The Verdict

by Nick Stone

  The first thing we saw when we got out of the train station were ugly towers of 1960s vintage. The buildings sapped the edge out of the sunlight and left the low-lying area around it in semi-dusk, as if a designated raincloud were hovering over it, waiting for God to look away long enough for it to unload and wash it off the map.

  The Ellises lived in a semi-terraced house off Reeves Corner. The street was quiet enough, but the retractable metal gates on all the windows said this was burglary central.

  Swayne rang the intercom and announced us.

  As we waited I checked out the surroundings. There was a shop on the other side of the road called the House of Reeves. I recognised the mostly white-painted Victorian building almost immediately. It was in the blown-up picture on the wall of our reception, the photograph Sid Kopf had won his award for. Superimposing memory on actuality, I realised Kopf must have been standing almost where we were now when he’d taken it.

  The door opened behind us.

  ‘Hazel Ellis?’ Swayne asked.

  Hazel Ellis – née Jensen – nodded. Short, skinny and with too much naturally frizzy blonde hair for her small head, she greeted us in a dark-grey sweatshirt and jeans.

  She led us up a flight of stairs to her apartment, and showed us into the lounge.

  Swayne and I sat on the couch, while she pulled up a dining-table chair and positioned herself so she was facing me.

  Swayne did his introductory preamble.

  ‘Is it OK if Richard sits in?’ Hazel interrupted him as he was telling her none of this was on the record, more of a dotting and crossing exercise. Richard was her husband of two weeks.

  It was against protocol. The police always interviewed adult witnesses alone.

  ‘Sure,’ Swayne said, before I could say no.

  ‘Rich!’ she called out. She had a chirpy, bird-like voice, but when raised it was a glass-shatterer. She’d be impossible to beat in a row.

  The door opened and Richard Ellis walked in. Tall and broad, with glossy black hair that stopped a couple of inches off his shoulders, he had the kind of classic dark and handsome looks you see in American soaps and aftershave posters. He shook our hands and went and sat next to Hazel.

  ‘Why are you investigating us?’ Hazel asked, looking directly at me. She had the same informed wariness about her as a particularly perceptive cat. Penny had obviously told her I was the bad cop here.

  ‘We’re not,’ Swayne said. ‘We’re just tightening up our case.’

  ‘It’s pretty solid already, though, yeah?’ Richard said. Deep voice. Region-free accent. Apart from the yeah. That was street, but an affectation, a hint of prole he might have picked up from living in places like this and needing to blend in. Minor public school, I reckoned.

  ‘We can’t discuss that, I’m afraid. It’s still an open investigation,’ Swayne said.

  ‘But you caught the guy?’

  ‘Innocent until proven guilty in a court of law,’ Swayne said. ‘Let’s crack on, shall we?’

  Hazel told us she’d talked to Evelyn when they had drinks at the start. Inconsequential smalltalk, mostly; couldn’t remember their final exchange at all. She didn’t speak to her at dinner, nor at the club. Too wrapped up in being the centre of attention and having fun.

  ‘So you didn’t notice she’d gone missing after 10.30?’ Swayne asked her.

  ‘Personally, no,’ Hazel said.

  Richard was looking at us – studying us, more like. Taking in details, crunching and computing them. Whenever his eyes stayed on me too long I’d look up from my notes and catch his gaze ducking out.

  ‘How well did you know her?’ Swayne asked.

  ‘Not that well. She was Penny’s friend, I think.’

  ‘Penny’s?’

  Swayne and I exchanged a look.

  ‘Penny Halliwell,’ Hazel prompted.

  ‘We’ve talked to her,’ I said.

  Hazel gave me a slight smile. I know.

  I noticed Richard fiddling with his wedding ring, twisting it back and forth on his finger. I’d done that too, the first month of marriage. My ring was a little too wide for my finger and used to itch. I never bothered getting it fixed.

  So what was this all about? Evelyn had been invited to a hen party for someone she barely knew, by someone she barely knew. And no one could remember originally meeting her. She was like the gatecrasher you don’t want to throw out at a party in case they’ve come with someone you might know and offend.

