The Verge Practice

by Barry Maitland

  ‘I don’t believe we could have got it so completely wrong,’ Peter protested.

  Alvarez evidently agreed. He was shaking his head in disbelief. Kathy hurriedly said, ‘Okay, let’s keep going.’

  She took a note of the address of the corner entrance, Passeig de Gràcia 83, and they continued along the route the McNeils had taken, crossing back to the east side of the Passeig, past the place where they had begun, and on to the entrance to the metro. Along the way they examined five more corner entrances as possibilities, but none had steps.

  ‘So it really comes down to how positive you are about those steps, Audrey,’ Kathy said.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ she sighed and closed her eyes, trying to focus on the mental image. ‘I was quite certain when it first struck me, but the more I try to visualise it, the harder it gets.’

  Captain Alvarez was examining his wristwatch pointedly and Kathy said, ‘I think that’s as much as we can do.

  Thank you for your help, Captain.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, there is one thing. Do you think you could get me a list of the businesses who use that entrance over there.’

  She pointed back across the street to the entrance with the steps, and checked the address from her notebook, ‘Passeig de Gràcia 83’.

  He seemed about to object, but then thought better of it and called to his officer in the taxi and gave him instructions. ‘Now I take you to your friends.’

  Kathy thanked him but said that she wanted to spend more time with the McNeils, who were looking bewildered.

  Alvarez gave her a card and pointed to the address, then turned and marched off to his car further up the street.

  ‘He wasn’t very friendly,’ Audrey said. ‘Did we upset him?’

  ‘Don’t worry about him. Let’s have a cup of coffee.’ She led them to a café, where they gradually relaxed. ‘It felt like we were sitting an exam,’ Peter said, ‘and getting the questions wrong.’

  When they’d finished their coffees, Kathy took them back up the Passeig to the Casa Milà, and walked them over the route again. Although they were now at ease and chatting freely, nothing new emerged. As they passed number eighty-three, the policeman in the black leather jacket emerged from the doorway into the sunlight, stuffing his notebook into his pocket, and headed away.

  Out of curiosity, Kathy went over to the entrance and mounted the steps. Inside, a directory board listed the occupants, but Kathy wasn’t able to make out what businesses they carried on, and after a moment she gave up and they continued on their way back to the metro station. There she thanked the McNeils and told them their time was now their own. They were apologetic about not having been more help, and waved goodbye as Kathy hailed a cab.

  As Kathy had expected, Linda and Tony’s time had been much more productive. The bank had been able to provide several useful pieces of information, beginning with an address for their client, Martin Kraus, in an apartment block in the northern part of the city. They had gone with a carload of local cops to the address only to discover that the flat number didn’t exist.

  ‘Yet the bank forwarded monthly statements to that address over a six-month period,’ Tony explained to Kathy.

  He was animated and so taken up with the chase that, Kathy noticed, he was able to keep his eyes off Linda for whole minutes at a time. ‘I reckon he’s done the same thing as he did with Turnstile Quality Systems in Neasden. There he got the Post Office to divert TQS mail to a business-accommodation bureau, where they held it for collection.

  They deal with hundreds of mail-drop customers, most of them dodgy, and couldn’t give a description of whoever picked up the mail. Jeez’s lads are checking that line now.’

  ‘Did the bank manager ever meet Kraus?’

  ‘He doesn’t believe so, and there was no note of a meeting in the file. The account was opened by an assistant manager who’s since moved to Madrid. They’re trying to track him down, and a copper is talking to the rest of the staff at the moment, with a picture of Verge. The other thing that’s really interesting is the history of the account. It was opened in October of last year. I’ve spoken to London, to get them to check if Verge was over here then.’

  He passed Kathy a photocopy of the form that Kraus had completed to open his account, and pointed to a line under the address he had given. ‘See that? He gave his nationality as Spanish, and provided identification documents of some kind. Jeez is checking on that as well.’

  Tony turned to Linda. ‘You got those other sheets, Lind?’

  Lind? Kathy suppressed a grimace.

