The Verdict

by Nick Stone

  Carnavale changed the subject. He asked about her family. And then they were off, chatting about kids, grandkids, houses…

  I tuned out.

  We’d come here from the cells downstairs. We’d seen VJ. He was calm, all smiles and quiet confidence, as if he thought this the beginning of the end of his ordeal, that it would be over soon; just one mountainous hurdle to get over and he was home free.

  Christine had talked him through what would happen today. Jury selection and opening statements. Setting up the pieces on the board. The fun, she said, would start tomorrow.

  Carnavale said his goodbyes to Christine, a quick hello to Redpath and went back to his team.

  ‘That’s a worried man,’ she said.

  ‘Seems confident enough to me,’ I said.

  ‘Barristers are the best fakers. Ergo good actors. Franco’s Oscar material.’

  ‘All rise.’

  Judge Blumenfeld came in with a swish of his robes and a bounce to his wig.

  We sat down after he’d taken his place at the podium. The clerk was the same woman with the same outdated curly-perm.

  ‘Anything before we start?’ the judge asked, looking at Carnavale, then Christine.

  Both barristers shook their heads.

  ‘Bring in the defendant, please,’ he said to his clerk, who picked up a phone and spoke inaudibly for a few seconds.

  Our seating arrangements were slightly different from the PCMH. Prosecution and defence barristers habitually sat in the first two rows, with their clerks behind them, but Christine had brought me on to her row and sat me next to her. More pieces being arranged on the chessboard.

  A security guard led VJ to the dock. A chorus of murmurs and whispers rose up from the packed public gallery. Christine glanced at him as he reached the bulletproofed dock. We all exchanged nods. He was expressionless.

  ‘Let’s proceed with jury selection,’ the judge said to the clerk. Another silent phone call.

  A few minutes later twenty people entered the courtroom. Mostly mid-twenties to mid-fifties men and women, all carrying a single sheet of paper.

  The clerk addressed them.

  ‘The court requires twelve of you to sit as jurors. I will call out the number you’ve been given. If your number is called please come forward and let me know if you are available for this trial. If you are not available, you will be asked to explain your reasons to the judge, and to provide relevant evidence on your behalf. Do you all understand?’

  She scanned their faces.

  ‘I will now call the first number,’ she said, running a finger down the list she was holding. ‘Fifteen.’

  A young Asian woman with shoulder-length hair came forward. The court clerk spoke to her. Then she motioned her to take a seat on the jury bench facing us.

  ‘This is where you start earning your keep,’ Christine whispered to me. ‘I want you to read the jury.

  ‘First thing to remember is that these people don’t want to be here. They’ve been ordered to do this. Most will stay resentful for the duration, wishing the whole thing be over. They’re the best and worst kind of juror. They barely listen. So when it comes to making a decision they’ll side with the majority just to get out of here as fast as possible.’

  The clerk read out the next number.

  ‘Seven.’

  A squat man in a blue blazer and silver-rimmed specs approached her with the waddling stomp of the seriously overweight. A few murmurs and head bobs later and he’d joined the Asian woman on the bench. He smiled as he sat down. And then he looked up at VJ, looked at him a little too intently for my liking. He didn’t like what he saw. If this had been America, Christine could have cross-examined him to root out bias or pre-judgement. Unfortunately in Britain we don’t have the luxury of not liking someone’s face. Jury selection was random. We were stuck with who we got.

  ‘Juries are dictatorships,’ Christine continued. ‘The verdict will be decided by three or four people at the most. Those are the ones who’ll follow the trial carefully, who’ll determine how the other eight vote. You’re to be my eyes on this. I want you to identify the main players and observe their reactions. I need to sway at least two.’

  ‘What should I look out for?’

  ‘Note takers, obviously. They’re the keenest. Also watch for how they react to me and Franco. If they smile when I speak and scowl when he does, that kind of thing.

