The Verge Practice (10 page)

There were reports of extensive roadwork delays on the A40, so Kathy headed north-west instead, picking up the M1 until it reached the M25 and the open country beyond Watford, where she turned off the main roads into hedge-lined lanes. There was an abrupt release from the pressure of heavy traffic, a sudden transition from the sprawling reach of the great conurbation into a rural landscape bathed in pure September sunshine, and she felt immediately cheerful. When she wound down the window the car filled with smells of wood smoke and damp silage. She came to a small village and stopped at the twisted crossroads in the centre to check her route. A thatched pub, its timbers painted black, stood silent across the way, and a bright scarlet tractor drove past, a dog in the cabin with a russet-faced farmer.

She came at last to a white gate bearing the name ‘Orchard Cottage’, and parked on the grass shoulder. When she stood at the gate she was presented with a little tableau, a rustic scene from a Pre-Raphaelite painting perhaps, except for the glint of chrome on Madelaine Verge’s wheelchair. Beside her a young woman was reaching up into an apple tree for fruit to fill the basket that Madelaine cradled on her lap. The young woman was pregnant, the swell of her belly obvious beneath an ankle-length smock, and her cheeks were as rosy as the pippins she was plucking. Her hair was long, straight and black, and Kathy thought she could recognise something of her father in her Latin features, unlike the older woman whose silver hair had once been fair and whose complexion looked as if it were rarely exposed to sunlight. They were set against a backdrop of a simple brick-and-tile agricultural worker’s cottage, wreathed in roses, and they turned their heads to stare at the newcomer as the hinges of the white gate creaked.

They both frowned when Kathy introduced herself.

The young woman, Verge’s daughter Charlotte, appeared frankly hostile, while her grandmother seemed at first put out that they had not sent someone more important. She quickly recovered herself and seemed prepared to make the best of it. ‘Do come in,’ she said graciously. ‘We were about to have a cup of coffee.’

They sat in the sun at a wooden table in the back garden, also planted with gnarled apple trees. ‘We have so many apples this year. We must give you some to take away with you,’ Madelaine Verge, Lady Bountiful, observed, while her grand-daughter kept silent, resting a hand on her stomach. Kathy felt a little twist, quickly suppressed, of envy or regret.

‘This is a beautiful spot,’ she said. ‘DCI Brock said that you used to live near here, Mrs Verge.’

‘That’s right. Just over that next rise. Charles built a house for me there, twenty-five years ago. His very first masterpiece. Are you interested in architecture, Sergeant?’

It was a polite inquiry, not expecting much.

‘I’m fairly ignorant about it,’ Kathy said honestly, and caught a small scornful snort from Charlotte. ‘But you can’t help being affected by it, can you? And I suppose if you were married to one architect, and had a famous son for another, you couldn’t help becoming an expert.’

Madelaine smiled. ‘That’s very true. It becomes part of the air one breathes.’

‘And have you followed the family tradition, Charlotte?’

Kathy asked.

The young woman turned to glare at Kathy, taking so long to reply that her grandmother broke in, ‘In a way.

Charlotte is a graphic designer. A very good one. She runs her business from here, designing people’s web pages. She’s
extremely
successful.’

Charlotte winced at this grandmotherly endorsement, and got awkwardly to her feet. ‘I’ll fetch the coffee,’ she muttered angrily.

‘You must excuse Charlotte,’ Madelaine said confidingly as she disappeared into the cottage. ‘This has been a very emotional year for her. She feels the loss of her father keenly—they were very close, his only child. And then she’d split up with her partner just a short while before that, and now she’s preparing to be a sole parent. All very trying.’

‘Yes. Of course.’ Kathy felt a familiar sense of viewing lives from the outside, as if through a lens, deciphering connections and relationships that would probably be irrelevant to her purpose.

‘Do you have children, Sergeant?’

‘No.’ Kathy was aware of being probed, while Mrs Verge made up her mind whether it would be more productive to groom or attack her.

