The verge practice

21

By eleven on Sunday morning, Suzanne Chambers had decided that enough was enough. Brock had arrived at lunchtime the day before, and it was soon clear that all was not well. Her grandchildren had picked up the signs quickly, and made themselves scarce after the first few threatening growls. She didn’t regard him as a moody man, nor especially self-indulgent, though living on his own was bound to have its effect. So she put his current behaviour down to exhaustion after the climax of his big case, and lack of sleep compounded by an inevitable sense of anticlimax. Yet that night she was aware of him twisting and turning, sleepless in the bed beside her. Overtired, she thought, and tried not to be disappointed by his perfunctory and preoccupied gestures of affection.

Over Sunday breakfast things were no better. He brightened briefly over bacon and eggs, and produced a couple of comics that he’d bought for the kids and forgotten to give them when he’d arrived. But when Stewart, encouraged by this, asked him eagerly about the Verge case, he was met with an ominous silence. Suzanne didn’t like the hurt look in the boy’s eyes. Then later, when they were reading the Sunday papers together, he abruptly threw the pages aside and jumped to his feet, marching out into the back garden with a muttered comment about fresh air. She picked up the page that had apparently provoked this, and saw the articles on Charles Verge, detailing the triumphant restoration of his reputation, the excitement in architectural circles over the revolutionary design of his last great building, and the latest rumours about the death of his partner.

She looked out the window at Brock’s back, his shoulders stooped as he poked disconsolately at the ashes of a camp fire the children had made the previous day, and was at a loss. There was nothing contentious about the articles. The police were not attacked. On the contrary, he himself was mentioned in positive terms. There was even a suggestion that if he had been in charge of the case from the beginning, it might have been resolved long ago. She put the paper down and followed him outside. A light southeasterly breeze was clearing the clouds from the sky, and sunlight was beginning to sparkle on the glossy leaves of an old rhododendron bush.

‘I think it’ll be fine by lunchtime,’ she said. ‘Shall we go to The Plough?’

He grunted a yes.

‘On the condition that you talk to me in words of more than one syllable, and don’t frighten the children.’

He turned to face her, a look of puzzlement on his face. ‘Is it that obvious? Sorry.’

‘What’s the matter, David? No one’s sick or anything, are they?’

‘No, no. It’s the case, that’s all.’

‘But it’s a triumph for you, isn’t it? Everyone says so. Your boss is pleased, isn’t he? And the papers say the timing was perfect, saving everyone’s face over the prison opening.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well then, will you tell me why you’re so unhappy? Not now-at The Plough, when you’ve got a pint in your hand.’

He smiled and put an arm around her shoulders, and they walked back inside.

The principal attraction of The Plough was a menagerie of ancient animals-a horse, some mangy rabbits, a cantankerous goat and two peacocks-for which the landlord’s aged mother had provided refuge in the back garden, possibly as an object lesson to her family on the care of the elderly. While the children renewed their acquaintance with the beasts, Brock and Suzanne took their drinks to a bench in a sunny corner.

‘It’s his body,’ Brock said at last, wiping beer froth from his whiskers. ‘We can’t find Verge’s body.’

Suzanne misunderstood. ‘Yes, that must be upsetting for the family.’

‘No, I don’t mean that. I think…’ He paused, as if hesitating to put his thoughts into words. ‘I think there may not be one. I think the whole thing may be a sham.’

She was startled. ‘Oh… But everyone is so sure. Did you read the interview with the Prince about the opening of the prison?’

‘Yes. As you said, the timing was perfect. That’s one of the things that worries me.’

Suzanne said nothing for a while, thinking. She understood about worriers, never satisfied unless there was some disaster to anticipate. She was a bit of one herself, though she’d never thought of Brock in quite those terms. ‘You really think he might still be alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘But, David…’ She stopped. The notion seemed preposterous. ‘Have you discussed this with the others?’

‘I can’t. The case is closed. I can’t start spreading rumour and doubt. I just hope I’m wrong, that’s all.’

‘You think he’s that devious?’

‘I thought that from the beginning. I had an image of a clever and devious man, evading his pursuers, and everything I learned about him seemed to confirm it. Now we’re asked to believe that he was a helpless victim, duped and murdered by a colleague who struck me as fairly transparent.’

‘You’re not just disappointed that your reading of the situation was wrong?’

‘There’s that, I suppose.’

