The verge practice

24

A watery sun was lifting the mist from the fens in pale curtains, revealing a country of unnerving flatness. From time to time Brock would ask Kathy to stop the car while he scanned the landscape with a pair of binoculars, and the silence, the eerie light and the limitless horizontality spread out around them like an alien sea.

Brock was preoccupied. He had told her to keep her eyes open during the visit, but hadn’t said for what. At one of their stops they found themselves next to an abandoned World War Two airfield. He examined it carefully through the glasses, then raised them to the hazy sky, as if he half expected to see a silver glider overhead. He was the navigator, guiding them according to some scheme of his own on a circuitous journey along the grid of minor roads that criss-crossed the marshlands.

Then, at last, when Kathy was beginning to wonder if they were completely lost, they saw it. It seemed like a mirage-so abrupt, so totally unnatural, that she gave a little gasp and pulled the car into the verge. The image that came into her mind was of a gigantic Rubik’s cube, sunk into the fen so that only its top layer glistened improbably over the sea of wild grasses.

Still Brock detoured, getting Kathy to circle the strange object while stopping periodically to peer at it and the surrounding countryside. During the course of this she realised that the building seemed to be made up of four large cubic elements, each in a vibrant primary colour, blue, green, yellow and red.

They came finally to the approach road, a ribbon of new concrete laid along the top of a dyke, aiming dead straight at the cleft between red and blue cubes. Brock recognised the view from the cover of Gail Lewis’s architectural magazine, and, as if in acknowledgement of this, the sun finally broke through, bathing the coloured walls in a brilliant light, and the sky above crystallised into a limpid cobalt blue.

There was a minimum of disturbance to the natural landscape around the building, no fences and only the most discreet of signs and lighting bollards. Ribbons of the surrounding water and grasses ran across the car park and forecourt, right up to the building’s base. The car park was already almost full, a small group of chauffeurs standing together in conversation beside a Rolls Royce. Kathy found a space and they walked across gravel towards the glass entrance between the cubes. Two men stood outside, watching the arrivals, and Brock went over to talk to them. Looking at the way they stood, hands clasped in front of them, Kathy guessed they might be armed, and when Brock returned she asked, ‘We’re not expecting trouble, are we?’

‘No, no,’ Brock replied, and led the way through the entrance.

Inside, men and women in black suits checked them in, gave them name tags and pointed the way to a broad ramp rising into the heart of the building between blue wall and red. They came to a hall in which a couple of hundred people stood about in conversation. Sunlight rippled over them from skylights in a coffered vault high overhead, and Kathy was reminded of a stripped-down version of the dungeon etching hanging in Charles Verge’s office.

Brock headed for a table where cups of coffee were being dispensed. Kathy followed, registering the low roar of networking notables, in their expensive suits and high-ranking uniforms. She had a sickening feeling that the audience for her working-party speech would be very much like this.

After ten minutes Brock touched Kathy’s arm and indicated a group emerging at the top of the ramp. Madelaine Verge was at the front, her wheelchair guided by a man Kathy barely recognised at first, being now clean-shaven and dressed in a smart suit. Behind them walked Charlotte and Luz Diaz, arm in arm.

‘Who’s the man?’ Brock murmured.

‘His name’s George. He does the garden and odd jobs for Charlotte. For Luz, too, I think. I don’t know his other name. He’s an ex-con that Charles Verge came across when he was doing the research for this place, and took under his wing, apparently.’

Several people detached themselves from the crowd and hurried forward to greet the Verge family effusively, and when the royal party arrived shortly afterwards, Madelaine and Charlotte Verge were among the first to be introduced to the Prince, who talked to them animatedly for several minutes.

Chairs had been set out in the hall, facing a lectern and screen, and when everyone had settled a senior bureaucrat from the Home Office gave a welcoming speech and invited the guest of honour to perform the official opening. The Prince spoke of the urgent need for fresh thinking in the field of criminal rehabilitation, of his profound belief in the power of architecture to shape our lives, and of his hope that the brave experiment of Marchdale would stand as a beacon in a bleak social landscape. This was met with warm applause, and he continued with praise for the process of consultation and research which had gone into the whole project, and in particular the willingness of the architect to undergo a period in detention himself in order to experience prison life at first hand. It was only when he came to speak of the building itself that his enthusiasm seemed to falter. He referred to its ambitious scale and rigorous planning, but in guarded terms that suggested that, perhaps, the scale was just a little too overwhelming, the interpretation too ruthless, and that his briefing had failed to prepare him for the shock of all this unbridled modernism. Recovering, he proceeded to unveil a plaque and declare the building open.