‘Perhaps you’re wise. They are a blessing, of course, but also a heartache.’

Especially if they go around stabbing people, Kathy thought. There was something odd about all this, something she was missing. ‘But this seems a wonderful refuge for Charlotte,’ she said. ‘Is it just a coincidence that it’s so close to where you used to live?’

‘Not exactly. Charlotte was born a couple of years after Charles built Briar Hill for me, and when she was a child she had so many happy memories of staying with me there that when her relationship broke down she decided to get out of London and come to live in the area. Charles helped her financially, and now when I come to stay with her we go for drives and catch sight of the house again, and remember those happy days. Someone else owns Briar Hill now, of course. Charles sold it to a Spanish artist, a friend of his, on the condition that she promise to change nothing.’

Not only odd but a little spooky, Kathy thought, as if his mother and his daughter had decided together to live in the past, before all of this unpleasantness had happened. ‘I can understand her resenting me for invading her privacy here to question you about her father.’

‘She does rather regard the police as the enemy, I’m afraid. She thinks you believe the worst of her father, but I tell her that we must try to do everything we can to help you come to the truth of the matter, that Charles is the real victim in all this.’ There was such a calm certainty in the way she said this that Kathy was impressed, despite her conviction that the woman was deluding herself. ‘So how can I help you? And may I say that I was most impressed by your Mr Brock. Much more intelligent than the last fellow.

I feel more confident now that we can make some progress at last.’ She smiled.

Grooming then, Kathy thought. ‘I’ve brought a copy of your earlier statements, Mrs Verge, and I’d like to go through some of the points you raised there, but mainly I’d like to get to understand Charles better, as a person.’ Made-laine Verge beamed. Nothing would delight her more, her only regret being that most of the photograph albums were in her London flat, a fact for which Kathy was silently grateful.

When Charlotte returned they were deep in conversation about Charles’s boyhood, his sense of mischief, his stubbornness, his enthusiasm for competitive sports, his oddly inconsistent school results until he suddenly blossomed just in time to get decent A-levels. Charlotte poured the coffee then said that she had work to do.

‘Before you go, dear,’ her grandmother said, ‘would you please fetch me the family album in my room?’

‘It must have been difficult for you, bringing him up on your own, Madelaine,’ Kathy said, the intimacies of Charles’s childhood having brought them to first-name terms.

‘I always felt that I had his father, Alberto, at my shoulder, guiding me. He was a very special man, an Olympic athlete and a very gifted architect. I never made any attempt to guide Charles into his father’s footsteps, but Alberto was always there as a shining example, and I was thrilled when Charles announced that he would become an architect, too. And it soon became obvious that the gift had been passed down, undiminished.’

Charlotte returned with an old photograph album, then disappeared again. It contained pictures from Charles’s childhood, mostly bland and remote, but there was one that caught Kathy’s attention for its strangeness. In it, the small boy was standing encased in some kind of tall, thin construction which Kathy couldn’t make out. It looked something like a giant condom or a syringe, daubed with spots and surmounted by a crown, his face peering out from a hole cut in the middle.

‘Oh, that’s a favourite of mine,’ Madelaine chuckled.

‘He won first prize.’

Kathy looked perplexed.

‘A fancy-dress competition! He went as the Empire State Building.’

Kathy got it now. The spots were windows, and the crown formed the famous silhouette. It was hard to make out what little Charles was thinking, but he didn’t look happy.

Madelaine went on to talk about the early years of his practice, when Charles had returned from graduate school in America with a young fellow-graduate as his wife and had put out his shingle in London, penniless but filled with confidence. She then glowingly related the critical success of Briar Hill, its publication in
Architectural Design
and
Casabella
, and the triumphs of the middle years.

‘The break-up with his first wife must have been hard, with her having been so much a part of all that,’ Kathy said, trying to move the story forward.

Madelaine Verge took a deep breath, as if reluctant to come to that episode, then turned her head sharply at the sound of feet on gravel. ‘Ah, George!’ she cried as a man came round the corner of the cottage, carrying a garden fork and hoe. ‘Did you get the plants you wanted?’

