by Nick Stone
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.
Fuck.
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.
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 s
o 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.
18
‘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.
