The Verge Practice (39 page)

‘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.

25

‘
I’ve just spoken to the local police,’ Kathy said. ‘They had nothing to tell me.’

‘Take me through that day again,’ Brock asked. On the desk in front of him he had the report sheet that Leon had sent to Kathy, together with the original forensic reports on Clarke’s suicide and Kathy’s car.

Kathy consulted her notebook. ‘Friday the fourteenth, the day you interviewed Sandy Clarke, and he thought you’d discovered that he was the father of Charlotte’s baby because of his DNA. You asked me to go out to Buckinghamshire to speak to Charlotte, to check his story. I phoned her to say I was coming, and drove out there in my own car, the Renault. I got there about two-thirty p.m., and stayed for half an hour. She was angry that Clarke had told us about Atlanta and the baby, and seemed keen to keep it a secret, but she confirmed his account. On my way back to London, I stopped at a new supermarket outside Amersham and did some grocery shopping. I suppose I was inside for about twenty minutes, and when I came out I found the side window smashed and things missing from my car—the CD player, sunglasses and my briefcase containing the transcript of Clarke’s interview. I noticed that another car next to mine had been broken into as well. It was about the same age as mine, a blue Ford, and didn’t have an alarm. I went back into the supermarket to report it to the manager, who admitted they’d had a few similar breakins.’

She turned the page of her notebook. ‘While I was in the car park I got a phone call from Robert, the administrator for the committee I’m on, wanting me to meet him urgently at headquarters, so I didn’t hang around to talk to the local cops. I left my details and returned to London.’

‘What else was in your briefcase?’

‘There was a small calculator . . . some notepaper, envelopes and stamps. The Clarke transcript was in a red plastic folder. There was a London A-Z. And I think there may have been the book that goes with my Spanish language tapes. I haven’t seen it since. The local police said nothing’s been recovered.’ Something else niggled at the back of Kathy’s mind, but she couldn’t pin it down. Then she remembered. ‘There was something else. The scrapbook you gave me to look at, Stewart and Miranda’s. It was in my briefcase too.’

Brock looked up sharply.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, thinking of all the work they had put into it.

He shrugged. ‘Not your fault. I’ll make it up to them.

You must have been followed from Charlotte’s house to the supermarket.’

‘Yes.’ Kathy looked glum. ‘Though I can’t imagine how they could have done it without me spotting them. The lanes are narrow and twisting around there, and they would have to have stayed close not to lose me. And as far as I can remember, there’s nowhere near the cottage that they could have waited in a vehicle out of sight.’

‘You didn’t discuss going to the supermarket with Charlotte?’

‘No, but her grandmother was there, Madelaine Verge.

It was she who recommended it. She gave me some sauce she was making, and suggested I buy some fish to go with it. I told her I needed some groceries anyway, and she told me about the new supermarket.’

‘And Charlotte heard this conversation?’

‘I think so. Yes, I’d forgotten that. They both would have known I was going there.’

‘But did they know about the Clarke transcript— assuming that’s what the thief was after?’

‘Charlotte certainly did. I referred to it while I was talking to her, and she wanted to read it. I said she couldn’t.

I don’t think she would have told her grandmother about it.

She seemed anxious to keep it secret.’

‘Well, I don’t believe that Madelaine Verge was capable of driving after you and breaking into your car, but I suppose it’s just conceivable that Charlotte might. Or alternatively one or other of them could have contacted someone else who came after you. Sandy Clarke, perhaps.

That would explain the same gloves being used in both places. Except that we never found the gloves at Clarke’s house.’

‘Why would he want to rob my car? He already knew what was on the transcript, and could ask for a copy any time he wanted.’

‘He might have been after something else. Perhaps he thought you had the whole file on him. This was at a time when he knew he was under suspicion. Maybe Charlotte phoned him and said you’d just been there, brandishing a file on him, and he saw a chance to find out how much we knew or suspected.’

‘We can check her phone records for that day.’

Brock lifted the phone and made a short call, then replaced the receiver and began turning the pages of the reports in front of him, reading them again. Finally he asked, ‘What did you make of Oakley this afternoon?’

