The Verdict (26 page)

She thought they were both gross, but ‘typical English’.

That made Swayne and me laugh because she was right, despite being wrong.

After she left, I put a star next to her name. She’d be worth putting on the stand to back up our explanation as to how VJ had got so much of Evelyn’s DNA on him, and vice versa. Just what Christine wanted – prosecution evidence she could turn and use in the defence.

Next up was Rudy Saks. I reread his statement. It was detailed and precise, and absolutely damning.

Torena came into the club.

‘Sorry, guys,’ he said. ‘Just heard Rudy phoned in sick this morning. He won’t be coming in today.’

Our last stop was the Circle bar.

It was a mock country pub with a mock Tudor interior, uneven white plaster walls and black timbering. It had a fake fireplace, plump leather armchairs with footstools, a small library and an upright piano. Pewter tankards hung above the bar, and the drinks menu was chalked on a board – real ales, wines and spirits.

The barman looked the part too. Gary Murphy, his name. Pinkish, plump and bald, with the sort of open, welcoming features you rarely saw anywhere in London.

‘Please talk us through what happened that night,’ Swayne asked him once we’d got the formalities out of the way and sat down.

‘The two of them came in before midnight,’ he said, in an Australian accent.

‘This man?’ Swayne showed him VJ’s mugshot.

‘Yup, that was ’im. He was with a bird. She went and sat right over there, in the corner by the window,’ he said, pointing to a two-seater table across the room to the right. ‘I remember his order, ’cause it was odd. He asked for a white wine for the lady, and a water for himself. ’Cept he got me to make the water look like a large vodka, said he’d pay for it like it was vodka. And he did – even left a tip.’

‘How was he? Drunk, sober?’

‘A bit pissed. Unsteady. Trying to hold it together. His clothes were a mess, though. The jacket was wet and a bit dirty, like he’d fallen over.’

I looked down his statement. It was short, barely two pages.

‘That’s not what you told the police,’ I said.

‘They didn’t ask.’

I made a note.

‘Carry on,’ Swayne prompted him.

‘He had… er… cuts on his face. Scratches on his cheek. Quite deep. They’d drawn blood.’

This wasn’t in his statement either. This was
good
for us and bad for the prosecution
.
It backed up VJ’s story that Evelyn had scratched him when they’d fallen over in the club.

DS Fordham had taken both the barman’s statement and Rudy Saks’s. He hadn’t asked either about VJ’s appearance. Why?

‘Did you ask the man what had happened?’ Swayne said.

‘No. You gotta be discreet here. I just served him his drinks.’

‘How were they together, him and the woman?’

Murphy frowned and his shiny forehead folded downwards from the temples and pouched up along his brow.

‘Were they arguing, or friendly?’ Swayne asked.

‘I didn’t look at them all that much ’cause I was startin’ to pack away. But whenever I did look over they seemed close – intimate. Low voices, leaning over the table, looking into each other’s eyes – if you know what I mean.’

Swayne pushed the picture of Evelyn in her green dress across to him. ‘Was this her?’

Murphy looked at the picture.

‘Nah.’

‘No?’

‘Wasn’t ’er, mate.’

Up until that moment, I’d believed Swayne when he said he didn’t care about the case. He’d cruised through the entire process with rock-solid indifference, only breaking a sweat when he was winding me up.

But what he’d just heard made him start, the same as me.

‘Are you sure? Look at it again,’ Swayne said.

‘That was
not
’er.’

‘You identified her from this photo.’ Swayne held up the post-mortem headshot.

‘No, I didn’t. What I told the copper was it
might’ve
been her. Check my statement. It’s right there. I reread every word before I signed it.’

I looked over his statement.

That was
exactly
what he’d said, when DS Fordham had shown him the crime-scene picture of Evelyn.

That
could’ve
been her, yes
.

Fordham hadn’t asked him to confirm or elaborate. He’d missed it. And so had we. I guessed the prosecution had too.

