‘You’re supposed to be the defence.’

‘It was a stupid thing to do,’ I said.

‘You can say that again.’

She scrubbed away at a pot.

‘Do you believe him, that man, that investigator? That you’re going to get fired after this?’ she asked.

‘What he said makes sense. He couldn’t have known what Janet told me – about getting promoted and all that.’

She carried on scrubbing. I saw her reflection in the glass, her downcast stare and knitted brow. It meant she was thinking things through.

‘It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing Janet’d do,’ she said, after a moment.

‘Exactly what I thought,’ I sighed. ‘But I’ve only known her four months. I knew VJ most of my life and look what happened there.’

Karen stopped what she was doing and turned to look at me.

‘You know what you should do? When the verdict comes in, you should quit,’ she said.

‘Quit?’

‘Resign. Hand your notice in. Don’t give them basstids the satisfaction of firing you, all right? Take their sting away. Play it for references – and salvage a little dignity in the process.’

She was right. Jumping before I was pushed was my only option, leaving on my terms instead of theirs. But I was going to be out of the best opportunity I’d had to make a better life for my family, to get us out of this place.

‘Then what?’ I asked.

‘Then you get another job,’ she said, rinsing suds off a plate and handing it to me.

‘Doing what? I can’t go back to hustling for pennies when I was earning pounds.’

‘You’ll find something.’

‘I can always dust off the clown suit.’

‘Best job you ever had, that was,’ she said. ‘It’s how you met us.’

Typical Karen. She wouldn’t blink or bow before a crisis. She’d weather storms that would uproot and break others. To her every problem came bundled with a solution, and every setback was a chance to find another way up. And she always had an unerring faith in things working out, even if they took time to get there.

We finished the dishes and Karen put her arms around my shoulders. Dishwater dribbled down my nape, but I didn’t mind. I drew her close and we embraced and kissed.

These days we didn’t have sex as often as we used to. Spontaneity was a thing of the past. We either didn’t have the time, or when we did, we didn’t have the energy. And on the occasions we had a little of both to spare, something else got in the way – usually the kids.

I pulled away from her a little so I could look at her face and lose myself in her big brown eyes. I stroked her cheek with the backs of my fingers, feeling the smoothness of her skin, its warmth.

‘I know what you want,’ she smiled.

I moved in to kiss her again, but there was a knock at our front door.

I groaned. She frowned. I wasn’t going to answer it. She was thinking about it.

‘God or gas, I bet,’ I mumbled. The only people who came to our door at night were either Jehovah’s Witnesses or energy supply salesmen.

There was another knock.

Karen went to the door. I followed.

She looked through the spyhole. Stood back. Looked again. And then she clamped her hand over her mouth and started laughing.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Take a gander.’

I did. And I almost laughed too.

It was Arun, our next-door neighbour. Twenty-something going on fifty-something; more plonk in his bloodstream than plasma. He was standing at the threshold, shivering. Holding a quilt around his waist. It was all he had on.

He knocked on the door again with his free hand.

He knew we were in, so he wasn’t going to go away until we answered.

I dropped the chain and opened up.

‘Yeah,’ I said quietly, but aggressively.

‘I’m sorry if this is… random,’ he began. ‘I’ve… I got a… an appointment tomorrow with me probation officer and I ain’t got no clothes. I ’ad an argument with me missus a few hours ago. I went ta bed, right, an’ when I woke up she’d gone and took all me cloves.’

I wanted to slam the door in his face. But I couldn’t be that heartless.

‘Just a sec,’ I said.

Karen had cleaned out our wardrobe and bagged up some old clothes we were going to take to the charity shop. The bag was by the door, waiting to go. I found some old jeans, a denim shirt and several stray socks.

I handed the clothes to Arun.

‘Cheers, mate,’ he said. ‘You’s a good geezer.’

‘No, I’m not,’ I said and closed the door.

Karen looked at me and smiled.

‘Where were we?’ she said.

We started kissing again, right there in the doorway, up against the wall. I slipped my hands under her sweatshirt. She giggled and caught my arms by the wrists and brought them down.

Then she led me towards the bedroom. We got inside and started undressing. She’d got my shirt off and I was fumbling with her bra hooks when there was another knock at the door. Louder, heavier than before. I thought of the kids waking up.

I stomped back to the door, pissed off, ready to give Arun an earful. But when I opened it, there was no one there. I looked left and right down the corridor. It was empty.

I was about to close the door when I saw something lying at my feet. A stiff-backed envelope, too big for the letterbox. It had my name on it, in large black felt-tipped capitals.

I took the envelope into the kitchen and opened it up.

It was from Andy Swayne. And it wasn’t good.

He’d left me a small sheaf of colour photographs, taken in the lounge of Suite 18. But they weren’t of the crime scene. They were of me
at
the crime scene.

In other words: he was letting me know he had me by the balls.

The two-faced, double-dealing wanker.

‘What you got there?’ Karen asked from the doorway.

I told her.

‘The sooner you leave that place the better. It’s nowt but trouble.’