The Verge Practice

by Barry Maitland

  As the voices died away she called the meeting to order and said, ‘Jay’s obviously made a point that we all find interesting. I happen to think that it’s a very valid point of view and one we ought to consider seriously in our report.’ She was aware of a choking sound from Robert. ‘But we need these ideas set out in a coherent form. We need a report. We need all our reports, mine included. They don’t have to be in fancy English. Dot points will do. Just something you can talk to and we can discuss. I think we should finish now so we can spend the rest of the day preparing them for circulation tomorrow morning. Come on, please,’ she added, feeling a sudden panic at the thought that in a very few days she would be standing in front of five hundred sceptical faces mouthing whatever feeble platitudes her group could cobble together. ‘Help me.’

  As they left the room, Jay said to her, ‘Thanks for the words of support. Did you mean them?’

  ‘I think I’d need to know more about what exactly you mean.’

  ‘How about lunch? I’ll give you a run-down.’

  Kathy hesitated and Jay added, ‘It’s okay, I identify as queer, but I’m not practising.’

  ‘Oh,’ Kathy said. ‘Right.’

  The wine bar was crowded, and they were lucky to find a small corner table to sit at with their turkey and avocado sandwiches. ‘I think I need this,’ Jay said, raising the glass of wine. ‘I found it difficult to get my brain working this morning.’

  ‘Until the end,’ Kathy said with a smile.

  ‘Well, I believed what I said. Most of the time we just trot out formulae we know everyone expects us to say, but this I believe. They’re different from us, Kathy. We all know it, but we pretend it’s otherwise. That Y chromosome does something to them. They think differently, feel differently.’

  ‘You make them sound like aliens.’

  ‘It’s safest if we do think that. It’s when we believe we understand them that we get into trouble.’

  A few days ago Kathy would have dismissed this as nonsense, but now she wasn’t so sure. She thought about Leon and the shock of realising that she had lived with a man for six months without detecting the most important thing going on inside his head. And about Sandy Clarke, whose secret life had, it seemed, been completely unknown to his wife of twenty-four years.

  As Jay went on to explain her ideas about ‘degendering and demilitarising the police force’, as she put it, Kathy imagined what her colleagues would make of it. Total garbage, of course. But there was something excitingly radical and fresh about it, too, at least to her, and she determined that she’d put something of it into their final report, if only to give Robert palpitations.

  Her mind drifted back to Jay’s opening comments about men, and she pictured Paul Oakley at Leon’s side in that pub. Did they understand each other? And how could she dislike Oakley so instantly, when she knew nothing about him? One look had been enough. Yet she’d been wrong about his incompetence, because she had wanted to believe it. The report on Bren’s desk had been quite clear in blaming a female clerk, Debbie Langley, for the error. In transcribing the original report she had apparently omitted the crucial item, then discovered her mistake a week later and amended the computer file without informing anyone and without realising that the file had already passed through the system.

  ‘Anyway, there’s no point in pursuing it in our report,’

  Jay was saying. ‘Your five hundred Chief Constables won’t want to know.’

  ‘No, but it might be nice to stir them up a bit.’

  ‘Watch out, Kathy. Don’t make yourself too conspicuous. You know when something goes wrong they all gang up and pin the blame on a woman.’

  ‘True enough.’ Kathy laughed, then thought, could that be what happened to the clerk, Debbie Langley? She finished her sandwich and said, ‘Tell me, Jay, do you think a grown man, who was secretly gay, still living with his parents, could hide that fact from his mother? Don’t you think she would know, deep down?’

  Jay shrugged. ‘Depends on her attitudes.’

  ‘Traditional, I’d say.’

  ‘Then, in my experience, she would probably be the first to know and the last to admit it to herself.’

  Kathy wondered. ‘Somebody else said to me recently what you just said about not understanding men. Charles Verge’s first wife said she divorced him after twenty years because she couldn’t understand him.’

  ‘I think there was a bit more to it than that. Chalk and cheese.’