‘What did the woman who came in here
actually
look like?’ I asked him.

‘I didn’t see ’er face too well, but she was blonde – long straight blonde hair. And she had this
dress
on.
That
I remember. I can as good as see it now.’ He smiled. ‘It was dark green, split down the thigh and open at the back. And tight too. Trouble. Showed off her curves. Not like that sheila you showed me
at all
.’

Murphy was practically drooling at the memory.

None of that was in his statement either – only:

The woman was blonde and had a green dress on
.

Nothing else.

‘How tall was she in relation to Vernon James?’ I asked.

‘Who?’

‘The man. How tall was the blonde next to him?’

‘Same height. A real Amazon type.’

VJ was six foot two. She would’ve been wearing heels, so take off a couple of inches. That meant she would’ve been around six foot.

Evelyn Bates was five foot four. Definitely not an ‘Amazon type’.

This was a breakthrough.

This was Christine’s silver bullet.

‘Haven’t you had enough excitement for one day?’ Swayne asked through a yawn, as we rattled along on the Tube going west, to Acton.

‘You can get off at the next stop if you want,’ I said.

He kissed his teeth.

We were on our way to see Rudy Saks.

Rereading his statement after interviewing Murphy, I could now see at least two tell-tale gaps in it:

No references to VJ’s physical appearance. He’d have had scratches on his cheek at 1 a.m.

Vague description of Evelyn Bates again –
Blonde, twenties, green dress.
Nothing about her height, body shape, hairstyle. Nothing about the style of the dress. And like the rest of the witnesses, he’d identified her from a post-mortem photo.

What if it wasn’t Evelyn Bates he’d seen in the room, but Fabia?

I won’t pretend I wasn’t excited.

Of course, I was. This was a
rush
.

I wasn’t thinking of VJ here. I wasn’t thinking of getting him off the hook, or even considering the slim possibility that he might not have done it, that he really could have been set up.

No, I wasn’t thinking along those lines
at all
.

I was thinking about myself, and how good I’d look if I pulled this off – if I, through my efforts and intuition, gave Christine enough to torpedo the case.

Christ – they might even keep me on at KRP. I could get that promotion…

Imagine that.
 

‘I want you to look into DS Fordham’s background,’ I said to Swayne.

‘What are you after?’

‘Procedural irregularities. Any cases that got thrown out of court, convictions that got quashed on his watch. Falsified statements, complaints against him. In fact, get me his life. Everything and anything you can find.’

‘Yes, Mr Kopf.’

I ignored that. I was on too fast a roll.

Rudy Saks lived down Berrymead Avenue, a sloping road of terraced houses with steepled slate roofs, short wrought gates, regular speed bumps and neighbourhood watch signs.

We weren’t supposed to be here, let alone even have Saks’s home address. It was in the CPS case file Swayne had given me the day we’d met, on a recruitment company form the hotel had in their personnel files. I recognised the company’s name: the Silver Service Agency. I’d almost gone to see them about work when I moved to London.

A muscular man in a plain blue T-shirt and baseball cap opened the door just as I was about to ring the bell. He was on his way out, sports bag in hand. He froze in mid-motion when he saw us.

‘Rudy Saks?’ I asked.

‘Me? No. Rudy moved out yesterday,’ the man said, in a foreign accent with an American twang. He looked Scandinavian, although he wasn’t tall enough.

‘Where did he go?’

‘He — Who are you, man?’

He looked me up and down, small brown eyes gauging me. His jugular vein jutted thickly out of his neck.

I was stuck for an answer. I didn’t want to say we were cops. He wouldn’t believe me. His eyes were too shrewd.

‘We’re private investigators,’ Swayne said over my shoulder.

‘For real?’ he said, surprised and a little bit impressed. ‘Is Rudy in trouble?’

That question was aimed at me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We were hoping he’d be able to help us with something. Is he still in London?’

