The verge practice bak-7

by Barry Maitland

  For a moment she thought she spotted Audrey McNeil’s auburn hair among the crowd, but before she could be sure the figure was hidden behind a bookstall. Sitting there on her own, she realised that she enjoyed being the one uncoupled person in their party, and that she didn’t envy the others their companionable state. She had a man of her own to go home to, of course, and she was lucky that, even after living in a confined space with him for six months, he could still make her knees go weak with a look or a touch. She thought of Tony and Linda, whose knees looked to be in a permanent state of weakness, and, at the other end of the relationship scale, of Audrey and Peter, who knew each other so well by now that they could anticipate their partner’s every thought and word before it was formed. She dreaded getting to that stage with Leon, and wondered if that was a bad sign.

  For her, orphaned in her teens, the idea of Leon still living with his parents at thirty-two had seemed weird, and it had seemed a big enough step to get him to move in with her. But what happened next? Somewhere she had read that, for unmarried couples living together, making a commitment before X months was too soon, and after Y months was too late, but she couldn’t remember the numbers. Was six months too short or too long? Neither of them had raised the subject of marriage, let alone children. For a moment she imagined returning to London and finding that Leon, feeling lost in her absence, now wanted to commit, and she realised with a little twinge of guilt that the idea made her feel uncomfortable. Why was that? Was it just the congestion at home, easily fixed up by getting somewhere bigger? Or was it something else? Fear, perhaps, of suffocation or of being betrayed.

  The waiter appeared with her starter, amanida catalana, the local antipasto. Oh well, she thought, how many people got it right anyway? What the hell were Brock and Suzanne doing, living at opposite ends of the county? She smiled to herself and lifted her glass in a silent toast to the old man. Maybe this was why they got on so well, sharing the same maladjustments.

  Five hundred miles to the north, Sandy Clarke was also sitting alone, nursing a drink and contemplating the mysteries of human relationships. He was in the kitchen of his home, his laptop open in front of him on the pine table, the cursor blinking on a half-composed email. He had a large brandy in his hand, the third of the evening. After a strained interview with the police that morning, Denise, his wife of twenty-four years, had gone to stay with her parents for an indefinite period. Not knowing exactly what she had learned, or suspected, from her meeting with DCI Brock, Sandy had found it impossible to remonstrate with her. He’d wanted to tell her that nothing he had done had any bearing on their relationship, which he had always regarded as rock solid, mainly due to her utter dependability; nonetheless, he dreaded being asked to explain exactly what it was he had done. So he had said nothing and Denise had said nothing, and in silence she had gone.

  The curious thing was that he felt almost relieved, as if some enormous responsibility had been lifted from his shoulders. In fact, the very greatest responsibility, for Denise, he now came to realise, had occupied a place so absolutely central to his life over the past twenty-four years that her removal made the other countless responsibilities-to his children and parents, to the firm, to clients and employees, to the old couple who maintained the investment villas in Greece, to the sports club of which he was president and the committee on design education of which he was chair, to the collector of taxes and the deliverer of newspapers-all seem somehow erased and meaningless, as if they had only existed in terms of that twenty-four-year life and if that were taken away then none of them counted any more.

  This fantasy-for he knew it was only that, but what an unexpectedly beguiling fantasy it was!-gave him a literal sense of weightlessness, as in a recurrent childhood dream when he had floated down his suburban street in his pyjamas. He hadn’t recalled that dream in forty-five years, and yet he could see it now as vividly as when it was fresh. He smiled, thinking of the small boy who had had the dream, a stranger now, yet somehow living deep inside him still.

  He wondered whether Charles had had dreams like that, and immediately, at the thought of Charles, the sense of weightlessness vanished. Oh Charles, he thought sadly, I am so sorry. Too late, of course, but still, so very sorry.