  ‘The most important juror of all is the foreman. The other eleven choose him or her as soon as they’re sworn in. It’s almost invariably a default decision. The person who volunteers for the role gets it. The foreman is the authority figure, the organiser. The weaker jurors always think as the foreman does. So he’s worth a couple of extra votes.

  ‘Last thing. Don’t let them catch you looking at them – especially when you’re helping me up or down. They’ll know it’s an act then and we’ll lose their trust.’

  ‘Did you teach your esteemed pupil this?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ she smiled. ‘What do you think his clerk’s doing right now?’

  I resisted the temptation to turn round.

  The proceedings took all morning. Several of those selected wanted to be excused and had to go before Blumenfeld to plead their cases. The judge made it hard on them from the off, glowering intimidatingly as they stood looking up at him on his podium, and asking them to speak up so the whole court could hear them. I knew what he was doing – making any potential shirkers think twice about trying to wriggle out.

  The first person – a redheaded woman in a pinstripe skirt – had a valid excuse. She was getting married next week and everything had already been booked before she got the jury summons. She stammered as she spoke and trembled as she produced the paperwork, which the judge scrutinised like it was incriminating evidence, his expression thunderous. Then, with a smile and in a purring tone, he told her that was fine and she was excused. He wished her well in her marriage.

  He wasn’t so accommodating to those who followed. There was a writer on a tight deadline. Blumenfeld asked him what he wrote. ‘Crime fiction.’ The judge’s lip curled ultra-sardonically and there was laughter from both press and public. ‘Then you should regard this an ideal research opportunity,’ he said and sent him to the bench. The writer was furious. We had our first potential problem juror.

  By 12.30 p.m. the jury had been sworn in. Ten men, two women. They chose as their foreman the fat man in the blazer. The worst choice.

  ‘We’ll break for lunch now,’ the judge said. ‘Let’s reconvene at two for opening statements.’

  Janet joined us in the canteen, motorbike helmet in hand, file under her arm.

  She didn’t so much as glance at me, never mind say hello. She went and sat several tables behind me, where Christine joined her. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I knew what they were talking about.

  Janet and I had talked till sunrise, mostly on her patio, because she’d chain-smoked her way through a whole pack of Silk Cut.

  It hadn’t started well. My fault. I hadn’t prepared, hadn’t planned what I was going to say. I spouted my theory about Kopf. She greeted it with predictable disbelief and outrage, but also fury. She shouted, slammed her hand on the kitchen counter, called me everything from stupid to nuts – all in pure, unadulterated Cockney. In-between she spat out chunks of Kopf’s career history, to underline his lifelong honesty and integrity. She dismissed everything I said as baseless paranoid delusion without a shred of evidence to back it up. Then she told me to get out – out of her house and out of the firm.

  I made it to the door when her husband intervened. The commotion and cigarette smoke had woken him up. He’d come down to see what was going on.

  That was when I told Janet how I’d spent my Saturday – minus the drinking.

  That got her attention.

  She fished her copy of the Sunday Times out of the recycling. She recognised me, even though my face was a blur. When she found out that one of Rudy Saks�
��s housemates was the gunman, she told her husband to fetch the whisky.

  But that wasn’t what swayed her.

  What did it was when I came clean about my past – VJ, Stevenage, Rodney, Melissa, Cambridge, the Lister.

  ‘But Sid had you vetted,’ she said. ‘I read the report. It matched your CV.’

  ‘Who did the vetting?’ I asked.

  Only one person it could have been:

  Andy Swayne.

  I’d been part of Kopf’s plan too.

  Janet drained the whisky I hadn’t touched in a single gulp.

  Then she asked me to go over my theory again. Out had come her notepad.

  ‘This changes everything,’ she said, when I finished.

  And that’s how we’d left things.

  Carnavale stood at his lectern and looked briefly at the judge, and then slowly over the faces of the jury as he began to speak in a precise and even tone, pitching his voice at just the right volume to carry around the court.