  Kathy was surprised. Everyone seemed to have opinions about the Verges. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘A friend of mine knows Gail Lewis. She runs a homeless shelter, and Gail has done work for her. She reckons Gail is great, really caring and sincere, unlike Verge, big-noting himself in all the colour supplements. Mind you, she did wonder if they might be getting together again.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘She saw them together one time, and they seemed to be very friendly.’

  ‘That must have been a long time ago.’

  ‘A year or two. My friend’s been at the shelter for a couple of years now. Verge dropped Gail off there one night. His silver Ferrari drew a bit of attention in that neighbourhood, and my friend recognised him.’

  Kathy was puzzled—that wasn’t what Gail Lewis had told her. As she said goodbye to Jay the discrepancy troubled her, so she pulled out her phone and rang Brock’s number.

  Brock made his way around Regent’s Park past Primrose Hill, eventually discovering the place tucked away in a back street of Camden Town, part of a terrace built of pale-yellow London stock bricks, blackened with age and the rain. There was a speaker by the front door, and a brass plate reading Gail Lewis, Architect. He pressed the buzzer and waited under his dripping umbrella. A male voice said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Brock for Ms Lewis. I phoned.’

  ‘One moment.’

  Gail Lewis opened the door, regarding him with a searching curiosity in her grey eyes, and Brock, getting an impression of sharp intelligence, felt as if he should have prepared more thoroughly for his visit. They shook hands and she led him down a hallway running the length of the house to a room at the back—her office, she explained— which had been extended into an L-shaped area around the small, paved rear courtyard. It was more like a workshop than an office, Brock thought, with its air of purposeful activity.

  Modest and informal in atmosphere, it could hardly be more different to the Verge Practice’s grandiose offices. It was physically different, too, the building and furniture made predominantly of pine rather than stainless steel. A man was sitting at a computer, a woman was building a balsa-wood model over by the windows. They both looked up and smiled at Brock as he passed, and he noticed how young they seemed; students, perhaps.

  ‘If you don’t mind we’ll talk at my board,’ Lewis said, leading the way between plan-chests and tables to the far corner. ‘I’m expecting a call that I really need to take, and I’ll want to refer to my drawings. Would you like a coffee?’

  Brock said yes, and the young man called after them, ‘I’ll get it, Gail.’

  They sat in her workstation, partly screened from the rest of the office by the tilt of her drawing board, to which a half-finished plan on tracing paper was taped. Wanting to get a better sense of the woman before he got down to business, and remembering the banks of machines in the Verge draughting studios, Brock said conversationally, ‘You don’t design on a computer, then?’

  ‘I still prefer a pencil,’ she said. ‘At least for the early stages. I think better with a pencil in my hand.’ She picked one up, clicking the lead forward, and took a notepad from the side table, as if she were about to interview him. ‘I’m puzzled by why you should want to see me, Chief Inspector.

  You’re in charge of the case, aren’t you? I’ve seen your name in the papers.’

  The case, as if there could be no question why he had come.

  ‘That’s right. You may have read that we’re closing down the investigati
on, but we just want to make sure there are no loose ends.’

  ‘One of your officers spoke to me not long ago. A woman, I can’t remember her name.’

  ‘Sergeant Kolla, yes. You were caught up in some other business at the time, I think, and she wasn’t able to cover all the points she wanted to raise with you.’

  ‘What do you want to ask me about?’

  ‘I’m still puzzled by the relationship between your former husband and his partner, Sandy Clarke. I thought, having known them both over an extended period, you might be able to throw some light on it for me.’

  Two little creases appeared between her brows as she considered this. ‘The papers say that Sandy Clarke murdered Charles and Miki, and confessed to this in a suicide note.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you’re quite satisfied that’s true?’

  ‘We are.’ He saw her eyes narrow at something, his choice of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, perhaps, sensing him distancing himself. ‘There doesn’t seem much room for doubt.’

  ‘And now that the case is closed you decide to come to have a chat with someone who hasn’t spoken to either of them for years.’

