The Verdict (27 page)

‘We can’t use this.’ Christine paused the DVD I’d made of the awards ceremony.

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘It merely confirms what Vernon told us in his statement, that he saw a blonde in a green dress from the stage. But that’s
all
it does. It’s no gamechanger. No silver bullet. Sorry.’

Janet looked pissed off, Redpath tutted, and my high spirits took a dive. It was a very sunny and very warm early Sunday afternoon, the kind of day that almost never falls on a weekend in England. Yet we were all spending it here in Christine’s house in Richmond, on a hastily arranged meeting that now needn’t have happened.

‘What about Gary Murphy’s statement?’ I asked, pointing at the screen. ‘Look at the dress. It’s the one he described.’

‘That’s a rubber not a silver bullet. It’ll only bruise the prosecution’s case – if that,’ Christine said. ‘They’ll say the barman never saw Vernon and Fabia together
after
they left the bar. He doesn’t know what they did or where they went. There’s only an
assumption
that they went up to Suite 18 together. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. But that doesn’t change the fact that Evelyn Bates was not only found dead in the suite, she was seen there a few hours later by Rudy Saks.’

Christine was the colour of grout, and her clothes – a loose plain-black kaftan and open-toed leather sandals – gave her the air of a ghostly mother superior without the wimple.

Janet cut in.

‘Finding Fabia is now your priority, Terry,’ she said. ‘You’ve proved she exists, and that our client at least talked to her. How are you going to find her?’

I’d been thinking about that since Thursday.

‘Fabia’s obviously a pseudonym,’ I said. ‘There’s no record of anyone by that name at the dinner, let alone the hotel. The dinner was invite-only. There was security at the door. She couldn’t have snuck in.’

‘Right…’

‘Someone at the dinner knows her, knows who she is and where she is,’ I said. ‘None of the guests have got back to me yet. So I’m going to go to them. Andy Swayne can get us the contact details. In-between I’ll talk to the TV camera crew, and anyone who worked front of stage that night – waiters, light people and so forth.’

‘Good,’ Janet said, and then she looked at the others. ‘Who thinks our client’s still guilty?’

Redpath held up his hand. ‘The evidence is still against us, namely the body in the bed and Rudy Saks’s statement.’

‘Christine?’

‘Vernon may well have met and talked to Fabia, but until we know otherwise, I don’t think she went up to the suite,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘A complete absence of proof. Besides, I don’t trust Vernon at all. He’s already withheld information from us,’ she said.

‘Terry?’

‘What if he was really set up?’ I asked out loud the question I’d been asking myself.

‘Why d’you think that?’

‘Look at the way Fabia’s sitting, and where.’ I rewound the DVD and froze it on the shot of the crowd, with her at the forefront. I knew the timings off by heart. ‘She’s pulled her chair out, away from the rest of the tables, so she’s in the light, where he can’t miss her. She doesn’t want to see better, she wants to be seen. Vernon said she was mouthing sweet nothings at him all through his speech.

‘He’d been named Ethical Person of the Year. What an embarrassment it would be – to him, and the Hoffmann Trust – to get caught
in flagrante
with a woman who wasn’t his wife.’

‘Apart from a blurred image of a woman showing a lot of leg, where’s your proof?’ Christine asked.

‘It’s just a theory.’

‘A
conspiracy
theory at that. Judges hate them, juries laugh at them. As for motive – exposing Vernon James as an
adulterer
. Come on. Who cares if he cheats on his wife in this day and age?’

She
does, I thought.

‘What do you think, Janet?’ Christine said.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Something seems to be off about all this. But I don’t trust Vernon either – even when he’s telling the truth.’

Given her previous stance, her certainty of his guilt, this was progress, I supposed.

I glanced around the room. It had taken a lifetime to get this way. The furniture was antique, lots of dark polished wood with shiny brass or copper fixtures. There were rugs on the floor and landscape paintings in baroque frames. Family photographs were displayed on shelves and massed on a mantelpiece, including one of Christine, her husband, their four grown-up children and their grandchildren. Yet for all its cosiness and warmth, the fresh flowers by the window, the evergreen plants in every corner, the place smelled of slow death and medication; the metallic whiff of whatever painkiller cocktails and get-me-to-tomorrow pills and potions Christine was living on.

‘As we’re here, we might as well talk about the PCMH on the 26th,’ Janet said.