‘And no one else has had any doubts?’

‘Kathy thought she’d picked up some kind of a trail in Spain, but the suicide and confession of Verge’s partner put an end to it. The problem is, you see, that to explain it the other way, you have to believe that Verge didn’t just act impulsively last May. You have to accept that he was planning the whole thing for a year or more beforehand, setting up companies and milking funds from his own firm, constructing the whole damn story. And more than that, that he’s probably been here all the time, in England, pulling the strings, while we combed the rest of the globe for him. And there’s no motive for it. Why would he do such a thing? He was at the height of his success. Why would he deliberately blow it all away?’

‘Apart from the lack of a body, what else is wrong?’

Brock shrugged with irritation. ‘A confession that doesn’t sound right, a trace at the suicide scene that doesn’t match anything… Nothing definite.’

Suzanne sat back, beginning to understand the scale of Brock’s dilemma. ‘What can you do?’

‘I don’t know.’ He took a deep swallow of beer.

Suzanne sipped her wine thoughtfully. ‘It depends on your reading of Verge, doesn’t it? Whether he really was as cunning and manipulative as you imagine?’

‘Yes. We’ve spoken to all the people close to him, but in the main they think he was a hero.’

‘What about his wife?’

‘She’s dead…’

‘Didn’t he have a first wife? Have you talked to her?’

‘Kathy did. Didn’t get anything. They’d had no contact for almost a decade.’

‘She might have a more informed view of his deviousness. Most divorced women do.’

‘It’s a thought.’ He turned it over in his mind. ‘Yes, it is a thought.’ He took her hand and gave it a squeeze. ‘Thanks.’

‘There’s a price,’ she said. ‘The bar billiards machine was free when we came through. Stewart is looking rather bored with Dobbin and his mates. He’d be thrilled if you offered him a game.’

It was raining heavily on Monday morning when Kathy arrived at Queen Anne’s Gate. The weather matched her mood after a difficult weekend. She had been to see two movies, neither of which she could now remember, and using her only recipe book had cooked herself an elaborate meal, which she had been unable to eat. It hadn’t helped her sense of isolation when Linda Moffat had phoned on Saturday morning to ask if she and Leon would like to make up a foursome to a concert that night. Tony had won some tickets, apparently, and his wife was elsewhere. Kathy had said that they were already committed to something they couldn’t get out of, and had wondered afterwards at her inability to tell the truth. And now she was faced with a whole week chairing the Crime Strategy Working Party.

Bren Gurney appeared from around a corner and gave her a weary grin. There were dark circles under his eyes.

‘Baby keeping you awake?’ she asked. His third girl was now three months old.

‘Yeah. Little bugger.’

‘You love it.’ Then, on impulse, she added, ‘Is Brock about?’

‘Don’t think so. I saw him half an hour ago, but he was heading off somewhere. Not in best of sorts. They sent him a couple of invitations to the opening of Marchdale Prison later this week, and he reckons he has to go. He asked me if I’d go with him, but I’ve got too many other things to do.

I said I’d find somebody. What about you, could you go? It’s on Thursday.’

It sounded like a good excuse to get out of at least one day on the committee. ‘Yes, all right. Listen, maybe you can help with what I wanted to check with him. I haven’t finished writing up my Verge report, and there’s something I’m not sure about. You remember the bit about the missing forensic evidence on the pillow? I was the one who first spotted it, and I just wondered if that was finally cleared up, how it happened and everything.’

‘Sure. Didn’t Leon tell you?’

She began to frame some innocuous lie, then stopped herself. ‘The truth is, we’re not talking at the moment. He’s moved out.’

‘Oh, hell. Sorry about that, Kathy. I thought you two were all set.’

‘Yeah, me too. Apparently not. But it wasn’t his fault it was overlooked the first time, was it?’

‘No, no. The lab ran an internal inquiry into how it happened. They were very pissed off, as you’d expect. But Leon was in the clear.’

‘Right. So it was the other guy’s fault, the other LO?’

‘No, it was a clerk who stuffed up. A part-timer, only there three days a week. No continuity, of course. They got rid of her. The report’s on my desk. Borrow it, if you’re interested.’

‘Great. I might do that. Thanks, Bren.’

‘I’ll tell Dot you’ll go to Marchdale with the boss. She’ll give you the details. Maybe you’d like to come over for a meal, see the baby?’

