The verge practice bak-7

by Barry Maitland

  ‘One of your officers spoke to me not long ago. A woman, I can’t remember her name.’

  ‘Sergeant Kolla, yes. You were caught up in some other business at the time, I think, and she wasn’t able to cover all the points she wanted to raise with you.’

  ‘What do you want to ask me about?’

  ‘I’m still puzzled by the relationship between your former husband and his partner, Sandy Clarke. I thought, having known them both over an extended period, you might be able to throw some light on it for me.’

  Two little creases appeared between her brows as she considered this. ‘The papers say that Sandy Clarke murdered Charles and Miki, and confessed to this in a suicide note.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you’re quite satisfied that’s true?’

  ‘We are.’ He saw her eyes narrow at something, his choice of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, perhaps, sensing him distancing himself. ‘There doesn’t seem much room for doubt.’

  ‘And now that the case is closed you decide to come to have a chat with someone who hasn’t spoken to either of them for years.’

  He was saved from responding to that by her phone. ‘Excuse me.’ She reached for it. ‘Hello? Yes, put him on.’

  Brock watched her straighten in her seat, heard her voice take on a brisk authority.

  ‘Steven? Thanks for getting back to me… Yes, it is important; it’s about the bathroom tiles. I’ve spoken to the supplier and they’ll be on site on Monday… Yes, Monday. They’re diverting another order for us, but there are no type EG30s, so we’ll have to change some of the details…’

  She spread a drawing from the side table across her board and put on a pair of glasses. The young man appeared with mugs of coffee and biscuits, and Brock waited while Lewis went through the details and brought her call to an end. She finally put the phone down, smiling to herself as she took off her glasses. ‘Got you,’ she said, then glanced over at Brock. ‘Sorry about that. He was hoping to use the missing tiles as an excuse for his delays. Where were we?’

  ‘You were going to give me a portrait of Charles Verge and Sandy Clarke.’

  ‘Actually I was going to ask you again why you’re here. Are you having second thoughts?’

  ‘The coroner will have to bring a finding on the death of Sandy Clarke. Until that’s done, I’m open to any ideas, no matter how unlikely.’

  ‘You haven’t found Charles’s body, have you?’

  Brock felt transparent, rather as he imagined the builder at the other end of the phone must have felt. ‘No.’

  She regarded him gravely for a moment, then turned her attention to her coffee. ‘While I was waiting for you to arrive I remembered an essay I once read, about how architects could learn about problem-solving from the great detective.’ She said the words with an ironic emphasis, and he wasn’t sure if she was having a dig at him. ‘It was about how they both have to cope with masses of pragmatic detail, but in order to do that they have to stand back from the detail and form an overall vision of the case, a theory or paradigm. That’s why Sherlock Holmes sat at home playing the violin while others scurried around collecting boring facts. Are you here to collect facts or play the violin, Chief Inspector? Because if it’s the first, I don’t think I can help you.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow.’

  She reached behind her to a shelf laden with heavy volumes bearing titles like Specification, Standards and Timber Code, and pulled down a thick manual. ‘This is the design brief for a district library we’re doing at the moment-not a big building.’ She let it fall open and scanned the page. ‘The Assistant Librarians require an office at twelve square metres per person, with four power points each, a carpet grade B on the floor, a lighting level of five hundred lux and sound reduction index of thirty-five decibels between rooms. There are over two hundred pages like that, of facts that make up the essence of the problem. But how do you generate a solution from facts like that? You can’t just pile them all up, room after room, and hope they somehow sort themselves out. In any case, many of the facts contradict each other, or are open to interpretation, or will have changed before the building’s finished. So you need something else, a big idea, that’s somehow truer and tougher than the data, but is also faithful to it. Would you say your job is like that?’

  ‘It sounds familiar.’

  ‘The trouble is, your big idea may be wrong. I once did a house for a couple who were friends of ours. There were several unusual things about the brief-their interests, the site and so on-and I arrived quite quickly at what I thought was the right answer. They liked it, and we went ahead. But I knew something wasn’t quite right. I’d got there too quickly, the whole thing had been too easy somehow, too glib. You know what I mean?’