PCMH stood for Plea and Case Management Hearing. On the surface this was a bit of costumed bureaucracy. The defendant would be brought to criminal court, and face the judge who’d try him. The prosecution would submit all or most of the evidence and witnesses they intended to present in the case, as well as what was referred to as ‘unused material’ – evidence they’d discarded, witnesses they’d discounted. The judge would then give the defence fourteen days to present their statement – their case. The judge would also set a date when the trial would start. This would either be the date originally determined by the magistrate, or, if the prosecution needed more time to get its case together, a new date.

PCMH was just over two weeks away.

‘Our only play, at this stage, is to accept the prosecution’s evidence and build a defence from there,’ Christine said. ‘They have all the aces. The body in the room, no signs of forced entry, the eyewitnesses, the DNA evidence, and the incriminating statements. Oh, and that thong too.’

‘What about the hotel CCTV?’ I asked.

‘We’re not meant to have that yet,’ Christine said. ‘And we don’t technically know if they’re even going to submit it. I expect they will.’

‘How does that help their case?’ I asked. ‘Doesn’t it disprove the club staff’s statements?’

‘No. The footage only shows the victim and the accused having contact, but only for a few seconds. We see Evelyn falling over, but we don’t see her falling
on
Vernon. Neither do we see them wrestling around on the floor, or her scratching him. All of that happens off screen.’

Christine’s trial strategy was becoming clear to me. She didn’t have one, because we didn’t have much of a case. She was relying on me to bring her stuff she could use, because she couldn’t find it herself. Why? Because it wasn’t there. The case was still a lock for the prosecution and we were shut out.

So, on the surface, nothing much had changed: VJ was still in deep shit and there was nothing we could do about it.

But I’d changed. A little. I didn’t think he was innocent, but I wasn’t so sure he was guilty. I was having my first reasonable doubt.

Why?

Because everything he’d told us so far had been true.

Monday morning, I got to the office early and went straight to work.

I plugged a pair of headphones into my computer, fed it the DVD and watched the award ceremony again. As it played, I jotted down a list of all the people who could have come into contact with Fabia:

31 guests

7 waiters and waitresses

2 camera crew

2 stagehands

Total: 42 potential witnesses. And that was just for starters. There were bound to be others, once memories were jogged.

Next, I reread all of VJ’s statements and highlighted everything he’d said about Fabia. I now had a pretty vivid picture of her.

She had a ‘medium-sized’ tattoo above her inner right ankle, either a rose or a snake, or a combination of both. Hazel eyes, dark eyebrows.

In his words:

‘Beautiful, severe features.’

‘Nordic-Latina.’

‘Fire trapped in ice.’

‘Pneumatic.’

‘Coke-bottle figure.’

‘Big breasts – implants?’

‘Hard body.’

‘Legs for days.’

‘Pierced belly button.’

And then, of course, there was the dress.
That
dress. VJ had spent so many billable minutes talking about it, it was as if the dress had worn her and not the other way round. Emerald green, plunging at the front, split up the side, open at the back,
so tight you could count her pores
.

The few audience shots in the video showed a conservatively dressed, older set. The men were in black tie and lounge suits, the women in ballgowns or standard dark dresses. Fabia would have stood out a mile.

No way
had she been missed.

Before I knew it, it was 9 a.m.

The office was full, but not for long. Iain was going to be spending his first week in court, clerking for one of the barristers. He’d got his hair cut and bought what looked like a new suit for the occasion.

Adolf was off to court too. Southwark, near London Bridge. It was her thug footballer’s PCMH.

She’d donned her dark-blue business garb, pinned her hair up and back, and laid off the aren’t-my-eyes-beautiful make-up. She was camera-ready professional, right down to the trolley case she’d be carrying the files in.

A couple of weeks ago, I’d overheard her giving Iain grooming tips for court attendance. Press and TV cameras were always rolling, so you had to look your best, but never flash, she’d advised him. Always reflect the profession and the gravity of your responsibilities. Dress in boring tones; dark shades of every colour, as long as they’re blue, grey or black. Good advice I’d memorised for future reference.

I waited until they’d left before picking up the phone and starting my calls.

Rudy Saks first.

I called the Blenheim-Strand. They told me he was still off sick. Did I want to leave him a message?

No, but…

I asked for the names and contact details of all the waiters and waitresses who’d served at the awards dinner.

Sorry, they didn’t have that information because they were all temps. Why didn’t I try the Silver Service Agency, who’d sent them? They’d also originally sent them Saks.

I called the agency.

The number was engaged.

I moved on to Channel 4. I’d got the names of the camera crew off the credits at the end of the video.

I was put through to the personnel department and rattled off my spiel. Strictly no bullshit, totally above the board. Who I was and why I was calling – give or take. I didn’t mention VJ by name.

They said the camera crew were freelancers. They couldn’t give out their contact details because of the Data Protection Act, but they were happy to take a message.

