The Verge Practice

by Barry Maitland

  She was becoming convinced that he shouldn’t be in the police force, at least not in the forensic area of laboratory liaison. His working hours revolved around the nasty end of the business, constantly confronted by the worst in life, a never-ending stream of crime scenes and their aftermath.

  Unrelieved by contact with living clients, he met only victims dehumanised by violent death, and she thought it was beginning to tell on him. He finished chopping and stood for a moment, as if wondering what to do next, looking forlorn and troubled and beautiful, and she was on the point of taking hold of him and telling him how much she loved him, when he suddenly shoved his hand inside the chicken carcass and began to scrape out the scraps of offal inside.

  And she felt guilty, because he had had an escape plan and she had been one of the reasons he had abandoned it.

  As a laboratory liaison officer he couldn’t rise above sergeant, so he had planned to go up to Liverpool University to do a master’s in forensic psychology and move into a more open career path, perhaps in the private sector. Kathy had felt that she would lose him if he left, and had made it easier for him to stay than to go.

  ‘You’ve got a lot of reading to do?’ Leon nodded at the pile of documents she’d dropped on the table, and she told him about the first meeting of the Crime Strategy Working Party. After some hiatus Desmond had returned with Robert, but without Rex, and they had agreed to postpone the meeting until something could be worked out. Kathy tried to make it sound funny, but Leon didn’t respond.

  ‘The Asian kid is paralysed,’ he said gloomily. ‘The one who got kicked by the police horse. It was on the news.

  He’ll likely be a quadriplegic. I shouldn’t think this is a very good time to be starting up your committee.’

  Kathy felt mildly deflated. ‘Well, it would suit me if they forgot the whole thing.’ She changed the subject. ‘Did you call your mum today?’

  He nodded, stuffing a whole lemon into the chicken.

  ‘You can open that wine if you like.’

  ‘How’s your dad’s tummy?’

  ‘Okay. The doctor said he was pleased with the way it’s going.’

  ‘Good. I’m going to be out that way tomorrow. I thought I might call in on your mum.’

  Leon looked at her in surprise.

  ‘Just to see how she’s coping. What do you think?’

  ‘Fine . . .’ Leon looked extremely doubtful. ‘Afternoon would probably be best. Do you want me to call her?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do it once I know how my time is going. Do you want some help with that?’

  ‘It’s all under control.’

  She thumbed reluctantly through the pile of her documents and, coming to the scrapbook that Brock had given her, pulled it out and opened the cover. Inside was the title, Dossier on the Murder of Miki Norinaga and Disappearance of Charles Verge. Compiled by Stewart and Miranda Collins, aged 9 and 6, of 349A High Street, Battle, East Sussex. She smiled to herself and began to turn the pages of cuttings.

  Later, relaxed by the wine and a surprisingly competent meal, they lay together in the darkness in the large bed that almost filled the tiny bedroom, and into Kathy’s mind returned the question Brock had asked and she had glibly deflected. Why had Charles Verge marked a passage describing an eighteenth-century architect identifying their crimes from the heads of dead criminals? She pictured the bizarre and macabre scene, and wondered how Verge might have interpreted it. Was he taken with the idea that somehow our worst acts were stamped on our faces? Or, if the faces preceded the acts, were we doomed to commit the crimes that our heredity or environment had conditioned us to? Or was it something to do with the idea of Verge’s new prison, that you had to reconstruct the whole person, physically as well as spiritually, in order to free it from its criminal fate? She was on the point of drifting off, when the idea suddenly hit her. She blinked awake and sat up.

  ‘He’s changed his face,’ she said.

  ‘What? Who has?’ Leon muttered.

  ‘Charles Verge. He’s had plastic surgery or something.’

  ‘Very likely . . .’ Leon turned over and buried himself under the bedclothes.

  She subsided back onto her pillow. Then another disturbing thought occurred to her. Just when had Verge marked the passage in the book?