  Brock nodded. He knew exactly what she meant.

  ‘One day, in an idle moment, I started doodling, and a different answer, the right answer, appeared on my board. It was too late to do anything about it, we were committed, and I couldn’t say anything to the clients. The other scheme was built, and they were perfectly happy with it-but I knew, and I felt terrible, like a detective who’d sent the wrong man to the gallows. I had the same feeling when I read the reports about Sandy.’

  She paused, setting her pencil down on the edge of the drawing board midway between them, almost as if offering it to him. ‘You’re worried you’ve got the wrong answer, aren’t you? You think Charles is still alive.’

  Brock didn’t reply for a moment, and the sound of rain splashing outside the windows in the courtyard filled the silence. Then he said, ‘What made you so sure, about Sandy?’

  ‘Just what I knew about him. He was a very steady, calm, practical man. He had to be to stick with Charles all those years. Oh, I know he had a roving eye, but there was never any suggestion of coercion or violence. He had a kind of self-possession, rather old-fashioned, like Gary Cooper or someone, that appealed to women. I daresay Charles and Miki together might drive many people to distraction, but the idea of Sandy plotting a fiendish double murder is, well, unbelievable-to me, anyway.’

  Brock reached for his coffee, then slid it away, feeling nauseous. It was as if his own doubts had found a voice in this woman, stern and unequivocal, and he felt obliged to challenge them. ‘Did you part on bad terms from your ex-husband, Ms Lewis?’ he asked, the words sounding pompous as he spoke them.

  ‘You mean, am I prejudiced? Of course, we all are. But no, we didn’t part on bad terms, not really. We just reached a point where I realised I had to leave him. You might say I left for professional reasons as much as personal ones, although the two were so mixed together. As we became more successful, I began to realise that we were after quite different things. For me, a good reputation was a means to being able to do good work, whereas for him the opposite was true-the quality of our work was a means to attract publicity and success. He was fanatical about publicity; I couldn’t understand it. He’d lose sleep fuming over some mildly critical comment in a review of one of our buildings, while I’d be lying awake trying to work out how to detail a window. And as the projects got bigger and the clients more prestigious, the differences in what we wanted became more difficult to reconcile. His ambition was like a steamroller, and in the end I decided I had to step out of the way or be squashed. He felt terribly betrayed, of course, the way he did if one of his bright young designers decided to quit. It was an affront to his ego.’

  ‘You make him sound insecure.’

  ‘Does that surprise you? I suppose people have told you that he was so full of self-confidence, and that was true. He loved being with people, and drew energy and confidence from them, but on his own, in the middle of the night, he was as insecure as the rest of us-worse.’ She nodded to herself, recalling something. ‘I remember once, it was in New York, we went to an opening at a little gallery in SoHo. There was an exhibition of photorealist paintings, and one of them was a huge watercolour, about eight feet by five, of a hermit crab. It was a stunning image, of this
soft little crawling thing pinned beneath an enormous florid shell, like a building it was dragging around on its back. Charles seemed mesmerised by it. Later I offered to buy it for him, but he was horrified at the idea, and eventually confessed that he saw himself as that little crab, forced to live inside the wrong body.’

  ‘The wrong body?’ Brock remembered the underlined passage about the criminals’ heads in Verge’s office. ‘What did he mean by that?’

  ‘I think he meant that he’d spent his whole life trying to be someone else, the person that his mother wanted him to be, maybe-his father the Olympian.’

  The reference to the painting reminded Brock of something else, and he said, ‘You were acquainted with a number of painters were you? I’m thinking of a Spanish artist, Luz Diaz, who bought the house you and Charles designed for his mother.’

  ‘Briar Hill. Yes, I heard she was living there, but I’ve never met her. Charlotte told me about her in one of our conversations-we maintain a rather distant mother- daughter relationship by phone. She was always her father’s daughter, and was very angry when I left Charles. I used to think…’

  She stopped in mid-sentence, a startled look dawning on her face. ‘I’m being very slow, aren’t I? If you think it possible that Charles is still alive, that Sandy didn’t kill him, then you also think that Charles may have staged Sandy’s suicide-that he’s here, in this country.’ Her surprise turned to alarm. ‘You think he’s come back?’