  ‘On the morning of Thursday, March 17th this year, the body of a young woman was found in the bedroom of a hotel suite. The woman’s name was Evelyn Bates. She was twenty-seven years old. She worked as a receptionist at a hairdresser’s. She was loved by her family, to whom she was daughter and granddaughter, sister and aunt. And she is sorely missed by all her friends, who called her “Evey”.

  ‘Evelyn was strangled to death. She fought for breath as hard as she fought her killer. But he was much bigger and far stronger. He crushed her windpipe with his bare hands. Her last few moments of life must have been absolutely agonising.’

  He paused there. Good beginning, I thought. He’d told the jury that this was about justice for the victim first and foremost. And the victim could be one of their friends, their daughter, their sister. In short, one of them.

  He’d also fired the first class warfare salvo, by establishing what she did for a living. And – above all – he’d started with the strongest bit of evidence against VJ: the body in the bed.

  ‘Later the same day, the police arrested and charged the person you see in the dock before you. His name is Vernon James.’

  Another pause. All the jurors looked at VJ. Some stared at him, others glanced. I scanned their faces for a reaction. None. Early early days.

  ‘The reasons he was arrested are straightforward,’ Carnavale continued. ‘He was the only guest in the room at the time of Evelyn’s murder. He was present in the room at the time of her murder. And several eyewitnesses saw him with Evelyn in the hours leading up to her murder.’

  Carnavale methodically went through the evidence against VJ, in the order he intended to present it. The autopsy report establishing time of death, forensics, eyewitnesses, the police interviews, the note Evelyn had left for Penny Halliwell. He would be taking the jury through his case chronologically, telling them what he believed happened that night at the Blenheim-Strand. Most took notes, pencils scratching away at pads.

  I had to hand it to him. Carnavale knew how to spin a yarn and hold attention. He varied tempo regularly. He focused on a different block of the jury, yet didn’t make eye contact with anyone specific. And he completely avoided looking at VJ, or mentioning him by name. He was ‘the accused’, ‘the man in the dock’, ‘the man the police arrested’.

  ‘Members of the jury, I can imagine what you’re thinking, because I thought the very same thing,’ he said. ‘How is it that someone clever enough to be a multimillionaire before the age of forty could be stupid enough to walk away from a hotel room where he’d just murdered someone, without even making an effort to conceal the body? He left Evelyn Bates where he killed her. Naked, on top of the bed. He didn’t even cover her with a sheet. No. He simply checked out of the room the next morning and went to his office.

  ‘Yet, over the course of this trial, you will learn enough about the accused’s character to understand, if not why he did this, then how he could do this. You will see that the accused is no ordinary man. He is a self-made millionaire. He can buy practically anything he wants. Maybe even, in his mind, anyone he wants. He’s someone who has created his very own personal exclusion zone. A golden bubble where he believes he’s beholden to no one. That he can do what he wants, when he wants, to whom he wants. He is no ordinary man, so to him, the rules that bind others – that bind you and me, that bound Evelyn Bates – simply do not apply to him.

  ‘You will also understand his state of mind. You will hear how he’s done this sort of thing to women before. How he was violent with them, how he indulged in extreme sado-masochistic practices for his own sexual gratification. The consequences may not have been fatal then, but had he been reported to the police, he would have been held to account in a court of law. That he wasn’t, is because of one thing and one thing only. His money. He paid off his previous victims. He bought their silence. And he bought the freedom to continue his depraved acts. And, by extension, in his mind, he bought himself the right to kill Evelyn Bates.’

  Carnavale sat down.

  The court was absolutely silent. Silent like it was empty. Silent like all the air had been sucked out of it. Both female jurors sneaked a look at the dock. This wasn’t good.

  ‘Mrs Devereaux. Would you like to proceed now or shall we have a break?’ Judge Blumenfeld asked.

  Christine put one hand on her stick, and I took her arm and helped her stand. She was slow and let the effort and pain play a little on her face. I took a quick look at the jury. No reaction.