  6

  First thing the next morning, Brock held another team meeting. In the grey light of day Kathy felt that her bright idea about Verge was blindingly obvious and hardly worth passing on. In any case, Brock was taking a different tangent.

  One of the experts who had provided support to Chivers’ team was a financial specialist from SO6, the Fraud Squad, and he had joined them that morning as Brock quizzed them on the details of their investigation of possible sources of funds for Verge on the run. As they explained where the trip-wires had been set up to warn of any of his close family or friends providing financial help, it became apparent that there was one possible major gap, the Verge Practice itself, whose income and assets represented the largest legitimate source of funds for the fugitive. The problem was that the firm was involved in so many financial transactions, large and small, with suppliers, consultants, contractors and sub-contractors in many different parts of the world, that it was impossible to monitor them all in detail. Superintendent Chivers had restricted checks to the most likely channels—Verge’s company credit card and cheque book accounts—but that wouldn’t help if he were getting assistance from someone inside the firm.

  ‘What sort of person, Tony?’ Brock asked the Fraud Squad man, who, in a black suit and with a pale expressionless face, looked as if he wouldn’t have been out of place in a convention of undertakers.

  ‘Almost anyone, sir,’ he said with an air of regret. ‘The ones able to authorise larger payments would be the most obvious—his partners, the finance manager, accountants, people like that. But anyone who knew the accounting system could probably slip something through to a dummy account if they put their mind to it. The girl who looks after the stationery, the bloke who approves the travelling expenses or maintains the computers.’

  ‘He’s got a lot of loyal staff there he might have contacted, chief,’ Bren observed. ‘And it’s not as if they’d really be stealing from the firm. I mean, it is his money, after all.’

  ‘How would we set about looking?’ Brock asked.

  Tony said, ‘If they were sensible, it could be hard to detect. They could use a number of small creditors to avoid being conspicuous, and change the names every few months. We should get every payment verified by at least two people, and we might look for coincidences or anomalies. Maybe payments to several different people but all to the same bank branch, or with the same VAT number. An added complication is that the firm does a lot of foreign business. With their overseas projects, VP often forms one-off partnerships with locals to manage the contracts, and these could provide a way of getting money overseas.’

  They discussed it for a while, until Brock, becoming impatient with the technicalities, finally said, ‘Tony, I want you to brief Bren and a small team on how to make a start—where they should look, what they should collect, what questions they should ask. Bren, get a warrant before you go, and threaten them with Tony’s heavy mob if they seem to be hiding anything. Make your presence felt, Bren.

  Make it very obvious what we’re doing. If anyone there is in touch with Verge, we want to get them worried.’

  There were reports of extensive roadwork delays on the A40, so Kathy headed north-west instead, picking up the M1 until it reached the M25 and the open country beyond Watford, where she turned off the main roads into hedge-lined lanes. There was an abrupt release from the pressure of heavy traffic, a sudden transition from the sprawling reach of the great conurbation into a rural landscape bathed in pure September sunshine, and she felt immediately cheerful. When she wound down the window the car filled with smells of wood smoke and damp silage. She came to a small village and stopped at the twisted crossroads in the centre to check her ro
ute. A thatched pub, its timbers painted black, stood silent across the way, and a bright scarlet tractor drove past, a dog in the cabin with a russet-faced farmer.

  She came at last to a white gate bearing the name ‘Orchard Cottage’, and parked on the grass shoulder. When she stood at the gate she was presented with a little tableau, a rustic scene from a Pre-Raphaelite painting perhaps, except for the glint of chrome on Madelaine Verge’s wheelchair. Beside her a young woman was reaching up into an apple tree for fruit to fill the basket that Madelaine cradled on her lap. The young woman was pregnant, the swell of her belly obvious beneath an ankle-length smock, and her cheeks were as rosy as the pippins she was plucking. Her hair was long, straight and black, and Kathy thought she could recognise something of her father in her Latin features, unlike the older woman whose silver hair had once been fair and whose complexion looked as if it were rarely exposed to sunlight. They were set against a backdrop of a simple brick-and-tile agricultural worker’s cottage, wreathed in roses, and they turned their heads to stare at the newcomer as the hinges of the white gate creaked.

