The verge practice bak-7

by Barry Maitland

  ‘You seem intent on shooting yourself in the foot, Brock. Almost obsessional about it. Why is that?’ Sharpe stopped pacing and sat down. ‘I’ve assured the three women that neither they nor their gardener will be disturbed again, and that the case is closed. You’ll write to them yourself, today, and confirm this, and apologise for any inconvenience and distress. All right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He felt ten years old again, in the headmaster’s study, the only one of the Black Hand Gang to have been caught wiping boot polish on doorhandles on April Fool’s Day.

  ‘And I want a copy of the letters for my file.’ Sharpe filled his lungs and relaxed slowly. ‘Anyway, on a brighter note, your DS Kolla seems to be acquitting herself extremely well on the Working Party committee. Robert is very pleased with her, tells me she’s taken it by the scruff of the neck and made it perform. Excellent leadership qualities, he says. Focused. Sound.’

  Sound was Sharpe’s favourite quality, Brock knew. He was in no doubt that his own soundness quotient had taken a dive.

  ‘You might learn a thing or two from her, Brock.’

  He stopped for a double scotch at a pub on the way back, a little place packed with office workers in no hurry to get home. They jostled and laughed too loudly at their own jokes, shouting their orders through the smoke to the girls behind the bar, and after ten minutes Brock felt a little better. He fought his way out onto the street and continued back to the annexe in Queen Anne’s Gate. It occupied a four-storey brick terrace of what had once been indiviual houses, later connected by a warren of doors and corridors and converted to offices, most recently belonging to a publisher. In a few years it would change its use again, Brock thought, and no one would remember or care what he and his people had done here.

  He stopped at an office on the second floor when he saw Kathy inside working at her computer. ‘Sorry I was a bit abrupt earlier,’ he said. ‘Was in a bit of a hurry.’

  ‘Bren said there was trouble.’

  As she looked up from the screen Brock was struck by how dark the shadows around her eyes seemed, how hollow her cheeks. Or perhaps it was just the light. ‘A call to order from above. The Verge case is closed. Drop it, forget it.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, maybe they’re right. We had our chance. Look, I’ve got some paperwork to clear up, but do you fancy a meal later on?’

  ‘Yes, okay. That would be fine.’

  After he’d gone she sat for a while thinking about the Verge case, then, inevitably, about Leon, then back to Verge. She thought of Brock’s conviction that they’d got it wrong, his fear that Verge might strike again, and her absurd notion about Todd. It was so easy to see threats and shadows where none existed.

  Her phone rang, Brock’s voice, but sounding odd, asking her to come to his office. When she got there she was startled to see the blank, stunned look on his face.

  ‘You all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Sit down.’ He shook himself, ran a hand across his eyes. ‘I just had a call from Suzanne. She happened to mention that the children had met up with someone we know, someone on the force, she assumed. Yesterday afternoon, they were coming home from school, and he met them outside the shop.’

  Kathy visualised the children in their school uniforms outside the front of Suzanne’s antiques shop and home on the High Street in Battle, wondering what this was leading to.

  ‘He called them by their names, and said that he was a good friend of ours, and that he’d heard they were very interested in the Verge case. He said he’d heard they’d made their own dossier of the case, and it was a very good piece of work.’

  Now Kathy understood. She felt a chill as she recalled the title page of the scrapbook that had been taken from her car, with the children’s names, ages and address.

  ‘Could they describe him?’

  ‘Oldish man, funny accent, and he spoke to them in an odd way, with the left side of his face turned away.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘It’s a threat, Kathy, or a warning.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s what Todd was up to.’

  ‘What can we do?’ And that, Kathy realised, was the big question, the reason why Brock was immobilised instead of calling all hell down upon the head of George Todd.

  ‘Sharpe won’t let me act on this without some confirmation,’ Brock said. ‘I’ll go down there now, and try to get something concrete from the kids. Maybe Sharpe will agree to an identification parade.’ He said it without conviction. ‘At the least I can get Suzanne to take them away somewhere safe for a while.’

