The Verge Practice (46 page)

‘It was in his wallet, and I didn’t have the heart to burn it. I suspect it was the most precious thing he had. I dare say it has his fingerprints on it. You can have it.’

‘Why?’

‘You can use it, perhaps. Tell your bosses that you found it in Lizancos’s house, to prove Charles was there and justify your actions. Tell them about what I have said tonight, too, if you like. Maybe they will forgive you.’

‘Why would you want to help me? You said you’d deny everything.’

‘Of course I will. But I want you and your people to know the truth and then leave us alone. I am betting that your bosses will want to bury it. It is all too late now, and too embarrassing. I have the feeling that, after tomorrow, the police will be thankful to never hear the name Charles Verge again.’

Kathy shrugged. ‘Yes. Makes sense.’

‘Good.’ Luz smiled at her, then turned and nodded to George, whose expression remained as morose as ever.

‘I really do feel very tired, Luz,’ Kathy said. ‘Can you call me a cab?’

‘It’s not necessary. George will take you home. We owe you that. I’m only sorry that we had to talk so late, but I think you understand now. Good luck tomorrow.’

‘Thanks.’ Kathy got to her feet and moved towards the stairs, Luz and George ahead of her. As she passed the glass table she stooped briefly, took the cigarette butt from the ashtray and dropped it into her pocket. As she started up the stairs behind them, George turned and took hold of her arm. He then gently slipped his hand into her pocket and produced the stub, holding it up for Luz. The other woman stared down, puzzled.

‘What is that?’

‘She took your fag-end, Luz. She wants to check your DNA.’ He turned to Kathy. ‘Right?’

Kathy said nothing, watching the expression go out of Luz’s face.

‘Oh.’ Luz’s voice sounded flat. ‘That’s too bad.’ She took a deep breath and began to descend once more. ‘We’d better go down to the lower floor. It seems it will be necessary for you to spend the night here, Kathy.’

With George close at her back, Kathy followed the other woman to a hallway near the foot of the staircase. Luz took a key from her pocket and opened a door, reached in to switch on a light, and led them into a small sitting room.

There was no picture window outlook down here, but rather a scatter of small windows, like irregular portholes, on the external wall, which was formed of blocks of rough stone. From the outside, Kathy imagined, this storey would look like a rock plinth on which the light glass and steel pavilion above was raised. There was an alcove with an unmade bed, and another with a small kitchen. The furnishings were spartan, as if the room had recently been stripped and scoured.

Luz gestured to a chair. ‘Sit down, Kathy. George, I’d like you to wait outside in the hall while I have this conversation with Kathy. Stay close to the door in case I need you, okay?’ The Spanish accent had faded.

George nodded and left, closing the door gently behind him.

‘That’s the only way out, Kathy. George is armed, in case you hadn’t noticed. He is very loyal to me, and would kill you without hesitation if he felt it necessary. You understand?’

Kathy nodded and sat. Luz pulled another seat in front of her, so that they were face to face, intimately close within the bare room.

‘How long have you known?’

‘I saw what kind of operations Dr Lizancos does, Luz.’

Kathy felt her throat dry. ‘He keeps videos of his finest work. I have actually seen him cutting off your balls.’

‘Oh . . .’ Luz’s mouth turned down in a grimace. ‘I didn’t know that.’

She sat back and lit a cigarette, the flame trembling a little as she held it to the tip. ‘You find the idea grotesque, do you? What Lizancos did to me?’

‘I think it’s rather extreme to change your gender so as to evade the law.’

‘Actually, it was more the other way around.’

Kathy frowned. ‘You murdered in order to change your sex?’

‘Yes, that’s what it amounts to.’ She leaned closer to Kathy and her voice dropped to an urgent whisper, as if she didn’t want George to hear. ‘I want you to understand, Kathy. I thought from the very first time I met you, here in this house, that if anyone could understand, it would be you—a young, independent woman, making her own life.’