  He was saved from responding to that by her phone.

  ‘Excuse me.’ She reached for it. ‘Hello? Yes, put him on.’

  Brock watched her straighten in her seat, heard her voice take on a brisk authority.

  ‘Steven? Thanks for getting back to me . . . Yes, it is important; it’s about the bathroom tiles. I’ve spoken to the supplier and they’ll be on site on Monday . . . Yes, Monday.

  They’re diverting another order for us, but there are no type EG30s, so we’ll have to change some of the details . . .’

  She spread a drawing from the side table across her board and put on a pair of glasses. The young man appeared with mugs of coffee and biscuits, and Brock waited while Lewis went through the details and brought her call to an end. She finally put the phone down, smiling to herself as she took off her glasses. ‘Got you,’ she said, then glanced over at Brock. ‘Sorry about that. He was hoping to use the missing tiles as an excuse for his delays.

  Where were we?’

  ‘You were going to give me a portrait of Charles Verge and Sandy Clarke.’

  ‘Actually I was going to ask you again why you’re here.

  Are you having second thoughts?’

  ‘The coroner will have to bring a finding on the death of Sandy Clarke. Until that’s done, I’m open to any ideas, no matter how unlikely.’

  ‘You haven’t found Charles’s body, have you?’

  Brock felt transparent, rather as he imagined the builder at the other end of the phone must have felt. ‘No.’

  She regarded him gravely for a moment, then turned her attention to her coffee. ‘While I was waiting for you to arrive I remembered an essay I once read, about how architects could learn about problem-solving from the great detective.’

  She said the words with an ironic emphasis, and he wasn’t sure if she was having a dig at him. ‘It was about how they both have to cope with masses of pragmatic detail, but in order to do that they have to stand back from the detail and form an overall vision of the case, a theory or paradigm.

  That’s why Sherlock Holmes sat at home playing the violin while others scurried around collecting boring facts. Are you here to collect facts or play the violin, Chief Inspector?

  Because if it’s the first, I don’t think I can help you.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow.’

  She reached behind her to a shelf laden with heavy volumes bearing titles like Specification, Standards and Timber Code, and pulled down a thick manual. ‘This is the design brief for a district library we’re doing at the moment—not a big building.’ She let it fall open and scanned the page. ‘The Assistant Librarians require an office at twelve square metres per person, with four power points each, a carpet grade B on the floor, a lighting level of five hundred lux and sound reduction index of thirty-five decibels between rooms. There are over two hundred pages like that, of facts that make up the essence of the problem.

  But how do you generate a solution from facts like that?

  You can’t just pile them all up, room after room, and hope they somehow sort themselves out. In any case, many of the facts contradict each other, or are open to interpretation, or will have changed before the building’s finished. So you need something else, a big idea, that’s somehow truer and tougher than the data, but is also faithful to it. Would you say your job is like that?’

  ‘It sounds familiar.’

  ‘The trouble is, your big idea may be wrong. I once did a house for a couple who were friends of ours. There were several unusual things about the brief—their interests, the site and so on—and I arrived quite quickly at what I thought was the right answer. They liked it, and we went ahead. But I knew something wasn’t quite right. I’d got there too quickly, the whole thing had been too easy somehow, too glib. You know what I mean?’

  Brock nodded. He knew exactly what she meant.

  ‘One day, in an idle moment, I started doodling, and a different answer, the right answer, appeared on my board. It was too late to do anything about it, we were committed, and I couldn’t say anything to the clients. The other scheme was built, and they were perfectly happy with it—but I knew, and I felt terrible, like a detective who’d sent the wrong man to the gallows. I had the same feeling when I read the reports about Sandy.’

  She paused, setting her pencil down on the edge of the drawing board midway between them, almost as if offering it to him. ‘You’re worried you’ve got the wrong answer, aren’t you? You think Charles is still alive.’

