The Verdict

by Nick Stone

  ‘I was called before the review board. Usually when you fail they’ll let you carry on and finish your course, but you get a degree without Honours. No letters after your name. They call it a Special.

  ‘Only that didn’t happen with me. And they knew about VJ’s diary.

  ‘The board told me I should’ve brought the matter to the college, that my failure to do so showed I had no respect for authority or rules of any kind. Therefore I had no business doing law. So I was sent down.’

  ‘“Sent down”?’

  ‘Cambridge parlance for “expelled”.’

  ‘God… So if it wasn’t for the diary…?’

  ‘I probably wouldn’t have got kicked out. But that’s all speculation now.’

  She rubbed her eyes and sighed. Then she took my hands.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this before, Terry?’

  ‘I was long over it when I met you. You and Ray were the present and future. That was the past. VJ didn’t matter. After I met you, my life started making sense. It had purpose. Tomorrow was worth looking forward to,’ I said.

  She stared at me a long moment, looking right into my eyes, probing for deeper secrets. But she saw nothing beyond what I’d told her. I was still the same person she’d met. I hadn’t changed, even if my past had – somewhat.

  I was relieved.

  ‘What happened when you went back to Stevenage?’

  ‘I didn’t tell anyone I’d got kicked out. I couldn’t face telling my parents. They were so proud of me, especially Mum. I stayed in my room most of that summer. Then, one day, Mum asked me when I was going to get my things together to go back to college. It was September. I’d barely noticed the time fly. That’s when I told her. And Dad.’

  ‘How’d they take it?’

  ‘Mum was livid. She wanted to go round to VJ’s house and confront him. Dad…? Dad didn’t give a shit. He told me they had vacancies on the building site.

  ‘After that things went blurry. I worked in Stevenage. All sorts of stuff. Mostly manual. That thing I’d tried to escape – the pre-planned life? It got me. But I didn’t care. I was drinking. Drinking every day. Drinking as soon as the pubs opened, drinking till they closed. I drank so much I couldn’t tell the difference between falling asleep and passing out. Then, about a year later, I ran into VJ in the High Street, by accident.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He was pleasant enough, I suppose. But distanced too, like he was talking to a casual acquaintance he hadn’t seen in a long while. I said we needed to talk. He agreed to meet me the next day. He never showed. I waited and waited. He never came.’

  I left out the next part. How I’d gone round his house that night. Pissed and pissed off. Spoiling for a fight. I’d rung the bell so hard it jammed. Then I started kicking the door. His mum had leaned out of the window and threatened to call the cops. “Call ’em then, you fuckin’ black bitch!” And she had. And two coppers came and put me in a car and took me down the station, booked me as drunk and disorderly and stuck me in a cell to sleep it off. The next morning I was given a caution and a cup of tea and sent home.

  ‘That was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s a damned-if-I-do, damned-if-I-don’t situation. If I tell Janet what I’ve told you, I’m out on my ear. If I say nothing and go into this with my fingers crossed, VJ will be well within his rights to refuse to work with me because of what happened between us.’

  She thought about it a moment, but not for long.

  ‘You’re not the judge and jury. You’re not a barrister or a lawyer. You just take notes. That is your job, right?’ she said.

  ‘In a nutshell, yeah.’

  ‘So you can’t affect the case or the outcome of the trial. Your role in it’s minor. You’re unimportant. Vernon’ll know that. Secondly, you don’t know what happened with his diary. Maybe he found it, or maybe he found out who really took it and was too ashamed to tell you, especially after it got you kicked out of Cambridge. Third, whatever happened between the two of you was over twenty years ago —’

  ‘Nineteen,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Whatever. You were as good as kids then. People move on. You have. He has,’ she said. ‘Plus he’ll have more pressing things on his mind. Like the fact he’s been arrested for murder… Again.’

  ‘He was never arrested the first time.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But you can’t cheat karma, can you?’

  Which was a way of looking at it, I suppose, if you believed that you paid in kind for wrongs you did to others. But if that was the case, that would’ve meant VJ had killed his dad.

  ‘So your advice is: say nothing and hope for the best?’

  ‘What else can you do, Terry? What’s the worst that can happen, eh? You lose your job. No big deal. You’ll find another.’

  ‘There’s a recession on,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Recessions only affect people who are picky about what they do,’ she said. ‘That doesn’t apply to you.’

  And right on cue, one of life’s little ironies happened. A picture of me in my blue clown suit fizzled up in the digital frame. It was the last time I’d worn it, complete with facepaint and big smiling sausage red lips and that blue wig that stained my neck whenever I sweated.

  ‘When are you likely to see him?’

  ‘Maybe as early as tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘The sooner the better. You’ll know where you stand.’

  ‘Why is it I feel like I’m still paying for something I didn’t do?’ I asked her. She had no answer to that.

  6

  After Karen had gone to bed, I went to the spare room.

  Everything we no longer had use for but couldn’t face throwing away ended up here, packed, sealed and stacked in cardboard boxes. Clothes, kids’ toys, books, videos, unused wedding presents. For the last two years we’d promised to clear the place out, strip the peeling wallpaper, replace the threadbare carpet tiles, but we never did. We simply made another promise and kept on adding to the clutter. It was too convenient the way it was.

