The Verge Practice

by Barry Maitland

  ‘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 Marchdale.’ 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 definitely 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.

  ‘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 conclusion. 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 café 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 evening 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.