The verge practice bak-7

by Barry Maitland

  ‘So you didn’t actually see George in person till the end of June?’

  ‘That’s right. What are you getting at?’

  ‘It’s not important.’ Brock tucked his book back in his jacket pocket. ‘Looks as if we disturbed you for nothing. Impressive ceremony this morning. Were you all pleased with how it went?’

  Charlotte eased herself to her feet with difficulty. ‘Except for what you said to Gran, about some people thinking my father is still alive.’ She glared accusingly at Brock. ‘What did you mean? You really upset her.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I certainly didn’t intend that. I was just making a general point, that she should be prepared for the fact that some people will never be satisfied until Mr Verge’s body has been found, that’s all.’ He gave her a bland, sympathetic smile, and watched the frown of distrust deepen on the young woman’s brow.

  As they were walking down the front path, she called after them, ‘Oh, and there’s no point you trying to talk to George anyway. He’s gone away.’

  ‘Away?’ Brock turned. ‘Where to?’

  ‘I don’t know. He mentioned it when we got back from Marchdale. He said he was going away for a few days.’

  There were lights on in the front room of the house, the end of a row of old brick terraces on the edge of the village. The woman who answered the door wiped her hands on her apron and looked at Brock’s identification anxiously.

  ‘Oh dear. George rents the attic room, but he’s not here just now. Why?’

  ‘We’re anxious to talk to him. We understand he’s gone away for a few days. Do you know where?’

  ‘He didn’t say. He’s a private sort of person. He’s not got into trouble again, has he? I know he’s on parole, but he’s never been the slightest bother to us.’

  She agreed to take them up to his room, which confirmed her claim that George Todd was the cleanest tenant she’d ever had. Everything was spotless. The few clothes in the wardrobe, including the suit they’d seen him wearing that morning, were immaculately folded and creased. The kettle and toaster on top of a small food cupboard were spotless. The small fridge was empty, wiped clean. On a shelf stood an orderly row of books concerned with horticulture, looking as immaculate as when they’d left the shop. The room reminded Kathy of a prison cell, ready for inspection.

  When they were back in the car, Brock said, ‘This is making me feel very uneasy, Kathy, but let’s not jump to conclusions too soon. We’ll keep your theory to ourselves for the moment. We’d better get it right. I’ve a feeling no one’s going to be happy about this.’

  ‘One malicious wounding with intent to resist arrest, two woundings with intent to do grievous bodily harm, three aggravated assaults with intent to rob, sixty-seven convictions for theft, five for handling stolen goods.’ Brock paused, scanning the piece of paper in his hand. They were all staring at an enlarged photograph of a tough, battered face, the left side covered by livid scar tissue. Kathy barely recognised the gardener or the man pushing Madelaine’s wheelchair at the Marchdale opening.

  ‘So approach with caution,’ Brock continued. ‘Aged fifty-five years, of which eighteen have been spent in gaol, twelve in category A prisons. George Todd is currently on parole. An alert was issued last night, but so far we have no idea of his current whereabouts. We believe he may have information relating to the Verge case, and we want to know his whereabouts on the afternoon of September fourteenth, when DS Kolla’s car was broken into, and the evening of September seventeenth, when Sandy Clarke died. We are also looking for a pair of black leather gloves, traces of which have been found at both scenes. Apart from the rented room where he lives, we also have warrants to search the two places where he is known to work regularly as a gardener and handyman-Orchard Cottage, belonging to Ms Charlotte Verge, and Briar Hill, owned by Ms Luz Diaz-and also the house of Mrs Madelaine Verge in Chelsea, which Todd also visited. Apart from gloves, we are interested in tools that might have been used to break the car window, any written notes resembling Sandy Clarke’s suicide statement, and anything which might belong to, or indicate recent contact with, Charles Verge.’

  People looked puzzled. ‘You mean recent as in before May twelfth, chief? When he died?’

  ‘No, I mean since May twelfth. I mean like in the last few weeks.’