  15

  Breakfast was available in the basement of the hotel, in a series of linked, windowless cellar rooms, one of which was filled by a long table bearing large quantities of eggs and cheeses, cold meats and fruits, cereals and breads, juices and hot drinks. Kathy filled her plate and made her way to a vacant dining table. Despite the generous portions of amanida and canelons the previous evening, she found herself hungry again. As she passed a low archway she heard Audrey McNeil’s voice calling her. ‘Kathy? Over here.’

  She obediently joined them at their table, and they swapped information on what they’d done the previous day. Kathy noticed the copy of Fifty Favourite Bridge Problems tucked in Audrey’s bag.

  ‘I’m sorry you haven’t had much luck so far,’ the woman said. ‘And we weren’t any help.’

  ‘I didn’t really expect I’d be able to achieve much. I just resent sitting around in an office all day when I could be out exploring the place.’

  Linda ambled by at that moment. She looked sleepy and extremely contented. ‘Oh, hi,’ she purred. ‘We’re back there. How are you this morning?’

  It was agreed they were all fine, though probably not as fine as Linda.

  ‘When are you meeting Jeez again?’ Kathy asked.

  ‘We thought we’d get a cab around ten.’ She yawned expansively. ‘There’s no real hurry, until they come up with something. If I were you, I’d take the morning off. Have a look around Barcelona, for God’s sake. What can you do in that dreadful office?’

  ‘Good idea,’ Peter McNeil piped up. ‘Tell you what, I’ll come with you, while Audrey’s off meeting her Spanish grandmother bridge fiend.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Linda agreed. ‘Take a city tour on the Bus Turistic. You can catch it just up the street, in the Placa de Catalunya.’

  ‘I know the place,’ Peter said, ‘and the kiosk where you get the tickets.’

  Kathy didn’t fancy being stuck with Peter McNeil all morning, but couldn’t think of any polite way of saying so. ‘Oh, great. But don’t you want to go with Audrey?’

  ‘Good Lord, no,’ Audrey said. ‘I don’t want him hanging around when I meet Juanita.’

  Twenty minutes later Kathy and Peter stood at the bus stop, clutching their tickets and complimentary guidebooks. They had debated which of two city circuits they should take, the red or the blue. Peter preferred the red, because it included the Sagrada Familia, but Kathy, trying to ease her conscience at skipping work, said they should try to see as many places as possible that Charles Verge had been involved with. This meant the blue circuit, since it included the sports facilities for the 1992 Olympics on the hill of Montjuic, including a small kiosk that the Verge Practice had designed there, as well as the new apartments of the athletes’ village at Vila Olimpica on the waterfront.

  ‘You can call it research,’ Peter suggested conspiratorially. ‘Getting into the mind-set of the murderer.’

  The amateur sleuth, Kathy thought. At least he hadn’t suggested that they might look for clues. Yet she had to revise her scornful judgement less than an hour later, when they reached the entrance to the Montjuic site.

  The idea with the Bus Turistic was that you could get off at any of the designated stops, then rejoin the tour on a later bus following the same circuit. They had stayed on for the first three stops, but then Peter suggested getting off at the Placa d’Espanya, at the foot of Montjuic and at the monumental entrance to the group of buildings constructed for the International Exhibition of 1929.

  ‘There’s something here that Verge would have loved,’ Peter said. ‘And from here we can walk up the hill to the Olympic buildings.’ They set off up the formal avenue and came to the foot of a series of terraces and fountains lying in front of the Palau Nacional. ‘This way
,’ he said, leading Kathy away from the main axis towards a grove of trees. They rounded the corner of one of the buildings and Kathy came to an abrupt halt.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Peter inquired. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘Not a ghost, a ghost house,’ Kathy said, staring at the single-storey building lying in front of them, uncannily like the top floor of Briar Hill, the house that Charles Verge had built for his mother in Buckinghamshire. There was the terrace, the hovering roof planes, the glass pavilion that at Briar Hill enclosed the entry and stairs to the lower levels. ‘Is this what you brought me to see?’

