The Verge Practice

by Barry Maitland

  We haven’t reinterviewed them yet. It’s always possible they may remember something else.’

  A very long shot, Kathy thought, but better that than another list. So the horoscope in the paper had been right.

  She hid her disappointment and took the details. After a couple of phone calls she had set up meetings with the

  couple and made for the door, passing Tony and his fraud team. DI Bren Gurney was with them, chuckling at a joke someone had cracked. He looked alert and cheerful in the unfamiliar company of the Fraud Squad officers, and Kathy thought, that’s where I should be, I’ve worked with SO6 before, then told herself not to be petty. She took the tube to Finchley to pick up her little red Renault and headed for the Great North Road.

  Weaving among the trucks thundering north out of London on the A1 motorway, Kathy experienced a familiar sense of anticipation, of heading towards a foreign country, the one to which she and her mother had moved after her father died—the strange and intimidating Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire where, after her mother, too, had passed away, she had been taken in by her aunt and uncle. She thought guiltily that it was some time since she’d been up to see them, elderly now and frail in their little Sheffield terrace house. From Peterborough she’d be halfway there; she considered continuing north after she’d seen the McNeils, then dismissed the idea.

  She followed the directions Audrey McNeil had given her, turning off the A1 at the first Peterborough sign and coming to an area of new detached houses on the outskirts of the city. From the welcome that Mrs McNeil gave her, she got the impression that the excitement caused by their possible sighting of the runaway had been thoroughly appreciated. Both women were prepared with documentation; Kathy with a file of the earlier interview transcripts and the plans and photographs supplied by the Barcelona police, and Audrey McNeil with her own collection of holiday snapshots, city guides and souvenirs.

  ‘It’s a wonderful city, so exciting, so much to see,’ Audrey enthused. She was in her early sixties, Kathy guessed, hair silvering and eyes sharp. ‘Wonderful buildings, the street life, the food . . . Well, to be honest I think tapas is overrated, and Peter says I do a better paella than any of the restaurants we tried, but anyway . . .’ She poured tea as she rattled on. ‘I have a Barcelona bridge partner now. We get on like a house on fire. Play practically every day. A grandmother like me, and the same age.’

  It seemed Audrey spent much of her days, and nights too, playing bridge on the internet. She handed Kathy her pictures of Barcelona, describing each in turn and eventually coming to the only one that seemed relevant.

  ‘Now this is the Casa Milà, which is on the same street where Peter saw Charles Verge, the Passeig de Gràcia. You see the sculpted shape of the balconies, almost like it’s made of clay, or bones? It was designed by Gaudí, the famous Barcelona architect, who was run over by a tram. Peter is a great fan of Gaudí. He took pictures of all his buildings, including the great church of the Sagrada Família of course, dozens of them.’ She turned to another packet but Kathy stopped her and guided her attention back to the Casa Milà.

  ‘That was taken from right outside the building?’

  ‘Yes. Peter was insistent that we cross the street to try to get further back, to get the whole building in, but the trees got in the way and he didn’t take that shot in the end. So we crossed back over again and continued down to a café near the metro station, and it was on our way there that we saw him.’

  Kathy unfolded her plans and got Audrey to trace the route. ‘We worked out that it must have been this block here that we saw him, going into the entrance on the corner, there.’

  ‘Okay, now in your earlier statement it’s Peter who really describes the figure you saw, and you agree with him.

  I wondered if you could try to picture the scene again now and tell me what you saw.’

  ‘Well, the trouble is that I took no notice until Peter said something like, “Oh, look at that chap over there, it’s the famous architect Charles Verge”, and then I looked and just caught a fleeting glimpse of him as he disappeared into the shadow of the entrance. I wouldn’t remember it at all if Peter hadn’t gone on about how important he was, and I got a bit irritated because frankly I’d never heard of him, not then. Now, of course, everyone has.’

  ‘All the same,’ Kathy persisted, sure she was wasting her time, ‘could you close your eyes and picture the scene, and just replay it in your mind? Don’t say anything, just try to visualise it, then tell me what you see.’

