The verge practice bak-7

by Barry Maitland

  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 Gaudi’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.’

  ‘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 Gaudi’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 Gracia from her file. As she’d thought, it ran almost due north-south, with the Casa Mila, 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 Mila, the facade 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

  A brisk north-easterly breeze gusted up the long slope of Greenwich Park, 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.

  Clarke’s distracted musings on axes and life were interrupted by a figure approaching across the grass, striding as straight and purposeful as if following some invisible axis of its own; a bulky figure, hands thrust into the pockets of a black coat flapping in the breeze. Clarke recognised the cropped white hair and beard and braced himself. ‘Deliver me, Lord,’ he breathed in prayer, ‘from eternal death on that dreadful day…’

  ‘Morning!’ Brock hailed him as he came in range. ‘Beautiful day.’

  They strolled across the slope, following the trail of the little boy. Clarke felt a great calm descend on him, and when the policeman didn’t seem inclined to broach the reason for his being there, Clarke saw no need to prevaricate.

  ‘You’ve come about the DNA test, I take it?’

  ‘Yes indeed.’

  ‘It was positive, was it?’ He took a deep breath, picking up the scent of distant chimneys. ‘I didn’t doubt it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us before?’

  Clarke bridled. The arrogance of these people was without limit, poking into everyone’s lives, requiring everything to be confessed. ‘It was and is none of your damn business, that’s why!’

  The detective looked mildly puzzled. ‘When exactly did she tell Mr Verge?’

  That stopped Clarke in his tracks. He felt the blood drain from his face. ‘Dear God… She told Charles? She swore…’ He tried to think clearly. ‘But of course, she’s told you too, I suppose.’ How absurd that he hadn’t realised that all along.

  The policeman was looking distinctly unsettled now. He gazed at Clarke beneath lowered brows and said finally, ‘Look, Mr Clarke, let’s make a clean breast of it, eh? What have you got to tell me?’

  Clarke gave a bitter laugh. ‘You want a confession, do you? I should have thought that was hardly necessary if you’ve got the tests, and she’s told you anyway.’ But the anger faded quickly. What was the point? ‘Very well, for the record, I acknowledge that I am the father of Charlotte Verge’s child.’

  ‘Blimey.’ Bren Gurney sat down beside Kathy who was watching the interview on the CCTV screen. ‘He was poking Verge’s wife and his daughter? We’d better check out his old mum, make sure Clarke wasn’t going for the triple crown.’

  Brock was letting Clarke find his own pace. Since agreeing to make a formal statement the architect had behaved as if the act of confession had brought some relief. The question of a DNA test to confirm the parentage of Charlotte’s unborn child had apparently been preying on his mind for some time, and when the police had asked for a second DNA sample he had assumed that it was for this reason.

  ‘It was a farce, really. A farce that turned into a nightmare. I’ve never been caught out this way before. That it should happen at this stage, and with Charles’s daughter…’ He lifted his hands in a gesture of appeal to Brock, man to man. Brock looked up from the report of the DNA test in which he seemed to be more interested, and nodded sympathetically.

  ‘Charles and I had been invited to an architectural
conference in Atlanta, last February. Charlotte had recently split up with her boyfriend of three years standing and was in the depths of despair, so at the last minute Charles invited her along. We’d been there a couple of days when some crisis blew up on the Marchdale Prison project and Charles had to fly back to London. I’d delivered my paper by that stage, and was getting a bit bored with the conference. The next morning I took Charlotte to see the Coca-Cola museum, and while we were there I mentioned that, in my opinion, the most beautiful city in the United States was Charleston in South Carolina. She’d never been there, and on an impulse we decided to go. I hired a car and we set off. That night we stayed in this rather seedy little motel, and I felt like Humbert Humbert with Lolita. It wasn’t a very pleasant feeling.

  ‘That was the farcical bit, and it lasted for one night only. The nightmare began a couple of months later when Charlotte told me that she was pregnant and I was the father. I was appalled, but she seemed rather… well, pleased. She insisted that she would have the baby and that my name would be kept out of it.’

  ‘This must have been a couple of weeks before Miki Norinaga was murdered?’

  ‘That’s right. After Charles disappeared, I contacted her again and said that I wanted to help her financially. She didn’t seem particularly concerned, but I sent her some money anyway.

  ‘Now look,’ Clarke sat up straighter in his chair and glared at Brock, ‘I’ve been completely open with you. But as far as I’m concerned this is a private matter between Charlotte and me. My wife doesn’t know and…’ He faltered. ‘I assume my wife doesn’t know. Good God, Charlotte hasn’t told her, too, has she? I can’t imagine what could have possessed her to tell her father. Are you sure about that? And what has this got to do with your inquiries? Surely you’re not suggesting that this has some bearing on what happened on the twelfth of May?’

  The other person in the interview room was Tony, the financial expert, who, like Brock, seemed more interested in his papers than in what Clarke had to say. They were photocopied account statements and computer printouts, some of whose items Tony would tick as his eye ran down the sheets. But now, as Clarke ended on a somewhat plaintive note, he lifted his head and looked questioningly at Brock.