  This produced a murmur of consternation. Brock’s raised hand restored an expectant hush. ‘The coroner will expect us to be thorough. In the absence of Verge’s body, we’ll be expected to be able to say categorically that he’s left no recent traces, and these women are the people who would have been closest to him, the ones he’d most likely have tried to contact, if he’d still been alive.’

  ‘We’re to search the whole properties, sir? Not just the outbuildings where Todd might have kept his tools?’

  ‘Everywhere, but do it tactfully. If they ask, explain that you’re looking for something Todd might have hidden or mislaid. Don’t tell them you’re looking for traces of Verge- that’ll only upset them.’

  You can say that again, Kathy thought, picturing the reaction of the three women to this violation. It was as if Brock were planning to put his hand into a beehive. The team looked doubtful too, perhaps imagining trying to explain to Madelaine Verge that they were searching her underwear drawers for something that her gardener might have hidden or mislaid. For once Kathy was glad that she would be tied up all that day with her committee.

  The Crime Strategy Working Party was going well under Kathy’s chairmanship, so everyone agreed, and she could only assume it was one of those cases of something going right when you’d paid it no attention, because she’d hardly given it any serious thought since Leon had left. She sat through the rest of the day half listening to the others excitedly discussing institutionalised racism and homophobia, and wondered how she was going to get through another weekend, and how Brock and the rest of the team were making out. When Jay spoke to her in the lunchbreak about the arrangements for Saturday night, it took her a while to remember what the other woman was talking about.

  ‘Do you know the pub on the corner of Old Compton Street? I thought we could all meet up there. What do you think?’

  ‘Oh, fine. Yes, that would be fine.’

  Jay lowered her voice, and looked sheepish. ‘I know you’re a copper and everything, but when you’re off-duty, you’re off-duty, right?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ But Kathy knew exactly what she meant.

  ‘Well, some of my friends like…’ Jay stopped as Shazia, balancing a paper plate of sandwiches and a cup of orange juice, joined them. They didn’t get a chance to finish the conversation, and afterwards Kathy wondered what she was getting herself into.

  Brock rocked forward on the balls of his feet, absorbing the confrontation between stubble fields and hedgerows out there, and stainless steel and leather cushions in here. It was a platitude of modern architecture, he knew, but it still had the power to shock, the unmediated impact of room and landscape through a sheet of naked glass.

  Luz Diaz stood with her back to him, arms folded, smoking angrily. ‘I cannot believe that this is permitted in this country. It is worse than Franco.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ms Diaz. But the coroner…’

  ‘Fuck the coroner!’ She spun around to face him. ‘That’s just an excuse. You know what I think? I think you enjoy breaking into people’s houses and turning over their private things. I think you are no different from criminals.’

  ‘Did you know that your gardener had an extensive criminal record?’

  ‘George? Yes, of course I knew. Charles told me all about George, ages ago, before I even came here. He met him in prison, when he was working on the Marchdale project. Is that all you see? A man has a record, so that’s it? Do you look beyond that? Do you know anything about him?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He was a model prisoner, doing a degree in horticulture with the Open University. No, he was the model prisoner, that is what the prison governor told Charles-the best, th
e most responsive prisoner he had ever met. And he had had a terrible life. Did you know that he witnessed his father murder his mother when he was five? Did you know that he was shockingly abused by the relatives who took him in, and then again when he was put into care?’

  The blaze of anger in her eyes died a little as she took in Brock’s look of concern. ‘No, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Well, you should do better research, Chief Inspector. George is probably the most trustworthy and honest man I know. What do you suspect him of doing?’

  ‘I can’t say at present. But your assessment of his character is very helpful.’

  ‘You’re just saying that to calm me down, yes?’ But despite her words, Brock saw that her stabs at her cigarette were less violent. ‘You believe that once a thief, always a thief, right?’

  ‘I think it’s very hard for any of us to change a pattern that’s shaped our whole lives.’