I made instant coffee and threw cold water on my face.

I tried Silver Service again. Still engaged.

Swayne called me. Yesterday I’d given him the names of all the award dinner guests and asked him to get me their numbers and addresses.

He’d already come up with twenty-five. I was impressed.

I got calling. I was rebuffed by twenty-five smooth-voiced, female gatekeepers.

Who was I? What did I want? No, they couldn’t put me through because their bosses were all busy/in meetings/not available. Could I please give them my number? Of course. Thanks. Bye.

It was lunchtime now.

I’d got nowhere.

I phoned Silver Service again. Another engaged tone. I checked their address: 75 Gloucester Road. That was fifteen minutes away, via the District Line. I decided to go over there.

I called Swayne again. I needed back-up.

It took a couple of walk-bys to locate the entrance to the agency – a grimy white door slipped between a pizzeria and a patisserie which advertised ‘traditional fish and chips’ in several languages after English. Easy to miss, especially as we were looking for something a tad more obvious – like a sign.

I rang the intercom. A sing-song voice announced the name of the company and buzzed us in without asking who I was.

We went up a narrow flight of thinly carpeted stairs. Then another. The agency was on the top floor, but before we reached it I understood why their phone had been perpetually busy.

A queue of people was lined up on the staircase all the way down to the lower landing; youngish men and women, most carrying small bags of one description or another, some still wearing that stunned, unfocused look of fresh-off-the-bus newcomers.

‘Aren’t we in a recession?’ I mumbled.

‘Tables don’t lay themselves,’ Swayne quipped.

We squeezed up past the line, earning hostile glares and a few protests. I suppose they were wondering what we were doing here, or if we hadn’t come to steal their jobs.

At the top of the stairs was a varnished brown door bearing the company’s name, printed in black on white paper and taped to the door. No expense spared there, then.

A man in a denim jacket came out and inched past us.

A red-haired woman poked her head around the door and beckoned me in.

We stepped into a surprisingly bright space that made me blink.

‘One at a time, please, gents,’ she said, in a South African accent.

She sat at a desk to our left.

‘We’re not here for work,’ I said. ‘Are you the manager?’

‘No, that’d be Bev.’ She pointed across the room to the window, where a much older blonde woman in a white rollerneck was on the phone. ‘Who are you?’

‘Investigators,’ Swayne said. ‘We’re trying to track down some of your employees.’

‘Oh…’ she said, looking worried.

The older woman eyed us and continued her conversation as we came over. Small, thin features set in tanned, lined skin. When she smiled, as she frequently did during her call, I thought of worn leather.

There were four of them in the room, all women, all on the phone except the redhead, who’d already summoned the next person in. Their workspace was no-frills functional. Desks, computers, phones. The floor was spotless grey linoleum and the only thing hanging on the walls was a whiteboard with a long list of hotels and restaurants in black and, next to them, numbers in red. That was it. No plants, photos or any other kind of personal knick-knacks around at all. They came, they worked, they buggered off home. Repeat five times over.

The manager finished her call.

‘How can I help?’ she asked, looking from me to Swayne, and flashing a professional smile. Her face was late fifties, her hands added a decade.

And she was also South African.

I introduced myself and asked for the names or numbers of the temp waiting staff she’d sent to the Blenheim-Strand on March 16th.

I gave her the list of names. She studied it carefully.

‘I don’t know how much I’ll be able to help you here, Terry,’ she said.

‘Data Protection, right?’

‘Not just that,’ she smiled. ‘We’ve got a very high turnover of people here, as I’m sure you’ve seen. Most of them are only on our books a month or two. More than half work for us just the once.’

No surprise there. They were a
temp
agency.

‘Don’t you have regulars?’ I asked.

‘Oh sure. For more specialised work, like chefs and stuff. But they’re not on here,’ she said, tapping the list. ‘Waiters and bartenders are ten a dozen.’

‘Right.’

‘Tell you what. Why don’t you let us contact these people for you – the ones we can get hold of. We’ll give them your name and number. How’s that sound?’

Like a professional brush-off.
 

‘This is pretty urgent,’ I said.

‘Do you have a card?’ she asked.

I took one out of my wallet and scribbled my mobile number on the back. She put it on her desk and then opened a drawer and handed me her business card.

Beverley Wingrove, Managing Director.
 

‘That’s my direct line on there. Call me Wednesday and I’ll let you know the state of play,’ she said.

‘Great. Thanks for your help,’ I said.

So I’d got her wrong.

Good.

‘That reminds me,’ I said. ‘We’ve been trying to get hold of someone called Rudy Saks.’

