The Verge Practice (28 page)

Maybe my shock at her veiled accusation betrayed my guilt. At any rate, she ignored my denials and began to speculate about how Charles would react to the news that his old friend and partner had seduced both his wife and his daughter. Her ruthlessness was very disturbing. Although I was almost twice her age, I felt like an innocent compared to her. I tried to prevaricate, saying I needed time to think things over, but she wasn’t having any of that. She wanted me to be there in the apartment the next morning, waiting with her to confront Charles as soon as he arrived back from the States, no doubt frayed after the overnight flight.

I had no choice but to agree.

It was only when I returned to my office to collect my things and go home that the full implications of all this came home to me. If open warfare for control of the practice broke out between Charles and Miki, they would each demand my support against the other, and they would both regard my attempts over the previous year to disengage myself financially as a form of treachery. The man who had set up the bogus identities for me had warned me that there were tax implications to what I was doing, and that I would be in trouble with the Inland Revenue if they got to hear of it. If Miki made good her threat to tell Charles about my sleeping with her and Charlotte, I could hardly expect him to go easy on me. I would be faced with personal and public disgrace.

Over the next hour I did the hardest thinking I have ever done in my life. Whichever way I looked at the problem, there seemed only one inescapable outcome.

There was no way now that either Charles or I could manage Miki. She was a law unto herself, and would destroy us both, therefore she would have to be eliminated.

It was a shocking thought, but unavoidable.

For a while I thought of trying to stage some kind of fatal accident for Miki, but my imagination failed me. I had so little time, and the longer I delayed going home the more suspicious my movements afterwards must seem. I cursed Charles for having married the damn woman and creating this impossible situation. He should be the one to deal with her, not me. And even as I framed that thought, another followed. Why not? Perhaps he will.

It had the force of utter conviction, as when, at the end of a long and draining design session, one simple, clear idea emerges as being the surprising but inevitable solution.

Charles would return the next morning, quarrel with Miki and murder her, then disappear, his flight demonstrating his guilt. All of my problems would vanish along with him.

The thought of doing such a thing to Charles made me feel physically sick; but then, I had already betrayed him twice, and all of this was his fault, really.

As I was turning this over in my mind, distracting myself from the horror of it by concentrating on the details of what would have to be done to make it work, a terrifying thing happened. My mobile phone rang, and when I answered it, Charles spoke to me. I literally jumped in my seat, as if he must have been listening in on my terrible thoughts. He was at LAX, he said, waiting for his flight home, and he wanted to check on the progress of the Wuxang presentation. I managed to frame some reply, and then an idea struck me. I said there were some other things that we needed to discuss urgently, and I suggested picking him up at Heathrow so that we could talk about them on the way back. That was the first irrevocable step that I took.

If he’d said no, that he would be too tired after the flight and to leave it until later in the day, perhaps I would have done no more. But Charles was indefatigable, of course.

I couldn’t sleep that night, rehearsing the details in my mind. The next morning I rose early, packed some things that I would need into the car, and left without disturbing my wife. I got to the office and went straight up to Charles and Miki’s apartment. Miki had been asleep, and asked me why I was so early. I said there was something we needed to discuss urgently, and she returned to the bedroom to get dressed.

I went to the kitchen, took a carving knife, and followed her into her room. She was naked and smiled at me, flirtatious, asking what I wanted. I pushed her back onto the bed and drove the knife into her heart.

I had tried to anticipate the messiness of a stabbing murder, and was wearing old clothes that I would later discard far away. I had worn gloves since leaving the car, and tried very hard to avoid leaving traces. I took one of Charles’s handkerchiefs from a drawer, stained it with Miki’s blood and took it away with me in a plastic bag.

When I returned to my car in the basement car park I changed into fresh clothes and shoes, and set off for Heathrow.

A year or so ago, we carried out a feasibility study for the Department for Transport, Local Government and the

Regions into the possible uses of vacant government land in and around London. There is an amazing number of such pockets of unused land—inaccessible former British Rail yards, redundant Ministry of Defence sites, surplus storage depots—which the government was keen to sell off if some kind of viable use could be dreamed up for them. When I collected Charles from his flight, I told him that we had now been approached at short notice to do a full master plan for one of those sites, provided we could submit a preliminary report by Tuesday. I said I wanted to take him to the site in question to bounce a few ideas off him, and would then get the work under way. When we got there I was thankful to see that the place was as derelict and overgrown as when I had last visited it. We got out of the car to have a look round, and I then bounced off him not ideas, but a sizeable lump of concrete. He crumpled without a murmur. Nearby, I found a sheltered spot of soft ground and used the pick and shovel I had brought to dig a grave for him. I removed his outer clothing and buried him.

I then returned to the office, had a good wash and made myself visible in the drawing studios before retiring to my office.

For the rest of that day I set about fabricating Charles’s trail. It struck me as fortuitous that we had opened a bank account in Barcelona for Martin Kraus. I transferred money into it, as I described to you, as a kind of insurance in case TQS and Martin Kraus came to light, as of course they eventually did, hoping to make it appear that they were Charles’s invention. That afternoon I took a bag with Charles’s clothes, his bloodied handkerchief and a suicide note I had written for him, and drove down to the south coast in his car, leaving it on a meter which would, I hoped, guarantee its discovery on the Monday. I then caught a train back to London. I knew that the supposed suicide would probably not be believed, but that didn’t matter so long as the hunt was for him, rather than for me.