Kathy felt a shiver of distaste creep up her spine. The other woman was so intense, little flecks of spittle flying from her mouth as she spoke, her perfume too strong at close quarters, that Kathy felt an overpowering desire to back away, but she could only hear the words if she bent her head close.

‘You must understand that this is not some kind of desperate last-minute ploy, Kathy. I have felt that I was really a girl from my earliest years. My first memory is of lying in my bedroom with a woman nurse, and feeling certain that I would grow up to be like her. As I grew older and became aware of human sexuality, the idea didn’t fade away. It grew stronger, more certain. I didn’t want to imitate a woman—I
was
a woman, locked inside the wrong body.

‘I told no one, but I read everything I could about my condition. When I read Jan Morris’s book
Conundrum
it was an inspiration to me. I remember the year it came out, 1974, the same year I returned to England with my new American wife and began work on this house. Here was a man who had frankly, publicly, discussed his innermost thoughts, his decision to surgically change his body to that of a woman. He had confided in his wife and family, who supported him, and had walked out into the world without shame, a free woman.

‘But I didn’t have the courage to follow her example. I kept my feelings secret, and the more successful I became, the more I shrank from the idea of going public. I had a young man come to work for me once, a brilliant draughtsman, sensitive designer. He had much the same problem as me, and one day, it being the liberated eighties, he came to work in a frock. The others goggled, then pretended not to notice. They smirked and sniggered behind his back, of course, but he stuck to his guns. He seemed quite self-possessed when he saw the faces of the trade reps and building inspectors and clients turn red when he walked into a room. Then the day came when he had to go out onto a building site. The men had heard about him, and they weren’t so polite. That night he hanged himself.’

Kathy’s back was stiff from crouching forward to catch Luz’s words; she straightened, stretched, and wondered how long this pitiful story was going to last. ‘I don’t see how this accounts for murdering your wife,’ she said.

‘It’s important you understand the background. I was trapped in a situation I couldn’t change, and I hated myself for it. I began to detest Charles Verge. I despised him for his paranoia and egomania. I didn’t want to be him. So I invented this other person who I wanted to be: Luz Diaz, the Spanish artist. It turned out to be the most satisfying design project I’d ever done; I created her life story, constructed her career, fabricated catalogues for her brilliant exhibitions long ago. It gave me a secret thrill to mention her to people: “Oh, and I bumped into that Spanish painter the other day in New York. You know, Luz Diaz, who did that big abstract in our flat. She was very sad, her mother died recently, so we had a drink together at the Hyatt and she cheered up a little.” It was a harmless fantasy, I thought, except that it became addictive. More and more I yearned to be Luz. And after my marriage to Gail collapsed I finally rented Luz an apartment in Barcelona and began to act her part, living her life for whole days at a time.

‘Then, about two years ago, I met Dr Lizancos at a lunch in Barcelona. He had been a boyhood friend of my father, and one of the other people at the table mentioned to me that he was an expert in reconstructive surgery— cosmetic, but also, more discreetly, transsexual surgery.

After the lunch I asked Dr Lizancos if I could have an appointment with him. That was how I began to believe that I might turn Luz Diaz into a reality.

‘I was married to Miki by that stage, of course, and the hope that my new wife might cure me of my obsession had not materialised. I decided to go ahead with Dr Lizancos’s program of drugs in preparation for future surgery. I envisaged that I would retire from the practice and disappear to Spain, to live Luz Diaz’s life, with Miki as my companion. It was a tremendous burden, this secret, especially when the drugs began to take effect. My sex drive diminished, I lost weight, and the whole shape and texture of my body began to alter. Miki began to make comments about how I had changed. Finally I told her everything, about Luz Diaz and Dr Lizancos, about my plans.

‘I expected her to be shocked, of course, but I hadn’t anticipated the full force of her reaction. She was contemptuous. She thought my lifelong dilemma was utterly absurd; she regarded my fantasy about Luz Diaz as disgusting; she said my plans were impossible, that I could no more become a woman through surgery than she could become a mermaid.