‘I know Rudy,’ she said.

‘Do you have a number for him?’

She turned to her computer and rattled her fingers across the keyboard.

‘The only number I’ve got for him is a mobile,’ she said and read it out to me.

I took it down and read it back.

Then I was about to bid her goodbye and wish her a pleasant day, when Swayne said something to her in a language I took to be Afrikaans.

Beverley Wingrove frowned at him.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘You’re not South African?’ he said.

She shook her head.

‘Rhodesian,’ she corrected him.

That threw me.

‘Don’t you mean Zimbabwean?’ Swayne asked.

‘No,’ she frowned. ‘I really don’t.’

‘Fairly common attitude among certain ex-pat Rhodies,’ Swayne said, taking hold of his coffee cup by its two ear-shaped handles.

He’d insisted on finding a Costa to talk in, because it was the only chain where a large coffee meant supersize. It came in a deep bowl with a dainty double handle. Swayne ordered it black and dumped in half a dozen sugars. I stuck to a single espresso.

‘There was mass emigration when Mugabe took over in 1980,’ he went on. ‘Over a third of the quarter million white population split. Some came here, some went to Australia and America. Most crossed the border to South Africa. I’m pretty sure Beverley Wingrove was one of them. I’m guessing she only moved to London after Mandela got in.’

‘She didn’t understand Afrikaans,’ I said.

‘Tough language to master,’ he said. ‘Unless she was pretending.’

‘What did you say to her?’

‘“
Ons sal lewe, ons sal sterwe
.” It’s from the old South African national anthem, the apartheid-era one. It means “We shall live, we shall die.”’

‘You were testing to see if she was a racist?’

‘No,’ Swayne said. ‘That’s the only Afrikaans I know.’

I laughed.

Customers were scattered about the café. There was a big group of young mothers by the window. They’d pushed four medium-sized tables together and set up a kind of encampment: them, their babies and their space-buggy-looking prams parked in a cordon around their space. The infants were all bawling their little lungs out. I thought of Amy and two years of nappy changes, colic and teething.

‘We need to refocus our investigation,’ I said.

‘On the Green Goddess?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Thought so.’

I laid out my honeytrap theory. It didn’t stack up to much more than a regurgitation of the relevant parts of Vernon’s statement, with weak circumstantial evidence holding it together by a thread. Swayne listened attentively, neither touching his coffee, nor letting his gaze wander. This was a first. No snide gleam in his washed-out eyes, no condescending smirk. Was he hungover?

‘It’s plausible, even possible,’ he said. ‘But if it is what you think it is, you’re not going to find the honey.’

‘Why not?’

‘She’s long gone. Either out of the country, or – given what happened to Evelyn Bates – dead,’ he said. ‘This would’ve been a professional job, exactly like a hit. It would’ve been subcontracted by someone via a middle man. No direct ties. The people who did it would’ve been a three-, four-, maybe five-man team – including the Green Goddess. She was the bait. They reeled in the catch. Then they were in the wind.’

‘So what are you saying – there’s no point looking?’

‘You’re a clerk, remember – fetch and carry? Leave it to the cops.’

‘They’re not interested. They think he’s guilty –
remember
?’ I said. ‘If you don’t want to do this, I’ll find somebody else.’

‘Oh, I want to do it all right, Boy Wonder,’ he said. ‘It’s money for nothing, as far as I’m concerned. ’Cause that’s what you’re going to find. Nothing.’

‘Enjoy your coffee, Andy. Pleasure as always,’ I said and stood up.

‘Sit down, Terry. We need to talk.’

‘We just did.’

‘Sit down. Please.’

I didn’t move.

‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘Defending that dick?’

‘It’s my job,’ I said.

‘You stopped doing that the minute you walked into Suite 18 with me. That wasn’t doing your job. That was something else entirely. That was about you and him.’

He wasn’t fishing now. He was telling me he had the goods on me. Everything. All of it.

I sat down.

He slurped some more coffee. When he took the cup away his lips were framed in a wet brown Cupid’s bow.

‘I couldn’t figure you out at first,’ he said. ‘If you really were a late starter like you claimed, you wouldn’t want to blow that second chance at a new career by breaking the law before you’d even sat your first exam. Come to think of it, most first-timers wouldn’t do that either. There had to be something else about you. It took me all of three phone calls to get your sorry little life. I’ve had harder times ordering pizza.’

I kept my cool, even though I was already on the boil.

‘Boy, did you ever miss the boat, Terry Flynt,’ he said. ‘You peaked at eighteen.’

‘Fuck you. At least I didn’t go to prison.’