The Verdict

by Nick Stone

  ‘He seemed about the same to me,’ I said.

  ‘When a person’s facing judgement day they like to know who they can count on. Wouldn’t you agree?’ Kopf said.

  He wasn’t smiling at me, nor speaking in that impassioned purr he’d used on Christine and VJ. This was Kommandant Kopf addressing his minion – the bastard who sat behind his desk with my bollocks in one hand and my windpipe in the other. And just what was he getting at here? Was he talking about VJ, me – or himself?

  ‘Goes without saying,’ I answered through a dry mouth. ‘If I was in Vernon’s position, I’d be happy to have this team here. Christine, Liam, Janet – and Andy Swayne too. He really couldn’t ask for a better… set-up.’

  Emphasis on set-up. But my delivery was deadpan. And I looked Kopf straight in the eye as I spoke, looking for a blink or a flash of realisation, or maybe trying to see into him, to glimpse the dark machinery that had driven him to conjure all this up in the name of his main client. Fat chance of that. Sid Kopf was as cool and opaque as a statue.

  ‘You didn’t include yourself,’ Kopf said.

  ‘I’m just a clerk.’

  ‘I’d say you’re a little more than that.’

  What did that mean?

  The train was over the river now, getting close to the station.

  ‘Which reminds me,’ Kopf said. ‘I have some bad news. The police called the office today. Your investigator is dead.’

  ‘My inv — you mean Andy Swayne?’ I said.

  He nodded.

  ‘He’s dead?’

  Another nod.

  My legs might’ve gone if I wasn’t sitting down.

  First thought: you killed him.

  Second… I’d been trying to call Swayne all week. His phone had been switched off.

  ‘When?’ I asked.

  ‘Yesterday morning. He was found at home. In bed. Apparently.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They said it was drink-related. He had some kind of seizure.’

  ‘Natural causes, then,’ Redpath quipped.

  All kinds of things I could’ve said to that, and a few more I could’ve done too, but I let it go. I was too shocked. Too panicked.

  ‘He hadn’t had a drink in years,’ I said.

  ‘That you know of,’ Kopf said. ‘You know where he lived, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Above a pub in Croydon. A dump called the Laughing Camel.’

  That stripper place.

  VELCRO!

  ‘First thing they tell you in rehab and AA is to avoid temptation. Andy rented the flat right above,’ Kopf continued.

  I thought of David Stratten, a non-drinker who’d jumped in front of a Tube train pissed. Is that what they had planned for me too?

  ‘Andy was a good man,’ Kopf said. ‘But I always knew it was going to end like this. Some people plan their demise, the way others map out their lives.’

  He was staring right at me as he spoke, not even a suggestion of sympathy or sadness about him. I understood what he was telling me. All too well.

  The train had stopped.

  67

  I waited until I got home to crack up.

  Swayne had been murdered. No doubt in my mind, whatsoever. I sat in the living room staring into space.

  A thunderclap made me jump. Then a flash of sheet lightning brightened the room.

  Then it pissed down with rain.

  I went and got Swayne’s coat and put it over the back of the chair. I turned the chair round and stared at it.

  ‘Who killed you?’ I asked.

  Yes, I know, crazy thing to do, but what is panic if not a breakdown on fast-forward?

  ‘Well…?’

  I sat down on the couch.

  Had Swayne being wearing my waterproof when he died? Was his death my fault? Had Fabia’s killers got to him?

  Or was it really just the drink?

  I was stuck with his cheap raincoat, a size too small.

  I didn’t want it. I could take it down the charity shop, but that didn’t feel right.

  No. I was going to give it back to him.

  68

  Saturday. The regulars got in early at the Laughing Camel. They were on their second or third rounds, well away down the slow slope to oblivion when I walked in. A few glanced expectantly my way, as if they hoped I’d be someone else, most ignored me.

  The barman was swaddled in a bright pink-and-green Hawaiian shirt and bopping along to ‘Club Tropicana’, which was playing at a semi-obtrusive volume.

  ‘What’ll it be, mate?’

  ‘I’m here about Andy Swayne,’ I said.

  ‘You family or plod?’

  ‘Neither,’ I said. ‘We worked to —’

  ‘You’re Terry, aren’t you?’

  That was a woman’s voice, to my right. Thirties, pale skin and eyes the exact same shade of dark brown as her eyebrows and long straight hair that cascaded over part of her face and fell past her shoulders . She was sat on my side of the bar with a mug in front of her.

  ‘I am, yeah.’

  ‘That’s Andy’s coat,’ she said.

  ‘I’m returning it.’

  ‘No use to him now,’ she said.

  The barman chortled.

  ‘Did you know him?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t you remember me?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘We’ve met before,’ she said.

  Had we?

  Yes… of course we had. Then as now, she’d been the only woman in here.

  VELCRO!

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t…’

  ‘Recognise me with my clothes on?’

  We both laughed. How many times had she heard that one?

  ‘I’m sorry about Andy,’ I said.

  ‘Want to see where he died?’

  Swayne had lived in a single room, but it was a bright and spacious studio apartment overlooking a derelict cinema. There was a small kitchen area in one corner and a dining table in the other.