  ‘Who organised the party?’ I asked.

  ‘Penny.’

  ‘How? Invite? Phone? Email?’

  ‘Facebook. That’s how we all keep in touch.’

  That explained it.

  Evelyn was a Facebook ‘friend’ to Penny and Hazel. I wondered if they’d ever really met. What were the chances? What if Penny had put a message up about Hazel’s hen party and Evelyn had simply invited herself?

  Suddenly, the intro to ‘Step On’ by The Happy Mondays started playing. Just the keyboards, on a loop.

  It was Richard’s phone, ringing in his pocket.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, pulling it out, glancing briefly at the screen and killing the call.

  He shifted in his chair, repositioned himself slightly, leaned forward.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. I warmed to him a bit. I’d loved The Mondays. Karen and I had bonded over them.

  Swayne carried on asking questions. I was beat. Really wanted to get out of here and get home. We weren’t going to get any dirt on Evelyn. The whole day had been a near waste of time. Then again, I could have said that about our entire investigation.

  As they talked, I glanced through the file. Swayne had handed me a new bit of disclosure this morning – a list of calls Evelyn had made and received from her mobile. I hadn’t had a chance to look at it. I did now.

  The last call had been incoming. At 11.07 p.m. The network was Vodafone, but the caller was unidentified because it was a pay as you go number. She’d made two calls to the same number before that, neither lasting longer than a minute. The person hadn’t picked up and she’d left a message.

  But it wasn’t the only time she’d called the number. The list was three pages long and the ingoing and outgoing calls were all listed in a single column, going back two weeks. Most of the calls were to the same Vodafone number.

  Facebook.

  If Evelyn had been a Facebook friend of Penny and Hazel’s, as opposed to a real one, it meant they’d all had someone in common.

  But it wasn’t anyone at the hen party. It was someone connected to it.

  So I played a hunch.

  I discreetly slipped out my phone and tapped in the number on the list.

  The sound was off, and I’d blocked my number.

  I stared at the screen.

  And ‘Step On’ started playing again.

  ‘Richard!’ snapped Hazel.

  Again he took out the phone and looked at it to see who was calling.

  I killed the call.

  The song died in his hand.

  ‘Who was it?’ Hazel asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Number withheld.’

  30

  ‘When did you guess he was doing her?’ Swayne asked me.

  ‘Not a guess,’ I said. And I broke it down for him, my rationale. The Facebook theory.

  As he listened, the two stretched worms he had for lips scrunched up into a condescending half-pout which stayed in place until I’d finished. He was telling me he not only knew a whole bunch of things I didn’t, but another whole bunch of things besides that too.

  We were still in lovely Croydon. Some dump called the Laughing Camel, round the back of the Whitgift shopping centre.

  His choice of venue surprised me. A pub, of all places. And not any old pub either, like a chain one, with its two-for-one vodka pitcher offers and pre-set menus of everything with chips. This was a professional drinker’s pub.

  It was full and getting fuller, the clientele almost exclusively middle-age
d to old men. They were sitting or standing solo or in pairs, nursing shots and chasers.

  Swayne was drinking ginger ale and eating Big D peanuts.

  ‘Not bad, but slow,’ he said. ‘I knew for sure as soon as I saw Hazel. She’s just an upgrade on Evelyn Bates. Look.’

  He opened his file and passed me a photograph. Colour, glossy A4 photo paper.

  Evelyn, alive.

  I wouldn’t have recognised her. Not because she looked all that different in life than she did in the police photographs or the ones in her green dress, but because I was used to seeing and imagining her another way – not as a person, but as a victim. VJ’s victim.

  Yet here she was smiling – smiling like she was enjoying herself, caught in the middle of a happy moment.

  It was a holiday snap. Clear blue sky and a blurred palm tree in the background. She was wearing a plain white T-shirt, which offset the pinkish glow to her face, and her wavy blonde hair. She was looking straight into the camera, cupping her chin in the ball of her palm, eyes full of tenderness. A lover’s gaze.

