The Verdict

by Nick Stone

  ‘No problem. Call me Albert. Please,’ Torena said. He was a trim, swarthy man with a shaved head, rimless glasses and a goatee so immaculate and dark it looked photoshopped. His accent was Spanish shade.

  ‘I didn’t know you and Andy knew each other,’ I said.

  ‘We go back a few years,’ he said, smiling at Swayne. ‘Shall we make a start?’

  He led us through the split-level lobby, walking slightly ahead, with his chest out, his chin up and his feet splayed, like a particularly self-satisfied duck. He nodded to every staff member he spotted – cleaners, waiters and waitresses, bellboys and receptionists. They all responded in kind.

  The lobby was a spacious sweep of gleaming cream and red-veined marble, whose centrepiece was a huge chandelier suspended over a sunken floor like a stalactite of tiered glass and trapped light. One of the walls consisted entirely of a water feature, a slab of rough granite washed over by a stream that fed into an aquarium filled with koi carp. Another was a solid plasma screen showing Sky News.

  We reached a vast carpeted atrium, eight floors high. It was practically the same layout as the cruise ship Karen and I had taken our honeymoon on, with wraparound interior balconies, and three giant silos for lifts.

  Torena motioned us to the VIP lift, on the right. It was matt black and there were no call buttons, just a card slot. He proudly explained how the system worked, showing us the two different keycards issued to guests – black for rich, white for everyone else. His was blue.

  It occurred to me that if Swayne was so tight with Torena, why had we bothered to break in? Surely he could have asked him to let us into the suite after forensics had left.

  Except he’d already been testing me then, seeing what I was made of, how far I’d go. And how gullible I was.

  It made perfect sense.

  The lift came and we got in.

  Suite 18 still reeked like a bar-room brawl, but the smell didn’t smart as much. Its sting was broken, its pungency dissipated.

  The only police presence today were the poles and blue-and-white tape sectioning off part of the lounge and the area near the stairs where Evelyn had met her end. The minibar had been left in place, its doors open, the scene’s skewed nucleus. Much of the broken glass was still on the carpet. The coffee table was missing its flowers and champagne; the couch had had rectangular patches of leather cut out of its seat and armrest, exposing the white padding.

  We moved to the bedroom. It was unchanged from our last visit, except for greyish dust that had settled on all the surfaces in a dirty frost.

  Torena explained where the body had been lying on the bed, and talked me through what had happened when the police and medics turned up. I half-listened and took a few notes.

  ‘I don’t know what it is about this place. It always attracts trouble,’ Torena said, when we left the bedroom.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Oh, you know – parties that get out of hand. Musicians and bankers and footballers stay here a lot. The bankers are the worst, when it comes to bad behaviour. They’re like spoilt brats on steroids,’ he said.

  ‘How long have you worked here?’

  ‘Since the place opened. Three years.’

  ‘Any deaths in your time?’ I asked.

  ‘A couple of near misses. Death hit the post.’ He smiled at his wit. ‘This whole suite is going to have to be remodelled,’ he said. ‘We’ve been getting a few enquiries from people wanting to stay here. Sick, no?’

  In the lift back down I noticed the round security camera in the ceiling.

  ‘What about those problems with your CCTV the night of the murder?’ I asked.

  ‘The fuses tripped out and killed the cameras around 7 p.m. Our maintenance guys said it was a power surge.’

  That used to happen in our flat whenever Karen dried her hair. She’d plug the dryer into a multi-socket extension and the power would automatically cut out in the living room.

  ‘Couldn’t you have flipped the circuit breakers back on?’ I said. That’s what we always did.

  Torena chuckled. ‘You didn’t hear this from me, OK?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘The power in all the cameras went – except for the ones in the Casbah club and the casino. Those still worked. The surveillance guys, watching the screens upstairs, called maintenance – the contractors who installed the CCTV. They said, “We’ll come out and fix the problem, but we’ll have to charge you extra because this isn’t covered in the contract.” To save money, hotel management didn’t take out a twenty-four-hour repair contract, only one for office hours.

  ‘Surveillance called the hotel manager. When he heard the casino cameras were still working, he said to wait until the next day. He only really cares about the casino. That’s where the hotel makes most of its money. The maintenance contract has been upgraded now, of course.’

  ‘What was the problem with the cameras?’

  ‘Just what you said. Circuit breakers. All they did was flip them back on and everything was back to normal. Nothing we couldn’t have done ourselves.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Rules. We’re not allowed to handle the fuseboxes. That’s why we pay electricians.’

  ‘Can I see these fuseboxes?’

  They were in a room in the basement. Plain grey door, keypad entry. His fingers punched in the code:

  1-2-3-4.

  Inside, more grey – walls, floor, ceiling. The fuseboxes were in mounted metal cabinets, all stencilled with alpha-numeric codes and also keypad-locked. A very faint drone emitted from them, making me think of beehives at the height of summer.

  1-2-3-4.

  He opened one of the cabinets and showed me two rows of circuit breakers fitted with dark-blue plastic levers. The general power switch was at the end.