  Luz frowned at him. ‘So you would say that once we have decided what we are going to do with our lives-you a policeman, Charles an architect, me a painter-that those things then lock us into their own patterns? You think after thirty years of thinking and acting in our different ways, we’re so shaped by the experience that we simply can’t change?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  She stared back at him as if trying to provoke him into saying more, then broke into a smile. ‘But people do it all the time, don’t they? And in your heart I bet you believe that you could still be anything you want. And George is the proof that you can be. He overcame his past and changed himself.’

  Brock smiled back. ‘We’ll see, Ms Diaz. We’ll see.’ Then he added, ‘Is that why George was important to Charles, because he was able to change himself, like a hermit crab throwing off its shell?’

  Luz looked startled. ‘Why do you say that? That was

  …’ She stopped herself and turned away, crushing her cigarette into a glass bowl. ‘George was a resource, that’s all. Charles paid him as a consultant, because he knew everything about prisons from the inside.’

  ‘I see.’ There was a thump from the floor below, a muffled curse, and Luz stiffened. ‘If those bastards break anything… I have jars of pigment down there from Venice. It’s the only place in the world you can get it. You’d better tell them…’

  ‘Don’t worry, they know their job. And is that why you left Barcelona, to change yourself? Or your painting, perhaps? Your colours are so bright and clear, the geometry so sharp-will that survive this damp English light?’ He nodded out to the view, where evening mist was seeping out of the copses.

  ‘I haven’t experienced an English winter yet,’ she said, lighting another cigarette. ‘But perhaps it is the reason, yes. We all need a change of perspective from time to time. Something to make us think and feel in fresh ways. A change of palette…’

  Another dull thud sounded from below and Luz wheeled around and made for the spiral staircase. ‘I’m going to see what those people are doing.’

  Brock remained in the artist’s studio, going over to a shelf of books. Most of them were gallery exhibition catalogues, many with pages marked by slips of paper. When he opened them he found illustrations of her work. They dated back over ten years, from private galleries in Barcelona, Madrid, San Francisco and New York.

  George Todd’s yellow motorbike was spotted early that afternoon, twenty-four hours after he had disappeared, parked outside a small holiday hotel in Bexhill, the place where Charles Verge had supposedly walked into the sea. Todd had apparently booked into the hotel the previous evening. Within half an hour he had been located in a pub less than a hundred yards away, and begun the journey back to London under escort.

  Now he sat on the other side of the table, painstakingly rubbing his fingertips with a handkerchief. Brock could see no remaining traces of the ink, but still he rubbed and scoured.

  ‘I thought you scanned them electronically now,’ Todd said softly. ‘What’s the point, anyway? Did you think I were someone else?’ A Yorkshire accent. He looked up from his scrubbing with a glint in his eye, as if relishing some private joke. ‘Who did you reckon I was then, Charles Verge?’

  Brock said nothing. The idea did seem far-fetched now, a clutching at straws.

  It was hard not to stare at Todd. There was a fastidious intensity about his gestures, which contrasted oddly with the anarchy of his damaged features. Brock noted the creases down the arms of his shirt, the way he folded the handkerchief neatly before replacing it in his pocket. The crew that had searched his toolshed at Orchard Cottage had commented on how obsessively neat everything was, like in his rented room. Brock had seen it before, the model prisoners who responded to the order and discipline of prison that had been so absent from their early lives. More than one of the assessors in Todd’s file had diagnosed an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

  ‘What were you doing at Bexhill?’

  ‘I wanted a few days’ holiday. Decided to go down to the seaside.’

  ‘To the place where Charles Verge was supposed to have disappeared.’

  Another private smirk. ‘Seemed as good a place as any.’

  ‘When did you first meet Mr Verge?’

  ‘Two, two and a half years ago.’

  ‘That was at…’ Brock consulted his notes.

  ‘HMP Maidstone. He was doing research.’

  ‘How did he come to meet you?’

  ‘I was picked, by the governor, to talk to him about my experiences. We hit it off. I was able to put him right on a few things.’

  Brock wondered if the two men had recognised something of themselves in the other. ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘He was interested in how people feel when they’re inside, how their attitudes change over time, what makes them tick. Then later on, when he was working on his plans, we talked about them. I helped him design March-dale.’ The claim was made flatly, without bombast.