  Swayne was right. She did take a little after Hazel, or vice versa. The fundamentals were similar. Hair, eyes, not unattractive, but no headturner either.

  ‘Find any pictures of her and Richard?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But he was one of her 217 Facebook friends. He calls himself “Poolboy”. And yes, all the hen party crowd were her “friends” too.’

  ‘You could’ve said something sooner,’ I said.

  ‘Why spoil the fun?’

  ‘Fun?’

  ‘Watching you blunder on to the truth,’ he said. And he smirked.

  Wanker.

  ‘Remember you told me I should know my place?’ I said. ‘Well, that cuts both ways. You work for us. Which means you work for me. So don’t waste my time again, all right?’

  He didn’t reply. The smirk thinned to crooked threads.

  ‘Anything else you’ve discovered?’ I asked.

  ‘Not yet.’

  I didn’t believe him, but I wasn’t going to push it again. The day was over. I had a free-ish weekend to look forward to. And he’d had his warning.

  He chomped more nuts and washed them down with ginger ale. I hadn’t touched my water. The glass had come clouded with fingerprints.

  ‘What are you doing in a pub anyway?’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Aren’t you ex-alkies supposed to avoid them?’

  ‘Pubs were never the problem,’ Swayne said.

  Yeah, right, I thought.

  ‘Why d’you reckon the police haven’t interviewed Richard? He was the last person to talk to her,’ I asked.

  ‘Why bother? He didn’t have anything to do with it. They’ve got the killer, they’ve got eyewitnesses, and most of all they’ve got DNA. Do you know what DNA stands for, in legal terms? Do Not Argue. Case closed.’

  He finished his Big Ds and screwed up the pack.

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll set up meetings with Evelyn’s proper friends and her family. They’ll know about Richard. How long it’d been going on. Then Christine’ll make him part of her case. Put him on the stand.’

  I thought about the implications. This was going to cause a lot of unnecessary damage.

  Swayne seemed to read my mind.

  ‘Fetch and carry, Terry,’ he said.

  ‘But these are people’s lives here. Innocent people. We’ll be ruining a marriage and Evelyn’s reputation.’

  ‘So what? That marriage is doomed anyway and what good’s your reputation when you’re dead?’

  ‘How did you get this way?’ I said.

  Suddenly loud music started playing in the pub. A chug-a-gug-a-lugga guitar riff.

  Then the first and only woman I’d seen in the pub brushed past us and got up on a nearby table. Long russet-brown hair, tight white blouse, half undone over her cleavage, spray-on black bellbottoms, killer heels.

  She went into the bog-standard stripper routine – air humping, arse shaking, tit grabbing, tongue lolling, crotch caressing.

  I looked at Swayne. He was gawping, all beige vulpine grin and twinkling eyes.

  I’d never been to a strip club before, let alone seen a live stripper. Not my thing. Couldn’t see the point.

  She tore off her blouse and I heard the rip of Velcro fasteners splitting apart. Shouts and growls and a catcall or two came from the crowd.

  She had a tattoo on her left shoulder blade. We were close enough to read it. Five letters of the lowercase Greek alphabet in a single blue line across the upper blade.

  She headbanged to the beat, then tossed her hair back and slid her fingers slowly down her abdomen, flat and ribbed from crunches. Her nails disappeared under the waistband of her bellbottoms. She turned, gyrating and grinding her hips, then bucked like she was riding a… yeah, a camel.

  VELCRO!

  Off came the trousers and away to the left they flew. Punters grabbed and flailed after them, reminding me of refugees and shipwrecked evacuees reaching for manna or a helicopter rope. But they were caught by a black bouncer type, who was also holding her blouse.

  Swayne was gone, eyes on stalks, brain set to dumb by the stripper, now in her bra and thong. I wouldn’t be getting anything more out of him.

  I was well out of sorts, embarrassed going on uneasy at being here with these sad, horny, but above all lonely, old blokes. And Swayne, close to drooling all over his cheap disguise.