  Audrey closed her eyes and sat motionless for a moment. Her lips pursed as if recalling the memory of her irritation with her husband, then her face relaxed a little and she made a gesture with her hand, as if tracing a movement in front of her. She opened her eyes and shrugged.

  ‘Not much help, I’m afraid. I got a glimpse of someone dressed in black, that’s all.’

  ‘Black jacket?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. Peter said afterwards it was a black leather jacket.’

  ‘Forget about what Peter said, Audrey. I just want your impressions.’

  ‘Well he was probably right. I think it may have been a bit shiny in the sunlight, just before he disappeared inside the building. And black trousers and black hair.’

  ‘Length of hair?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Just now, when you had your eyes closed, you moved your right hand to the right, as if you were following his movement. Is that what you were doing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Only, if you were walking down the Passeig de Gràcia here . . .’ Kathy pointed to the map, ‘. . . on the same side as the Casa Milà, surely he would have passed in front of you going from right to left, from the kerb to the building, that way, yes?’

  Audrey frowned in thought. ‘I suppose so. Well . . . maybe he did. I don’t know.’ Her irritation was surfacing again. ‘You’ve got to realise that I didn’t take much notice at the time. I mean, if Peter had said it was Elton John or Fergie or someone interesting I’d have paid attention, and anyway, it was a whole week later that we realised it might be important and had to think back. I mean, our whole time in Barcelona was packed with interesting sights, and this was just one little incident, over in a flash.’

  ‘Of course,’ Kathy said, conciliatory. ‘Police hope for the impossible from eyewitnesses.’ It was quite obvious that Audrey McNeil could tell her nothing new. ‘So Gaudí’s church is impressive, is it?’

  ‘Actually, it’s very weird,’ Audrey said, and opened the packet of photographs.

  After a decent interval Kathy said she would have to go to keep her appointment with Mr McNeil. He had officially retired from his structural engineering practice, Audrey had said, but still went in one day a week, to the irritation of his partners. Kathy followed her directions to the city centre and found the offices in a neat Georgian terrace not far from Peterborough’s cathedral. The place was very different from the Verge Practice’s glossy building. A receptionist and a couple of other staff were packed into a series of small rooms along with a purposeful jumble of hard hats, surveying equipment and computers.

  ‘Audrey any help?’ her husband inquired, lifting a pile of files to the floor so that he could sit on the other side of the desk.

  ‘Oh, it’s always useful to hear it direct, rather than just reading it from files,’ Kathy lied.

  ‘Nothing, eh?’ he beamed smugly, and in that smile Kathy thought she might have seen the source of his wife’s irritation. ‘Well, I doubt if I can add anything new either, but fire away.’

  Kathy got him to repeat his account, then said, ‘So you saw him get out of a taxi over to your right, then walk across in front of you from right to left.’

  ‘That’s it, yes. I was concentrating on his face, trying to decide if it really was him. He looked younger than the photos I’d seen in the magazines, and his hair was a bit longer, but when your people showed me the most recent picture they had of him, I knew he was the one.’

&n
bsp; ‘It’s just that Audrey seemed to feel that she saw him go into a doorway to her right, not her left.’

  ‘Well, that doesn’t surprise me.’ The grin spread over his face again. ‘Do you know that it’s now been scientifically proven that the only thing women can do that men can’t is have babies, and the only thing that men can do that women can’t is read maps.’ He chuckled. ‘If I’m ever forced to get Audrey to map-read for me in the car and she says, “Turn left here”, I turn right, because I know that’s what she means. You get my drift? Don’t get me wrong, Audrey can be sharp as a tack, but she gets right and left mixed up. And she hardly had time to register him. But she did notice his hair, come to think of it. Did she mention that? I was telling her how he was England’s leading architect and she got a bit cross with me going on about him and said something like, “Well, that’s as maybe, but he needs to wash his hair. It’s greasy.” I’d forgotten that until now. But it’s not surprising, is it? I mean, if he’d been on the run for forty-eight hours?’

