The Verge Practice (29 page)

The receptionist, a very muscular young man with hair as blonde as Kathy’s and a name tag identifying him as ‘Sigfried’, eyed her navy suit trousers and white blouse, clearly wondering where she’d come from. ‘Here on business?’ he asked, in a strong German accent.

‘Just passing through. A friend recommended you.

Luz Diaz, from Barcelona. She’s a member, I think. You know her?’

‘I don’t recognise the name. Are you interested in membership?’

‘No, I don’t think I’ll be back for some time.’

‘Okay. Just one session then, huh?’

‘Thanks. I haven’t brought a towel, though.’

‘No problem.’ He fetched one from a cupboard at his back, and led Kathy through to the gym. He pointed out the machines, the spa and the changing rooms in a bored voice, then left her to it. The place didn’t seem very large, or very busy, with just a couple of men there labouring with weights. There was no sign of Dr Creepy, Kathy was pleased to see. Probably in a back office doing the books.

They clearly didn’t have many female clients, for the women’s changing room was tiny, with barely half a dozen lockers. Kathy put her clothes in one and returned to the gym to get started with stretching exercises and a spell on a treadmill. She stayed there an hour, working her way round the machines, and in that time the two men left and no one else arrived. At one point, when she was struggling with the preacher curl and regretting the big breakfasts, the German came in and began lifting weights at a bench in front of a large wall mirror. The trapezius and deltoid muscles of his neck and shoulders were massively developed beneath golden skin, and she wondered if he was working them for her benefit. Then the phone sounded from the front office and he strolled out, leaving her to herself once more.

Kathy got up from her machine, wondering what Luz Diaz’s interest in this place had been. Was it the gym, or something else? Had Charles Verge ever been here? She picked up her towel and walked to the back of the room, where there was a door marked as a fire exit. It gave onto a short corridor with an escape door at the far end. There was one other door in the corridor, unmarked and on the opposite side to the gym, but when Kathy tried it she found it locked. She returned to the changing room, showered and left.

The gym was housed in a single-storey building whose stuccoed walls were washed terracotta. A laneway ran down one side of the building, and the wall onto the lane was windowless, punctuated only by a single door, part way along. This, Kathy realised as she was throwing her bag into the back of her car, must be the fire-exit door she had seen in the corridor at the back of the gym. What was odd about it was that there was at least as much building beyond the door as on this side of it. She relocked the car and made her way down the lane.

At the back of the building the lane turned into a yard, big enough for vehicles to manoeuvre. The back wall of the building, in the same terracotta render, contained a wide steel roller door, and beside it another door, also metal, with an intercom speaker mounted beside it.

Kathy was considering this when she heard the scrape of activity on the other side of the roller door. She stood motionless as a motor began to whine and the door began to rattle upwards. She saw the snout of a black Mercedes and beside it two pairs of legs. There was an absurd moment, which seemed to last much longer than its actual couple of seconds, when the people on both sides were aware of each other’s presence without being able to see their faces. Then the door rose above shoulder level and Kathy found herself facing Dr Lizancos.

The lizard eyelids popped open as he recognised her, the leathery lips gawped apart. He appeared to be gripped by a panic attack. Then he whirled around and ran, while his companion, a middle-aged woman in a crisp white dress, stared after him in surprise. The door rumbled into life again and began to slide downwards. Kathy had a final impression of the woman’s flat-heeled shoes turning away and her voice calling after Lizancos before the door hit the ground and the place reverted to silence.

Afterwards, driving back to Barcelona, Kathy wondered if she’d misjudged the old man. Perhaps he really was as respectable as he’d made out, not sinister at all. She imagined the effect on his elderly nerves of the door rising and her standing there motionless in the bright sunlight, like an avenging angel. Or maybe he had some other reason to be alarmed. What did he use the other half of the building for? Whatever it was required a location that was anonymous, windowless and secure. Maybe he had a laboratory in there, and was cooking up special pills for the clients of the gym.