  ‘We haven’t got anywhere near thinking that, Ms Lewis,’ Brock said. ‘As I said at the beginning, I’m just trying to cover every angle, for my own satisfaction. As far as the authorities are concerned, there’s absolutely no doubt that your former husband is dead.’

  But Gail Lewis wasn’t reassured. As she reached forward for her pencil Brock saw a tremor in her hand. She fiercely clicked the lead.

  ‘In any event,’ he added, ‘you’ve surely got nothing to be worried about.’

  ‘You don’t think so? Chief Inspector, if Charles has been crazy enough to slaughter his wife in May, and then come back to kill Sandy now, I don’t think anyone connected with him can feel safe!’

  Brock sipped his coffee thoughtfully, then said, ‘You were talking just now about too much data. One of the problems in my line of work is false data, people who tell us lies. You lied to my sergeant, didn’t you, Ms Lewis? You told her you hadn’t seen Charles Verge in eight years.’

  She looked startled, then guilty, her face turning pink. ‘How did you…? Yes, you’re right, I did lie. I felt bad about it afterwards, but I just wanted to get back to my meeting, and there was no point… I thought there was no point.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  The woman sighed, shaking her head. ‘I bumped into Charles one evening about a year ago, at the opening of an exhibition. He was at his most charming, the champagne was flowing, and he suggested we have dinner together, for old time’s sake. God knows why, but I agreed. He was a little drunk, and a little tired, and during the course of the meal he came out with all this stuff. His marriage was finished, Miki was a nightmare, Sandy was a shit, the partnership was doomed. The thing was, he was laughing all the time he said it, as if he was describing some ridiculous comedy he’d seen at the movies. He was quite witty, almost boasting about his disasters, and I laughed along with him. He said that he’d like to wipe the slate clean, do away with them all, and start afresh.’

  ‘He said that, that he wanted to do away with them all?’

  ‘Yes, something like that. I didn’t think it meant anything, and forgot about it until Miki’s murder. Then I decided I didn’t want to remember what he’d said that evening. I didn’t want anything more to do with the story of Charles Verge. Then I read that it was Sandy who had killed Miki and Charles. But if you’re saying now that Charles may have engineered the whole thing…’

  ‘All the same, you’re surely not in any danger.’

  ‘Aren’t I? I was one of the people who let him down, perhaps the most, in his eyes. And I remember something else he said that evening, when he dropped me off and said goodbye. He said that in a year’s time we might meet up again, and I should remember what he’d said.’

  There was no panic in her eyes, but certainly there was fear.

  ‘But surely,’ Brock felt himself being dragged into confidences that he didn’t really want to share, ‘in the unlikely event that Charles did kill Sandy Clarke, his purpose was much more deliberate than just getting even?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The death of Sandy Clarke cleared Charles Verge’s name, re-established his reputation.’

  ‘His reputation…’ She thought about that, sipping absently at her coffee. ‘Yes, you’re right.’

  And yet, Brock thought, that wasn’t quite the whole story. Like Gail, he felt as if his thinking had been slow, unwilling to pursue the implications of a scenario he didn’t want to believe. But if Verge, officially cleared and dead, was still alive, any program of vengeance would be open to him. He thought again of the suicide note on Clarke’s computer. Whoever had written it had known that Clarke was the father of Charlotte’s child. Did that betrayal precipitate Clarke’s death, and did it now put Charlotte herself at risk? Who else?

  ‘I mean, he was a rational man, yes? Not unstable.’ He tried to make it sound like a positive statement, rather than a plea.

  Gail drew the shape of a cone on her pad, frowning. ‘He had mood swings… periods of depression. I don’t think they were properly diagnosed then. Charlotte said he had one for a year after I left. Maybe he’s had better help since then.’

  Or none at all, Brock thought, and watched her add a small creature peering out from under the bottom edge of the conical shape, legs and eyes and one lopsided claw.