‘Thanks, Bren. I appreciate it. Maybe when she’s settled down a bit? I wouldn’t want to give Deanne any extra work at the moment.’ The truth was, she didn’t think she could face babies right now.

‘Sure.’ He waved and continued on his way.

The wet Monday morning seemed to have affected the mood of the committee, too. They were fractious and uncooperative, niggling over trivial points. They were supposed to have prepared outline position papers for general discussion on policy relating to their particular areas of interest and expertise, but none of them had. Like recalcitrant schoolchildren, Kathy thought, surveying the sulky expressions around the table. Even Robert seemed sleepy and off-colour, hardly bothering to help her steer their discussions in more positive directions.

Finally, towards lunchtime, Kathy lost patience. Knowing that her voice sounded too angry, she declared that it was pointless to go on like this, and proposed that they pack it in until everyone was in a more constructive frame of mind.

Her outburst was met with a surprised and embarrassed silence, and Kathy felt herself blushing, not quite sure what to do next. Then Jay ran a hand through the bristle on her head, and adjusted her lozenge glasses, which appeared to be a shade of blue today. ‘Yeah, well, that’s right,’ she said. ‘I mean this whole thing is crap. We’re not getting anywhere because we haven’t even begun to address the fundamental problem.’

‘Which is?’ Robert blinked at her as if waking up. He seemed genuinely interested to know her opinion.

‘The nature of the police, Robert. Ranks, uniforms, mind-set-they’re an army. A male army, of occupation.’

This produced a stir of interest. The administrator smiled languidly and said, ‘Oh, come on. Two of the three officers on this committee are women.’

‘Yes, and there are women in the all-male rugby club, too. They clean the toilets and serve behind the bar. Sorry Kathy, Shazia, but it’s true. The whole organisation is founded on a male model of domination and aggression. Until you deal with that, you’re wasting your time. Look at this stuff.’ She lifted her pile of the supporting documents, the effort making the tattoos on her biceps swell. ‘Cosmetics. Public relations crap. Rape-denial.’

Everyone began talking at once, some laughing, others serious. Kathy caught Robert’s eye. He was beaming at her, pink lips pursed with amusement as if to say, what an absolute fool, but what else can you expect? She suddenly found his complacency very irritating indeed.

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 investigation, 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, recalling 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.

‘In any event,’ he added, ‘you’ve surely got nothing to be worried about.’

‘You don’t think so? Chief Inspector, if Charles has been crazy enough to slaughter his wife in May, and then come back to kill Sandy now, I don’t think anyone connected with him can feel safe!’

Brock sipped his coffee thoughtfully, then said, ‘You were talking just now about too much data. One of the problems in my line of work is false data, people who tell us lies. You lied to my sergeant, didn’t you, Ms Lewis? You told her you hadn’t seen Charles Verge in eight years.’

She looked startled, then guilty, her face turning pink. ‘How did you…? Yes, you’re right, I did lie. I felt bad about it afterwards, but I just wanted to get back to my meeting, and there was no point… I thought there was no point.’

‘Tell me.’

The woman sighed, shaking her head. ‘I bumped into Charles one evening about a year ago, at the opening of an exhibition. He was at his most charming, the champagne was flowing, and he suggested we have dinner together, for old time’s sake. God knows why, but I agreed. He was a little drunk, and a little tired, and during the course of the meal he came out with all this stuff. His marriage was finished, Miki was a nightmare, Sandy was a shit, the partnership was doomed. The thing was, he was laughing all the time he said it, as if he was describing some ridiculous comedy he’d seen at the movies. He was quite witty, almost boasting about his disasters, and I laughed along with him. He said that he’d like to wipe the slate clean, do away with them all, and start afresh.’

‘He said that, that he wanted to do away with them all?’

‘Yes, something like that. I didn’t think it meant anything, and forgot about it until Miki’s murder. Then I decided I didn’t want to remember what he’d said that evening. I didn’t want anything more to do with the story of Charles Verge. Then I read that it was Sandy who had killed Miki and Charles. But if you’re saying now that Charles may have engineered the whole thing…’

‘All the same, you’re surely not in any danger.’

‘Aren’t I? I was one of the people who let him down, perhaps the most, in his eyes. And I remember something else he said that evening, when he dropped me off and said goodbye. He said that in a year’s time we might meet up again, and I should remember what he’d said.’

There was no panic in her eyes, but certainly there was fear.

