The Verdict (3 page)

When the lift doors opened, Vernon did the gentlemanly thing and stepped aside to let her pass. He would have done it anyway, because he knew his good manners and how they spoke volumes to the aware, but he also used the opportunity to check her out again and take her in.

Her dress exposed much of her back, all the way down to the absolute lowest limit of her spine, stopping tantalisingly close to the bold convex swell of her buttocks. He let his eyes slide down the groove of her vertebral column and linger on the fine pale down matting her tawny skin. She was perfect.

In the suite, they stood by the floor-to-ceiling window, taking in the view.

‘Is this how you see the world?’ she asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘From up on high, like a god? Everyone small and insignificant and crushable?’

‘Just tonight,’ he said. It was raining outside, and the glass was speckled and running.

He took her hand gently and turned her towards him. Then he pulled her a little closer. He started kissing her. There was an initial resistance on her part. Her mouth was set and unyielding, her arms down by her sides. He stopped and asked if she was OK.

Instead of answering, she grabbed his head and brought her mouth to his. They tongue-torqued. She nibbled his bottom lip.

Then she bit it.

He stepped back with a gasp and touched his mouth for blood. She apologised with a giggle, said it was over-enthusiasm. And maybe the wine too. He said OK and excused himself.

He went into the hallway bathroom. She’d drawn blood from his lip, but it didn’t make much difference to his overall appearance because he looked a mess. He was dishevelled, his face was scratched, his shirt pocket was torn and hanging loose, and the left sleeve of his jacket was wet and filthy with booze and dancefloor dirt.

He splashed cold water on his face, which chased some of the mist out of his head.

When he came out he found her standing by the couch and coffee table in the middle of the room, adjusting her dress about her hips.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Make it up to me,’ he said.

He took her face in his hands and kissed her. Again he met hard, closed lips. What was the matter with her? This was starting to irritate him. If she was teasing him, he was way too tired and booze-jaded. If she was trying to provoke him, it was working.

He started to say something when Fabia came at him again. She nibbled at his neck and put her tongue in his ear. Then she pushed his jacket off and undid his belt, then his trousers. She licked her fingers and slipped them through the fly of his boxers and freed his hardening prick. He groaned, loving how she was taking the initiative, her aggression.

She stopped abruptly and took a few steps back.

‘What’s wrong now?’ he asked, with a frustrated sigh.

She looked him up and down and smiled – a strange, dislocated grimace, her lips twisted into a sneering parody of happiness. He noticed she was trembling.

‘Are you OK?’

She glanced towards the door, then back at him.

‘I thought I could do this,’ she said, under her breath.

‘What?’

‘I can’t do this,’ she said, louder, taking another step away.

His irritation ran to anger.

‘What’s going on? Is this some kind of game?’

‘I’m sorry.’ She backed off, holding up her hands, palms out. ‘I shouldn’t have come here.’

‘Why
did
you, then?’ he snarled.

She wasn’t moving. She certainly wasn’t leaving. She was standing there, almost naked in that ultra-tight dress, the material moulding her concave stomach so perfectly he could see the diamond hollow of her navel and the impression of the ring it was pierced with. And her breasts were bulging and subsiding with every deep anxious breath she was taking.

And she wasn’t moving.

She wasn’t…

Which meant:

She
wanted
him…

Like this…

NOW
.

He went for her.

She recoiled and fell back on to the drinks cabinet, sending all the immaculately stacked glassware on top – crystal tumblers, wine glasses, champagne flutes and decanters – crashing to the floor.

She got herself upright, gripping the edge of the cabinet for support.

Vernon came at her again, but his undone trousers had slipped down past his knees and puddled around his ankles, stopping him in his stride. And his dick was poking out through his boxers like the gnomon of a sundial.

As he went to pull up his trousers, Fabia kicked him hard in the stomach. He caught the full wallop of the blow, compacted into the tip of her pointed shoe, right in the solar plexus. He cried out. Vodka and bile shot up to his gullet. He sank to his knees, gagging and gasping.

He tried to get up, but the pain was too much, and he was too pissed, the alcohol all over him like a lead net.

He sat down, briefly, trying to breathe through a tightening chest, the room tilting this way and that.

He tried to get up. He couldn’t.

He couldn’t even sit any more.

He
had
to lie down.

…

And he did, gently lowering himself on his side to alleviate the churning pain in his stomach.

Then he rolled on his back.

Fabia hadn’t moved. She was glowering down at him, breathing through her mouth. Her eyes were wild.

