The verge practice

17

A CONFESSION

I, Andrew Christopher Clarke, being of sound mind (sound enough at least to recognise the inevitable when it stares me in the face), confess to the murder of Charles Verge and Miki Norinaga on the morning of 12 May.

It will be impossible for innocent people (more innocent than me) to appreciate the relief that I feel on finally putting those words down. I am not made of the stuff that successful murderers must be built of. For four months I have lived with my guilt, have risen after each sleepless night to the horror of it, have felt it grow inside me, hour by hour, fed by the innocence of everyone around me, and especially of my dear wife Denise, whose disgust I regret most bitterly of all, whose forgiveness I now know I shall never have.

Lately I have felt this guilt to be so heavy that it must surely be stamped on my features, visible to the detectives who know of such things and who have been grinding their way with such agonising slowness towards me. I feel them coming closer now, and to them I offer this explanation.

It will be apparent to most people who have been familiar with the Verge Practice over the past couple of years that relations have not been harmonious between the partners. After the debacle of the Labuan Assembly project (I’m sure someone will explain that one to you, Chief Inspector), it became increasingly clear to me that the partnership had lost its way so badly that it risked collapsing altogether. An architectural firm such as ours, which operates in the stratosphere of international practice, relies absolutely upon its reputation for high-quality innovative design. That is what our clients buy from us, and if the magic touch fails us, then our viability is punctured as fatally as a high-altitude balloon. Charles had that magic touch. When his devotion to Miki, indulging her ridiculous pretensions to great talent, crippled his gift, I saw the writing on the wall. I tried to reason with Charles, tried to tell him that Miki was destroying us, but he wouldn’t listen. Then I said that I wanted to withdraw from the practice, but he wouldn’t hear of it, and said that he wouldn’t agree to me pulling out my share of the firm’s capital. He believed the Marchdale Prison project would triumphantly restore our reputation. Good God, a prison of all things! I shuddered to think how the architectural press would savage him for it. There would be no mercy for a second Labuan.

Knowing how stubborn they both were, I could see that they would go on fighting each other until the balloon finally smashed to the ground, its goodwill and assets totally spent. I began to contemplate the need for a parachute.

Around the beginning of last year I got in touch with a private investigator who had expertise in company fraud on an international scale, and a reputation for discretion. He assured me that he could create the fictitious entities necessary for me to remove as much as possible of my own share of the capital of the practice over a period of time and without immediate detection. My aim was to reveal to Charles and Miki what I had done once the funds were safely out of their reach, and to resign forthwith, without further claim on the practice assets. I felt sure that, to avoid scandal, they would accept the situation as a fait accompli. I was, after all, only taking what was mine. They could then go on to destroy themselves and the Verge Practice to their hearts’ content.

I instructed the investigator (whose identity I have no wish to betray) to proceed with the creation of a company called Turnstile Quality Systems Limited and its sole director Martin Kraus. He advised that there would be certain advantages in having Kraus as a foreign national, and I enjoyed the irony of having him born in Barcelona, like Charles.

All went according to plan until May of this year. By then I had transferred a significant amount of money to TQS and was looking forward to completing the arrangements by July, when I would sever my connections with the Verge Practice, well before the completion of the Marchdale Prison, when I anticipated that things would start to go from bad to worse, as far as our reputation and the value of our assets were concerned. But then I had the disastrous encounter with Miki Norinaga on the evening of 11 May.

My account to you of what happened that evening, Chief Inspector, was true as far as it went (I could hardly avoid confessing to having sex with her in the light of your DNA evidence). However, there was more to it than I explained. As I told you, she caught me at a vulnerable time. I was tired, and annoyed with Charles for having gone abroad at such a critical time in the competition for the Wuxang City project. Miki, on the other hand, was keyed up, energetic and decisive, and her seduction of me was almost rapacious. Afterwards, when she explained what was going on, I realised that it was also very calculated. She told me that Charles had been unable to have satisfactory sex with her for months, and that in every other respect their personal and professional relationship had deteriorated to the point that she no longer felt able to continue. She said that she believed Charles was a spent force, both as a man and as an architect, and that it was necessary for the design control of the practice to pass to her. She wanted Charles effectively to retire from an active role, and she wanted my support if he refused to agree.

I was astonished at her boldness. Here was a young woman just half a dozen years out of architecture school bidding to take control of one of the world’s leading practices. I wanted to laugh in her face and tell her that, in my opinion, the problem with the Verge Practice was her, not Charles. But I was cautious, knowing how vindictive she could be to people who crossed her, and so I simply argued that, with or without my support, Charles would never agree to stand down from the firm he had created.

She sensed my equivocation, I suppose, no doubt as she had anticipated, for we had never been natural allies in the past. Her manner became harder and more threatening. She had heard a rumour, she said, from someone who had been to the Atlanta conference, that after Charles had left for home I had taken his daughter on a trip, and when we returned we had what her informant described as a ‘sheepish look’. And then, in no time, Miki went on, Charlotte was pregnant.

Maybe my shock at her veiled accusation betrayed my guilt. At any rate, she ignored my denials and began to speculate about how Charles would react to the news that his old friend and partner had seduced both his wife and his daughter. Her ruthlessness was very disturbing. Although I was almost twice her age, I felt like an innocent compared to her. I tried to prevaricate, saying I needed time to think things over, but she wasn’t having any of that. She wanted me to be there in the apartment the next morning, waiting with her to confront Charles as soon as he arrived back from the States, no doubt frayed after the overnight flight. I had no choice but to agree.