  Especially for me.

  This was where I came to be alone and think; my retreat. Here with all the rejected stuff of our lives.

  I kept my big black and brass trunk in the corner, by the door. I’d used it to move my stuff from Stevenage and London. It had belonged to my dad, who’d brought it over on the boat from Ireland to Liverpool a million years ago. He hadn’t asked for it back.

  I pulled the trunk across the door and opened the padlock with the key I kept Blu-tacked to the back.

  There wasn’t much in there. My clown clobber, wrapped in clear drycleaner plastic, was the first thing anyone would see. Then, tucked upright, against the side, my framed Sidney Sussex matriculation photo from 1991. I hadn’t seen it in ten years. I’d wrapped it in parcel paper, put it in a big jiffy bag and superglued the flap shut.

  And in a corner, almost invisible, shrinkwrapped in dull black plastic, was a metal container about the size and shape of a bigger than average shoebox. The box was locked and I’d long thrown away the key. Which had been a pointless thing to do, because I didn’t need to see the contents ever again. I’d memorised them years ago, every word, every comma and full stop, every date.

  As with everything else in the room, it was waiting to be dumped.

  Karen didn’t know about the box or the picture.

  Just like she didn’t know I crept in here when she slept.

  Just like she hadn’t known about VJ.

  And just like she didn’t know the rest of the story, the other part…

  The coda.

  Talking about him tonight, about the diary and the beating and getting kicked out of Cambridge, should’ve brought me some kind of relief, a little clarity. But it hadn’t. I felt no differently now than I had yesterday.

  I hated VJ.

  I’d hated him almost all my adult life
.

  I wished him ill. I wished to see him destroyed the way he’d destroyed me.

  Yeah, I know…

  Be careful what you wish for, in case you get it.

  Well, I was getting ‘it’ all right.

  By fate or coincidence or plain dumb luck, I’d have a front-row seat to VJ’s demise. Justice was being served up by way of the law.

  Even if I lost my job at the end of it, it would be worth it; if only to see the look on his face when he recognised me, walking back into his life at the moment he was at his most frightened and vulnerable – and most in need of a friend. He’d know then he was paying for far more than the crime he was accused of. He’d know that what had gone around – a long time ago – had come around.

  Karen was right. She’d said it best.

  You can’t cheat karma.

  Can you?

  7

  The next morning I headed back to the office. Everyone on the train platform at Clapham Junction looked miserable, like they were contemplating jumping on the rails. It was the life of work, and it got to us all. Five days a week, you get out of bed before you want to, go to a place you don’t want to be, do things you’d rather not do, and publicly tolerate a small group of people you’d rather not know.

  I checked the digital board. The train was delayed. The platform was windblown, wet and dark, with little to no shelter from the elements. The clocks would be going forward soon, but you couldn’t guess it would be brighter later. Up ahead, along the rails, I could see part of central London, still lit up as if it were the middle of the night.

  I picked up my copy of Metro. The arrest had made the front page.

  ‘West End Hotel Murder’.

  The report was more detailed. It named VJ as the suspect in custody, and said that the body had been found in a £2000-a-night suite in the Blenheim-Strand, where he’d been staying. The writer couldn’t resist mentioning that VJ had been named Ethical Person of the Year just twelve hours before his arrest.

  At Victoria I bought all the papers. There was something about VJ in every one. Third, fourth pages. Prominent pieces all. The broadsheets carried a slight variation of the same photograph of him after the award ceremony, posing with his trophy, flashing his broadest smile. ‘Murder Horror in Posh Hotel’ ran one headline, ‘Millionaire in Sleaze Death Arrest’ ran another. VJ’s trial had as good as started.

  I walked out of the station and headed up Buckingham Palace Road. It was close to 8 a.m. and the street was clogged with crawling traffic on both sides. The sun was up, but the light was weak, as if the sky were a dirty window the rays were struggling to penetrate.

  I passed the art deco coach station and turned down Elizabeth Street. A short stretch of the road was geared towards one-stop itinerants, the new arrivals and departees coming on and off the coaches. Newsagents, a short row of greasy back-to-back chicken and burger places, souvenir shops selling nothing but Prince William and Kate Middleton memorabilia, and cafés with smokers sat shivering outside.

  Two minutes later the whole neighbourhood jumped up three social classes, and you could almost hear the disposable millions fluttering in the wind. I was in Belgravia, one of the wealthiest areas not just in London or Britain, but the world. All grand terraces and great squares of white stucco Georgian houses, fringed with stark black railings gleaming like patent leather. There was a sense of timelessness here, where nothing had lost one iota of its original shade or class or desirability, and the smooth broad streets looked clean enough to eat off.

  I crossed to Belgrave Square, home to numerous embassies, each identified by their respective flags flapping from poles outside the buildings they occupied.

  At the next square, I turned right and headed for KRP.

  Kopf-Randall-Purdom was one of the top private law firms in Britain. They were big, as in highly successful. And they were big, as in they outright owned numbers 15–20 of Cubitt Square. That’s a whole block of six-storey nineteenth-century terraced houses; or, roughly £200 million-worth of real estate.

