Free The Verdict by Nick Stone

five feet tall, brown-haired and a borderline beauty. I might have fancied her, if I didn’t know her better – or, in fact, knew her at all.
    ‘Morning, Bella,’ I said.
    No reply. No surprise.
    When it came to letting someone know she despised their very existence, Adolf was without parallel. She wasn’t merely good, or even simply brilliant at it. With her it came naturally, as if her sole purpose in life were to project hate – of me in particular. At least that’s what it felt like, five days a week.
    Her weapons of choice were silence and an armoury of black looks she used with such precision it would have been impressive if I hadn’t been the target. Her centrepiece was an unblinking glower that got glassier the longer it lasted, as if the intensity of her loathing was making her eyes water. Which was a shame because her eyes were far and away her most attractive feature, the blue of tourist brochure oceans.
    There were four of us in the office, along with a junior clerk called Iain, and Michaela, the graduate gopher. Adolf and I sat facing each other, cordoned off from the others by a grey soundscreen.
    I turned on my computer and listened to it powering up.
    ‘Sid Kopf wants to see you,’ Adolf said without looking at me.
    ‘Bit early for wind-ups, isn’t it?’ I said.
    Kopf only ever summoned clerks to his office when he was firing them.
    Adolf carried on typing a moment longer, without comment. Then she turned to look directly at me for the first time.
    ‘I don’t wind up people I like,’ she said. There was the usual mix of contempt and a dash of poison in the stare she gave me.
    I still didn’t know if she was being serious. Then my phone rang.
    ‘Is that Terry?’
    I recognised the woman’s voice – nasal, blue-blooded posh; every ‘t’ crossed with silver, every ‘i’ dotted with a pearl. It was Sid Kopf’s PA. Edwina.
    ‘Yes?’ I said.
    ‘Come upstairs.’
    No ‘
please’
. This was an order.
    My balls dropped. Had they found out about me?
    ‘Sure,’ I said.
    She hung up with a crunch.
    Adolf smiled at her screen. Her typing accelerated.

8
    I saw Janet first when I walked in, sitting opposite Kopf’s desk. She glanced briefly my way, then looked down at the yellow legal pad resting on her lap.
    Kopf was something of a myth in the company – part legend, part bogeyman. We’d catch fleeting glimpses of him once in a while, always out of the corner of our eyes, going upstairs to his third-floor office, or walking out with a client. Very occasionally we’d hear his voice from the landing, but our experience of him was limited to second- and third-hand tales. He’d stopped practising law twenty years ago to concentrate on running the firm, but in his time he’d been one of the best corporate lawyers in the country, a fearsome and utterly ruthless litigator when he’d needed to be. They used to call him ‘the Blond Assassin’.
    Kopf pointed me to a free chair facing his desk, and appraised me as I made my way into his office. I knew what he was seeing: the off-the-peg plain navy-blue suit – jacket and trousers bought separately – my cheap blue shirt and non-clashing tie, the polished but worn black Dr. Martens shoes.
    I sat down. I was too close to his desk, and far too close to him for my comfort. Janet was out of my line of sight. It was as if she’d already distanced herself from me.
    Sid Kopf was a tall man, about my height. He was eighty-two, but could have passed for twenty years younger. He was big on exercise. Only last year he’d done the London Marathon. And he’d run the New York version the year before that. He’d finished both in slightly under four hours. He cycled to the office on good days. He still had most of his hair, which was so white it appeared to hover slightly above him, glowing like a molten halo. His skin was lined and craggy, but still firm. I wondered if he hadn’t had work done, but he didn’t seem the type to get hung up on personal