The Verdict

by Nick Stone

  Reset. Focus. Concentrate.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Fabia Masson. Not Mason. Or Massoon,’ she replied.

  ‘That’s not your real name, though, is it?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘French?’

  ‘Swiss,’ she said.

  ‘Now I want you to listen to me very carefully. We don’t have a lot of time. My name’s Terry Flynt. I’m not your lawyer. But I am here to help you,’ I said.

  No reaction.

  ‘I work for the law firm that’s defending Vernon James.’

  That got her attention. First surprise, then anxiety. Her eyes darted left and right, past my shoulder, where the panic button was, then over to the door.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘The watch,’ I said.

  ‘It is a fucking fake. I thought I was going to sell it and get out of here.’

  ‘On a fake passport too?’

  ‘What do you want, Monsieur Flynt?’

  Her aggression was masking fear.

  ‘I want to know exactly what happened between you and Vernon James in the Blenheim-Strand that night. Everything. All of it.’

  ‘I’m not talking to you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just want to get out of here. Forget everything that happened.’

  She spoke perfect, precise English, her voice on the deep side.

  ‘Vernon James is in prison,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘So?’

  She’d been following the case.

  ‘Who are you running from?’ I asked.

  ‘Who said I was running?’

  ‘You’ve changed your hair.’

  ‘Women do it all the time. Men too.’

  ‘It doesn’t suit you,’ I said. ‘You did it in a hurry.’

  ‘Are you a hairdresser too?’

  If we’d been together in a pub or a café, I would have laughed.

  ‘I know you’re in trouble,’ I said. ‘You came here to sell the watch and catch a plane to Europe.’ Southend had a small airport, with regular flights to Holland, Spain and Ireland.

  She looked at her nails.

  ‘Who are you running from?’

  Still no answer.

  ‘I’ll tell you what’ll happen if I leave here right now,’ I said. ‘You’ll be charged with trying to sell counterfeit goods, possession of fake ID and stolen credit cards. That’s two years in prison,’ I said, bluffing it.

  That got her attention again.

  ‘What are you offering?’ she asked.

  ‘A way out,’ I said. ‘But I need to know what happened with Vernon James first.’

  ‘How do I know you’re telling the truth?’

  ‘You don’t. You’re just going to have to trust me.’

  She laughed.

  ‘I trust no one.’

  ‘Me neither. That’s why I work in law not hairdressing.’

  Another laugh.

  She weighed me up. Same socio-economic biopsy as Breeze, the stripper. She focused on my wedding ring, then my eyes, then my mouth. She was too scared to trust me. Luckily for me, she hadn’t worked out that I wasn’t supposed to be here; that I’d blagged my way in.

  ‘Who are you running from?’ I asked again.

  Outside I heard people coming down the corridor. They stopped right by the door, talking. The words were muffled. Then they moved on.

  ‘If I tell you everything, will you get me out of here?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said.

  She scanned my face up and down, looking for lies and agendas. I passed.

  ‘I was paid to seduce Vernon James in the hotel, the Blenheim-Strand,’ she said.

  Time stopped and my brain froze.

  I told myself to keep calm, get the story, get it now, get it fast.

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never met anyone in person. It was just a voice on the phone. Always the same man. English.’

  ‘Did he give a name?’

  ‘Yes. Bill.’

  ‘What do you do for a living?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  ‘Tell me anyway,’ I said.

  ‘I’m an escort.’

  ‘How long have you been doing that?’

  ‘What is this, career guidance?’

  ‘Background,’ I said.

  ‘Four years, in London. I work through an agency for new clients. But I also have regulars I deal with directly. Some recommend me to their friends also. I have a separate phone for them. On March 1st I got a call from Bill. He said he wanted to book me on March 16th. He needed a date for a black-tie event at the Blenheim-Strand.’

  ‘He called you directly?’

  ‘Yes. On my private clients line.’

  ‘Did he say who’d recommended you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Didn’t you get suspicious?’

  ‘I always get suspicious. But not anyone has that number, and I’ve been recommended in the past. I assumed he was a high roller, big bucks.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I asked to be paid in cash, as usual. My outcall rate is £4000 for an evening. I always ask for half upfront, the rest when I meet the client.

  ‘He asked where I wanted the money delivered. I said a café in Knightsbridge. I thought he would come in person, but a courier delivered it in an envelope. I signed for it. It was my full fee, not half. I thought he’d made a mistake, or misunderstood me.

  ‘Two days before we were due to meet, Bill called again. He told me to wear a dress that would “stand out”.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I had just the thing, but it was emerald green. I asked him if that was OK. He said he wanted me to make an impression. I thought, Typical older rich man – wearing women like a wristwatch. Showing off.

  ‘On March 16th, I went to the hotel. We had arranged to meet at the cocktail bar in the lobby at eight o’clock. I ordered a drink. A waiter came over to me and handed me something – lipstick, it looked like. He said, “This is for you,” and went away before I had a chance to say anything.

  ‘Then my telephone rang. It was Bill. He told me he was watching me and I had to do exactly as he said. Open the lipstick. I did. Instead of lipstick, there was a small glass ampoule inside, about the size of my little finger. It was filled with clear liquid.