  Brock didn’t reply for a moment, and the sound of rain splashing outside the windows in the courtyard filled the silence. Then he said, ‘What made you so sure, about Sandy?’

  ‘Just what I knew about him. He was a very steady, calm, practical man. He had to be to stick with Charles all those years. Oh, I know he had a roving eye, but there was never any suggestion of coercion or violence. He had a kind of self-possession, rather old-fashioned, like Gary Cooper or someone, that appealed to women. I daresay Charles and Miki together might drive many people to distraction, but the idea of Sandy plotting a fiendish double murder is, well, unbelievable—to me, anyway.’

  Brock reached for his coffee, then slid it away, feeling nauseous. It was as if his own doubts had found a voice in this woman, stern and unequivocal, and he felt obliged to challenge them. ‘Did you part on bad terms from your ex-husband, Ms Lewis?’ he asked, the words sounding pompous as he spoke them.

  ‘You mean, am I prejudiced? Of course, we all are. But no, we didn’t part on bad terms, not really. We just reached a point where I realised I had to leave him. You might say I left for professional reasons as much as personal ones, although the two were so mixed together. As we became more successful, I began to realise that we were after quite different things. For me, a good reputation was a means to being able to do good work, whereas for him the opposite was true—the quality of our work was a means to attract publicity and success. He was fanatical about publicity; I couldn’t understand it. He’d lose sleep fuming over some mildly critical comment in a review of one of our buildings, while I’d be lying awake trying to work out how to detail a window. And as the projects got bigger and the clients more prestigious, the differences in what we wanted became more difficult to reconcile. His ambition was like a steamroller, and in the end I decided I had to step out of the way or be squashed. He felt terribly betrayed, of course, the way he did if one of his bright young designers decided to quit.

  It was an affront to his ego.’

  ‘You make him sound insecure.’

  ‘Does that surprise you? I suppose people have told you that he was so full of self-confidence, and that was true. He loved being with people, and drew energy and confidence from them, but on his own, in the middle of the night, he was as insecure as the rest of us—worse.’ She nodded to herself, recal
ling something. ‘I remember once, it was in New York, we went to an opening at a little gallery in SoHo.

  There was an exhibition of photorealist paintings, and one of them was a huge watercolour, about eight feet by five, of a hermit crab. It was a stunning image, of this soft little crawling thing pinned beneath an enormous florid shell, like a building it was dragging around on its back. Charles seemed mesmerised by it. Later I offered to buy it for him, but he was horrified at the idea, and eventually confessed that he saw himself as that little crab, forced to live inside the wrong body.’

  ‘The wrong body?’ Brock remembered the underlined passage about the criminals’ heads in Verge’s office. ‘What did he mean by that?’

  ‘I think he meant that he’d spent his whole life trying to be someone else, the person that his mother wanted him to be, maybe—his father the Olympian.’

  The reference to the painting reminded Brock of something else, and he said, ‘You were acquainted with a number of painters were you? I’m thinking of a Spanish artist, Luz Diaz, who bought the house you and Charles designed for his mother.’

  ‘Briar Hill. Yes, I heard she was living there, but I’ve never met her. Charlotte told me about her in one of our conversations—we maintain a rather distant mother– daughter relationship by phone. She was always her father’s daughter, and was very angry when I left Charles.

  I used to think . . .’

  She stopped in mid-sentence, a startled look dawning on her face. ‘I’m being very slow, aren’t I? If you think it possible that Charles is still alive, that Sandy didn’t kill him, then you also think that Charles may have staged Sandy’s suicide—that he’s here, in this country.’ Her surprise turned to alarm. ‘You think he’s come back?’

  ‘We haven’t got anywhere near thinking that, Ms Lewis,’ Brock said. ‘As I said at the beginning, I’m just trying to cover every angle, for my own satisfaction. As far as the authorities are concerned, there’s absolutely no doubt that your former husband is dead.’

  But Gail Lewis wasn’t reassured. As she reached forward for her pencil Brock saw a tremor in her hand. She fiercely clicked the lead.