  VELCRO!

  The stripper lobbed her bra over her shoulder and there was something like a scrum to get it. Bouncer beat them to it. A voice shouted, ‘You promised!’ over the music. The stripper blew a kiss its way and jiggled her breasts and winked and jiggled her breasts some more.

  Swayne leaned forward. I swore I heard him panting. I hoped to hell he wasn’t wanking under the table. I pulled my chair away from him.

  The song cross-faded into another number.

  Then something hit me smack in the face. I jolted back. What was it? I searched the table, around me, didn’t see anything. The stripper was on her table, stark naked but for her heels and tattoo, still doing her thing. Except she was also looking our way, a big smile under cold eyes.

  I knew what had just happened.

  She’d thrown her thong at me.

  I felt myself blush.

  Then I looked at Swayne.

  He was watching the stripper, now pirouetting deftly on one foot and stretching her leg out and up in the air. The crowd were in ecstasy, whooping, shouting, groaning, corrr-yeahhhhing.

  The song ended and the stripper slipped off the table and sashayed off. The bouncer chaperoned her through her audience, slapping or glaring away potential gropers and graspers.

  Time to go.

  ‘I’ll call you Monday,’ I said, gathering my things.

  ‘Better places to be?’

  ‘Yeah. Home.’

  ‘You sure?’

  I didn’t like the way he said it, like he wouldn’t swap lives with me if I paid him.

  ‘Don’t you want this?’ He held up the stripper’s thong, waving it back and forth like a pendulum.

  ‘Call it a bonus,’ I said.

  31

  Sunday afternoon and I was sat at the bedroom computer, staring at the screen, trying to make a decision between the lesser of two evils.

  I’d written two versions of the investigation report. One was the truth, the other my take on it. Or Evelyn with and without the dirt. I liked the truth better, from a professional point of view – it was solid work; an investigation that had yielded a definite result, the kind of thing that made me look good. But the abridged version was the one I could live with.

  If I went with the truth, Swayne and I would have to confirm the affair with Richard Ellis by interviewing some of her family, conning our way into their lives, walking in on all that grief and pain and torment, pretending to be people who cared, who wanted to make things right and fair and just. We’d weasel out Evelyn’s secrets and intimacies,
and then turn them on her – and her loved ones – in court. I wanted no part of that.

  It would have been different if I thought VJ was innocent, or that we had even a halfway chance of getting an acquittal. But I didn’t. Yes, he was entitled to a fair defence. But this was neither a defence, nor was it fair. It was pointless, gratuitous damage.

  At that moment, Karen came in the room. She had my chiming phone in her hand.

  Tales of the Unexpected.

  ‘How are your inquiries going?’ Janet asked.

  Never mind the formalities, the pleasant smalltalk, the apologies for today being Sunday…

  I gave her the summary, but stuck strictly to the facts.

  ‘We had some new disclosure on Friday afternoon,’ she said, when I was done. ‘Evelyn’s phone records. Have you got a copy?’

  ‘No,’ I lied. Again, the CPS had released the information fast.

  ‘Makes for interesting reading,’ she said. ‘The list goes on for half a dozen pages, but says the same thing over and over.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That she spent the last two weeks of her life calling and texting the same number. She made more than eighty calls to it, none longer than a minute. Which means she left messages, or kept getting voicemail and hanging up. And she was calling at unsociable hours too. Early morning was her favourite time – 3, 4 a.m.’

  Janet let that hang, inviting me to offer an opinion. Even if my thoughts hadn’t been scrambling every which way and my mouth wasn’t as dry as salt on a hotplate, I wouldn’t have said anything for fear of giving myself away.

  ‘Evelyn Bates was a stalker. A restraining order just waiting to happen,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t all one way. The person she was harassing did call her back. Once. At 11.08 p.m., on the night she died. They were the last person she ever spoke to on her phone. The police didn’t look into it, because they’ve got their man. But I have looked into it.’