  ‘Then he told me what I really had to do: go to the ballroom and pick up Vernon James. Then I had to get him alone, go up to his room with him, and put the liquid in his drink. The man said the liquid would knock him out. Once he was unconscious, I had to call room service and order champagne.’

  ‘Champagne?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘After I made the call, I was to wait in the room until someone came. They would take pictures of Vernon James and me in “compromising positions”. Then I’d be paid again. My full fee again.’

  ‘So they wanted you to pose for blackmail pictures?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I told the man no. I wouldn’t do it.’

  She took a deep breath, looked off to the side.

  ‘And?’ I prompted.

  ‘He said, “You will do as you’re told. You try and walk out of here, you’ll never walk again. You try and warn Vernon James or anyone, you’ll be sorry.” I got scared. Then he called me by my real name. Not Fabia – my real name. He also told me other things too – very personal things, private matters. He made me understand that…’

  She closed her eyes. Two tears ran down her face.

  ‘They’d looked into you?’ I said.

  She nodded.

  And I got the chills.

  ‘They knew everything. I knew I’d been picked for this. I had to do it. I had no choice.’

  ‘So you went to the ballroom?’

  ‘Yes. The event had started. I just walked in. There was one security guy at the door, but he didn’t stop me.

  ‘Vernon James made his speech. I sat in the light, directly in front of
him. He noticed me as soon as he started talking. He couldn’t stop looking at me. I tried to meet him after he had finished, but there were too many people around. One of the men on the table near where I’d been sitting asked if I was going to the afterparty. I asked him where it was, and he told me. So I decided that was where I’d approach Vernon James.

  ‘I didn’t go there immediately. I was very nervous. I was shaking inside. I had a drink in one of the bars. I stopped in the bathroom to freshen up and get myself together.

  ‘While I was there, another woman came in. She was wearing a green dress too – bright green, like leaves. One of the straps was torn, she was holding the dress up, crying. She kept trying to tie it together, but she could not. There was an attendant in the toilet. She said she could fix the dress for her.’

  ‘You saw Evelyn Bates?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That was the woman they found in Vernon’s suite.’

  She looked confused.

  ‘What time did you see her?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. But that was not the only time I saw her,’ she said. ‘When I came out of the bathroom, I went to find the club, but I went the wrong way. I turned round and retraced my steps. That’s when I saw him, Vernon James.

  ‘He was coming down the corridor. His suit was dirty. He seemed drunk. We talked a little. As we were talking, the girl – Evelyn – passed me. She was going in the direction of the club. I saw her talking to a man.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘I think he was hotel security. He was a bodybuilder type in a black suit with a name-badge, a shaved head, and a plastic earpiece.’

  ‘Did you hear what she was saying?’

  ‘No. Too far away. There were other people in the corridor.’

  ‘What about you and Vernon James?’ I asked.

  ‘We went to a bar on the eleventh floor. He bought drinks. He had vodka straight. I noticed his watch. The Rolex. I asked to see it, so I could distract him. He had problems taking it off. That was when I put the liquid in his glass. He drank it all. Didn’t notice. A little later we went upstairs.

  ‘We got inside his room. We talked for a bit. Then he started kissing me. I went along with it, but I was confused. He was supposed to pass out. But he wasn’t showing any signs of being more than just drunk. In the back of my mind I was really scared. Paranoid. I didn’t know what was going on. Was I being set up instead of him? Was this a cop sting? Or one of my ex-clients playing a trick, I didn’t know.

  ‘He started getting rough. He pinched my nipple, twisted it hard. I bit his lip. He was bleeding. That’s when he went crazy. He touched his mouth, saw the blood and smiled at me. Not a nice smile. This cruel smile. Then like that he slapped my face. BAFF! I screamed. He hit me again. And then he jumped on me.

  ‘I lost my balance and fell on the drinks counter. I knocked all these glasses over. Everything was smashed, there was broken glass everywhere. He tried to pull me on to the couch. I held on to this piece of furniture. I thought it was fixed to the wall, but it moved. It was on wheels.

  ‘He flipped me around and pinned me down with his body so I couldn’t move. He put his belt around my neck, like a noose, and started pulling it tight. It was hard to breathe. He pushed my dress up over my arse. He forced my legs apart. I thought he was going to rape and kill me.

  ‘I was trying to fight, trying to breathe. But I couldn’t. I was trapped by his body. My head was getting light. I was seeing stars.

  ‘And then, suddenly it just stopped. He backed off. I turned round and I saw him standing there, with his trousers down around his ankles and his erection in his hand, but he was dizzy, stumbling. He looked like he didn’t know where he was, what was happening.

  ‘I got the belt off my neck. And then I just freaked. I wanted to kill him. I kicked him in the stomach. He fell over on his back, straight on to the glass. I tried to push the big minibar on him. It went halfway over and everything fell out, all over him. Everything in there was broken. All the bottles. Then I ran out of the room.’

  ‘So you never made the call – for champagne?’

  ‘Of course not. I didn’t even think of that.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘I left the hotel. I was scared. I did not go home,’ she said.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘When you ran out of the room, did you take the lift down?’