‘It took me some time to realise that, not only would Miki never join me in my new life, but that she would do everything she could to ridicule and destroy it. I imagined her regaling our London friends with tales about her ludicrous ex-husband, doing interviews for newspapers and TV shows, writing her memoirs,
My Life with the Freak
, turning me into a national and international joke. And I also saw her destroying my reputation as an architect, taking over the practice, taking credit for my work, and especially for Marchdale.

‘When I realised all that, I began to see that another plan would be necessary to achieve my flight from Charles Verge. I made her promise to say nothing until I was ready to make an announcement to my family and closest friends, and meanwhile I began to arrange the destruction not only of Miki, but of the Verge Practice, when I finally departed.’

It occurred to Kathy that he might have changed his sex and his appearance, but the self-absorption, the egomania, were unchanged. ‘How did Sandy Clarke deserve to be your victim too?’

Luz waved a dismissive hand. ‘Sandy was a mediocre talent who made an extraordinarily good living from riding on my coat-tails for twenty-five years. He was also screwing my wife. It was time for payback. I knew that if Miki died in suspicious circumstances and I disappeared, I would be blamed. I had to provide an alternative explanation both for the murder and for the money funnelled out of the practice to fund my new life. But what the bloody hell were the police playing at? I left the ground thick with clues, and the bumbling plod missed them all. Didn’t they find Sandy’s glasses in the bedroom, his pen in the bed, for God’s sake?’

‘Sandy removed those when he discovered the body.’

‘Oh.’ Luz looked annoyed. ‘What about the bed linen?

Miki boasted to me that morning when I got back from the States that Sandy had slept in her damn bed. Didn’t he leave any traces?’

‘She’d already changed and washed the sheets,’ Kathy said, but didn’t mention the pillowcase that had had such ramifications.

‘Well, what about his driving glove? I took that from his car when he picked me up at the airport that morning, and left it in my car at the beach. Didn’t you trace that back to him?’

‘It had never been worn. It was assumed to be yours.’

‘And the missing money? Didn’t the accountants pick that up?’

‘Only now.’

‘Hell.’ Luz shook her head. ‘I didn’t imagine it would be so difficult. I didn’t intend for Sandy to die, not until I found out what he did to Charlotte. Perhaps I should have stuck to designing buildings, not murders. But I’ve always believed that any design problem, no matter how intractable, has a solution, if one only has the imagination and nerve.’ She caught Kathy looking at her, the question in her eyes, and am I next? Luz turned away, and in that equivocation Kathy thought she saw the fate in store for her.

‘You’d better bed down here, while I work out what to do now,’ Luz said. ‘There’s blankets and linen in the drawers over there.’

‘If you threaten the children, Stewart and Miranda, Brock will never rest until he’s taken care of you.’

‘Of course we shan’t touch them. That was a rather clumsy initiative of George’s. He was concerned that your boss was going to persist and needed warning off. I promise you, there’s nothing to be concerned about in that area.’

Kathy nodded. ‘And the same goes for me. I’ve got an important meeting first thing tomorrow, and if I don’t show up all hell will break loose.’

It sounded feeble even as she said it, and she saw that Luz was unimpressed.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll work things out.’ She got up to call George in, but Kathy stopped her, wanting to keep her talking.

‘I’d like to know what Lizancos did to you, exactly.’

‘Everything he could think of. I was the last opportunity for an old man to display his talent, his last masterpiece. He thinks of himself as an artist too, you see, his medium being flesh and bone, and once he’d begun I didn’t have much say in the matter.’

Kathy remembered the first time she’d seen Luz in this house, and the rubber gloves. ‘Your fingerprints?’

‘Yes, he had a go at those too. It was something he’d always wanted to try, he said, to transplant toe pads to fingertips. I’m still having trouble with them. He’d have transplanted my whole hands if I’d let him—they’re too large, of course. The most difficult thing has been something he couldn’t alter, my voice. I took voice lessons in Barcelona, but I’ve been terrified that some rhythms of speech, some characteristic sounds, would be there for Charlotte or Madelaine to pick up. But they didn’t.’ Luz smiled, proud of herself.