He was completely at her mercy.

‘Please…’ he whispered.

She snorted. Her eyes searched the room, quickly. She stared hard at the spume of broken glass on the floor, sifted through it with her foot.

Then she turned to the cabinet. She pushed her fingers through the gap between the wall and its edge and started pulling at it.

It was on wheels, but it was a big heavy thing, hard to shift.

She put her back into it. She grunted and cursed as she pushed and shoved the cabinet across the carpet. The contents rolled and bumped and bashed around inside with every violent twist and lurch. Bottles broke and liquid leaked through the gaps, running trickles at first, and then a steady babble of mixed booze. The stench of alcohol filled the room.

Vernon knew what she was going to do and he tried to move, but he couldn’t. The pain was so intense it had virtually paralysed him. He could barely feel his legs, let alone get them to move. And he felt pissed too – really really unbelievably pissed. More pissed than he’d ever been. He wanted to pass out. He wanted to be sick. But he fought it – fought it – fought it.

Finally, Fabia had manoeuvred the bar in range.

She stepped behind it and pushed it towards Vernon with her foot.

The cabinet toppled forward, and the minibar fridge inside slid down with a deep glissando. It smacked into the double doors and threw them open. Then the fridge’s doors were flung open and its contents vomited out in a bright wet splash of booze, soft drink and shattered glass, drenching Vernon from the waist down.

But neither fridge nor cabinet fell over. They were stopped at a forward tilt, their full collapse arrested by the parted doors, wedged open on the carpet, and the flex and plug, which hadn’t popped out of the socket.

Fabia looked around confused.

Not what she’d expected to happen either.

Then she saw the flex and swore in French at the top of her voice.

‘
Putain de merde!
’

Vernon lay there, fearing what she’d do next as he gripped at the carpet and tried to drag himself away, knowing it was futile.

Fabia stepped over the flex and glanced back down at him. He could tell she still really wanted to hurt him, but she was exhausted and out of breath.

She looked him up and down, sneering at his shrivelled-up dick, at his very vulnerability.

Then she flounced out of the room, cursing the whole way to the door.

Vernon lay on the floor a while. There was broken glass everywhere. His award was smashed in two. The upturned drinks cabinet was sitting in a pungent lake of blended booze.

He eventually managed to get up.

He was dizzy and unbelievably tired, his internal systems crashing all over. He looked towards the bedroom, but knew he wouldn’t make it that far.

He stared at the wall in front of him, which the cabinet had covered.

He thought of the bill he’d get. Thousands and thousands.

He thought of phoning for help… security… a doctor…

But he couldn’t even see a phone.

And then he noticed something lying there, on the floor, right under the fridge’s taut electrical flex. Something black and small and soft. For an instant he thought it was a mouse, but this thing was the wrong colour, and shape, and it wasn’t moving, and… the hotel was too new and expensive and…

He picked it up.

It was a tiny black thong, with a bright pink bow in the front, a rhombus-shaped hole in the back, and a snap button on the waistband, which was undone.

He slumped down on the couch and held it up. He closed the waistband and twirled it around his finger.

He guessed it was Fabia’s. He’d seen her smoothing her dress down about the hips; maybe she’d slipped off her underwear when he was in the bathroom.

He thought about her and all her potential, and what they would have been doing about now if things hadn’t turned out so badly.

Then – unbelievably, to him – he was hard again.

What was that thing she’d done to him?

That thing he’d liked so much?

Oh yeah…

He licked his fingers and closed his eyes and saw her…

He jerked off and came quickly in the thong.

When he’d finished, he tossed it at the wastepaper basket.

Bull’s-eye.
 

He chuckled.

Crazy bitch
, he thought. At least he’d got
something
out of her.

Then he stretched out on the couch, closed his eyes and fell asleep.

And that is
exactly
how he told me it happened.

When the news broke that Vernon James had been arrested for murder, I had mixed feelings. Even though we’d once been best friends, I hoped he’d be found guilty and go to jail for life.

But that wasn’t the cause of conflict.

Let me explain.

I was working late as usual when the call came.

‘Terry?
Terry?
’ It was Janet Randall, my boss and partner of the legal firm I was employed by, Kopf-Randall-Purdom. KRP, for short.

I knew Janet was in one of her last-minute/need-it-yesterday/the-end-is-nigh panics, because I could hear her smoking on the other end of the line, taking a deep drag, holding it in. Which meant this was a
serious
panic. She’d quit five or six years ago, but she was one of those ex-smokers who always reached for cigarettes in times of stress. They made her, if anything, even more agitated.