  ‘So, the casino and nightclub cameras were working, but all the others went down?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Odd,’ I said. ‘The cameras run off the same circuit. Surely they should have all gone out?’

  Torena shrugged.

  ‘What did the maintenance people say happened?’ I asked.

  ‘System overload.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What about the police? What did they say?’

  ‘They talked to maintenance, were told the same thing, I guess.’

  ‘So they just accepted that almost all the CCTV was down the night someone got murdered?’

  Another shrug.

  ‘Who knows the entry codes?’

  ‘Security and the management.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have the codes been changed recently?’

  ‘No.’

  I typed the code into the keypad on the cabinet door. It clicked open.

  Torena looked at me with surprise and suspicion.

  ‘1-2-3-4 is a common factory preset,’ I said. ‘Anyone could come in here and switch off the power.’

  The ballroom was being prepped for a gala dinner of some kind. A cleaner was going over the tiles near the entrance with a floor polisher, while waiters and waitresses were dressing the round tables in brilliant white cloths.

  On the stage at the end, technicians were wiring microphones to a lectern and fitting filters to the spotlights.

  All these goings-on were being supervised by a slim brunette in a dark-blue suit, standing in the middle of the room, a clipboard in hand, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose.

  Torena introduced her as the banqueting manager.

  We shook hands and exchanged pleased-to-meet-yous. Then, without prompting, she ran through her job description. She was in charge of running the hotel’s corporate events from planning through to execution.

  ‘Did you work on the Ethical Person of the Year awards?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes. I put that one together.’

  ‘Were you at the event?’

  ‘Yes.’

 
‘Do you remember seeing a woman in a green dress that night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘About my height, blonde – long hair?’

  ‘There were a lot of people there, but I don’t remember anyone in green.’

  ‘What about Vernon James? You know who I mean?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you remember seeing him?’

  ‘Yes. He gave the speech.’

  I looked at the seating plan for the Ethical Person award dinner. Twenty-one tables, the highest numbers at the back, the lowest at the front; eight to ten guests on each.

  ‘Mind if I check something from the stage?’ I asked.

  ‘Go ahead,’ she said.

  I stood at the lectern, and looked out across the ballroom. As to be expected, it was impressive, even in the bare broad daylight. The ceiling was finished in black satin and supported half a dozen boat-shaped chandeliers.

  In his statements to Janet and Christine, VJ had described first seeing Fabia to his right, out of the corner of his eye. I tried focusing my gaze ahead of me, while scanning my peripheral vision.

  I couldn’t see the tables to my right very clearly. They were set too far back from the stage, a good three metres away at least.

  It would have been much darker when VJ was stood here, and the stage lights would have been in his eyes – eyes that were already impaired, whose short-sightedness he corrected with contacts.

  How could he have seen Fabia?

  He couldn’t, unless she’d been directly in his line of sight – so sitting or standing between the tables and the stage.

  Nightclubs and daylight don’t mix. The Casbah was no exception to the rule. It may have scored five stars out of five in all the London hotspot listings, but here and now it was dismal going on depressing; like an out of season summer resort in the middle of a cold snap.

  Swayne and I sat in the same VIP booth VJ had. Down on the dancefloor, a young woman was on her knees, chipping and prising away gobs of pancaked chewing gum with the blunt edge of a knife.

  I looked out the window, at Sea Containers House and the Oxo Tower across the river. And then I came back here and noted the chips and nicks on the table, the grime on the red velvet ropes around the booths, the stains on all the seats; and how the place couldn’t shift the rank, bittersweet whiff of booze, stale perfume and staler sweat.

  Swayne was handling the interviews, which were almost entirely pointless, because the CCTV footage had rubbished all but one of them. Yet we still had to go through the motions, so there was no comeback from VJ – and, I suppose, to add to his bill.

  The only person we really wanted to talk to was the final name on the list – Rudy Saks, the waiter who’d delivered the champagne to Suite 18 at 1 a.m.; the last person to see Evelyn alive.

  The witnesses came in individually and in order, and went through their statements.

  Four waitresses. Swedish, Czech, Polish and Turkish.

  We got the story in random fragments, according to the teller.

  The Czech saw VJ and Evelyn talking together when she passed them on her way to drop off empties at the bar. She didn’t hear what they said, simply noticed the tall black man talking to the blonde. She said they didn’t get a lot of black people at the club, or the hotel. She looked embarrassed when she said that.

  Swayne told her not to worry. He showed her the pictures. VJ’s mugshot first, then two of Evelyn – the post-mortem headshot, and the self-taken picture of her in the green dress she’d posted on Facebook.

  The waitress positively ID’d them as the couple she’d seen.

  We thanked her for her time.

  The next two witnesses assumed more than they’d actually seen, but we didn’t let on.

  The Turkish waitress had narrowly missed tripping over Evelyn and VJ on the floor. She thought they were both pissed and rolling around on the ground like they were ‘lovers in a field’, she said.

  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.