  Linda shot him a smile, ‘Yeah, here you go.’

  Tony passed one of them to Kathy. ‘This is a summary of the account history. It was opened on the fourth of October last year with a deposit of two hundred and fifty thousand pesetas, which is about a thousand sterling.

  There were no deposits or withdrawals until the twelfth of May this year, when forty-eight thousand euros were deposited—that’s Clarke’s thirty thousand quid sent over from England. Then on the fifteenth of May the account was closed, the whole balance transferred to an account in another bank.’

  ‘Do we know where?’

  ‘Yes.’ Tony sounded sad. ‘It’s the same one that TQS transferred the payments they received from the Verge Practice to. It’s offshore, and so far we haven’t been able to track that money any further.’

  Linda patted the back of his hand. ‘Never mind, Tony.’

  She grinned at Kathy. ‘He’s really pissed off about that account, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Kathy asked.

  ‘Wait for Jeez and his lads to come up with something,’ Linda said. ‘I think we should get lunch.’

  But by the end of the afternoon, after some long and unproductive hours spent waiting around in the CGP offices, they were no wiser. Only London had come up with anything definite, confirming that both Charles Verge and Sandy Clarke had been in Barcelona on the fourth of October the previous year, for a meeting with city officials to discuss the possibility of a new project there.

  While they waited, Kathy thought she might at least check what the CGP had found out about Luz Diaz, and asked to see her file. It arrived just as they were leaving for the evening, and Kathy was allowed to take it with her.

  14

  That evening Kathy ate alone. There had been no sign of the McNeils at the hotel, and when Linda and Tony had half-heartedly suggested that she join them for the evening she had tactfully declined, saying that she wanted to look for a pair of shoes, then have an early night. Linda had suggested some places nearby and Kathy had left them to it.

  She did in fact buy a pair of sandals in a street off the Plaça de Catalunya, and had then strolled for a while through the narrow winding streets of the Gothic Quarter before emerging onto the Rambla. It was still early by Spanish standards, and she was able to get a table on a first-floor balcony overlooking the street. She sat, sipping a glass of chilled white ranci wine and watching the passing stream of people in the street below.

  For a moment she thought she spotted Audrey McNeil’s auburn hair among the crowd, but before she could be sure the figure was hidden behind a bookstall. Sitting there on her own, she realised that she enjoyed being the one uncoupled person in their party, and that she didn’t envy the others their companionable state. She had a man of her own to go home to, of course, and she was lucky that, even after living in a confined space with him for six months, he could still make her knees go weak with a look or a touch. She thought of Tony and Linda, whose knees looked to be in a permanent state of weakness, and, at the other end of the relationship scale, of Audrey and Peter, who knew each other so well by now that they could anticipate their partner’s every thought and word before it was formed. She dreaded getting to that stage with Leon, and wondered if that was a bad sign.

  For her, orphaned in her teens, the idea of Leon still living with his parents at thirty-two had seemed we
ird, and it had seemed a big enough step to get him to move in with her. But what happened next? Somewhere she had read that, for unmarried couples living together, making a commitment before X months was too soon, and after Y months was too late, but she couldn’t remember the numbers. Was six months too short or too long? Neither of them had raised the subject of marriage, let alone children. For a moment she imagined returning to London and finding that Leon, feeling lost in her absence, now wanted to commit, and she realised with a little twinge of guilt that the idea made her feel uncomfortable.

  Why was that? Was it just the congestion at home, easily fixed up by getting somewhere bigger? Or was it something else?

  Fear, perhaps, of suffocation or of being betrayed.

  The waiter appeared with her starter, amanida catalana, the local antipasto. Oh well, she thought, how many people got it right anyway? What the hell were Brock and Suzanne doing, living at opposite ends of the county? She smiled to herself and lifted her glass in a silent toast to the old man.

  Maybe this was why they got on so well, sharing the same maladjustments.

