The Verdict (23 page)

David Stratten?

That was the same name and number listed as a contact on VJ’s list of ongoing business deals – one of the two that had been scrubbed out.

I checked the list again.

Yup.

Stratford Quakers. Contact: David Stratten. 07423 814921.
 

Was Adolf looking into
my
case?

I’d got the key in my front door, when Arun came staggering out of his flat, face bloated and blotchy, moving like a cork trying to stay upright in a whirlpool.

‘Awrite, Terry?’

I nodded to him.

Piss off
– fast!
 

He burped loudly, put his fist to his mouth afterwards, giggled at the memory of manners past. I smelled the beers he’d had for breakfast and lunch, the ones he was having for dinner.

‘I got sumfin’ for you.’

‘What?’

‘This geezer dropped it off.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Left it with me, dinn’e?’

‘Where
is
it?’

‘He gave it me ta safekeep for you.’

‘
With YOU?
Where
is it?’

He pointed to his flat. I heard his baby crying inside.

‘Can I have it, then. Please?’

‘Yeah, sure… ’course. But… um… ur…’

He scratched his thatch of chestnut hair. A scrap of tin foil floated out and rested on his shoulder.

‘I was finkin’, right. I don’t wanna be…
vague
or nuffink… but can I get like a… a reward, please?’

‘A
what
?’

‘A reward.’

‘You want me to
pay
you for holding my mail?’

‘Lotta dishonest people around ’ere, you know, Tel? And I coulda nicked it m’self for all you know.’

I took a step towards him.

‘Arun. Get me my mail –
now
!’

He burped again.

‘Awrite, bruv, awrite.’ He backed off towards his door. ‘No need to get stressed. Bad for yer elf.’

Swayne answered on the first ring, like he’d been expecting my call.

‘What’s on this?’ I asked, looking at the unmarked DVD he’d dropped off.

‘CCTV from the hotel. Footage from the nightclub entrance. Evelyn Bates is on it. So’s the Strangler.’

‘
One
disc?’

‘All they’ve got for the evening of March 16th. They had some kind of power failure. Took out most of the cameras. There’s nothing from the lobby or any of the floors or lifts.’

‘How convenient,’ I said, suspicions crowding in.

‘Shit happens.’

‘The day of the murder?’

‘Way it goes sometimes. But look on the bright side.’

‘What?’

‘The CPS haven’t got that disc yet.’

‘How come?’

‘They got given a dodgy DVD. They haven’t got round to requesting a replacement,’ he said.

No point in asking how he knew that. The information had probably come from the same place he got the disc.

Christine and Janet were going to want to see the footage first thing tomorrow. Which meant I was going to have to view it now, sort the relevant from the useless.

I turned on our PC.

‘Have you heard of an investigator called David Stratten?’ I asked him.

‘Is the Pope a Nazi?’

‘Do tell.’

‘Dodgy Dave, or Diamond Dave, depending on whether you’re snoopee or snooper. He’s a techie. Speciality: phone and computer hacking. Also a dab hand at surveillance,’ he said. ‘Up till a few years ago he worked for the papers, whichever one paid the most. He had a good thing going with the
Daily Chronicle
. He was their go-to poop-scoop.’

‘What happened?’

‘He reinvented himself as a CSC – a corporate security consultant. Theoretically he sets up internet firewalls and secure phone connections for businesses. In reality he’s a spy.’

‘Hacking the competition?’ I said.

‘Whatever they desire. City banks have a lot of CSCs on the payroll. It’s the next level up from insider trading.’

So what did Stratten have to do with VJ and the Stratford Quakers?

I’d looked them up before I left the office. They were a Quaker group who’d been based in Stratford since Victorian times. They ran a homeless shelter and soup kitchen in the area. It really didn’t fit at all.

‘Why d’you want to know anyway?’ Swayne asked. ‘I know you’re not replacing me with him.’

‘Don’t flatter yourself.’

‘Sid’d never employ a PI who worked for the press.’

‘Why not?’

‘They’re mercenaries. No discretion, no loyalty. Nature of the sewer they swim in.’

‘And you’re different?’

‘I’ve never crossed a client. And I’ve never worked for their competition,’ he said. ‘I’m going to hazard a guess here. Stratten’s name came up in connection with Vernon James.’

‘Our client thinks he’s the victim of a conspiracy.’