  ‘Yes. I remember reading an article by Verge in which he said that his favourite architect, and the greatest influence on him, was Mies van der Rohe. Well, this would be just about his most famous building, the German pavilion for the 1929 Exhibition. It’s one of the classic masterpieces of modern architecture, and it doesn’t look the least bit dated, does it? I mean, it could have been designed yesterday, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘So Verge would have seen this when he was a boy growing up in Barcelona? His father, the architect, would have brought him here, surely?’

  Peter laughed. ‘Well, no. After the exhibition they demolished the pavilion, and it was only rebuilt here in 1986, on the centenary of van der Rohe’s birth. But Verge would have known the building from photographs. Every architecture student in the world would know it.’

  They walked on to the open terrace of the building, now known as the Pavello Mies van der Rohe, while Kathy tried to come to terms with the strange sensation of having been here already, but on an English hillside, as if the polished stone and glass structure were capable of floating from place to place like a magic carpet. The smaller glass enclosure now contained a visitors’ shop, and as they went inside Kathy half expected to see the artist Luz Diaz standing waiting for her. Instead, there was a young woman behind the counter, wearing one of the black T-shirts on sale, with Mies’s famous slogan, ‘Less is more’, in white lettering across the chest.

  All the gifts and souvenirs in the glass cases were of elegant design, and among them Kathy spotted a silver pen that looked identical to the one that Sandy Clarke had used. It wasn’t particularly expensive, either, and she thought she might buy it for Leon. As she was studying it, Peter suddenly appeared at her elbow, his eyes bright with some new discovery.

  ‘I’ve found something,’ he whispered excitedly in her ear. ‘A clue!’ Then, seeing the look that crossed Kathy’s face, he added, ‘No, really. Come and look!’

  ‘Hang on.’ Kathy replaced the pen and followed Peter to a corner of the room, where a book lay open on a table.

  ‘Visitors’ book,’ he hissed, as if a sudden noise might frighten it away. He took her arm and led her to it, then turned the pages back to the month of May. ‘There!’ he cried triumphantly.

  And there, indeed, it was. Kathy recognised the black, spiky architectural script even before she focused on the words. There was no date, but the entries before and after were both dated the fourteenth of May. The message read, To the New Era!, and in the space for name and address was written simply Carlos.

  ‘My God,’ Kathy whispered, catching Peter’s mood of shocked elation.

  ‘That was the day we saw him,’ Peter breathed. ‘He must have come here. Like a pilgrim to the shrine, to pay his respects, or gain strength perhaps. What do you think?’

  It seemed a rather fanciful idea, but not more fanciful than the fact of that spiky script sitting there in public view all this time.

  ‘Excuse me.’ Kathy turned to the woman behind the counter. ‘This entry here…’

  The woman came over and looked. ‘Oh, that was a phrase that Mies used, “the New Era”. It was the title of a famous speech he gave in 1930, the year after this building was built.’

  ‘You wouldn’t happen to remember the person who wrote this, I suppose?’

  ‘When was it? Last May? Oh no, I couldn’t possibly remember.’

  Kathy reached into her bag for the photograph of Charles Verge and handed it to her. ‘Would you remember this man coming here?’

  ‘Hm, he looks familiar… Oh, of course! It’s Charles Verge, isn’t it?’

  ‘You recognise him?’

  ‘Certainly. I’m an architecture student. We all know his work, and since May…’ She stopped and stared again at the entry in the visitors’ book. ‘Oh, Carlos!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He was here?’ Her face lit up with excitement. ‘Wait until I tell the others!’

  ‘No! Look, I’m a police officer, from London.’ Kathy dug in her bag again for her ID. ‘It’s very important that we keep quiet about this, okay? What’s your name? Please?’

  The girl looked disappointed, but also captivated. ‘Clara.’

  ‘Well look, Clara, there are some very heavy detectives here with the CGP who will be very upset with you if this gets out. Understand?’

  Clara made a face, then shrugged. ‘Okay. I don’t know how I’ll be able to keep it to myself, but I’ll do my best.’

