Barry Maitland - The verge practice

‘He’s changed his face,’ she said.

‘What? Who has?’ Leon muttered.

‘Charles Verge. He’s had plastic surgery or something.’

‘Very likely…’ Leon turned over and buried himself under the bedclothes.

She subsided back onto her pillow. Then another disturbing thought occurred to her. Just when had Verge marked the passage in the book?

First thing the next morning, Brock held another team meeting. In the grey light of day Kathy felt that her bright idea about Verge was blindingly obvious and hardly worth passing on. In any case, Brock was taking a different tangent.

One of the experts who had provided support to Chivers’ team was a financial specialist from SO6, the Fraud Squad, and he had joined them that morning as Brock quizzed them on the details of their investigation of possible sources of funds for Verge on the run. As they explained where the trip-wires had been set up to warn of any of his close family or friends providing financial help, it became apparent that there was one possible major gap, the Verge Practice itself, whose income and assets represented the largest legitimate source of funds for the fugitive. The problem was that the firm was involved in so many financial transactions, large and small, with suppliers, consultants, contractors and sub-contractors in many different parts of the world, that it was impossible to monitor them all in detail. Superintendent Chivers had restricted checks to the most likely channels-Verge’s company credit card and cheque book accounts-but that wouldn’t help if he were getting assistance from someone inside the firm.

‘What sort of person, Tony?’ Brock asked the Fraud Squad man, who, in a black suit and with a pale expressionless face, looked as if he wouldn’t have been out of place in a convention of undertakers.

‘Almost anyone, sir,’ he said with an air of regret. ‘The ones able to authorise larger payments would be the most obvious-his partners, the finance manager, accountants, people like that. But anyone who knew the accounting system could probably slip something through to a dummy account if they put their mind to it. The girl who looks after the stationery, the bloke who approves the travelling expenses or maintains the computers.’

‘He’s got a lot of loyal staff there he might have contacted, chief,’ Bren observed. ‘And it’s not as if they’d really be stealing from the firm. I mean, it is his money, after all.’

‘How would we set about looking?’ Brock asked.

Tony said, ‘If they were sensible, it could be hard to detect. They could use a number of small creditors to avoid being conspicuous, and change the names every few months. We should get every payment verified by at least two people, and we might look for coincidences or anomalies. Maybe payments to several different people but all to the same bank branch, or with the same VAT number. An added complication is that the firm does a lot of foreign business. With their overseas projects, VP often forms one-off partnerships with locals to manage the contracts, and these could provide a way of getting money overseas.’

They discussed it for a while, until Brock, becoming impatient with the technicalities, finally said, ‘Tony, I want you to brief Bren and a small team on how to make a start-where they should look, what they should collect, what questions they should ask. Bren, get a warrant before you go, and threaten them with Tony’s heavy mob if they seem to be hiding anything. Make your presence felt, Bren. Make it very obvious what we’re doing. If anyone there is in touch with Verge, we want to get them worried.’

There were reports of extensive roadwork delays on the A40, so Kathy headed north-west instead, picking up the M1 until it reached the M25 and the open country beyond Watford, where she turned off the main roads into hedge-lined lanes. There was an abrupt release from the pressure of heavy traffic, a sudden transition from the sprawling reach of the great conurbation into a rural landscape bathed in pure September sunshine, and she felt immediately cheerful. When she wound down the window the car filled with smells of wood smoke and damp silage. She came to a small village and stopped at the twisted crossroads in the centre to check her route. A thatched pub, its timbers painted black, stood silent across the way, and a bright scarlet tractor drove past, a dog in the cabin with a russet-faced farmer.

She came at last to a white gate bearing the name ‘Orchard Cottage’, and parked on the grass shoulder. When she stood at the gate she was presented with a little tableau, a rustic scene from a Pre-Raphaelite painting perhaps, except for the glint of chrome on Madelaine Verge’s wheelchair. Beside her a young woman was reaching up into an apple tree for fruit to fill the basket that Madelaine cradled on her lap. The young woman was pregnant, the swell of her belly obvious beneath an ankle-length smock, and her cheeks were as rosy as the pippins she was plucking. Her hair was long, straight and black, and Kathy thought she could recognise something of her father in her Latin features, unlike the older woman whose silver hair had once been fair and whose complexion looked as if it were rarely exposed to sunlight. They were set against a backdrop of a simple brick-and-tile agricultural worker’s cottage, wreathed in roses, and they turned their heads to stare at the newcomer as the hinges of the white gate creaked.

They both frowned when Kathy introduced herself. The young woman, Verge’s daughter Charlotte, appeared frankly hostile, while her grandmother seemed at first put out that they had not sent someone more important. She quickly recovered herself and seemed prepared to make the best of it. ‘Do come in,’ she said graciously. ‘We were about to have a cup of coffee.’

They sat in the sun at a wooden table in the back garden, also planted with gnarled apple trees. ‘We have so many apples this year. We must give you some to take away with you,’ Madelaine Verge, Lady Bountiful, observed, while her grand-daughter kept silent, resting a hand on her stomach. Kathy felt a little twist, quickly suppressed, of envy or regret.

‘This is a beautiful spot,’ she said. ‘DCI Brock said that you used to live near here, Mrs Verge.’

‘That’s right. Just over that next rise. Charles built a house for me there, twenty-five years ago. His very first masterpiece. Are you interested in architecture, Sergeant?’

It was a polite inquiry, not expecting much.

‘I’m fairly ignorant about it,’ Kathy said honestly, and caught a small scornful snort from Charlotte. ‘But you can’t help being affected by it, can you? And I suppose if you were married to one architect, and had a famous son for another, you couldn’t help becoming an expert.’

Madelaine smiled. ‘That’s very true. It becomes part of the air one breathes.’

‘And have you followed the family tradition, Charlotte?’ Kathy asked.

The young woman turned to glare at Kathy, taking so long to reply that her grandmother broke in, ‘In a way. Charlotte is a graphic designer. A very good one. She runs her business from here, designing people’s web pages. She’s extremely successful.’

Charlotte winced at this grandmotherly endorsement, and got awkwardly to her feet. ‘I’ll fetch the coffee,’ she muttered angrily.

‘You must excuse Charlotte,’ Madelaine said confidingly as she disappeared into the cottage. ‘This has been a very emotional year for her. She feels the loss of her father keenly-they were very close, his only child. And then she’d split up with her partner just a short while before that, and now she’s preparing to be a sole parent. All very trying.’

‘Yes. Of course.’ Kathy felt a familiar sense of viewing lives from the outside, as if through a lens, deciphering connections and relationships that would probably be irrelevant to her purpose.