‘Course he does,’ Swayne said. ‘You know Elvis runs al-Qaeda from a chipshop in Bradford, right?’

‘So I keep hearing,’ I said.

The PC had powered up. I smelled the dinner waiting for me on the table, heard Amy talking next door, and I thought of getting the first of what would be several pots of coffee ready for the all-nighter ahead.

‘Have you examined CCTV footage before?’ Swayne asked.

‘No.’

‘It’s an art,’ he said. ‘Never watch it the same way twice.’

‘Could you be a little more cryptic?’

‘You’ll figure it out. You went to Cambridge.’

‘What did you just say?’

‘You heard.’

And he hung up.

‘What do you think?’ Janet asked.

‘We haven’t formed a fist yet, but we’ve certainly got a finger to poke in the prosecution’s eye,’ Christine said.

The defence team had convened in a windowless office in Christine’s chambers and watched the CCTV. Actually, ‘watch’ doesn’t describe what we’d been doing for the past two hours. We’d
scrutinised
the footage, all but put it under a microscope and prodded at it with probes and needles. It had been played half a dozen times, twice at normal speed, then in slow motion, then significant parts had been reviewed frame by frame, not to mention magnified and brightened too.

I hadn’t had much sleep. I was running on fumes, will-power and coffee with a Red Bull chaser. I’d been up all night doing the exact same thing we were doing now. Watching footage of Evelyn and VJ in the Casbah nightclub.

‘This affects their take on motive,’ Christine continued. ‘Prior to this video, the prosecution would’ve had it that Vernon went up to Evelyn
specifically
in the club. As in: he chose her. As in: her murder was premeditated.

‘The tale of the tape has it differently. His motive for going up to her was commonplace. Sex. He fancied her – from a distance, with her back turned. But when he saw what she looked like from the front he either changed his mind – or, as he has it, realised he’d made a mistake, and backed off. Quickly.’

We’d seen exactly that. VJ approached Evelyn while she was on the phone, her back to him. He tapped her on the shoulder. She turned round. They appeared to have a brief exchange of words. Then VJ backed off – almost immediately – palms out in apology and the name of peace.

‘Beer goggler’s remorse,’ Redpath chuckled. ‘That’ll play well with the men in the jury.’

‘And lose us the women, Liam,’ Janet said, sharply.

But what he’d said made me think of something.

‘Liam isn’t all that wrong.’

Janet turned her icy blue beams on me.

‘Vernon’s eyesight’s not too good,’ I said.

‘He’s short-sighted. So? He had his contacts in that night,’ she said.

‘When was his last eye test?’

‘What’s your point?’

‘Assuming he takes the stand, he’s going to have to explain how he mistook five-foot-four, plump Evelyn Bates, for a woman he’s described as “six foot and slim, but curvy”. Their only resemblance is hair and dress colour. He wasn’t pissed enough.’

‘Good point. Talk to his optometrist. With any luck he was overdue a check-up,’ Janet said.

Christine took a sip of her herbal tea and cleared her throat.

‘From what we’ve seen here, Vernon and Evelyn barely spoke, never danced, and definitely did
not
leave together.’

‘And he didn’t spike her drink with Rohypnol there either,’ Redpath added.

I looked at the screen. The image was frozen on the empty entrance, seconds after VJ had walked out at 11.19 p.m. He’d spent slightly over an hour there. Evelyn had left at 11.13. Six minutes apart.

‘We have to figure out how Carnavale will spin this,’ Christine said. ‘His initial theory, that Vernon met Evelyn in the club and developed enough of a rapport with her to invite her for a drink, and then to his room, simply does not hold. So where’s he going to go now? Remember, he has to prove murder, not manslaughter. And his narrative has to be consistent.’

She paused. I was getting to know her through her pauses. She’d sometimes use them for dramatic effect – the quiet before she hit you with a motherlode of insight; or, when going over VJ’s statements, to communicate very subtly that she thought he was talking crap. And then there was
this
kind of pause, which was really a time-out silence while she ordered her thoughts and chose her words.

‘What I’d do in his place is play a variant of the wounded pride angle,’ she said. ‘Vernon went up to Evelyn and tried to chat her up. She told him where to go. That hurt his pride. Got his blood up. To a Master of the Universe like Vernon that was an insult. He saw Evelyn as a
challenge
. He
had
to have her – out of principle. This then introduces the anger, the
rage
that compelled him to strangle her later.’