  Kathy went through the maps and photographs in her file with him, but he had nothing new to add. In fact, she had the impression from his answers, too quick and too confident, that he was determined to be absolutely consistent with what he’d said before. As she made to go he tried to interest her in visiting Peterborough Cathedral, a few minutes’ walk away. ‘The only remaining early example of a painted wooden ceiling in a major Romanesque church,’ he enthused. She said she had to be getting back to London, but he insisted on walking her past the west front of the cathedral in a roundabout way back to her car, and explaining the theory that the odd spacing of the great arches was derived from musical intervals described in the Boethius de Musica, a work familiar to all educated men in the twelfth century, apparently. Kathy was careful not to get him started on Gaudí’s church in Barcelona.

  On the road back to London she thought about the McNeils’ statements, wondering what she could report to Brock. Despite Peter McNeil’s confidence, she wasn’t convinced that the man he’d seen was Charles Verge. She’d never been to Barcelona, but she guessed that it must contain thousands of shortish men with black hair who looked a bit like the missing man. The building that McNeil had seen Verge going into had yielded nothing, and there had been differences in the recollections of husband and wife.

  Driving south now, the sun was in Kathy’s eyes, glittering from the glass and metalwork of oncoming vehicles.

  She recalled Audrey’s comment that the leather jacket had appeared shiny in the sunlit street, just before it disappeared into the shadows of the doorway. Presumably the sunlight had also picked out his greasy hair, which she’d forgotten noticing. But that couldn’t be right.

  She turned off into the forecourt of a filling station and took the street plan of the Passeig de Gràcia from her file.

  As she’d thought, it ran almost due north-south, with the Casa Milà, the metro station and the assumed sighting of Verge on the east side. But it had been about ten-thirty in the morning, and surely the east side of the street would have been in shadow, the west side sunlit? Yes, she remembered the photograph of the Casa Milà, the façade in shade.

  And Audrey had thought that the man had walked across the footpath from left to right, as would have been the case if they’d been walking southward down the west side, not the east. It was as if the two McNeils had been describing completely different incidents, on opposite sides of the street. Which was about par for eyewitnesses.

  She reported this to Brock when she returned. He shrugged as if he’d expected no more. ‘This is how it is with taking over an old case, Kathy,’ he grumbled. ‘Faded memories, second-hand accounts. But at least the Clarke lead seems to be bearing fruit. That was a fortunate discovery, the forensic report on the pillow. Leon tells me you were helping him when he found it.’

  Kathy nodded, still uncertain exactly what Leon had said. ‘Is someone in trouble for missing it the first time?’

  ‘Hard to say. It was probably just one of those things that happen when there’s a turnover of people. The important thing is we’ve got it now.’

  ‘And Clarke has been up to something?’

  ‘There are several things I’d be very interested to hear his explanation about. I think we should be ready to speak to him quite soon.’

  Dusk was falling, shop windows throwing bright pools of light across darkening pavements as Kathy drove south across the river to keep the appointment she had made with Gail Lewis. The architect had asked her to come to an address in Clapham, where she would be working all that afternoon and evening. It was a shopfront, Kathy discovered, with a sign reading ‘South London Housing Aid’.

  Inside a woman was working at a word processor on a desk in the middle of the room. She looked up and smiled at Kathy as the doorbell tinkled, then looked beyond her to someone passing by on the street outside and gave a wave.

  There were posters and leaflets on the walls, with information on housing cooperatives and housing associations in the London area.

  It was very hot in the office, and the woman’s black skin glistened with perspiration. ‘Hello, how can I help you?’ she asked, seeming oblivious to the sounds of a violent argument going on beyond the partition behind her.

  Kathy asked for Gail Lewis and the woman put her head round a door in the partition and said something. The noise died for a few moments, then started up again as a woman came through the door and shook Kathy’s hand.

  ‘Let’s go upstairs.’

  They climbed a steep staircase to a small bare room with a drawing board and T-square set out on a table, and Gail Lewis offered Kathy a seat.

  ‘Is this your office?’ Kathy asked, puzzled.

  ‘No. I visit once a week to offer advice and work on new projects with some of the people who come here.’

  She was a slight woman with grey hair cut short, wearing a shirt and jeans. From the brief file entry Kathy knew that she was the same age as Verge, fifty-two, and had met him in the master’s program at Harvard he’d attended after completing his degree in England. An American, she still had a distinct New England accent, although Kathy assumed she had now spent as much of her life in the UK as in the USA.