Kathy’s mind filled with one thought, a thought she had been suppressing with considerable force since watching Oakley’s interview—that Leon had gone to Dublin with him on the same day she had left for Spain, when he had been so desperate for time to finish his university assignment. The thought burned so brightly that she couldn’t see past it to answer Brock’s question.

‘I . . . I’m not sure.’

‘Did he sound plausible, do you think?’

Yes, she thought, this time he had seemed plausible, and she sensed that Brock and Bren had felt that too, becoming less aggressive in their questioning. ‘Some bits, certainly.

The bits we can check.’

‘Yes. How about the meeting he had with Clarke?’

Kathy forced herself to concentrate, wondering what Brock was leading to. ‘That seemed inconclusive. I thought there must have been more to it than he was saying.’

‘What did you make of the bit about Clarke’s pen and glasses?’

‘That didn’t make much sense.’

‘Can we believe Oakley?’

Kathy thought. ‘Probably. I mean it doesn’t do him any credit, does it? He should have reported it to Chivers.’

‘Exactly. He probably thinks Clarke did tell Chivers, and that now we’re wondering why he didn’t report it himself, so he decided to come clean. But if Oakley is telling the truth about that, what does it mean?’

‘I don’t know. Why would Clarke mention it? It could only tend to place him at the scene and incriminate him.’

‘And why didn’t he refer to it in his confession, when he did mention his lost driving glove? Suppose he was genuinely mystified by it, and worried enough to try to pursue it. Imagine for a moment that he didn’t kill Miki and Charles. He’s called up to the bedroom, to the shocking scene of Miki’s corpse. Then, while he’s waiting for help to arrive, he notices things that belong to him. He thinks he must have left them there on the Friday night, and he doesn’t want to have to explain what he was doing in her bedroom then, so he snatches them up and looks around desperately for anything else incriminating. But later, he becomes increasingly certain that he never had that pen and that pair of glasses with him on the Friday night. How had they got there? Had someone deliberately planted them?’

‘The murderer,’ Kathy said. ‘Charles Verge.’

And catching the expression on Brock’s face, she understood for the first time his odd detours around the fens of that morning, and his sense of expectancy when they reached Marchdale. ‘You’ve been thinking this for some time, haven’t you? You do think he’s still alive.’

‘Just a private doubt, Kathy. Let’s keep it that way.’

‘You’ve thought this all along?’

‘I wasn’t sure, but when I spoke to Gail Lewis she seemed to confirm my doubts. And then I became worried.

If Verge really is the killer then she may be at risk too, and perhaps others. It depends how rational he is.’

‘Did you really think he might show up at the Marchdale opening?’

‘It seemed too good an idea to ignore. But perhaps he had other eyes and ears there to witness the event for him.

Because, if he is here among us, I think it’s a fair bet that he’s got help, don’t you?’

‘And Oakley is in the clear?’

‘I believe he is. Oh, if he’d been better at his job he might have picked up Debbie Langley’s error, and he should have made a report of his meeting with Sandy Clarke. I’m sure Leon would have done. I doubt if it goes further than that.’ Then he added, ‘Leon did well to pick up this match between the two traces. Did you ask him to chase it up?’

‘No, he must have done it off his own bat.’ Neat Leon, efficient Leon, badly needing to prove something, Kathy thought.

Brock said, ‘Odd that he should be such good pals with Oakley. I’d have thought they’d be opposites, really. No?’

They were interrupted by Brock’s phone. He listened for a moment, then thanked the caller and hung up.

‘They’ve checked Charlotte’s phone records. It wasn’t used within an hour of your visit. We’ll have to find out Clarke’s movements that afternoon, but if it wasn’t him, who else could it have been? Someone Charlotte could confide in, someone in the neighbourhood.’

‘Someone like George . . .’ Kathy said softly.

‘Who?’

‘The gardener. We saw him at Marchdale, remember?

Helping with Madelaine’s wheelchair. He was working in the garden the day I spoke to Charlotte. He would have seen how upset she got—he might even have overheard some of what we said. He certainly seems to be devoted to her. She could have got him to follow me and steal the transcript.’

‘And then kill Clarke?’