  ‘Your place or his?’ I asked.

  ‘He was already here when I met him,’ she said. On the way up, she’d introduced herself as Steff.

  The furniture was plain but sturdy, obviously bought as a long-term investment. There were a couple of rugs on the dark parquet flooring, and a couch opposite a big silver Sony Trinitron TV. No books or music, no DVDs, no photographs. Nothing on the walls, apart from a corkboard by the window.

  ‘Did he mention me at all?’ she asked.

  ‘We didn’t talk about personal stuff,’ I said. She sucked on her bottom lip, her eyes silvering. Please don’t cry on me, I thought. You need a sincerer shoulder. ‘How long were you together?’

  ‘A couple of years, if you can call what we were “together”.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We were lovers who weren’t in love. Do you understand?’

  Yes, I did. Swayne had been some kind of low-rent sugar daddy. He’d had a little joy in his life after all.

  ‘We met downstairs,’ she said.

  ‘When you were st —’

  ‘Dancing. I call it dancing,’ she said, quickly. She looked a few years older in daylight, closer to her forties than her thirties. ‘You get to know your regulars by sight. Andy’d always be there at the same table, always in a suit and tie, always with a ginger ale and a little bag of peanuts. He never missed one of my shows… until Wednesday night.’

  ‘Was that when he died?’

  ‘He was well on his way.’

  The double bed was unmade, the duvet piled on the floor, the sheet half off the mattress. There were two pillows on the couch, where I guessed she’d been sleeping.

  ‘I found him here when I got back,’ she said, pointing to the bed. ‘He was passed out. He stank of booze. I tried to wake him. I was yelling at him, shaking him, slapping him. I was so angry. I couldn’t believe he’d been drinking.

  ‘When he didn’t wake up, I had a bad feeling. I felt his face. He was cold
and clammy, his breathing was shallow. I called an ambulance. He died in hospital early Thursday morning. Alcohol poisoning.

  ‘The doctor said he was twenty times over the limit. The binge killed him. He hadn’t had a drink in God knows how long, and his body couldn’t cope. The exact same thing happened to my dad, you know. He was an alcoholic too. He’d have these dry spells, swear he wasn’t going to touch another drop for the rest of his life, and just when you thought he might mean it, he’d go on a week-long bender. He died of liver failure.’

  She teared up again.

  ‘When did you last see Andy alive – conscious?’

  ‘Wednesday morning. We had breakfast together.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Fine. Normal. The usual,’ she said.

  ‘Did you have any indication he might start drinking again?’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that with alcoholics. My dad was exactly the same. You never knew when he’d go off. I don’t think he did either. He didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to get pissed. It just happened. He said it was a compulsion. A “magnetic pull”, he called it. Everything’d be fine and then the next thing you knew he’d be in the pub with nine double brandies in him, or down the park with two carrier bags of lager.’

  It was all too familiar, what she was saying. I’d been there, my will-power broken by that powerful undercurrent; every vow broken. Maybe Swayne hadn’t been murdered after all. Maybe his death was accidental – or even suicide.

  ‘Did Andy say anything about being followed?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ She frowned. ‘Who was following him?’

  ‘Did he talk about what we were working on?’

  ‘No. He was enjoying it, though, whatever it was. He said it was going to make things right.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘He once told me he had one big regret in life, one thing he’d take back and undo in an instant if he could. He refused to say what it was, except that it was something so terrible, it led to every other bad thing that happened to him,’ she said.

  Had he kept her out of the loop for her sake, or his?

  ‘Did he ever talk much about his past?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  ‘If you find out what that bad thing he did was, please don’t ever tell me. I only want to remember him as I knew him.’

  ‘Of course.’

  In spite of what she’d said, she’d loved him. Even if only a little, but that was enough. Had Swayne loved her back? I hoped he had, but it was hard to imagine someone as hateful and as bitter as him having any room for tenderness in that dried-up cactus he’d had for a heart, but what did I know? I’d thought he lived alone with his ghosts and his demons, a broken old man whose existence was in a holding pattern until the final landing. As it turned out, Andy Swayne had been shacked up with a woman three decades his junior. Some people would say he hadn’t done too badly, all things considered.

  ‘I knew he was a bit dodgy. He had that look about him,’ she said.

  ‘Did he tell you he’d been to prison?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. For burglary, right? Do you know the story?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a bit of a funny one. This lawyer he used to work for – Sid – asked him to get some documents from a rival law firm. The job should’ve been easy for Andy. Breaking and entering, a bit of safecracking, then out. Except he was drinking back then.

  ‘He gets into the lawyer’s office just fine, but his hands start shaking as he’s trying to get the safe open. Can’t keep his fingers steady. He finds a bottle of Scotch in a desk drawer and knocks some back.

  ‘He opens the safe, takes the documents and leaves. Two days later he gets arrested. The police have found his fingerprints on the whisky bottle. He hadn’t realised it, but he drank most of the bottle. His prints were on file, because he’d had a drink-driving conviction the year before.