In a way, that was the easy part, driven along by adrenaline. The difficult bit, as I soon discovered, was living with the knowledge of what I had done, and watching the investigation going on around me, waiting for some dreadful flaw to reveal itself. For instance, I found that I had mislaid one of my driving gloves, and was terrified that I might have left it in Charles’s car. When the designer of a building makes a mistake he can always say to his client, as Frank Lloyd Wright famously did to one of his who complained that the roof was leaking, “Move your chair”. When the designer of a murder makes a mistake, the result is deadly serious, as I have learned.

It became a terrible irony that I had been the one who had planned to break free of the Verge Practice, yet now I was the sole surviving partner, obliged to stay with the plummeting balloon for fear of betraying my part in events.

After a couple of months of the investigation, I began to feel that I might indeed escape. Then they brought in the new team under DCI Brock, and the whole nightmare began again, from the beginning. And this time things began to unravel. After the interview last Friday, I realised that the game was up. Nothing could save me.

I’ve gone on too long. There is no point in delaying further.

Sandy Clarke

18

I
n her hotel room, Kathy read the fax for the third time.

She felt cheated, and not only by Sandy Clarke. The McNeils, Dr Lizancos, Carlos with the black spiky writing, had all in their various, innocent ways embellished Clarke’s false trail, even though Alvarez and Jeez had warned her against it. She’d cheated herself, that was the really annoying thing, because her idea had seemed more interesting.

And, just to compound her frustration, she discovered one further twist in the false trail before she turned in for the night. Sorting through her bag she found the slim file on Luz Diaz she had borrowed from the CGP. Reminding herself to return it before she left, she flicked through the pages. Though mostly in Spanish, it included the summary in English which had been sent to London following the interview that the Barcelona police had conducted with Luz on the twentieth of July. Two officers had visited her at the small studio apartment she rented. She had been cooperative and, they felt, credible. Afterwards they had spoken to her landlord, an elderly man living on the ground floor of the same block. He confirmed that she had lived there for six years, had paid her rent regularly and been a model tenant, quiet and extremely private. If she had any male visitors, he wasn’t aware of it.

The only supporting documents that Kathy could understand were some copies of Luz’s recent telephone bills.

They were remarkable for their brevity. The artist had hardly used the phone at all. Some of the listed calls had been annotated with pencilled notes identifying the number—a taxi company, an art gallery, the airport. One was marked ‘Sitges’. It began with the digits 93 894, just like Dr Lizancos’s second number, and when Kathy checked her notebook she found it was the same. A year ago, Luz Diaz had made a call to the Apollo-Sitges Fitness Club. What did that mean?

Needing someone to talk it over with before she spoke to Brock, she phoned home, but got only the answering machine. When she tried Leon’s mobile there was no response. She had a shower and went to bed.

The following morning she had her last big breakfast in the hotel cellar, then checked out and caught a cab across town to the car-hire office, where she picked up a little red Seat Cordo. Despite Clarke’s revelations, she had decided to go ahead with her trip along the coast. There was nothing she could do to help Tony and Linda, and she was intrigued by the two references to the Apollo-Sitges Fitness Club.

She drove carefully through the city traffic, adjusting to driving on the other side of the road and trying to follow the route, drawn for her with a ballpoint line on a city map, towards the airport autovia. When she reached the A-16 she switched on the radio and picked up speed, opening the little car up to one hundred kilometres per hour, the sun shimmering off the roofs of industrial buildings and low-flying aircraft, and occasionally, in the distance, the glittering sheet of the sea.

Before long she reached the exit for Sitges Centro and turned off the highway towards the town, crossing under the railway line and continuing on through residential streets until she came to the seafront. After the density and bustle of Barcelona, the town had a pleasantly relaxed scale.

Cream and pink hotels lined the front, overlooking colonnades of palm trees and the beaches beyond. Girls walked arm in arm along the boulevard, boys played beach volleyball or danced on windsurfers in the light breeze.

Kathy parked her car and strolled along the front. She thought she sensed an end-of-season mood, as if the bars and restaurants that lined the footpath had an air of fatigue after a long, hot summer. After a while she turned off into one of the narrow streets that ran up into the old town, passing shops selling sandals, straw hats and souvenirs, and climbing finally to the cluster of little museums and monuments on the point overlooking the Mediterranean. As she tried to take an interest in the odd collections of artworks and artefacts, she felt like a fraud, a tourist by default, extemporising until it was time to return to reality. She bought the most brightly coloured postcard she could find, ordered a short black at the next café she came to, and wrote a little message to Leon: ‘One day we’ll come here together.’

There was a payphone in the corner of the café, Kathy noticed, and on a shelf beneath it a well-thumbed directory.

She went over and turned the pages to the As, jotting down the address for the Apollo-Sitges Fitness Club. The name was in English, she saw, presumably aiming at the tourist market. Perhaps Dr Lizancos was the owner, coming each week to check on his investment. The café owner gave her a stamp for the postcard, and unfolded a street map to show her where the Apollo-Sitges was located, in the newer area of the town to the west, and a couple of blocks back from the waterfront.

What with the big breakfasts, Kathy felt like some exercise. Why not? she thought. The worst that could happen was that she’d bump into Lizancos and he’d complain to Alvarez that she was harassing him. She walked back to her car, dug a T-shirt, track pants and trainers from her suitcase, and put them into a carrier bag.