The Verdict by Nick Stone

witnesses: three were waiting staff in the hotel nightclub where Vernon went after the award ceremony. Two saw him and the victim dancing together. The third says she saw them rolling about on the floor.
    ‘“Rolling about on the floor”?’
    ‘The club got pretty rowdy, apparently,’ Janet said. ‘The most damning statement so far is from a barman in the Circle, a few floors up from the nightclub. He says he served Vernon and a blonde in a green dress shortly before midnight. They sat in a corner, had a drink, talked, “looked intimate” – his words – and then left together, approximately half an hour later. Again, he positively photo-ID’d the victim as the woman.’
    ‘What did the client have to say to that?’ Kopf asked.
    ‘He’s sticking to his story. Except for one detail. He had another look at the victim’s photo, and now insists she
wasn’t
the woman he went to his room with. He says Evelyn Bates looked nothing like this “Fabia”.
    ‘But he admits to meeting the victim in the nightclub, by accident. He was looking for Fabia and mistook the victim for her, because they were both wearing green dresses. While they were talking they both got knocked over. She tore her dress and left the club. He then —’
    Kopf held up his hand.
    ‘OK. Enough,’ he said. ‘His story’s a mess. Obviously made up on the hoof.’
    ‘My thoughts exactly,’ Janet said.
    ‘Did you tell him?’
    ‘I told him how it’ll look to a jury. And I outlined the police’s case.’
    ‘Did you suggest a plea?’
    ‘Of course. I told him if he pleads guilty now, we could negotiate in his favour.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘He refused. He insists he’s innocent. He says he never brought Evelyn Bates up to his room. He clearly remembers lying down on the couch, and waking up there at daybreak,’ she said.
    ‘When do you think they’ll charge him?’
    ‘The autopsy’s due soon. They could have him in front of a magistrate first thing Monday.’
    ‘Any chance he’ll change his mind?’
    ‘Not at the moment,’ Janet said.
    There wasn’t even the suggestion of a
presumption
of innocence here. We were a defence team in name only. I might as well have been working for the prosecution. But I held my tongue.
    ‘So we’re potentially in trial mode. We need to —’ Kopf said, but was interrupted by a knock on the door.
    His PA looked in.
    ‘Mr Kopf, I’m sorry to interrupt but Scott Nagle’s on the phone. Shall I put it through to here?’
    ‘No. I’ll take it in my office,’ Kopf said. He looked from Janet to me. ‘Let’s have a short break.’
    After he’d left, I turned to Janet.
    ‘Who’s Scott Nagle?’ I asked.
    ‘There are people who make you jump, and people who make you ask, “How high?”
before
you jump,’ Janet said. ‘Nagle is the firm’s biggest client. And we’re all his pole-vaulters.’
    ‘What does he do?’ I asked.
    ‘What hasn’t he done?’ she smiled.
    ‘I mean for a living.’
    ‘None of our clients do anything for a living, Terry. They’re way past that. They all have what Americans call “Fuck-Off Money”.’
    And she went back to her three stacks. I wanted to see the crime-scene photos, but I didn’t want to ask right now. Too crude, too voyeuristic for a future lawyer. I needed to concern myself with higher things, like police reports and witness statements – except Janet was working through those.
    I pondered VJ’s story. Kopf was right. It was bullshit, the kind of desperate lie you conjure up in a cornered panic. It was almost infantile too, a variation of the “twin brother defence”…
It wasn’t me who broke the window, Miss, it was my identical twin
. I’d found out how useless that lie was when I was five.
    Yet something didn’t feel right.
    If VJ had stabbed Evelyn Bates, I wouldn’t have had a problem believing in his guilt – because there could have been a precedent. But strangulation? I remembered those delicate quasi-feminine hands of his; long and