  For how long, she thought, and what then?

  ‘I’m sorry, Brock. I feel this is my fault, with the scrapbook.’

  ‘Nonsense, it was sheer bad luck. At least it confirms that Todd is tied up in this. If the worst comes to the worst, I’ll take the bastard away for another little holiday, and beat the truth out of him.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ He got to his feet and began shoving documents into his briefcase. ‘I’d better go.’

  Kathy felt helpless. ‘I’ll see you on Monday. You won’t do anything till then, will you?’ He smiled grimly. ‘Don’t worry. Have a good weekend.’ Later, sitting alone in her office, she came to a conclu sion. She picked up her phone and rang the number of a twenty-four hour ticketing agency.

  26

  In view of the tools she was carrying, Kathy had checked her bag in at Heathrow, though she had brought little else. After retrieving it from the carousel at El Prat, she made for the car-rental desks on the ground floor and hired a little Seat like the one she’d had before. Thinking of her current bank balance, she decided not to pay extra for additional damage insurance. It was the last Saturday in September, the sky outside was pale blue, the temperature mild, and a fresh easterly breeze spiked the jet-engine fumes with the tang of salty sea air. She wound the window down and headed south. By two p.m. she was driving along the waterfront of Sitges.

  It was only ten days since she’d been here, yet it seemed like another period of her life entirely, a time of innocence, of unforgivable naivety. There was the cafe where she had written the postcard to Leon, imagining that they would return here together, perhaps-who could tell?-on a honeymoon. And all the time that she had been playing the detective in Spain, thinking that she might find the answers that had eluded everyone else, she had been oblivious to the unravelling of her own life. On the very same Sunday that she had come to Barcelona, Leon had gone with Paul Oakley to Dublin. On the Tuesday, when she’d been looking for clues in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, he had returned to London, and on the Wednesday, while she was writing her postcard, he had been removing his stuff from her flat. She felt a sense of bitter satisfaction now at the cruel synchronicity, as if she’d deserved to be hurt, for being so unaware, so smug.

  Not any more. This time, right or wrong, she would set the agenda. She turned the car and drove to the Apollo-Sitges Fitness Club.

  It had an abandoned air, the front door closed, an empty Coke bottle standing on the front step. She rapped on the door and noticed a sign hanging behind its glass panel. Its printed letters announced that it was ‘tancat’, and beneath, in a felt pen scrawl, ‘closed’. When she walked down the side lane to the rear yard she found an empty dustbin, and plastic bags blown against the foot of the roller door. She tried the intercom and found that it was dead.

  Kathy returned to her car and drove back to the seafront. She had missed lunch and felt hungry. She took a seat at the Bar Chiringuito overlooking the beach and ordered sardines, bread and mineral water from an old man who bustled about as if run off his feet, although she was the only customer. Afterwards, she drove through the town until she found a cinema, and fell asleep watching a love story she couldn’t follow.

  Daylight was fading when she emerged from the theatre. The streetlights were lit, groups of young people strolling, window shopping, wearing jumpers or jackets against the cool ev
ening breeze. When she got back to her car she pulled on her black tracksuit top with the hood, and packed her tools in a small backpack that she slipped under her seat. She took her time making her way back across town, letting the sky turn completely black, and parked a block away from the gym. It was a neighbourhood of small hotels, out of season now, and houses on narrow lots. Shrubs and trees spilled over the dividing walls, and there was a smell of pine resin in the night air. She met no pedestrians and almost no vehicles on the street as she approached the unlit building.

  She pulled on latex gloves and used the rubbish bin in the yard at the end of the lane to haul herself up onto the parapet of the rear building. On the way up she examined the burglar-alarm box mounted over the side doorway, and thought it looked new. She crouched behind the parapet, catching her breath and getting her bearings. The sky was clear of cloud, and there was a pale light from a half moon as well as the reflected glow from streetlights.