  Five hundred miles to the north, Sandy Clarke was also sitting alone, nursing a drink and contemplating the mysteries of human relationships. He was in the kitchen of his home, his laptop open in front of him on the pine table, the cursor blinking on a half-composed email. He had a large brandy in his hand, the third of the evening. After a strained interview with the police that morning, Denise, his wife of twenty-four years, had gone to stay with her parents for an indefinite period. Not knowing exactly what she had learned, or suspected, from her meeting with DCI Brock, Sandy had found it impossible to remonstrate with her.

  He’d wanted to tell her that nothing he had done had any bearing on their relationship, which he had always regarded as rock solid, mainly due to her utter dependability; nonetheless, he dreaded being asked to explain exactly what it was he had done. So he had said nothing and Denise had said nothing, and in silence she had gone.

  The curious thing was that he felt almost relieved, as if some enormous responsibility had been lifted from his shoulders. In fact, the very greatest responsibility, for Denise, he now came to realise, had occupied a place so absolutely central to his life over the past twenty-four years that her removal made the other countless responsibilities— to his children and parents, to the firm, to clients and employees, to the old couple who maintained the investment villas in Greece, to the sports club of which he was president and the committee on design education of which he was chair, to the collector of taxes and the deliverer of newspapers—all seem somehow erased and meaningless, as if they had only existed in terms of that twenty-four-year life and if that were taken away then none of them counted any more.

  This fantasy—for he knew it was only that, but what an unexpectedly beguiling fantasy it was!—gave him a literal sense of weightlessness, as in a recurrent childhood dream when he had floated down his suburban street in his pyjamas. He hadn’t recalled that dream in forty-five years, and yet he could see it now as vividly as when it was fresh.

  He smiled, thinking of the small boy who had had the dream, a stranger now, yet somehow living deep inside him still.

  He wondered whether Charles had had dreams like that, and immediately, at the thought of Charles, the sense of weightlessness vanished. Oh Charles, he thought sadly, I am so sorry. Too late, of course, but still, so very sorry.

  15

  Breakfast was available in the basement of the hotel, in a series of linked, windowless cellar rooms, one of which was filled by a long table bearing large quantities of eggs and cheeses, cold meats and fruits, cereals and breads, juices and hot drinks. Kathy filled her plate and made her way to a vacant dining table. Despite the generous portions of amanida and canelons the previous evening, she found herself hungry again. As she passed a low archway she heard Audrey McNeil’s voice calling her. ‘Kathy? Over here.’

  She obediently joined them at their table, and they swapped information on what they’d done the previous day.

  Kathy noticed the copy of Fifty Favourite Bridge Problems tucked in Audrey’s bag.

  ‘I’m sorry you haven’t had much luck so far,’ the woman said. ‘And we weren’t any help.’

  ‘I didn’t really expect I’d be able to achieve much. I just resent sitting around in an office all day when I could be out exploring the place.’

  Linda ambled by at that moment. She looked sleepy and extremely contented. ‘Oh, hi,’ she purred. ‘We’re back there. How are you this morning?’

  It was agreed they were all fine, though probably not as fine as Linda.

  ‘When are you meeting Jeez again?’ Kathy asked.

  ‘We thought we’d get a cab around ten.’ She yawned expansively. ‘There’s no real hurry, until they come up with something. If I were you, I’d take the morning off. Have a look around Barcelona, for God’s sake. What can you do in that dreadful office?’

  ‘Good idea,’ Peter McNeil piped up. ‘Tell you what, I’ll come with you, while Audrey’s off meeting her Spanish grandmother bridge fiend.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Linda agreed. ‘Take a city tour on the Bus Turístic. You can catch it just up the street, in the Plaça de Catalunya.’

  ‘I know the place,’ Peter said, ‘and the kiosk where you get the tickets.’

  Kathy didn’t fancy being stuck with Peter McNeil all morning, but couldn’t think of any polite way of saying so.

  ‘Oh, great. But don’t you want to go with Audrey?’

  ‘Good Lord, no,’ Audrey said. ‘I don’t want him hanging around when I meet Juanita.’