  ‘Anyway, it may not be him. We’ll need to borrow this book for a while to do some tests. I’ll give you a receipt and the names and telephone number of the local police you should contact if you remember anything.’

  ‘What do I tell the boss when he notices the book is missing?’

  ‘Tell him the police confiscated it and he should ring Lieutenant Mozas if he wants more information.’

  Clara gave her a plastic bag for the book and called them a cab. Kathy thanked her and the girl said as they left, ‘You know, I hope you don’t catch him,’ and gave them a broad grin.

  Kathy dropped Peter at the hotel on her way to the police offices. As they shook hands on the pavement there was a cry from Audrey McNeil, hurrying towards them, looking flustered. It seemed that the meeting with her bridge partner had been something of a disappointment, not to say a shock, for ‘Juanita’ the grandmother had turned out to be a forty-year-old, childless, male butcher, who had taken a great deal of shaking off. He had been unapologetic about his deception, apparently, and became quite plaintive when Audrey said she would never play bridge with him again.

  ‘The shocking thing, when I think about it,’ she said, ‘is how convincing he was as a grandmother. I remember all our little exchanges of news about our children and grandchildren, and he was so plausible. I thought I knew Juanita so well! I can still hardly believe she doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Well, maybe you should think about becoming someone else,’ Peter said, clearly enjoying this. ‘Become a biker or a lion-tamer or something. Wouldn’t be hard for you.’ He winked at Kathy, who was getting back into the taxi.

  It seemed that the only progress that Linda and Tony had to report was that Kathy’s list of the occupants of Passeig de Gracia 83 had been left for her attention. They were twitchy with impatience at the delays. ‘Jeez says that there’s been some panic over an ETA bomb threat or something, but reading between the lines, I think he’s embarrassed. My guess is that Alvarez is making us wait.’

  ‘But why? What’s his problem? He was pretty unhelpful with me yesterday.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it was Dick Chivers’ fault really. When he was over here a couple of months ago, Superintendent Chivers got a bit stroppy, acting as if these guys were working for us. Jeez says that at one point the super made Alvarez look bad in front of his superiors, and he hasn’t forgiven him. If he’s found out anything he’s probably holding onto it to see what glory he can earn for himself before he passes it on to us.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got something that might help us.’ She described her visit to the Pavello and showed them the entry in the visitors’ book.

  ‘Wow!’ As Linda craned forward to look, Tony leaned over her shoulder, unconsciously stroking her arm. ‘That is his writing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘Have you checked the rest of the book?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Linda
turned the pages back. ‘Let’s start at the beginning.’

  While the two of them pored over the entries, Kathy examined the list that Alvarez’s officer had left for her. The information was sparse, confined to a single sheet. Thankfully, she saw that the business descriptions had been translated into English. The building contained a lawyer, a financial consultant, medical consulting rooms, an accountant, a media company of some kind, two stockbrokers and an insurance broker. Almost any of them might have been of use to Charles Verge, Kathy guessed.

  ‘Is anyone around?’ she asked.

  Linda looked up. Tony’s hand was now stroking her neck. She caught Kathy’s look of amusement and shrugged his hand away. ‘Jeez left his extension number if we need him.’ She handed it to Kathy who dialled and asked Lieutenant Mozas if someone could help her with the list. He came in after a few minutes with Alvarez’s detective in tow.

  ‘How can we help?’ He gave Kathy a smile that was almost too big to be sincere, as if he felt compelled to compensate for his captain’s offhandedness.

  ‘I wondered if you had any more information on these companies?’

  Jeez translated to the other man who seemed to have no English, then turned back with the answer. ‘No criminal connections that we know of.’

  ‘Okay, but what else? The lawyer, for instance?’

  Again there was some discussion in Spanish or Catalan. The other policeman consulted a notebook, then Jeez said, ‘Family law.’

  ‘Well, that doesn’t sound likely. What about the financial people? Could they have any connections with the UK?’

  ‘That would take a lot of investigation,’ Jeez said doubtfully. ‘There’s no one shady there that we know of.’