  ‘Did he pay you for your help?’

  ‘He insisted. He called me a consultant, and put money into an account for me, for when I got out. Don’t worry, it were all declared. I paid tax on it.’

  ‘And you got out last January? What did you do then?’

  ‘He invited me to work for his family, as a general handyman and gardener. I got Orchard Cottage ready for Miss Charlotte, painting and wallpapering and repairs, and I do the gardens and other odds and ends for her, and for Mrs Madelaine Verge and Ms Diaz at Briar Hill. Ask them. I’m a good worker.’

  Brock didn’t doubt it, and moved on to Todd’s whereabouts at the time of Kathy’s car break-in and Clarke’s suicide. He had been working in Charlotte’s garden at the time of the first, he said, though whether she or her grandmother had seen him there all afternoon he couldn’t say. As for the second, he thought he had been at home that evening, probably watching TV, but he couldn’t be sure. The absence of a firm alibi didn’t encourage Brock. None of the teams had found a pair of black gloves, or anything else incriminating.

  It was six p.m. before Kathy returned to Queen Anne’s Gate from her committee meeting. She passed Brock on the front steps. Clearly he was in a hurry, buttoning his coat against the chill with one hand, the other clutching a briefcase, a preoccupied frown on his face. He grunted hello, unsmiling, and marched off down the street in the direction of headquarters.

  Bren was inside in the lobby, consulting the appointments book.

  ‘What’s up with the boss?’ Kathy asked.

  ‘Shit and fan have connected, Kathy. Phones have been melting, explanations demanded.’

  ‘The searches?’

  Bren nodded gloomily. ‘Not a thing. No black leather gloves, no hidden messages, not even a trace of an illicit substance in Todd’s medicine cabinet. You heard we found him, did you? Sitting in a pub at Bexhill having a quiet beer. Said he was having a seaside break.’

  ‘Really?’ Kathy was stunned, and realised how convinced she had become that Todd and Verge were the same man.

  ‘And he’s de
finitely who he says he is?’

  ‘Sure. We took his prints and DNA, and had his parole officer in.’

  ‘Does he have an alibi for the times on the fourteenth and seventeenth?’

  ‘Convincingly vague. He runs a motorbike, by the way. Yellow Honda, with a black crash helmet. You don’t remember seeing it in the supermarket car park, do you?’

  Kathy thought. ‘Sorry, no. And the women have complained?’

  ‘Long and loud, in person and through legal representatives, and to higher authorities. Brock’s just been called in to see Sharpe. Hell, it isn’t as if we couldn’t have seen it coming. What was in his mind, do you know, Kathy? It was almost as if he believed that Charles Verge was still alive.’

  Kathy shook her head.

  ‘I can just hear Sharpe telling him he’s being obsessive. And it’s true. Well, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know, Bren. I really don’t.’

  ‘And how certain is this match of the leather fibres?’ Sharpe demanded.

  ‘Ninety-seven per cent,’ Brock replied.

  ‘Ninety-seven per cent certain of what?’ Sharpe insisted. ‘That they’re from the same glove, or from the same type of glove, or from a similar piece of black leather?’

  ‘A piece of leather processed in the same way, using the same dye.’

  ‘And that covers what percentage of the total number of leather items on sale in London?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘There could be hundreds of matches for these samples, yes? Thousands maybe. One might be from a bag and the other from a glove, or the sleeve of a jacket, or a shoe. You see my point?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And you must have realised this, yet you persisted. Why?’

  ‘I said when we met a week ago that I felt it was premature to close the investigation, sir, especially in the absence of a body.’

  Sharpe’s face hardened, his voice taking on a repetitive stress as if he were reciting an obvious truth or a nursery rhyme. ‘And I made it quite plain to you that the case was over. I congratulated you on a brilliant result. I made it crystal clear that everyone was completely satisfied.’ He reached for a file and slammed it down in front of Brock. It was open at a record of a meeting dated the twentieth of September. The wording was almost identical to what Sharpe had just said.