The next speaker was a psychiatrist, the leader of the team of criminologists and Home Office experts which had compiled the initial brief, and had developed the concept with the design team. She described the theory and organisation of the complex so that those who wished to go on one of the conducted tours would appreciate what they were witnessing.

Using a plan projected onto a large screen, she pointed out the features with a cursor. Around the central administration core in which they were now located, prisoner facilities were arranged in four zones, each forming a square around its own central landscaped exercise area. The zones were easily identifiable, she explained, each being denoted by a thematic colour of the spectrum, from blue through green and yellow to red. This sequence marked the stages of the inmates’ residency, from induction into blue to final rehabilitation and release from red. The progress through these four domains was to be governed by a system of education, therapy and incentive. The building’s design formed an intrinsic part of this system, with every aspect contrived to reinforce the underlying program. She illustrated this with views of amenities, finishes, colour schemes, environmental controls, right down to the design of furniture and crockery, clothes and diet, in each of the four zones. The cumulative effect, she said, was of a progress from alienation to integration, from institutionalisation to independence. The building was a machine for the reconstruction of human consciousness.

This was met with polite but restrained applause. The woman’s tone had been just a little too confident for such a sweeping and unproven claim, like the building itself perhaps. Half the audience, Kathy suspected, didn’t believe a word of it. But Madelaine Verge clearly did, sitting upright in her chair with eyes bright. This was a vision worthy of the brilliant son now brilliantly vindicated. Did they give out posthumous knighthoods? Kathy wondered. Maybe they’d need to see a body first.

The speeches over, the guests were invited to attach themselves in groups of a dozen to one of the many black-suited men and women who were available to take them on a conducted tour. Brock and Kathy hung back, watching the lines of dignitaries file through the connecting doorway to Blue Square, like oversized children on a school outing, passing whispered jokes about doing time and not bending over in the showers.

‘Ah, Chief Inspector!’

They turned at the sound of Madelaine Verge’s voice, sharp as a warder’s. Her chair was cutting through the crowd, the others in her party following in her wake. From the fierce look in her eye, Kathy thought they were about to be taken to task, but when she was close enough Mrs Verge took hold of Brock’s right hand in both of hers and squeezed it hard.

‘I am so very grateful to you. I felt certain, that first time we met, that you would bring an end to our nightmare, and you did. I told you then that my son was dead, do you remember? An innocent victim. No one but us believed it then…’ She gestured with her head to the group behind her, all staring intently at Brock as if to gauge his reaction. ‘But you proved that we were right!’

Kathy was particularly struck by the look on George’s face, tight-lipped, bright-eyed, as if suppressing some inner elation. She thought she could appreciate his feelings, the convict as an honoured guest at a party of police and prison bigwigs.

‘It was a difficult thing for people to accept, Mrs Verge.’ Brock spoke deliberately, without a trace of pleasure at her praise. ‘Even today there are some who find it hard to believe that your son is not still alive.’

‘What?’ She released his hand. ‘How can they possibly do that?’ She jerked her head back angrily. ‘Well, you must make it your job to persuade them that they’re wrong, mustn’t you!’

‘We would all feel much happier if we could find his body.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Madelaine Verge’s face recovered its composure. ‘I have reconciled myself to the possibility that that may never happen. Do you know Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph in St Paul’s? Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. “If you want a monument, look around you.” That shall be my son’s epitaph, Chief Inspector.’ She lifted an arthritic hand in a wide arc. ‘Look around you…’

As she swept away, Kathy said to Brock, ‘Is there really anyone who thinks he’s still alive?’

He said nothing for a moment, staring after the departing group, then murmured, ‘Yes, Kathy. I rather think there is.’

They joined the last departing group, and passed through the door into a narrow tunnel, walls, ceiling and floor coloured dark blue, which led abruptly into a lobby of dazzling white light. Kathy noticed that the comments and humorous asides quickly died away as they followed their guide through the quarters of Blue Square. It was so stark, so depersonalised, so minimal in its design, that it had a numbing effect on the brain. It took her a while to notice the most telling detail, the complete absence of any of the plethora of controls-plugs, sockets, switches, handles, taps-which are scattered over the walls of any normal room. Here, everything was operated remotely, by men with electronic controls. There was nothing on the smooth bare walls that an inmate could touch to make anything work, to cause a door to open, a toilet to flush, a light to glow.