  They both frowned when Kathy introduced herself.

  The young woman, Verge’s daughter Charlotte, appeared frankly hostile, while her grandmother seemed at first put out that they had not sent someone more important. She quickly recovered herself and seemed prepared to make the best of it. ‘Do come in,’ she said graciously. ‘We were about to have a cup of coffee.’

  They sat in the sun at a wooden table in the back garden, also planted with gnarled apple trees. ‘We have so many apples this year. We must give you some to take away with you,’ Madelaine Verge, Lady Bountiful, observed, while her grand-daughter kept silent, resting a hand on her stomach. Kathy felt a little twist, quickly suppressed, of envy or regret.

  ‘This is a beautiful spot,’ she said. ‘DCI Brock said that you used to live near here, Mrs Verge.’

  ‘That’s right. Just over that next rise. Charles built a house for me there, twenty-five years ago. His very first masterpiece. Are you interested in architecture, Sergeant?’

  It was a polite inquiry, not expecting much.

  ‘I’m fairly ignorant about it,’ Kathy said honestly, and caught a small scornful snort from Charlotte. ‘But you can’t help being affected by it, can you? And I suppose if you were married to one architect, and had a famous son for another, you couldn’t help becoming an expert.’

  Madelaine smiled. ‘That’s very true. It becomes part of the air one breathes.’

  ‘And have you followed the family tradition, Charlotte?’

  Kathy asked.

  The young woman turned to glare at Kathy, taking so long to reply that her grandmother broke in, ‘In a way.

  Charlotte is a graphic designer. A very good one. She runs her business from here, designing people’s web pages. She’s extremely successful.’

  Charlotte winced at this grandmotherly endorsement, and got awkwardly to her feet. ‘I’ll fetch the coffee,’ she muttered angrily.

  ‘You must excuse Charlotte,’ Madelaine said confidingly as she disappeared into the cottage. ‘This has been a very emotional year for her. She feels the loss of her father keenly—they were very close, his only child. And then she’d split up with her partner just a short while before that, and now she’s preparing to be a sole parent. All very trying.’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ Kathy felt a familiar sense of viewing lives from the outside, as if through a lens, deciphering connections and relationships that would probably be irrelevant to her purpose.

  ‘Do you have children, Sergeant?’

  ‘No.’ Kathy was aware of being probed, while Mrs Verge made up her mind whether it would be more productive to groom or attack her.

  ‘Perhaps you’re wise. They are a blessing, of course, but also a heartache.’

  Especially if they go around stabbing people, Kathy thought. There was something odd about all this, something she was missing. ‘But this seems a wonderful refuge for Charlotte,’ she said. ‘Is it just a coincidence that it’s so close to where you used to live?’

  ‘Not exactly. Charlotte was born a couple of years after Charles built Briar Hill for me, and when she was a child she had so many happy memories of staying with me there that when her relationship broke down she decided to get out of London and come to live in the area. Charles helped her financially, and now when I come to stay with her we go for drives and catch sight of the house again, and remember those happy days. Someone else owns Briar Hill now, of course. Charles sold it to a Spanish artist, a friend of his, on the condition that she promise to change nothing.’

  Not only odd but a little spooky, Kathy thought, as if his mother and his daughter had decided together to live in the past, before all of this unpleasantness had happened. ‘I can understand her resenting me for invading her privacy here to question you about her father.’

  ‘She does rather regard the police as the enemy, I’m afraid. She thinks you believe the worst of her father, but I tell her that we must try to do everything we can to help you come to the truth of the matter, that Charles is the real victim in all this.’ There was such a calm certainty in the way she said this that Kathy was impressed, despite her conviction that the woman was deluding herself. ‘So how can I help you? And may I say that I was most impressed by your Mr Brock. Much more intelligent than the last fellow.