  ‘The cops offered him a reduced sentence if he shopped Sid. Andy kept his mouth shut. Got ten years. Served eight. Sid did all right by him, when he got out.’

  Hush money. Which was how he’d been able to afford this place – and her.

  So why had he turned on Kopf? Was it linked to this ‘one big regret’ he’d had in his life? And what did that have to do with VJ?

  ‘Did he talk about Sid much – apart from that?’

  ‘No. I knew he was scared of him, though.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I was here when Sid called him out of the blue, last year.’

  Last year?

  ‘Andy was really surprised to hear from him. They hadn’t spoken since he came out of prison. The call upset him. Upset him a lot. He was really down. And scared. I’d never seen him like that.’

  ‘What did Sid want?’

  ‘He wanted Andy to investigate someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know that bloke who got arrested for killing that girl in the hotel?’

  Christ…

  ‘When was this, do you remember?’ I asked.

  ‘Last Easter or thereabouts.’

  ‘Did he talk about the investigation? Tell you what kind of things he’d found out.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I only knew the bloke’s name because Andy left some stuff lying around, copies of old newspapers he’d marked up. Stuff about him killing his dad.’

  So Kopf had got Swayne to do the background work on VJ. He’d used someone he knew he could trust – or, better still, someone he had a hold over.

  Kopf had done more than just rig the defence.

  ‘I’d better give you your anorak back,’ she said, holding her hands out to take the coat.

  I went over to the corkboard. It was slightly askew. Swayne had pinned my mobile and office number up there on a piece of paper, along with two colour postcards and a black-and-white photograph of three people standing with their arms around each other.

  The photo was of a black man and woman, with a younger, shorter white man in-between them. They were all laughing, as if sharing a joke with the photographer.

  Steff came back with my waterproof.

  ‘Who are these people?’ I asked her.

  ‘That’s Andy there in the middle…’

  Really?

  I looked again.

  I hadn’t recognised him at all. He couldn’t have been older than mid-twenties there. Short, neat dark hair with a parting and medium-length sideburns. In his open-necked white shirt, and the pen in his breast pocket, he could have passed for a Mormon missionary. But it was the sight of him happy that threw me. This was him before the corrosion had entered his soul.

  ‘That’s his mate Michael.’

  ‘Michael…? Michael who?’

  ‘Andy only put the board up on Tuesday. He just said the guy’s name was Michael.’

  The man was a head taller than Swayne, light-skinned and handsome, with a dignified bearing. I thought of a leaner Muhammad Ali in his prime. They had had the same bright wit about their eyes.

  ‘And the woman is Miriam.’

  Miriam? Miriam Zengeni. Had to be. She was marginally taller than Swayne and far darker than Michael, with an almond-shaped face and strong cheekbones. Her rimless pebble specs gave her a serious air.

  ‘Do you know anything else about the picture? When or where it was taken?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he tell you anything about Michael and Miriam?’

  She shook her head. ‘He didn’t talk much about his past. He said he couldn’t remember much about it because of all the drinking he did.’

  Yeah, right… What if he’d drunk to forget?

  ‘Did Andy have any friends at all? Any people he saw regularly, people who dropped by?’

  Again she shook her head.

  ‘You didn’t find that odd?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘Some people are happy being loners.’

  The colour postcards were of Wellington Arch and a train station surrounded by fields. />
  I took them down. The back of the train station card had the number ‘7’ written on it in blue biro.

  Frant Railway Station, Bells Yew Green, East Sussex.

  ‘Ever been to this place?’ I showed Steff the postcard.

  ‘No.’

  I checked the pockets of the waterproof to make sure there was nothing of his there. I found a packet of tissues in one, and a small, square-handled brass key in the other. The key had a number felt-tipped on the handle: ‘7’.

  I checked the postcards again.

  Swayne had put the board up on Tuesday.

  He knew he was a marked man. He’d guessed I’d come here, looking for answers.

  So he’d left me a message.

  We’d met at Wellington Arch.

  The set-up was linked to Michael Zengeni. Go see Miriam. I knew where she lived. Archer House, near Battersea Embankment. I’d seen them together. Had that been deliberate on his part?

  ‘When my dad died, my mum said she felt like the lone survivor in a plane crash, stumbling around in a daze all the time, wondering what she was doing here, what life was all about,’ Steff said behind me. ‘I didn’t know what she meant then. I do now.’

  I felt sorry for her. And I felt sorrier still that I’d taken Swayne away from her – even if I hadn’t meant to. He must have had kindness and decency in him, for her to be missing him like this. Or maybe she was still in shock.

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea or anything?’ she asked.

  ‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to get going.’

  69

  Frant station was two hours and two train changes out of London.

  First stretch: East Croydon to Tonbridge.

  The train was at the platform. I went to the last carriage and got in.

  Five people were already there, two men, three women. All middle-aged.

  I sat right at the back, so I could see who was getting on.

  Pure tactics. I didn’t know if I was being followed.

  Funny. Even in death, I still didn’t trust Swayne. He was the sort whose ghost would lie. He was an alcoholic – therefore an addict. Addicts are chronic liars. And yes, I’m speaking from personal experience.

  No one boarded the carriage.