By the time the party reached the courtyard at the centre of Blue Square, their minds had so adjusted to the purgative effects of all this visual absence that the foliage of the blue larches in the sunlight seemed extravagantly artificial. Conversations began to revive, if cautiously, when they had passed up the ramp to Green Square, where some muted colours were allowed. There was even a light switch or two. But it wasn’t until Yellow Square that they were given a narrow glimpse of the outside world, the first time their eyes had been able to focus further than a few metres, and the sight of fens stretching to the distant horizon had a disturbingly agoraphobic effect.

When they finally reached Red Square, the whole group, both sceptics and believers, seemed to recover their spirits. Kathy saw it on the faces of other groups they met there, a sense of relief and of a return to normality. Here were armchairs, newspapers, coffee-making facilities and large picture windows, some of which actually opened to admit the boggy breeze. People were checking their watches, commenting that it had been only an hour, but felt like a lifetime.

On the way back, following a strung-out line of expensive motors across the fen, Brock’s phone rang. He grunted into it, agreed to something and shoved it back in his pocket. ‘Your friend Mr Oakley wants to speak to me again. With his solicitor this time.’

Kathy felt a knot of anxiety form in her gut.

Paul Oakley and his lawyer wore similar striped ties, as if they belonged to different houses of the same public school.

‘Mr Oakley’s purpose in requesting this interview is to clarify his statements to you yesterday and answer openly any further questions you may have. But before we begin, he has asked me to make three points.’ The solicitor slipped on a pair of gold-framed glasses and consulted his notes. ‘First, he feels he was unfairly treated yesterday in that he was allowed to believe the purpose of the meetings was an innocent business contact when in fact it was to gather information about him relating to a possible criminal matter.’

‘He was cautioned,’ Brock objected.

‘But only at the second meeting. In his first meeting there was no indication of the real purpose, and he feels this amounted to deception and entrapment.’

‘Go on.’ Brock picked up a pen and began doodling, looking bored.

‘Secondly, he believes this underhand treatment was inspired by one of your officers who has a personal grudge against my client, and that any suspicion of wrongdoing on his part is malicious, completely unjustified and grossly unfair. And thirdly, he would like it to be known that, if any of your officers denigrates his reputation to any third party, then I am instructed to seek legal redress against that officer.’

‘His reputation?’ Brock said softly. ‘Your client told Sergeant Gurney and myself several very significant lies yesterday. What do you want us to say? That he’s an honest man?’

Kathy examined Oakley’s face on the screen, apparently unperturbed by this. He had been a copper, after all, and knew the importance of not getting riled.

‘He was confused by your unexpected questions about matters in the past, and was provoked to speak without due consideration.’

‘The past? He denied knowing a woman he went out of his way to visit just days ago.’

‘Phil, may I?’ Oakley broke in smoothly, talking to his solicitor as if wanting to borrow his partner on the dance floor.

‘Be my guest, old chap.’

‘Chief Inspector, I didn’t tell you about visiting Ms Langley because I did that as part of an internal procedural review by the laboratories, and I didn’t see, frankly, what business it was of yours. I still don’t.’

‘You weren’t asked to assist that review, you got someone else to falsely witness the signature you obtained by deception from Ms Langley, and you lied to us about it. In fact, you behaved exactly like someone trying to cover up the fact that the original loss of important forensic information was your responsibility, not Ms Langley’s.’

‘Not true. The original mistake was Debbie’s, there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind about that. Ask the other clerks at the lab, ask her supervisor. She was famous for her cock-ups. She was always getting flustered and distracted and losing her place. Look at the notes in her personnel file, the record of warnings and complaints. She was in the wrong job, and as soon as they decently could the lab got rid of her.’

Poor Debbie, Kathy thought, listening to Oakley’s hatchet job. But it would be too easy to check for it not to be true, and, remembering the young woman wringing her hands in the front room of her mother’s house, Kathy could see it all too clearly.

