by Nick Stone
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.’
41
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:
Green.
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?’
42
‘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.