  Kathy was about to speak again when the sound of argument suddenly billowed up from below.

  The architect’s mouth tightened. ‘Look, this isn’t a very good time. And I really don’t see how I can help you.’

  ‘As I said on the phone, I just wanted to talk to you about your former husband.’

  ‘Yes, but what exactly?’

  The woman was impatient, and Kathy felt the pressure rising from below. ‘I’d like to understand him better.’

  ‘Understand what? He’s fifty-two years old. You want me to summarise that in a sentence?’

  ‘You were married to him for twenty years . . .’

  ‘Well, maybe I didn’t understand him either. Maybe that’s why we split up. Look, I haven’t seen him in eight years. Talk to the people who’ve known him recently—his mother, Sandy Clarke, his people at work . . .’

  ‘Yes, I’m doing that.’ Kathy felt that she wasn’t getting anywhere. ‘Was he ever violent to you?’

  ‘Only with his tongue, which was bad enough.’

  ‘Do you believe he could murder someone?’

  ‘Yes, if he put his mind to it.’

  ‘But that makes it sound deliberate. Everyone points out how disastrous this has been for him, that it must have been impulsive.’

  For a moment Kathy felt that the other woman might have said something, but there was a sudden turmoil from below and she jumped to her feet.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you. I have to get down there and sort things out.’ And then she was disappearing down the staircase. Kathy shrugged and took a last look around at the threadbare room with its peeling wallpaper, and thought about how different this was from the Verge Practice offices.

  10

  Abrisk north-easterly breeze gusted up the long slope of Greenwich P
ark, ruffling the hair of the little boy in the pushchair. Despite the wind the morning was mild, the sun glinting through a silvery sky and casting a shimmer of light on the surface of the river and the glassy towers of Canary Wharf beyond. Sandy Clarke stooped and lifted the child, setting him on his feet. Like a mechanised toy, the little legs immediately began pumping and the toddler hurtled off across the grass.

  Clarke had surprised both his wife and himself when he had announced over breakfast that he wouldn’t be going in to the office that day. He added that he had paperwork he could do better in the peace of home, but that was fiction. In truth, it was simply an impulse, something to do with the claustrophobic atmosphere in the office and his inability to sleep these nights. And something, too, about the day itself, mild yet misty as if on a cusp between summer and winter, the past and the future, very like that other turning point, in May, when everything had changed forever.

  When their daughter had arrived with their grandson later in the morning he had insisted on taking the child to the park, and now, watching him chasing tiny butterflies caught in the breeze, he found himself overwhelmed by a terrible sense of loss. The force of it made his eyes momentarily water and filled him with a desire to flee, not to some other place but to another time, twenty years before, when he had walked another child, his daughter, on this same grassy hillside. He had been cocky then, confident and strong. Now he felt like an impostor, as limp and undeserving as the used condom lying by his foot. They had worked on small buildings in those days, houses and office conversions, projects for which you could hold every detail in your mind. Now they tendered for whole cities. What madness was that, to imagine that you could design a whole city? All you made was a shell, an imitation of a real place. Had Charles felt that too, that their lives had insidiously progressed from the tangible and real to the grandiose and fake? For a moment Clarke was certain that he had, that Charles’s tragedy—all their tragedies—boiled down to that.

  But all lives have a trajectory, he thought, an axis running inevitably onward, regardless of our doubts. The thought of axes, of intention and certainty, was comforting, and appropriate, too, in this place criss-crossed by organising lines. His eye strayed down to the great central axis of symmetry of the Queen’s House and Wren’s Naval College, so firm and bold. It continued, he knew, back up the hill to the south, and along Le Notre’s formal avenue to the gates of the park and then out across Blackheath to the spire of All Saints, and it also continued northward, aligning across the river to the distant Hawksmoor church of St Anne’s in Limehouse, hidden now by the modern piles on the Isle of Dogs. And even this grand four-mile-long axis paled into insignificance alongside the greatest axis of them all, the invisible meridian running through the Old Royal Observatory up there on the hill, the axis of zero longitude encircling the whole globe.