  There were fourteen of us in the criminal division – two solicitors, in-house barristers and paralegals, three clerks and PAs, a graduate trainee and a receptionist. We were always busy, keeping the high-value clients’ no-good spoilt offspring out of jail – and the headlines – mostly for drug, drink and traffic-related offences. No one we represented had ever been to prison. They got fines, community service, stints in rehab, suspended sentences, but no jail and next to no publicity.

  I punched in the access code and the door clicked open.

  The first thing newcomers always commented on was the quiet that greeted them when they stepped into the building. Concentrated and intense, it was the silence of a place where secrets come to live for ever.

  I stopped, as I always did, to look at the sole ornament filling up the wall of the waiting area. Printed on canvas and hung like a prized painting was a black-and-white photograph of a furniture shop on a street corner. It was a mid-period Victorian structure with steepled slate roofs, whitewashed upper floors and bay windows, propped up by a modern extension that served as a showroom.

  The picture had baffled me at first, because it didn’t belong here. It was a portrait of drab everyday Britishness, affordable fittings to go in affordable houses in an affordable area, where crime was high and expectations low. Then I’d noticed similar, smaller photographs – black and white, mounted on white card and framed in plain glass – hanging in every room I went to. Our office had a picture of an East End bath house, Janet’s a traditional barber’s, while a shot of an old bingo hall graced the kitchen.

  It turned out Sid Kopf had taken them. The picture in reception had won an award. Kopf was an amateur photographer, and a passionate one. He was always entering competitions and submitting his work to newspapers and magazines. His speciality was local London landmarks, those quirky buildings and businesses that had survived almost unchanged for decades, even centuries, and yet remained invisible to all but those in the know.

  I carried on to the clerks’ office.

  Adolf was already there, at her desk, eyes to her screen, furiously typing away. I supposed she was either sending personal emails or updating her Facebook page, because she didn’t type with the same breakneck abandon when she was doing her job.

  She didn’t look at me when I came in, just scowled grimly, as she always did whenever I was in her orbit.

  She was slightly over five feet tall, brown-haired and a borderline beauty. I might have fancied her, if I didn’t know her better – or, in fact, knew her at all.

  ‘Morning, Bella,’ I said.

  No reply. No surprise.

  When it came to letting someone know she despised their very existence, Adolf was without parallel. She wasn’t merely good, or even simply brilliant at it. With her it came naturally, as if her sole purpose in life were to project hate – of me in particular. At least that’s what it felt like, five days a week.

  Her weapons of choice were silence and an armoury of black looks she used with such precision it would have been impressive if I hadn’t been the target. Her centrepiece was an unblinking glower that got glassier the longer it lasted, as if the intensity of her loathing was making her eyes water. Which was a shame because her eyes were far and away her most attractive feature, the blue of tourist brochure oceans.

  There were four of us in the office, along with a junior clerk called Iain, and Michaela, the graduate gopher. Adolf and I sat facing each other, cordoned off from the others by a grey soundscreen.

  I turned on my computer and listened to it powering up.

  ‘Sid Kopf wants to see you,’ Adolf said without looking at me.

  ‘Bit early for wind-ups, isn’t it?’ I said.

  Kopf only ever summoned clerks to his office when he was firing them.

  Adolf carried on typing a moment longer, without comment. Then she turned to look directly at me for the first time.

  ‘I don’t wind up people I like,’ she sa
id. There was the usual mix of contempt and a dash of poison in the stare she gave me.

  I still didn’t know if she was being serious. Then my phone rang.

  ‘Is that Terry?’

  I recognised the woman’s voice – nasal, blue-blooded posh; every ‘t’ crossed with silver, every ‘i’ dotted with a pearl. It was Sid Kopf’s PA. Edwina.

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘Come upstairs.’

  No ‘please’. This was an order.

  My balls dropped. Had they found out about me?

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  She hung up with a crunch.

  Adolf smiled at her screen. Her typing accelerated.

  8

  I saw Janet first when I walked in, sitting opposite Kopf’s desk. She glanced briefly my way, then looked down at the yellow legal pad resting on her lap.

  Kopf was something of a myth in the company – part legend, part bogeyman. We’d catch fleeting glimpses of him once in a while, always out of the corner of our eyes, going upstairs to his third-floor office, or walking out with a client. Very occasionally we’d hear his voice from the landing, but our experience of him was limited to second- and third-hand tales. He’d stopped practising law twenty years ago to concentrate on running the firm, but in his time he’d been one of the best corporate lawyers in the country, a fearsome and utterly ruthless litigator when he’d needed to be. They used to call him ‘the Blond Assassin’.

  Kopf pointed me to a free chair facing his desk, and appraised me as I made my way into his office. I knew what he was seeing: the off-the-peg plain navy-blue suit – jacket and trousers bought separately – my cheap blue shirt and non-clashing tie, the polished but worn black Dr. Martens shoes.

  I sat down. I was too close to his desk, and far too close to him for my comfort. Janet was out of my line of sight. It was as if she’d already distanced herself from me.