‘What’s up?’

‘Thank God!’ she said. I’d taken my time answering the phone, hoping it’d stop ringing so I could finish what I was doing and go home. ‘Ahmad Sihl just called me.’

‘Who?’ I asked, fighting back a yawn.

‘Only one of
the
top five corporate lawyers in the country. In fact, make that top
three
.’

‘Probably why I haven’t heard of him,’ I quipped.

There was a double-edged joke in the office about corporate lawyers not being ‘real’ lawyers because they only saw what a courtroom looked like on TV dramas. And KRP didn’t just handle criminal law. The firm also had corporate, tax and marital divisions. Those were the biggest and most lucrative sections of the business, the money-spitting hubs, and boy did they like reminding ‘the criminals’ – as they called us – who we owed our livelihoods to.

The name Ahmad Sihl did ring a bell, but I couldn’t quite place it. I was tired and thinking of home; my wife and two kids, my dinner, the kids’ homework.

‘He represents Vernon James,’ Janet said.

That
name I knew, and knew well.

But, initially, I thought I’d misheard.

‘Who?’

‘Who?
Who?
Are you an owl?
Vernon James
.’

I swallowed. Something in me went cold. My hand tightened to a fist around the phone.

And my legs turned to jelly.

‘Hello… Are you there?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, trying to stop the tremor from getting at my throat. ‘Go on.’

‘Do you know who Vernon James is?’

‘Sure.’ And I reeled off his CV: founder and owner of VJ Capital Management, a hugely successful hedge fund. The
Sunday Times
Rich List estimated his fortune at £145 million. Age: thirty-eight. Homes in New York, Paris, London and Grantchester, a village outside Cambridge. Married, three daughters…

‘I stand corrected! How come you know so much about him?’

‘I read the business pages,’ I replied, hurriedly. ‘What about him?’

‘He’s been arrested for murder.’

‘
Murder?
Who? When?
’ I couldn’t contain my – well,
excitement
; because that’s what it was. It went through me in a warm intoxicating surge. I got light-headed, dizzy. I was standing and had to sit down.

Then I realised something was off.

‘What’s this got to do with us?’ I asked.

‘Just about
everything
,’ Janet said. ‘Vernon doesn’t have a criminal lawyer. Ahmad’s asked
me
to represent him.’

‘Oh…’ was all I could say to that. The ground had just given way under my feet, and I was fast-treading thin air.

‘Terry, do you know how big this is going to be?’ Janet said, puffing away. I could almost see her smiling through the smoke. ‘We are talking
the
biggest trial in the country. This is
exactly
what we need. You know how I’ve been trying to get Sid Kopf to expand our division? This is
just
the kind of case I can use.’

‘Sure…’ I said. But I was only half-listening.

‘You know what this means for
you
?’ Janet said.

Of course I knew. The Call and Response Rule, aka: the Ownership Rule.
It called, you answered, it’s yours
.

Although the call had come through to my colleague, Bella, who sat opposite me, I’d picked up the phone, therefore I was working the case.

‘Yeah…?’

‘What’s the matter?’ Janet asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘This is the biggest break you’ll ever get, Terry. Or do you want to stay a clerk all your life?’

‘Long day,’ I said.

‘Better get used to it,’ she said. ‘You know if this goes well, it could mean you get the nod for the degree?’

And the hits just kept on coming…

Every two years KRP rewarded its best clerk with a fully funded law degree. No one from the criminal division had ever won it. Our branch was too small, our cases too trifling, too under the radar. The degree invariably went to someone from corporate or tax. The prize was due to be given out this year. Sid Kopf, our CEO, had hinted that he was looking to break with tradition. Now everyone had perked up and started plotting, especially Bella, who’d already been trying to do me over from my first day on the job, three months ago. My catching the most high-profile case our division had ever had was going to mean outright war between us.

‘I need you to do something for me right now,’ Janet said. ‘I have to go and see Vernon at Charing Cross nick in the next hour. I don’t have my pen with me. I left it in my office.’

She always used the same fountain pen when she was working a case. She thought it brought her luck. She told me where to find it and asked me to bring it round to her house.

I said sure and hung up.

Then I sat on the floor and put my head in my hands.

Vernon James
– arrested for murder
.

Of all the payback scenarios I’d conjured up in my head, I’d never once imagined it would be in a judicial setting – and least of all, with me
defending
him.