‘But surely,’ Brock felt himself being dragged into confidences that he didn’t really want to share, ‘in the unlikely event that Charles did kill Sandy Clarke, his purpose was much more deliberate than just getting even?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The death of Sandy Clarke cleared Charles Verge’s name, re-established his reputation.’

‘His reputation…’ She thought about that, sipping absently at her coffee. ‘Yes, you’re right.’

And yet, Brock thought, that wasn’t quite the whole story. Like Gail, he felt as if his thinking had been slow, unwilling to pursue the implications of a scenario he didn’t want to believe. But if Verge, officially cleared and dead, was still alive, any program of vengeance would be open to him. He thought again of the suicide note on Clarke’s computer. Whoever had written it had known that Clarke was the father of Charlotte’s child. Did that betrayal precipitate Clarke’s death, and did it now put Charlotte herself at risk? Who else?

‘I mean, he was a rational man, yes? Not unstable.’ He tried to make it sound like a positive statement, rather than a plea.

Gail drew the shape of a cone on her pad, frowning. ‘He had mood swings… periods of depression. I don’t think they were properly diagnosed then. Charlotte said he had one for a year after I left. Maybe he’s had better help since then.’

Or none at all, Brock thought, and watched her add a small creature peering out from under the bottom edge of the conical shape, legs and eyes and one lopsided claw.

She looked up suddenly and said, ‘It’s funny you mentioning that Spanish woman just now, the artist. Charlotte told me about her buying Briar Hill at the time that Charles was buying the cottage nearby for her, and I thought it was an odd coincidence. Knowing that Charles and Miki’s marriage was rocky, I wondered if there might be something going on between Charles and this other woman, almost as if he were establishing an alternative happy little family down in Bucks. Then there was Miki’s murder, and Charles disappeared, and another thought came to me. In retrospect, it was almost as if Charles had set about taking care of everything before the tragedy happened-getting Charlotte settled, and establishing the Spanish woman nearby, like a kind of chaperone or proxy parent.’

‘He’s never contacted you, since May?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘You’re absolutely certain of that? No unexplained silent phone calls, no indirect approaches? He would have needed help after it happened, and he might have thought of someone from the past, like you, who we wouldn’t necessarily consider.’

‘He wouldn’t have come to me. And I haven’t the faintest idea where he would have gone. I thought of Spain, like everyone else, but I don’t know of any secret boltholes.’

‘There was speculation that he might try to make contact when Charlotte has her baby. Do you think that’s plausible?’

‘I guess it’s possible. He’d want to know, of course, but he wouldn’t be stupid enough to make a direct approach. You think Charlotte might know how to send him a message? Or the Spanish woman? Or Madelaine, of course…Formidable Madelaine.’ She thought for a moment, then said, ‘Actually, if I’d been asked what would make him come back, it wouldn’t have been Charlotte’s baby.’ She reached over to the table beside her and handed Brock a thick magazine. The front cover showed a dramatic glossy photograph of a building, so geometric and brilliantly coloured that at first glance it looked like an abstract graphic, two squares, red on the left side and blue, fretted with shadows, on the right. Beneath the name of the magazine was the issue’s title, ‘Il Carcere Nuovo’.

‘Marchdale,’ Gail said. ‘ “The New Prison”. It came out last week, ahead of the opening, and before they knew about Charles’s reinstatement. That didn’t bother the Italians one bit. In fact, from the text you’d say that the fact that the architect was a famous murderer only increased the building’s glamour. But they also give it a very detailed appraisal, and the conclusion is that it’s brilliant.’

Opening the magazine, Brock found pages of dense text interspersed with plans and lush photographs. He wondered how they’d been able to conjure such blue skies, such beautiful raking shadows, in the fen country.

‘I have a friend at the Architectural Review who tells me that their special issue is about to come out, equally glowing. It seems Marchdale really is Charles’s masterpiece, and I can’t imagine how he’ll be able to stay away, especially now, with this sort of publicity.’

He thanked her for her time and she led him to the front door. The rain had stopped, a weak sun forcing through the cloud. As he walked back to his car, several streets away, he felt rather as if he’d been through a Turkish bath, like he sometimes did after a particularly probing conversation with Suzanne. The effect was both exhausting and rejuvenating. He wondered what story he could use to mobilise the security services and local police at Marchdale to be alert for a man who no longer existed.