‘But how did he get her up to his room?’ Janet asked. ‘He didn’t follow her. He left six minutes after she did.’

‘She’d ripped her dress. She was exposed, embarrassed,’ Christine said. ‘Where would she have gone? The club is on the first floor. Her room is on the fourth. She’d have to get a lift up there. And there were plenty of people around. She wouldn’t want to be seen going around half naked. Where did she go?’

Christine looked at me to state the obvious.

‘The nearest bathroom?’

‘Yes. It’s on the same floor, between the club and the lifts,’ Christine said.

‘Vernon says that after he left the club, he walked to the lifts. It’s perfectly feasible he met Evelyn as she came out of the bathroom. He apologised to her. He was sincere and charming. They went up to the bar on the eleventh floor.’

‘She fixed her dress in
six minutes
?’ Janet said.

‘More like four, or even five.’

‘Impossible,’ Janet said.

‘Not to a red-blooded man like Franco. To him all she had to do is tie a knot and walk out. Nothing about adjusting the dress, making it look presentable,’ Christine said. ‘And, of course, she would’ve done her make-up too – all of which I’ll be sure to highlight for the
women
in the jury.’

She addressed the last to Redpath, who winced on cue.

‘What about her phone?’ Christine asked.

‘She lost it when she got knocked over by that conga line,’ I said.

Now that bit of video had made everyone laugh when they first saw it. Evelyn, seconds after she’d talked to VJ, getting crashed into by someone in the conga line that had burst through the door almost at the same time. She went flying face forward off the screen.

‘He said he picked it up and put it in his pocket. He said he was going to hand it in,’ I said.

Christine coughed and cleared her throat.

‘This video isn’t a silver bullet, but it’s definitely a silver dart,’ she said. ‘We can discount some of the prosecution witness statements – the waiters in the bar, who saw them “dancing” and “frolicking around” together. It’s obvious from the tape they were doing no such thing. She fell over, or was pushed. And she landed on him and they both went down.

‘Vernon says her hair got tangled up in his clothes and she scratched his face while trying to stand up. That explains the hair on his person, and on the couch. It also explains the lipstick on his collar, his skin under her nails, and his saliva on her fingers.

‘And it’s also obvious, from the way she’s moving when she leaves the club, that her dress is torn and she’s holding it in place. She hurries out, hunched over, holding her modesty by the straps. So, from that we can assume the dress was ripped during the melee with Vernon. That accounts for the matching green fibres the police found on his suit and in his
suite
. In other words, we’ve just moved a chunk of the forensic evidence out of the suite and into the club – well away from the crime scene.’

It was a great argument. And I could see a jury wavering, hesitating,
doubting
. I wondered what Carnavale’s comeback could be.

‘That’s good,’ Janet said. ‘But we still need to account for one thing – one key piece of evidence against us.’

‘What?’ Christine asked.

‘The body in the bed.’

The next morning I decided to visit David Stratten.

I wanted to know what Adolf was up to. She hadn’t wanted me to see what Kev was giving her. That quick, sneaky look my way, that sharp ‘
Shush!
’. She was either looking into VJ’s case, or she was violating ethics while working on hers.

This was about her getting the paralegal job. I may have been getting fired, and the promotion and the degree were as good as hers, but I wasn’t just going to roll over and accept my fate. She didn’t deserve that easy a ride.

I called Janet, put my thumb up my left nostril and told her I was ill. I assured her I’d be in later.

She said I sounded terrible and wished me a speedy recovery.

Stratten’s offices were in a three-storey semi-detached in Tufnell Park. Thick, shiny ivy covered the lower walls, but advanced no further than the window. The tendrils had been pruned back to preserve the effect and the house itself.

I rang the bell.

The short squat man who answered had a worried look on his face he was trying to cover with a smile. He’d missed shaving for a day or two, and didn’t appear to have slept in as long either. His skin had the yellowy texture of fresh dough, and his small, bloodshot eyes were suspended in shadows. I couldn’t tell what colour they were.

‘I’m looking for David Stratten?’ I said.

‘That’s me, yeah. Come in.’ He stepped aside and beckoned me in.

Not what I was expecting. I didn’t move.

‘David Stratten, the investigator?’