‘Most of ’em, Mrs V. They were out of onions.’ He lifted his cap to the women, squinting suspiciously at Kathy. He was a stocky figure, of late middle age, with a deeply lined face and wisps of fair hair across his pate, dressed in old clothes for garden work. He replaced his cap, picked up his tools and moved towards a freshly dug bed on the far side of the small lawn. As he turned away Kathy saw that the left side of his face was badly scarred.

‘George is one of Charles’s projects,’ Madelaine whispered, leaning towards Kathy. ‘He was in prison at the time Charles was doing research for the Marchdale project—are you familiar with that? Yes, well, Charles learned a great deal from George about prison life, so much so that he engaged him as a consultant and then, when he was released, Charles took him on as a general handyman to look after my little garden in town and to get this place into shape for Charlotte. It really was a mess when he bought it for her, but within a few months George had repaired the roof, knocked out a wall, put in a new kitchen and bathroom, redecorated, and now he’s reorganising the garden.’

‘Very handy.’

‘And very honest and loyal. We trust him absolutely, despite his past. He is a real vindication of Charles’s faith in him.’

‘What happened to his face?’

‘The story is that he had a pan of chip fat spilled on him when he was young. He has had a very tragic life.’

‘We were talking about Charles’s divorce.’

‘Oh . . . yes.’ Her voice hardened. ‘Well, I think the truth of the matter is that Charles simply outgrew Gail. The split was inevitable, really.’

‘Outgrew her?’

‘In professional terms. Oh, Gail was very supportive in the early days, very clever with designing the details, Charles used to say. But as the practice grew, it really became far too demanding for Gail’s abilities. She had to take a back seat, and I’m afraid that had its effect on their personal relationship. Charles was very sad about it, of course.’

‘He had a breakdown?’ Kathy ventured.

‘No, no, that’s putting it far too strongly. It was a setback, yes, and at a sensitive time for Charlotte, at sixteen.

Gail . . . well, I’m probably biased, but she let a lot of people down, walking out like that.’

‘But then Charles met Miki Norinaga.’

Silence for a moment, then the elderly woman said primly, ‘Not immediately. There was an interval of a couple of years.’

‘That must have been difficult for Charlotte too, her being not much younger than her new stepmother.’

Madelaine Verge turned a stern eye on Kathy. ‘If you’re trying to suggest some kind of family crisis arising from Charles’s second marriage, you’re quite wrong. Charlotte was starting at university, she had a new life of her own to focus on.’

‘I get the impression that you didn’t like Charles’s choice much, Madelaine.’

The other woman seemed about to make some frosty remark, but then she raised her twisted hands in a gesture of resignation and sighed. ‘Miki was an arrogant and manipulative young woman. But Charles fell for her, and there was nothing that I or anyone else could say to dissuade him.’

‘Others tried, did they?’

‘His colleagues were concerned. Sandy Clarke had the unenviable task of voicing their reservations to Charles, but he swept them aside.’ Then she added wistfully, ‘He always had the courage of his convictions, my Charles.’

‘Mr Clarke said that Miki became much more assertive as time went on. Do you think that Charles had begun to have second thoughts?’

Madelaine Verge sighed, as if weary at being dragged from the golden memories of her son’s youth to the sordid complications of the present. ‘He said nothing to me. And no matter how difficult his wife might have been, he would never, never have resorted to anything so grotesque and stupid as murdering her like that. And that really is the nub, isn’t it, Kathy? You must see that. That’s why you must come round to my point of view.’

‘I have to tell you that from the information we’ve got, your idea about the American competitors just doesn’t seem plausible.’

‘You’re direct, Kathy. I like that. Superintendent Chivers was always so tactful in dismissing my ideas that he ended up being patronising and offensive. I didn’t say it was the Americans necessarily, just that it must be somebody like that; a rival, a resentful enemy.’