  She looked up suddenly and said, ‘It’s funny you mentioning that Spanish woman just now, the artist. Charlotte told me about her buying Briar Hill at the time that Charles was buying the cottage nearby for her, and I thought it was an odd coincidence. Knowing that Charles and Miki’s marriage was rocky, I wondered if there might be something going on between Charles and this other woman, almost as if he were establishing an alternative happy little family down in Bucks. Then there was Miki’s murder, and Charles disappeared, and another thought came to me. In retrospect, it was almost as if Charles had set about taking care of everything before the tragedy happened-getting Charlotte settled, and establishing the Spanish woman nearby, like a kind of chaperone or proxy parent.’

  ‘He’s never contacted you, since May?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘You’re absolutely certain of that? No unexplained silent phone calls, no indirect approaches? He would have needed help after it happened, and he might have thought of someone from the past, like you, who we wouldn’t necessarily consider.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have come to me. And I haven’t the faintest idea where he would have gone. I thought of Spain, like everyone else, but I don’t know of any secret boltholes.’

  ‘There was speculation that he might try to make contact when Charlotte has her baby. Do you think that’s plausible?’

  ‘I guess it’s possible. He’d want to know, of course, but he wouldn’t be stupid enough to make a direct approach. You think Charlotte might know how to send him a message? Or the Spanish woman? Or Madelaine, of course…Formidable Madelaine.’ She thought for a moment, then said, ‘Actually, if I’d been asked what would make him come back, it wouldn’t have been Charlotte’s baby.’ She reached over to the table beside her and handed Brock a thick magazine. The front cover showed a dramatic glossy photograph of a building, so geometric and brilliantly coloured that at first glance it looked like an abstract graphic, two squares, red on the left side and blue, fretted with shadows, on the right. Beneath the name of the magazine was the issue’s title, ‘Il Carcere Nuovo’.

  ‘Marchdale,’ Gail said. ‘ “The New Prison”. It came out last week, ahead of the opening, and before they knew about Charles’s reinstatemen
t. That didn’t bother the Italians one bit. In fact, from the text you’d say that the fact that the architect was a famous murderer only increased the building’s glamour. But they also give it a very detailed appraisal, and the conclusion is that it’s brilliant.’

  Opening the magazine, Brock found pages of dense text interspersed with plans and lush photographs. He wondered how they’d been able to conjure such blue skies, such beautiful raking shadows, in the fen country.

  ‘I have a friend at the Architectural Review who tells me that their special issue is about to come out, equally glowing. It seems Marchdale really is Charles’s masterpiece, and I can’t imagine how he’ll be able to stay away, especially now, with this sort of publicity.’

  He thanked her for her time and she led him to the front door. The rain had stopped, a weak sun forcing through the cloud. As he walked back to his car, several streets away, he felt rather as if he’d been through a Turkish bath, like he sometimes did after a particularly probing conversation with Suzanne. The effect was both exhausting and rejuvenating. He wondered what story he could use to mobilise the security services and local police at Marchdale to be alert for a man who no longer existed.

  22

  Kathy tried the home number on file for the former laboratory clerk Debbie Langley. She wasn’t expecting a reply in the middle of the day, but the phone was answered by Debbie’s mother, with whom she apparently lived. ‘Debbie gets home from work at six,’ the mother said. ‘Well, would it be convenient if I called tonight at, say, six-thirty?’ ‘I don’t know,’ the woman said defensively. ‘Does she know you?’

  ‘We’ve never met. I’m with the police. It’s not a big matter, and it only indirectly affects Debbie, so it’d be easier me seeing her at home rather than asking her to come to a police station. It won’t take long.’

  Debbie’s mother agreed, and Kathy put the phone down, feeling a squirm of guilt.

  The house was a rather gloomy dark-red brick semi, not far from the local commuter rail station and shops. The paint on the garage door was peeling and the concrete path cracked. Debbie Langley opened the door looking worried. Her make-up was fresh, her cheeks flushed as if she’d rushed to get ready to face this unexpected complication to her day. From the back of the house came a smell of cooking and the sound of a child’s voice. She closed the front door after Kathy and led the way into the front sitting room, the furnishings spotless but worn.