‘Yes, the same,’ he said, impatiently. ‘Come in, come in.’

The foyer made me think of how an upscale brothel might’ve looked in the swinging sixties. Oak beams on the floor, garish turquoise and black tiles on the walls, and a gilt-framed theatre mirror complete with bulbs.

I smelled coffee and burned toast in the air.

Stratten led me into the front room, which was his office. There were filing cabinets, wall-to-wall shelves stacked with ring binders, and an expensive-looking orthopaedic executive chair.

He was dressed like he was running late for a business meeting. He had on plain dark-blue suit trousers and a blue-and-white gingham shirt with silver cufflinks.

‘That’s all the receipts and invoices,’ he said, pointing to three cardboard boxes on a desk, stuffed to subsidence with paper. ‘Over there’s the bank statements, credit card statements and whatnot.’

Those were in a trio of splitting orange recycling bags.

‘Um…’

‘Sorry, they’re in a mess and out of sequence,’ he said sheepishly. The ingratiating smile grew. ‘I had a couple of mishaps when I was pulling it all together. It was a bit short notice.’

‘Who do you think I am?’ I asked.

‘Inland Revenue, right?’

‘The taxman?’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Oh…’ The smile disappeared and his round cheeks deflated like a stabbed soufflé. ‘Who are you, then?’

‘My name’s Terry Flynt. I’m from Kopf-Randall-Purdom, the solicitors.’

‘
Solicitors?
I didn’t call you.’

‘It’s about some work you did for a client of ours. You looked into the Stratford Quakers?’

Stratten thought, head back, hands in pockets. His eyes traced an arc across the ceiling before they came back to me.

‘This isn’t a good time,’ he said, gesturing to the boxes. ‘I’m busy.’

‘Tax inspection?’

‘Yeah. Due any minute. Fuckin’ nightmare.’

He moved towards the doorway and beckoned me to follow him out.

The situation was slipping from my hands. I racked my brains to remember what they’d taught us back when I was door-to-door selling in Croydon.
Always assume the close
. Act like you’ve already got what you want. And, most of all…

‘It’s just a couple of questions, really, then I’ll be on my way. Won’t take long,’ I said.

He looked down the corridor at his front door, and then at his watch. He wasn’t wearing one.

‘All right then. If it’s quick.’

His hands went back in his pockets. His hair was several shades of brown at the top and greyish-white at the temples.

‘The work you did on the Quakers. What did it entail?’

‘What’s this in relation to?’

‘We’re defending Vernon James. And we’re looking into all his business deals. It’s just routine. Your name was on a list of contacts.’

‘Right,’ he said, nodding. ‘I wasn’t investigating
them
. And, for the record, I didn’t know I was working for your guy. Not officially.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘His lawyer hired me. Not Vernon James himself. Never met the fella. That’s the way things usually work in our trade. A second- or third-party approach.’

‘A middleman?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So dirty hands stay clean?’

That got him smiling again. No obsequiousness now, but a sly, knowing grin that put small, deep dark rhomboid dimples in either cheek. Diamond Dave.

‘What did he want with the Quakers?’

‘Not that I asked, ’cause I never go into ulterior motive, but he was looking at bidding on some of their land. The Quakers were being coy about who his competition was.’

‘And he was using you to find that out?’

‘Yup.’

Then he laughed and shook his head.

‘It was one of the hardest cases I’ve ever worked.’

I frowned.

‘The Quakers didn’t do business over the phone or by computer. Everything was face to face. I’m into techy stuff. Hacking, basically. So I was like Spider Man in the desert here. I had to do it old school – go in and bug their HQ. Hadn’t done that in years.’

‘Where’s the HQ?’

‘Stratford. Your bloke was after the land.’

‘Did you find out who the competition was?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And…’

‘Client confidentiality, mate. Ahmad Sihl knows, obviously.’ Stratten winked. Dodgy Dave.

I still hadn’t got to first base with him. I couldn’t just bring up the
Daily Chronicle
, even if time was short and getting shorter.

The sales manual oracle needed consulting again:

When you sense a close coming over the hill, get closer – be a friend, work the empathy angle.

‘What’s this about a tax inspection?’ I asked.

He blew out his smile in a long woe-is-me sigh.

‘’Bout a month ago I was due to meet some clients. I had a set of meetings scheduled. Including Ahmad, funnily enough, to talk about the Quakers.