When she arrived at the offices of the CGP she half expected to face a dressing down from Captain Alvarez, but it seemed there had been no complaint from Sitges, and everyone was relaxed and happy to see the case of the missing English celebrity resolved outside of Spanish jurisdiction. She returned the Diaz file, and Jeez helped them load their bags into the hire car, and shook their hands, lingering over Linda’s.

Kathy asked Linda to direct her to Montjuïc on the way back to the airport, so that she could return the visitors’ book to the Pavelló Mies van der Rohe. The same young woman was behind the counter and Kathy thanked her, explaining that the whole thing had been a mistake. The girl was disappointed, and Kathy, feeling mildly guilty about the whole absurd episode, asked to buy the silver pen she’d noticed before, as a souvenir for Leon. While the woman was wrapping it, Kathy admired the covers of the architectural books on display on the shelves. The images were gorgeous, with lustrous planes of colour basking beneath perfect skies, and entirely devoid of people. One in particular caught her eye, featuring an ornate skyline in brick and decorative glazed tiles. She thought it looked familiar, and when she checked the inside flap she saw that it was of part of the Hospital de la Santa Creu i de Sant Pau. The book was titled, in Spanish and English,
The Complete Works of Luis Domènech i Montaner
.

She turned the pages and came to the hospital superintendent’s house, now owned by Dr Lizancos. On impulse, and ignoring the formidable row of zeros on the price label on the back cover, Kathy handed the book to the girl. It would be fun to show Leon the pictures of the spooky house when she described her encounters with the strange pioneer of closed rhinoplasty.

There were long queues at the check-in counters at El Prat airport, and the flight to London was delayed for two hours. By the time they got to Heathrow it was late, dark, and raining. Kathy, Linda and Tony travelled into central London together on the tube as far as Leicester Square, where Kathy changed to the Northern line to Finchley. She felt tired and grubby as she finally struggled into the lift of her building. The palm-lined marine drive of Sitges already felt unreal and remote, and she longed to have a bath and curl up in bed with Leon. But when she opened the front door she found the flat in darkness, and when she switched on the lights she saw immediately that the table was bare, his computer gone.

Her first thought was that they had been robbed, but then she saw a note in Leon’s handwriting propped against a small pile of unopened mail. It read, ‘Kathy, had to leave.

Sorry. Will talk when you get back. Love, L.’ Then a PS scribbled underneath with a different pen, ‘Sorry I didn’t have time to get the car window fixed’.

It sounded rushed. Maybe his dad’s had a relapse, she thought, and reached for the phone. As she waited for someone to answer, she realised how bleak the flat was without him there to welcome her home. Then she noticed his house key beside the pile of mail, and her heart stopped.

She heard his mother’s voice. ‘Hello?’

‘Ghita? Hello, it’s Kathy.’

‘Oh yes. We were in bed, actually. We thought you might have phoned earlier.’

Why? ‘My flight was delayed. Is something wrong? Is Morarji all right?’

‘He’s fine, thank you.’

‘Leon’s not here. I thought . . .’

‘Everyone’s all right. He wants to talk to you in person, face to face. But not tonight.’

Kathy’s heart sank. This was sounding worse by the second.
Face to face
. ‘But where is he?’

There was a delay before Ghita answered. ‘He’s here, actually.’

‘Well, can I speak to him, please?’

‘Not tonight, Kathy. He’ll contact you tomorrow.’ And the line went dead.

‘The bitch!’ Kathy breathed. She felt shocked and disturbingly vulnerable. What the hell was Leon playing at?

Why wouldn’t he talk to her? Or was that just a fabrication of his mother’s? The thought offered a brief moment of comfort that quickly faded. They had been expecting her to ring, and Ghita had been appointed guardian of the phone.

Nobody could get past Ghita. Kathy imagined a history of smitten teenage girls trying to phone the handsome Indian boy, and being blocked by Ghita. Was that all she was, the latest in a long line of Ghita’s rejects? She felt angry now, and for a moment considered driving over there and storming their snug little semi. Then the anger turned cold, and she went to run a bath.