  ‘No. It needed a special card. I used the stairs.’

  ‘What time was this, do you know?’

  ‘It was around 12.20 a.m.’

  ‘That specific?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I was still wearing his fucking fake watch.’

  Rudy Saks had told the police – and me – that he’d found the suite undamaged when he’d been up there at 1 a.m. – to deliver champagne.

  Rudy Saks had lied.

  This changed absolutely everything.

  ‘Did anyone see you leave the hotel?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What did you do after you left?’ I asked.

  ‘I went home. Changed my clothes, packed a bag. Then I left town,’ she said. ‘Southend is a good place to lie low. I knew I could get a passport made here, and sell the watch too.’

  ‘And you were going to leave the country?’

  She nodded.

  It was time to bring Janet in.

  ‘Don’t say anything about this to anyone. If the police interview you again, say no comment,’ I said. ‘You’ll go back to your cell. I’ll get you a lawyer. She’s coming from London, so it’ll take a couple of hours. Please sit tight, OK?’

  I got my stuff back at reception and signed out. The sergeant nodded to me as I left.

  Once outside I called Janet.

  ‘Terry, where the hell are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Southend nick,’ I said. ‘I’ve found Fabia. You’ve got to get over here – now.’

  I went down the road, looking for a café. Nothing doing. It had gone six, so they were all shut. I found a pub instead. Not ideal, but the rain was coming down harder, and I needed somewhere to sit and think for a while.

  I ordered coffee and went to a corner table.

  I eyed the beers. Then the bottles of spirits all lined up at the back, inverted, ready to pour. Spotted the Jameson…

  Just one…?

  And a Guinness.

  No!

  I was shaking – not for want of booze, fighting all that temptation – but because of what Fabia had told me, what it meant.

  VJ was innocent.

  He had been set up.

  He hadn’t killed Evelyn Bates.

  So who had?

  My theory: the people who’d hired Fabia had intended to murder her in the room, while VJ was passed out. They’d known about his sexual proclivities, and the type of women he went for. And they’d set him up for the fall.

  Things had gone wrong: the Rohypnol hadn’t kicked in fast enough. Then Fabia had fled and messed up their plans, so they’d grabbed Evelyn instead.

  How that had happened, I didn’t know.

  But she’d been drugged, taken up to Suite 18 and murdered.

  Fabia had last seen her talking to someone from hotel security:

  A bodybuilder type with a shaved head.

  David Stratten had mentioned ‘a big bald bugger’.

  So, where to now?

  The trial would definitely still go ahead. But with Fabia as our main defence witness, it would be very difficult for Carnavale to prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt. Pretty much impossible.

  VJ would either be acquitted, or the trial discontinued.

  And it would all be because of what I’d done today.

  My work. My win.

  Me.

  I’d handed Christine her silver bullet and the gun to fire it with.

  Hell, I’d handed her the silver bombshell…

  My chest swelled and I grinned, and I really wanted to punch the air.

  But not quite…

 
; Look at who this was all for, who I was defending.

  VJ may have been innocent of murder and the victim of a frame-up, but he’d as good as attempted to rape Fabia, and he got his kicks hurting women. The thought of setting him free, putting him back in circulation, made me suddenly very uneasy. This may have been the law, but it wasn’t any kind of justice.

  Was he ever going to pay for anything?

  Janet pulled up outside Southend nick on the back of a dispatch rider’s motorbike at 7.45 p.m. The rain was bucketing down.

  She’d come in her raincoat with waterproofs underneath. She handed the rider her helmet and we headed inside.

  As we crossed the parking lot, a squad car pulled up and two uniformed cops got out in a hurry. They keyed open the door. We followed them in, quickly.

  An alarm was sounding. A long loud pulsing drone, with a couple of seconds’ silence in-between. The counter was unmanned. There was no one around at all.

  Janet and I looked at each other.

  What was going on?

  Phones were ringing. All of them at once, it seemed.

  We stepped up to the desk and waited.

  The sergeant who’d signed me in came through the door leading to the cells and interview rooms.

  He looked at us, at me specifically.

  ‘That’s him, that’s the fucker, right there,’ he shouted, pointing at me.

  Next thing I knew, my arms were grabbed from behind and I was pushed face down on the desk.

  ‘What’s this? What’s going on?’ I yelled.

  The sergeant was now back behind the desk, looking down at me.

  ‘You’re under arrest for the murder of Fabia Masson.’

  Part Three

  The Verdict

  54

  They put me in an interrogation room and left me alone to stew for a couple of hours.

  It was a narrow space of perforated walls and thin grey carpet, much of it filled by a big metal desk, shaped like a sawed-off grand piano, with only a cramped sluice to manoeuvre in. I sat with my back to the wall, flanking what I guessed was a two-way mirror. The chair was too small, the room too hot and too bright, but there was exactly nothing I could do about it. The basics were now officially out of reach, beyond my control. This was the sharp end of the law. Next stop: prison.

  I was in a daze. I knew it wasn’t a nightmare, but reality had slipped its moorings all the same. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, except that I’d been arrested for Fabia Masson’s murder.