  It looked to her as if the building had been constructed in two stages. The gym at the front, facing the street, would have been the original part-once a garage, perhaps, or a workshop. It had a pitched roof spanning the width of the plot, and Kathy recalled the industrial steel trusses she had seen inside the gym. The rear half of the building looked more recent, and had a flat roof, on which Kathy was now squatting. Windowless, its natural light was provided by rows of square roof lights raised on kerbs above the granulated roof surface. As she moved forward to have a closer look at them, she caught sight of a lit window in a neighbouring building, the white light of a TV flickering soundlessly inside.

  The roof lights looked strong and new and, Kathy guessed, alarmed. Their plastic surface was thick and translucent, so that when she shone her flashlight the beam couldn’t penetrate to illuminate the interior below. Kathy imagined the filtered milky light that would come from them, as if the people beneath didn’t want the sight of a cloud or the sound of a dog barking to disturb whatever they did down there.

  She walked the length of the flat roofed section and came to the triangular gable of concrete blockwork that formed the back wall of the gym. There were roof lights in that section too, she recalled, remembering daylight in the gym, but there they were formed simply as panels of clear corrugated plastic inset into the metal roof sheeting. Peering over the edge of the gable she could make them out, paler rectangles in the dark sloping surface. She climbed onto the pitched roof and edged forward to the nearest one, crouching low so that her silhouette would stay below the ridgeline of the roof. Though she was reasonably fit, the unfamiliar movements and the strain of trying to do everything in total silence were having their effect. She was breathing heavily, her heart pounding, her fingers and ankles aching from trying to keep a grip on the corrugated metal roofing. As she eased her backpack off she imagined it sliding down the smooth pitch, and herself following it into the void.

  She thought the larger screwdriver might do the job, and managed to force its blade under the edge of the plastic sheet. But the metal roof gave her no leverage, and she had to pull the two parts of the crowbar out of her bag, screw it together and lay it alongside the edge of the plastic to act as a fulcrum. She put all of her weight on the handle of the screwdriver, and felt the sheet begin to rise, then switched tools and used the jemmy to try to force it up. There was a creak of protest from the restraining screws, then a sudden explosive bang as they gave and the plastic sheet jerked open. Kathy froze, feeling her arms trembling from the effort.

  There were no shouts, no sounds of doors opening or dogs barking. She lay against the metal sheeting, letting her breathing return to more like normal, then carefully put the tools back into her bag and slipped it back over her shoulder. The ache in her ankles had spread up to her thighs now, from the tensing of her legs against the roof, and she thought she should have begun with stretching exercises, and how ridiculous it would be to pull a muscle breaking into a gym.

  She lifted the edge of the plastic roof light sheet and squeezed her head and shoulders inside, looking for the winking red light of a movement detector. Nothing. She pointed a pocket torch into the darkness. The beam picked out a steel truss right in front of her, and in the dimmer distance a row of exercise bikes on the floor below, their handlebars erect like bulls’ horns. It wasn’t too far to the ground, she thought optimistically, perhaps twelve feet from the bottom chord of the truss, maybe only ten. She reached out to take hold of a vertical bar of the truss, and began to wriggle herself and her pack through the gap beneath the edge of the sheet, swinging one foot then the other onto the bottom chord, an inverted T in section and uncomfortable to stand on, but strong enough to take her weight. She pulled the roof sheet down behind her as well as she could, and stood clinging to the steelwork of the truss, feeling like Spiderwoman. Then she lowered herself to hang from the bottom bar and dropped to the floor.

  She sprawled on all fours, but felt thankfully intact. Checking again for alarm sensors, she felt the guilt pangs of the novice burglar. The musty smells of the gym accused her; she was an intruder, an illegal, beyond the pale of decent bodybuilders. And looking around, her eyes growing accustomed to the dim light filtering down from the roof, she realised she wasn’t going to be able to climb out the way she’d come in.

  The door at the back of the gym hall was neither wired nor locked, and she found herself in the corridor that led to the fire exit in the external wall to the alley. That would have to be her way out. Across the corridor was the door to the rear half of the building. She used the screwdriver and jemmy in combination again to try to force the lock. As she applied pressure she imagined the possibilities. The door might be bolted on the other side, it might be alarmed. As she gave a final jerk it sprang open with a crash and she tensed, waiting for the siren howl or clanging bell, but none came.