It was only when I returned to my office to collect my things and go home that the full implications of all this came home to me. If open warfare for control of the practice broke out between Charles and Miki, they would each demand my support against the other, and they would both regard my attempts over the previous year to disengage myself financially as a form of treachery. The man who had set up the bogus identities for me had warned me that there were tax implications to what I was doing, and that I would be in trouble with the Inland Revenue if they got to hear of it. If Miki made good her threat to tell Charles about my sleeping with her and Charlotte, I could hardly expect him to go easy on me. I would be faced with personal and public disgrace.

Over the next hour I did the hardest thinking I have ever done in my life. Whichever way I looked at the problem, there seemed only one inescapable outcome. There was no way now that either Charles or I could manage Miki. She was a law unto herself, and would destroy us both, therefore she would have to be eliminated. It was a shocking thought, but unavoidable.

For a while I thought of trying to stage some kind of fatal accident for Miki, but my imagination failed me. I had so little time, and the longer I delayed going home the more suspicious my movements afterwards must seem. I cursed Charles for having married the damn woman and creating this impossible situation. He should be the one to deal with her, not me. And even as I framed that thought, another followed. Why not? Perhaps he will.

It had the force of utter conviction, as when, at the end of a long and draining design session, one simple, clear idea emerges as being the surprising but inevitable solution. Charles would return the next morning, quarrel with Miki and murder her, then disappear, his flight demonstrating his guilt. All of my problems would vanish along with him. The thought of doing such a thing to Charles made me feel physically sick; but then, I had already betrayed him twice, and all of this was his fault, really.

As I was turning this over in my mind, distracting myself from the horror of it by concentrating on the details of what would have to be done to make it work, a terrifying thing happened. My mobile phone rang, and when I answered it, Charles spoke to me. I literally jumped in my seat, as if he must have been listening in on my terrible thoughts. He was at LAX, he said, waiting for his flight home, and he wanted to check on the progress of the Wuxang presentation. I managed to frame some reply, and then an idea struck me. I said there were some other things that we needed to discuss urgently, and I suggested picking him up at Heathrow so that we could talk about them on the way back. That was the first irrevocable step that I took. If he’d said no, that he would be too tired after the flight and to leave it until later in the day, perhaps I would have done no more. But Charles was indefatigable, of course.

I couldn’t sleep that night, rehearsing the details in my mind. The next morning I rose early, packed some things that I would need into the car, and left without disturbing my wife. I got to the office and went straight up to Charles and Miki’s apartment. Miki had been asleep, and asked me why I was so early. I said there was something we needed to discuss urgently, and she returned to the bedroom to get dressed. I went to the kitchen, took a carving knife, and followed her into her room. She was naked and smiled at me, flirtatious, asking what I wanted. I pushed her back onto the bed and drove the knife into her heart.

I had tried to anticipate the messiness of a stabbing murder, and was wearing old clothes that I would later discard far away. I had worn gloves since leaving the car, and tried very hard to avoid leaving traces. I took one of Charles’s handkerchiefs from a drawer, stained it with Miki’s blood and took it away with me in a plastic bag. When I returned to my car in the basement car park I changed into fresh clothes and shoes, and set off for Heathrow.

A year or so ago, we carried out a feasibility study for the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions into the possible uses of vacant government land in and around London. There is an amazing number of such pockets of unused land-inaccessible former British Rail yards, redundant Ministry of Defence sites, surplus storage depots-which the government was keen to sell off if some kind of viable use could be dreamed up for them. When I collected Charles from his flight, I told him that we had now been approached at short notice to do a full master plan for one of those sites, provided we could submit a preliminary report by Tuesday. I said I wanted to take him to the site in question to bounce a few ideas off him, and would then get the work under way. When we got there I was thankful to see that the place was as derelict and overgrown as when I had last visited it. We got out of the car to have a look round, and I then bounced off him not ideas, but a sizeable lump of concrete. He crumpled without a murmur. Nearby, I found a sheltered spot of soft ground and used the pick and shovel I had brought to dig a grave for him. I removed his outer clothing and buried him. I then returned to the office, had a good wash and made myself visible in the drawing studios before retiring to my office.

For the rest of that day I set about fabricating Charles’s trail. It struck me as fortuitous that we had opened a bank account in Barcelona for Martin Kraus. I transferred money into it, as I described to you, as a kind of insurance in case TQS and Martin Kraus came to light, as of course they eventually did, hoping to make it appear that they were Charles’s invention. That afternoon I took a bag with Charles’s clothes, his bloodied handkerchief and a suicide note I had written for him, and drove down to the south coast in his car, leaving it on a meter which would, I hoped, guarantee its discovery on the Monday. I then caught a train back to London. I knew that the supposed suicide would probably not be believed, but that didn’t matter so long as the hunt was for him, rather than for me.

In a way, that was the easy part, driven along by adrenaline. The difficult bit, as I soon discovered, was living with the knowledge of what I had done, and watching the investigation going on around me, waiting for some dreadful flaw to reveal itself. For instance, I found that I had mislaid one of my driving gloves, and was terrified that I might have left it in Charles’s car. When the designer of a building makes a mistake he can always say to his client, as Frank Lloyd Wright famously did to one of his who complained that the roof was leaking, “Move your chair”. When the designer of a murder makes a mistake, the result is deadly serious, as I have learned.

It became a terrible irony that I had been the one who had planned to break free of the Verge Practice, yet now I was the sole surviving partner, obliged to stay with the plummeting balloon for fear of betraying my part in events. After a couple of months of the investigation, I began to feel that I might indeed escape. Then they brought in the new team under DCI Brock, and the whole nightmare began again, from the beginning. And this time things began to unravel. After the interview last Friday, I realised that the game was up. Nothing could save me.

I’ve gone on too long. There is no point in delaying further.

Sandy Clarke