The man put his bag down and leaned against the doorway, using his elbow to keep the door ajar. His inner forearm was tattooed with a black lion’s head inside a Star of David, encircled in a green laurel leaf. There was some kind of writing underneath.

‘Yeah. He’s moved in with his girlfriend.’

‘Do you have an address or a number?’

The man looked from me to Swayne, and then back to me.

‘Why don’t you give me your details, and I’ll leave Rudy a message?’ he said.

‘Are you likely to see him soon?’

Again the man looked me over.

‘He’s coming back sometime tomorrow to get the rest of his stuff.’

I took out a blank KRP business card and wrote my name and mobile on the back of it.

The man took the card. ‘In case he asks, what is this about?’

No point in lying.

‘It’s to do with something that happened where he works,’ I said.

‘You mean the murder?’ he asked.

‘You know about it?’

‘It’s all we talked about for a week, man. I’ll make sure he gets the message.’

‘Thanks. What’s your name, by the way?’

‘Jonas.’

‘Thanks, Jonas.’

He was about to go back inside when Swayne said something to him in a language that sounded Arabic.

Jonas looked taken aback.

‘You know
Hebrew
?’ he asked Swayne.

‘The writing on your arm –
Lo tishkach
– it means “Never forget”, doesn’t it?’ Swayne said and smiled.

‘That’s right. How do you know?’

‘I’ve seen the design before. A long time ago.’

‘What was the tattoo?’ I asked Swayne as we walked back to the Tube station. That he knew Hebrew didn’t quite surprise me. In the short while I’d known him, I’d heard him speak Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish and English.

‘Postcard from the past,’ he said.

‘Care to elaborate?’

‘No.’

I came home to an empty flat.

Karen had taken the kids to Manchester for the weekend. It was her dad’s birthday. A few weeks ago, she’d asked me if I was coming. I’d begged off, claiming I’d probably be busy with the case. This was half-true. I liked my in-laws a lot, but their birthday parties were always an excuse for a piss-up – therefore slow-motion torture for me.

I slumped down on the couch and closed my eyes.

The Serbs downstairs were shouting down the phone to their relatives back home. Arun was having an argument with someone next door – at least I assumed there was someone there. You never knew with him.

Tonight the loudest sounds were coming from outside. One big drawback to living here was that when the weather was good all the school-age kids would come and hang out right under our window. The plonker who’d designed the estate had thought it a great idea to stick concrete benches on the edge of the back passageway linking the houses. For some reason I’d never been able to work out, the kids and their friends favoured our bench over the five others. It was their hang-out and meeting spot, their youth centre and clubhouse. They’d come and they wouldn’t go. And their numbers would swell. Twenty or more barely broken voices would babble loud and fast and all at once, projecting that inner city melting pot argot through the double-glazing, under our skins and into our heads.

There were maybe a dozen of them on the bench now, blowing my attempt at chilling out and unwinding.

I did what Karen always did. I turned on the TV and jacked up the volume.

Peace of sorts.

The local news was on. Royal Wedding preparations followed by football match previews.

I channel surfed.

Nothing hooked me.

I turned on the digital recorder and remote-clicked through the list of programmes Karen had taped and stored on the hard drive. She had a thing about recording whole series and watching them after they’d finished, an episode a day.

She also had a thing for Billy Wilder films. There’d been a complete season of them on the BBC last summer, and I knew she’d recorded some of those. I liked a few of them,
The Apartment
and
Sunset Boulevard
in particular – and the one about alcoholism, of course,
The Lost Weekend.

I moved the blue highlight bar down the contents page, passing titles and recording dates.

What did
that
just say?

I went back.

The Hoffmann Trust’s Ethical Person of the Year Award. Channel 4. March 16th, 2011.
 

I gawped at the screen for a long moment.

Then I remembered.

