The Verge Practice (27 page)

‘Leon? No, we’ve been living together for six months now.’

‘Sounds serious.’

‘Sometimes it feels like no time at all; other times it feels like he’s been there for ever.’

‘I always seem to lose interest before then. How old are you?’

‘Thirty-four.’

‘Me too.’

Kathy imagined a checklist of basic questions in Linda’s mind. It would be simpler if they all just carried cards of essential life data they could exchange. What stereotype are you? She’d be asking if Kathy wanted children next.

‘Does he want kids?’

‘We haven’t discussed it.’

‘Really?’ Linda raised her eyebrows as if that were
very
significant.

‘What?’

‘I’ve found that usually comes up in month three or four, which is probably why I drop them at the end of month two.’

Kathy smiled. ‘So you don’t want kids?’

‘My family was so utterly
nuclear
, so
solid
, that I think it put me off the whole idea. How about yours?’

Here we go, Kathy thought. ‘I lost both my parents when I was in my teens.’

‘Oh dear. But that didn’t make you want to found a new dynasty?’

‘The opposite, really. I suppose I got nervous of forming attachments, in case I lost them, too.’

‘Ah, yes, of course.’ Linda sipped thoughtfully at her drink.

That’s enough of the amateur psychology, Kathy thought. The tapas arrived, the sun slipped below the rooftops and they changed the subject.

When they had finished their drinks and tapas they moved on to a small restaurant hidden in a back street of the old quarter, where Linda told Kathy she should try black rice, the most famous rice dish of Catalonia. And it was after this, strolling back towards the hotel, that Kathy’s phone rang. She pulled it out of her bag and recognised Brock’s voice.

‘Kathy? How are you?’

‘Great. Did you get my fax?’

‘The entry in the visitors’ book? Yes, thanks. Very ingenious. I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your imagination.’

He sounded grim and preoccupied, and not greatly impressed by her discovery. ‘Can they analyse the handwriting from the fax, or do you need the original?’

‘You haven’t seen my fax to you this afternoon? I sent it to the CGP number.’

‘No.’

‘Ah, well, you might want to get hold of it. It should make interesting reading.’

‘Okay. Is it about Clarke?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll go and pick it up now. We’ve also tracked down a retired plastic surgeon who may have been in the building that the McNeils now think they saw Charles Verge disappear into. I may need you to talk nicely to Captain Alvarez to get him to do a proper check on the man. He’s reluctant . . .’

‘Read my fax,’ Brock said enigmatically. ‘You’re flying back tomorrow? Fine. See you soon.’ He rang off.

When the passport photograph of Martin Kraus had arrived from Barcelona, Brock had immediately obtained a warrant and taken a couple of cars to the house near Greenwich Common. According to Sandy Clarke’s secretary he hadn’t been into the office that day. Apparently he had done this a couple of times lately, taken paperwork home to deal with in peace. Then she had added, hesitantly and with the proviso that she hoped the Chief Inspector would treat this as confidential, that he may not know about Mr Clarke’s wife leaving him. He had told her the previous day, and he’d obviously been very upset and had said he might take the next day or two off.

Bees were humming among the hollyhocks that Denise Clarke had grown in the small cottage garden at the front of the house, a protective buffer against the city whose fumes nevertheless seemed to hang around the place. The house was silent and no one answered the doorbell. They went around to the back, where an officer broke a windowpane in the back door and so gained entry to the kitchen.

A bottle of brandy, almost empty, stood on the scrubbed pine table next to an empty glass and a medication packet, also empty. A small ormolu vase of roses stood nearby, its petals fallen in a ring around its base. There was also a laptop computer on the table, power on but asleep, its light winking.

The smell of city traffic was as strong inside the house as out, as if they were stuck in the middle of a rush-hour jam instead of a leafy backstreet. Brock called out Clarke’s name, but his words sank into muffling silence. ‘Okay,’ he said to the men at his back, and they moved forward to search the house. As he made towards the living room, Brock passed an alcove in one wall of the kitchen, beside the Aga, and he noticed that the traffic smell was especially strong here. Drawing on latex gloves, he went into the alcove and found a small laundry room and beyond it a door. When he opened it he was met by a nauseating gust of saturated exhaust fumes. There was no window, but in the dim light he could make out the dark shape of a car.

He shut the door quickly against the stench and called for assistance.

The ignition was on, they discovered after they had opened the garage door to dispel the fumes, but the vehicle had long since stalled or run out of petrol, and the engine was cold. One end of a hosepipe had been neatly taped to the exhaust, the other to the rear passenger-side window, which was cracked open a couple of inches. Sandy Clarke sat slumped in the driver’s seat which had been tilted back, his head cradled by the seat’s headrest and his mouth open, so that he looked rather as if he was in the dentist’s chair, waiting for the drill. The medical examiner would later discover that the larger muscle groups of the chest and thighs were locked in rigor, while the smaller ones in the face and hands were not. On this basis, and a rectal temperature of 13°C, he suggested an approximate time of death twenty-four hours earlier.

When Brock returned to the kitchen he had one of the team, who had more computer skills than he did, bring the machine to life. The man tapped a key and the screen flickered awake to reveal text, headed with the words, in capitals, ‘A CONFESSION’. Afterwards they determined that the document had been saved at seven thirty-six p.m. on the previous day, Monday the seventeenth of September, and a copy of it was found on a disk in the shirt pocket of the dead man. It was this document that formed the bulk of the message that Brock had faxed to Kathy a couple of hours later, while she was exchanging personal insights with Linda over a glass of sangria in the square below the cathedral of Barcelona.

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.