‘But the lab didn’t want to turn it into a major industrial relations issue. Debbie was gone, and everyone just wanted to move on. Someone at the lab told me that it would help to have some kind of statement from her, and I volunteered to have a word with her. We’d always got on well, and I was outside the loop, less threatening. Okay, I may have cut a corner or two getting her signature, but it was in everyone’s interests, including hers. What was the point of rubbing her nose in it? No hurt feelings, no claims of wrongful dismissal, no problems.’

Oakley sat back, exchanging a look with his lawyer, who nodded at him as if to say, couldn’t have put it better myself, old chap.

‘Let’s turn to your meeting with Sandy Clarke on the twenty-third of May,’ Brock said. ‘Why did you lie about that? Was that none of our business too?’

Oakley took his time. He put his hand to his mouth in the same gesture Kathy had seen him use the previous day, then stroked his chin and said, ‘No, I genuinely didn’t remember it.’

Liar, thought Kathy. Too smooth, too bland.

‘There was so much going on that week, and, frankly, he didn’t make that much of an impression on me.’

‘But you remember now, do you?’

Oakley drew a desk diary from his briefcase. ‘I checked my old work diary, and found a reference.’ He opened it to a marked page and passed it across to Brock, who read the entry aloud.

‘“Eleven a.m. S. Clarke, partner Verge, his request- purpose? Pen-he to advise Chivers.” Would you interpret that for us?’

‘Well, as far as I can. First of all, the meeting was at his request-he’d phoned me the previous day to arrange it. And at the end of the meeting I was still unclear what the purpose had been. He talked about the effects of the publicity on his business and the morale of staff, etcetera, but I told him that he should speak to Superintendent Chivers about all of that. Then he asked how long the forensic tests would take, and when they could have access to the apartment again, and I described our progress in general terms. I seem to remember he asked about the DNA samples we’d taken from some of the staff, including him, and whether they’d be destroyed after the case was over. It was all rather vague, and I got a bit impatient, as I had things to do.’

‘What’s this reference to “Pen”?’

‘Yes, he slipped that in at the end. I didn’t really follow what he was saying at first. It seems that when he discovered the body he had a few minutes alone in the bedroom while the other person with him went to raise the alarm, and during this time he noticed a pair of his glasses and a pen of his lying in the room. He showed them to me, a silver pen and reading specs. He said he’d had no idea what they were doing there, and that either Verge or his wife must have picked them up by mistake. Anyway, he’d pocketed them, because there was no doubt they were his, and he wondered now if he’d done the wrong thing. I said he should tell Chivers, and he agreed. Then he asked if there were any other unexplained objects in the apartment that the police were interested in, and I said again that he should speak to Chivers, but I wasn’t aware of any. He seemed, I don’t know, over-anxious about the whole thing. I put it down to delayed shock.’

‘Did you report this to Superintendent Chivers?’

‘No, I left that to Clarke. There was too much else on the boil.’

‘Your memory seems to have made a remarkable recovery, Mr Oakley. Anything else?’

‘That’s the lot.’

‘Pity you didn’t tell us all this yesterday.’

‘Yes, well, like Phil said, if you’d gone about things differently I might well have been able to. No hard feelings, eh?’

‘One last thing. We’d like an account of your movements on the Monday before last, the seventeenth.’

‘What?’ Oakley looked shocked and his solicitor began to protest, but then Oakley stopped him, face grim. ‘Doesn’t matter, Phil. We’ll give the gentlemen what they want.’ He pulled his electronic diary out of his briefcase and began to tap. In the event, his alibi for the evening on which Sandy Clarke had died could hardly have been more solid. The previous evening, Sunday, he and a friend had flown to Dublin, where Oakley had grown up. They had stayed there two nights, returning on the Tuesday morning. The friend was a police officer, Sergeant Leon Desai.

Another envelope with her name in the familiar handwriting was waiting for Kathy at her desk. She steeled herself and opened it this time with hardly a tremor. Another forensic report form. Two samples, identified by number and a brief description, were listed at the top of the sheet, and beneath, in someone else’s handwriting, the words ‘Positive match’.

This must have been meant for someone else, she thought, then recognised her car number in the description of one of the samples. She read the descriptions again, then a third time as realisation came. One was the trace of material found on the broken glass in her car window, smashed on the fourteenth of September, and the other was the leather fibres found on the adhesive tape attached to the hosepipe used to gas Sandy Clarke on the seventeenth of September. Fibres from the same source, a pair of gloves most likely, three days and twenty miles apart.