While it was filling the phone rang. She raced to pick it up. ‘Hello?’ She just stopped herself from adding, ‘Leon?’

But it was Brock’s voice on the other end. ‘Ah, you’re home, Kathy. Good. You got back safely then.’ His voice sounded cautious and concerned, as if he had hardly expected her to get back in one piece.

‘Yes. The flight was delayed. I’ve just got in.’

‘You must be tired.’

‘I am rather.’

‘Well, I won’t keep you. I just wanted to make sure everything was okay. It is okay?’

This wasn’t like Brock, and Kathy had a sudden suspicion that he knew something, about Leon. For a moment she almost told him that he was gone, but then she bit it back and said only, ‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ He didn’t sound reassured. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then.’ He hung up.

Kathy swore to herself and began to pull off her clothes.

19

C
ommander Sharpe stood at his window, gazing with satisfaction at the scaffolding on the roof of the Home Office building. ‘Our friends are very content, Brock. Very content.’

‘You’ve told them already?’ Brock asked unhappily.

‘Certainly.’ Sharpe lifted his coffee cup to his mouth and sipped, then came and sat down to face Brock. ‘Time is short. The Palace was on the point of calling the whole thing off. The Home Secretary is expecting questions in the House. There’s no way we can keep quiet about this, you know.’ Then he broke into a smile. ‘Oh, I understand how you feel. You want to keep it all close to your chest until you’ve dotted every I and crossed every T.’

‘Verge’s body would help,’ Brock said morosely.

‘No sign yet?’

‘We’ve got the list of sites they surveyed for the DTLR, and we’re searching them as fast as we can, but so far nothing.’

‘Hm. But there’s no suggestion that the confession isn’t genuine, surely?’

‘I’d have preferred it in his handwriting, with his signature.’

Sharpe chuckled again. Clearly he was in a good mood, indulging the reluctant Brock. ‘That’s not how it works any more, is it? Pretty soon we’ll all have lost the knack of handwriting— and of speech, too, I shouldn’t wonder. Just communicate through keyboards. But you said in your report that only Clarke could have known many of the things he referred to.’

‘Yes.’ It was true. The affairs with Miki and Charlotte, the references to TQS and Kraus, the Barcelona bank account—no one else outside the police force knew of all of these.

‘Details,’ Sharpe insisted, ‘like the bloodstained handkerchief found in Verge’s car, and the single driving glove, neither of which we released to the press.’

All true. So why was he unhappy? Perhaps it was the confession itself, its form rather than its content. It wasn’t like any suicide note he’d ever seen before. For one thing, it was long, longer than any other he’d come across—except one, a rambling twenty pages of invective and self-pity left behind by a city bankrupt. But that one had been tearstained and almost incoherent in places, with sentence structure and spelling all over the place. Clarke’s confession, on the other hand, was written in impeccable prose, even allowing for the computer’s spelling and grammar checks.

And it had been written fast; the computer recorded the document as having been created at six fifty-four p.m. and saved at seven thirty-six p.m., just forty-two minutes later.

Two thousand six hundred and eighty-two words in forty-two minutes, which was some going. No doubt he’d been thinking about it for much longer, marshalling the ideas, composing the phrases. He probably had most of it memorised before he began. But he couldn’t have been very drunk when he wrote it, just as he couldn’t have been very drunk when he taped the hose so neatly to the car. Presumably he completed those preparations and then settled down with the brandy and sleeping pills that had been absorbed so plentifully into his bloodstream.

And then there was the tone of the confession; rather calculated, it seemed to Brock. Clarke had spoken about his feelings of horror and regret, but in such a very controlled way, like an observer rather than a participant. Brock sensed no real panic or terror, no blackness of despair. In fact, the tone seemed rather playful in places—the metaphor of the high-altitude balloon, for example—even tongue-in-cheek, ‘I then bounced off him not ideas, but a sizeable lump of concrete’. Brock knew the whole thing by heart. Of course, a psychologist would provide a professional opinion.