  Twenty minutes later Kathy and Peter stood at the bus stop, clutching their tickets and complimentary guidebooks. They had debated which of two city circuits they should take, the red or the blue. Peter preferred the red, because it included the Sagrada Família, but Kathy, trying to ease her conscience at skipping work, said they should try to see as many places as possible that Charles Verge had been involved with. This meant the blue circuit, since it included the sports facilities for the 1992 Olympics on the hill of Montjuïc, including a small kiosk that the Verge Practice had designed there, as well as the new apartments of the athletes’ village at Vila Olímpica on the waterfront.

  ‘You can call it research,’ Peter suggested conspiratorially. ‘Getting into the mind-set of the murderer.’

  The amateur sleuth, Kathy thought. At least he hadn’t suggested that they might look for clues. Yet she had to revise her scornful judgement less than an hour later, when they reached the entrance to the Montjuïc site.

  The idea with the Bus Turístic was that you could get off at any of the designated stops, then rejoin the tour on a later bus following the same circuit. They had stayed on for the first three stops, but then Peter suggested getting off at the Plaça d’Espanya, at the foot of Montjuïc and at the monumental entrance to the group of buildings constructed for the International Exhibition of 1929.

  ‘There’s something here that Verge would have loved,’ Peter said. ‘And from here we can walk up the hill to the Olympic buildings.’ They set off up the formal avenue and came to the foot of a series of terraces and fountains lying in front of the Palau Nacional. ‘This way,’ he said, leading Kathy away from the main axis towards a grove of trees.

  They rounded the corner of one of the buildings and Kathy came to an abrupt halt.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Peter inquired. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘Not a ghost, a ghost house,’ Kathy said, staring at the single-storey building lying in front of them, uncannily like the top floor of Briar Hill, the house that Charles Verge had built for his mother in Buckinghamshire. There was the terrace, the hovering roof planes, the glass pavilion that at Briar Hill enclosed the entry and stairs to the lower levels.

  ‘Is this what you brought me to see?’

  ‘Yes. I remember reading an article by Verge in which he said that his favourite architect, and the greatest influence on him, was Mie
s van der Rohe. Well, this would be just about his most famous building, the German pavilion for the 1929 Exhibition. It’s one of the classic masterpieces of modern architecture, and it doesn’t look the least bit dated, does it? I mean, it could have been designed yesterday, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘So Verge would have seen this when he was a boy growing up in Barcelona? His father, the architect, would have brought him here, surely?’

  Peter laughed. ‘Well, no. After the exhibition they demolished the pavilion, and it was only rebuilt here in 1986, on the centenary of van der Rohe’s birth. But Verge would have known the building from photographs. Every architecture student in the world would know it.’

  They walked on to the open terrace of the building, now known as the Pavelló Mies van der Rohe, while Kathy tried to come to terms with the strange sensation of having been here already, but on an English hillside, as if the polished stone and glass structure were capable of floating from place to place like a magic carpet. The smaller glass enclosure now contained a visitors’ shop, and as they went inside Kathy half expected to see the artist Luz Diaz standing waiting for her. Instead, there was a young woman behind the counter, wearing one of the black T-shirts on sale, with Mies’s famous slogan, ‘Less is more’, in white lettering across the chest.

  All the gifts and souvenirs in the glass cases were of elegant design, and among them Kathy spotted a silver pen that looked identical to the one that Sandy Clarke had used. It wasn’t particularly expensive, either, and she thought she might buy it for Leon. As she was studying it, Peter suddenly appeared at her elbow, his eyes bright with some new discovery.

  ‘I’ve found something,’ he whispered excitedly in her ear. ‘A clue!’ Then, seeing the look that crossed Kathy’s face, he added, ‘No, really. Come and look!’

  ‘Hang on.’ Kathy replaced the pen and followed Peter to a corner of the room, where a book lay open on a table.

  ‘Visitors’ book,’ he hissed, as if a sudden noise might frighten it away. He took her arm and led her to it, then turned the pages back to the month of May. ‘There!’ he cried triumphantly.