  I feel more confident now that we can make some progress at last.’ She smiled.

  Grooming then, Kathy thought. ‘I’ve brought a copy of your earlier statements, Mrs Verge, and I’d like to go through some of the points you raised there, but mainly I’d like to get to understand Charles better, as a person.’ Made-laine Verge beamed. Nothing would delight her more, her only regret being that most of the photograph albums were in her London flat, a fact for which Kathy was silently grateful.

  When Charlotte returned they were deep in conversation about Charles’s boyhood, his sense of mischief, his stubbornness, his enthusiasm for competitive sports, his oddly inconsistent school results until he suddenly blossomed just in time to get decent A-levels. Charlotte poured the coffee then said that she had work to do.

  ‘Before you go, dear,’ her grandmother said, ‘would you please fetch me the family album in my room?’

  ‘It must have been difficult for you, bringing him up on your own, Madelaine,’ Kathy said, the intimacies of Charles’s childhood having brought them to first-name terms.

  ‘I always felt that I had his father, Alberto, at my shoulder, guiding me. He was a very special man, an Olympic athlete and a very gifted architect. I never made any attempt to guide Charles into his father’s footsteps, but Alberto was always there as a shining example, and I was thrilled when Charles announced that he would become an architect, too. And it soon became obvious that the gift had been passed down, undiminished.’

  Charlotte returned with an old photograph album, then disappeared again. It contained pictures from Charles’s childhood, mostly bland and remote, but there was one that caught Kathy’s attention for its strangeness. In it, the small boy was standing encased in some kind of tall, thin construction which Kathy couldn’t make out. It looked something like a giant condom or a syringe, daubed with spots and surmounted by a crown, his face peering out from a hole cut in the middle.

  ‘Oh, that’s a favourite of mine,’ Madelaine chuckled.

  ‘He won first prize.’

  Kathy looked perplexed.

  ‘A fancy-dress competition! He went as the Empire State Building.’

  Kathy got it now. The spots were windows, and the crown formed the famous silhouette. It was hard to make out what little Charles was thinking, but he didn’t look happy.

  Madelaine went on to talk about the early years of his practice, when Charles had returned from graduate school in America with a young fellow-graduate as his wife and had put out his shingle in London, penniless but filled with confidence. She then glowingly related the critical success of Briar Hill, its publication in Archi
tectural Design and Casabella, and the triumphs of the middle years.

  ‘The break-up with his first wife must have been hard, with her having been so much a part of all that,’ Kathy said, trying to move the story forward.

  Madelaine Verge took a deep breath, as if reluctant to come to that episode, then turned her head sharply at the sound of feet on gravel. ‘Ah, George!’ she cried as a man came round the corner of the cottage, carrying a garden fork and hoe. ‘Did you get the plants you wanted?’

  ‘Most of ’em, Mrs V. They were out of onions.’ He lifted his cap to the women, squinting suspiciously at Kathy. He was a stocky figure, of late middle age, with a deeply lined face and wisps of fair hair across his pate, dressed in old clothes for garden work. He replaced his cap, picked up his tools and moved towards a freshly dug bed on the far side of the small lawn. As he turned away Kathy saw that the left side of his face was badly scarred.

  ‘George is one of Charles’s projects,’ Madelaine whispered, leaning towards Kathy. ‘He was in prison at the time Charles was doing research for the Marchdale project—are you familiar with that? Yes, well, Charles learned a great deal from George about prison life, so much so that he engaged him as a consultant and then, when he was released, Charles took him on as a general handyman to look after my little garden in town and to get this place into shape for Charlotte. It really was a mess when he bought it for her, but within a few months George had repaired the roof, knocked out a wall, put in a new kitchen and bathroom, redecorated, and now he’s reorganising the garden.’

  ‘Very handy.’

  ‘And very honest and loyal. We trust him absolutely, despite his past. He is a real vindication of Charles’s faith in him.’