I’d read about VJ winning the award in the papers in January, and found out the ceremony was being shown live on Channel 4 for the second year running. I’d set the machine to record it a few days before the broadcast.

But I’d forgotten all about it after VJ’s arrest, and my subsequent involvement in the case.

I pressed play.

The Blenheim-Strand ballroom again, looking suitably glitzy. A still-famous, once-funny comedian was on stage, warming up the well-heeled crowd with fastball cracks at the current government, and softball digs at a few of the showbiz guests in the room – actors and musicians – who laughed on cue when the camera picked them out.

He was followed by three short videos highlighting the Trust’s work around the world.

And then it was time for the presentation and VJ’s speech.

I’d read the transcript a few times over, so I knew that practically everything he told his audience was a lie with a few truths slipped in the pockets.

Yet I wasn’t ready for the
way
he said it. I don’t know if it was something he’d been taught, or something he’d picked up and made his own, but he exuded the type of sincerity they give out Oscars for. It was in his occasionally tearing eyes, and his voice, which constantly threatened to be engulfed by the emotions he was trying to control when talking about his ‘beloved’ dad. He made most of the crowd laugh, and a good few of them cry.

Boy, was that bastard good.
 

So good I had to pause and rewind to make sure he wasn’t allowing himself just the one sly smirk somewhere, that he didn’t have his fingers crossed the few occasions the camera left his face and concentrated on those long and slender hands of his, weaving small concentric circles in the air.

And then it dawned on me:

If Christine put him on the stand, and he played the jury like he was playing this crowd – this initially hostile, sceptical crowd – he could very well get off. He’d do what he was doing here, but far better. He’d make them believe he was innocent, that he was
incapable
of murder. Factor in the weakening prosecution case, and things were looking pretty damn promising for him.

I thought back to the Stratford Quakers. I saw him sitting where I had, sweet-talking and soft-pedalling them over to his side.

And I thought of Melissa, and imagined him doing exactly the same thing to her; making her fall in love with him. What line of crap had he fed her? And how had she been so duped? Melissa who’d been so smart, so sharp, so worldly beyond her years. Melissa who knew what he’d done to me, what he was capable of.

And all the elation I felt about today’s little win crumpled into a tight, hard ball and rolled away.

This
was who I was defending –
what
I was defending. Not just a consummate liar, but a shameless, calculating one too. He was pimping out the father he’d hated – and maybe killed – recasting him as some kind of martyr, for no reason I could think of, except to make this audience like him.

Then the camera that was on him did something strange. Instead of focusing on VJ, it zoomed in on the lectern in front of him and held the shot. The lectern was empty. He wasn’t using notes. Camera-to-viewer subtext: this speech is coming straight from his heart to them, to us – to me.

He was near the end. I noticed how his gaze had been roaming as he spoke, in a slow left to right pan, so he included every section of the room.

He was talking about the lessons his totally fictitious dad had taught him and how he – a daddy himself – was passing those on to his children.

The camera cut away to the audience for a few seconds, as it had been doing throughout the speech.

And if I’d blinked, I would have missed it.

But my eyes were wide open.

And I saw:

A hint of green, to the right of him.

I hit pause and rewind. I went back too far.

I got off the couch and squatted in front of the TV.

I played it back in ultra-slow motion, frame by frame.

As I’d suspected, standing on the same stage this morning, he couldn’t have seen the audience clearly from where he was. They would have been a constellation of dark-orange blobs, all individual features blurred by distance and dim light.

I paused the video.

There she was. Exactly where he said he’d seen her.

A woman was sitting between the middle and last table on the right. She was a couple of feet in front of both, so that while they were misted in darkness, she was clearly visible – unmissable, in fact.

I couldn’t make out her face, because it was out of focus. But the rest of her was clear enough – the shoulder-length fair hair, and the dress. It was long, emerald green and split down the thigh.

‘Hello, Fabia,’ I said. ‘Where the hell are you?’