  Her torch showed a short corridor ahead, with three identical doors on each side, each with a circular porthole window, and beneath that an empty slot for a name. She tried the first door on her left. It was empty, but the furniture and fittings it had once contained had left their traces. There were the imprints on the vinyl floor sheeting of four heavy casters where a bed had been, the scuff marks of a side chair, the blank rectangle of a bedside cabinet. On the walls were brackets and connections for a TV, a light, headphones and a call button.

  Kathy continued to the end of the corridor, pushing open the door to a further suite of rooms. There was what had probably been an office, two storerooms with empty shelving, and a room that might have been an operating theatre, with mountings on the ceiling for heavy lights and a washbasin with extended lever taps such as a surgeon might operate with his elbows. Every fitting, every notice on the pin boards, every paper roll in the toilets, had been scrupulously removed, and from the smell of cleaning fluid in the stale air, every surface had been scrubbed.

  She made her way back to the fire exit and pushed the bar. Still no alarms sounded. The night was cool and she could hear the faint murmur of surf and the moan of a siren. When she reached the street she noticed a blue lamp flashing above the front door of the gym, and realised she must have triggered a silent alarm. The siren’s howl was louder now. She turned and jogged to her car, keeping to the shadows close to the garden walls. Once safely inside, she did a quick U-turn and headed back through the city to the highway beyond.

  27

  Plan B. When she got back to Barcelona, Kathy drove into the centre of the city and parked near the hotel where they had stayed ten days ago. She wondered about asking if they had a room, but she guessed it would be expensive and postponed a decision, though it was now gone ten p.m.

  She approached the Placa de Catalunya on foot along a narrow twisting lane, and, turning a corner, suddenly found her way blocked by a police car and a small knot of people. She recognised English accents. A man was saying loudly, ‘… all over me, then this other bloke offered to help. Next thing he’d taken my wallet…’

  As she got closer Kathy saw that his shirt was covered in some b
rown liquid, and a foul smell hung in the air. A woman said, ‘We were warned about this!’

  The two cops, looking bored, made room for Kathy to get past.

  ‘They looked so respectable,’ the woman complained, and Kathy thought, yes, you just can’t tell who’s a thief these days.

  ‘Hey!’ A man’s voice, calling after her. She turned and saw one of the policemen wave at her. He began to walk towards her. For a moment she thought of running, but instead gave him a smile. He looked stern and pointed at the pack slung over her right shoulder, then waved an admonishing finger. He made a gesture like someone snatching it, then mimed wearing it properly on her back, with both straps. She grinned and thanked him, and he gave her a wink. Clearly she was more interesting than the tiresome middle-aged tourists who were making such a fuss.

  She found a place in a cafe overlooking the square. There were shiny aluminium tables and chairs spilling out across the broad pavement, the outdoor ones packed by under-thirties who were maintaining running conversations with the crowd passing by. Kathy chose a table in a corner inside, where the light was bright enough to study the book she had brought in her backpack, The Complete Works of Luis Domenech i Montaner.

  She ordered a long black and turned to the plans of the house of the hospital superintendent of Sant Pau. It wasn’t a large house, quite modest really in terms of the number of its rooms, but compensating in the extravagant flourishes of its details. She traced the route that she and Linda had taken through the house, from the front door through the hall to the main salon at the rear where they had met Dr Lizancos. From the plan she saw that there was also a dining room, kitchen and maid’s room on the ground floor, and a staircase leading from the hall to the upper floor, containing three bedrooms. There was no cellar or any room indicated as an office or study, but there was one unidentified feature, a turret room at roof level, circular in plan and accessed by a spiral staircase rising from the top of the main stairs. The lizard’s lair, Kathy thought. She memorised the plans and the intricately ornamented elevations, paid for her coffee and set off once again.