  I was hoping we’d have a recess, so we could put some distance between what we’d heard, let people forget a little.

  ‘My Lord, I’d like to proceed. I won’t take as long as my learned friend,’ Christine said.

  She looked at the jury.

  ‘I don’t like Vernon James,’ she said.

  What?

  ‘I don’t like him one bit. I don’t think he’s what you’d call a “nice person”, or a “good person”. Over the course of this trial, I expect you’ll agree. He’s been physically abusive to women. He’s a sexual sadist, a serial adulterer, a habitual user of prostitutes. He’s betrayed and shamed his family. He’s also shamed the venerable institution that elected him Ethical Person of the Year the night before he was arrested for murder. In short, Vernon James is an absolute disgrace as a human being. Yet, he is not on trial for any of these failings. And neither is he on trial for being rich. He is on trial for murder. The murder of Evelyn Bates.’

  A pause. So far so dreadful.

  What the hell was she doing?

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I will ask only one thing of you. Please consider the evidence against Mr James very very carefully and ask yourselves if it really adds up, if it really proves he killed Evelyn Bates. I do not for a moment believe it does. Thank you.’

  ‘What the fuck was that about?’ VJ said to Christine when we met him in the cells, half an hour after the judge had dismissed us for the day.

  I didn’t blame him for being angry. Neither did Redpath. Janet wasn’t even there. She’d torn out of the courtroom, her phone already on.

  ‘Did you see the jury’s faces?’ he asked.

  She hadn’t, but I had. Universal confusion. As in: where’s the defence?

  ‘You didn’t even say I didn’t do it,’ VJ went on.

  ‘Because that’s what they were expecting me to say,’ Christine said, finally.

  ‘No kidding! That’s what I was expecting you to say!’

  Me too.

  ‘Did you follow the prosecution’s opening statement?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah…’

  ‘I wrote two very different openers – “Dry” and “Dramatic”,’ she said. ‘If Carnavale had gone the melodramatic route, acted like every lawyer always does in American films, my response would have been “Dry”. I would have laid out the facts of the case bit by bit and explained how I was going to dismantle them. But that was the direction he took.

  ‘Never bore a jury. Always give them something to talk about,
something to remember you by. Carnavale took almost an hour to say he thinks you’re guilty. I was brief. I gave them drama. And I stole the prosecution’s thunder.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I told the jury the worst thing they’ll hear about you – that you’re into rough sex with prostitutes. It won’t come as a surprise when they hear it. And I’ve also sided with them, distanced myself from you as a person, but not as a client.’

  None of us were buying it. It was a clever enough tactic in theory, but she hadn’t pulled it off. The jury didn’t get it. They’d heard a defence lawyer say she didn’t like her client, that she found him despicable. And they hadn’t heard her state his innocence either. They’d heard her say the evidence against him was flawed. In other words, he did it, but the prosecution can’t prove it.

  ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ VJ said.

  I went down the road to Ludgate Hill to hail us a taxi.

  As I was standing there waiting, it started to rain. Not heavily; a few stray droplets peeled off the clouds and fell on the pavement and on my face.

  Then Sid Kopf turned the corner. He’d been in court, watching from the public gallery, I guessed. He was with a much younger woman in a dark-grey suit and sunglasses.

  I didn’t recognise her until they got closer.

  Melissa.

  She hadn’t left the country after all. She was standing by her man.

  I ignored them and looked up the road. A cab was coming along. I held out my hand. The taxi stopped in front of me.

  ‘Do you mind if we grab this one?’ Kopf said, catching up to me.

  ‘Be my guest,’ I said.

  He asked the driver to take them to Kensington Roof Gardens and opened the door for Melissa.

  ‘Oh, sorry – have you two met?’ he asked me.

  I looked at Melissa, saw my double reflection in her opaque glasses, caught there like twin locusts in an oil slick.

  ‘I don’t believe we have,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘I’m Melissa James. Vernon’s wife.’