‘Eight-thirty in the morning, the bell rings. I go to the door. A man and a woman are standing there. Smart – suits, coats. But officious too. I thought they were cops, right? Except they’ve got this big bald bugger behind them. Bouncer type, you know?

‘The woman shows me ID and a warrant. Inland Revenue. HMRC. Says I’ve got undeclared earnings going back three years, and asks – no,
demands
– to come in and inspect my business premises.

‘So I let them in. What choice do I have? Death and taxes, right? Always get you. They start removing everything – computers, hard drives, flashdrives, paperwork, you name it. I complain. I say, “This is interfering with my business. You can’t do this.” And the woman says, “Yes we can, ’cause it’s been authorised by a magistrate. Read the warrant.” So I check it again. There’s an official stamp on it.

‘They took
everything
. All my gear. The muscle loaded it up in a van outside. They were dead polite, the lot of ’em.
Thanks for your cooperation
, and all that. The woman gave me a card and told me to call the next day, to find out what the next stage’d be.’

Stratten rubbed his face and made his bristly chin crackle.

‘That fucked me up, let me tell you. Not only was I facing God knows what they were going to throw at me, but they’d just cost me about two hundred grand’s worth of business. One of the computers they took had all my active jobs on it,’ he said.

‘When did this happen?’ I asked.

‘St Paddy’s Day… um…’

‘March 17th?’

‘Yeah, that’s it. Anyway, I called the number on the card the next day,’ he said and smiled again. Shook his head. He’d gone a little red.

‘And…’

‘Have you ever called the tax office?’

‘No.’

‘Consider yourself lucky. I got put on hold for about forty minutes, waiting for an answer. All the while this pre-recorded message is telling me to go on the website!
Sorry, I can’t do that. You took my fuckin’ computers!

‘Then someone
finally
came on and told me an adviser would be with me shortly. “Shortly” took for ever. At this point I’d been on the phone something like two hours.

‘When the adviser came on, I tell ’em why I’m calling. They didn’t say anything. They just transferred me to another department. Didn’t know what it was called.

‘No holding this time. Phone’s answered immediately. I give this woman on the other end my name, NI number and the case reference number from the warrant. “How can I help you?” she says.

‘I asked to speak to Heather Gifford. That was the name on the inspector’s card. “Sorry, no one here by the name.”

‘I told her why I was calling, what had happened. She told me it wasn’t them. First of all, they would’ve written to me before coming round. And they wouldn’t have taken my stuff.’

‘So you got robbed?’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I mean this lot were good. They didn’t even have to give me a fake phone number, ’cause they knew most people lose the will to live trying to get through to the right tax department on the phone.’

He chuckled.

‘They got everything on every case I’ve worked on in the last five years. And I didn’t suspect a sodding thing. Everything about them looked legit. Right down to that warrant.’

‘Weren’t you due to meet Ahmad Sihl on March 17th?’ I asked.

‘Yeah. But he wasn’t the only client I had meetings with that day. The others were
much
bigger fish with a lot more to lose, if you know what I mean.’

Now my head was churning.

‘Who do you think’s behind this?’

‘Got a list of suspects as long as my dick,’ he said.

‘You said earlier that Ahmad knows who the competition was? He got that from you?’

‘Course. I remembered the names. I had a lot more information that I’d recorded, but the fuckers got all of that.’

I still wanted to know about the
Daily Chronicle
, but now it wasn’t such a priority. The Quakers’ land deal was. It was too much of a coincidence that Stratten had been robbed the day VJ had been arrested.

‘So you’ve got an
actual
tax inspection now?’

Dodgy Dave smiled and shook his head again.

‘Here’s the kicker. The minute you ring up the tax office – for anything – you’re on their radar. And I
definitely
raised a flag, ringing up about a raid,’ he said. ‘A couple of weeks ago I got a letter from an inspector saying they were coming round to look at my books.’

God had a twisted sense of humour, I thought. But He was funny with it too. God
had
to be Irish.

‘I’ll tell you something for nothing, though, ’bout your bloke,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘He’s guilty.’

‘Why do you say that?’

The bell rang.

‘That’ll be the
real
taxman,’ Stratten said.

‘Tell me. Please.’

‘Ask Sihl. You’re both on the same side, right?’