Barry Maitland - The verge practice

‘Now? I’m in the middle of working.’

‘It would get it over.’

‘Oh…I suppose I could break for ten minutes. No more, okay?’

Kathy listened to her instructions on how to find the house and set off again. She passed into a wood and came abruptly upon a harvester filling the narrow lane. She slowed to a crawl behind it. Rooks shrieked down from the treetops and she felt a sense of unreality, as if this were all some kind of rural theme park and she a participant in a fairytale.

Little Red Riding Hood, perhaps, on her way to her grandmother’s cottage. The machine turned in to a field and she accelerated away.

She turned in to a gravelled driveway that threaded between tall beech trees and stopped in a clearing. Ahead lay a flagged path leading towards an opening in a white wall that sliced across the top of the slope. She reached it and stepped through onto a terrace, catching her breath at the sudden revelation of a panorama of rolling fields and copses, and in the distance hills that Kathy assumed must be the Chilterns. She realised that the white wall was a cunningly placed barrier between the enclosed woods and the broad view that lay on this side of the ridge, the doorway like Alice’s space-warping looking glass.

The rectangle of a swimming pool was cut into the terrace in front of her, and to her right a horizontal roof plane hovered over what she took to be a bathers’ pavilion. To her left, a second roof sheltered a larger pavilion enclosed by a glass wall, one panel of which was open, a woman standing motionless there, watching her.

Luz Diaz was wearing a paint-streaked pair of workmen’s overalls and yellow plastic gloves. Her black hair was cut in a short bob, neat and compact like her figure. She gazed at Kathy with intent dark eyes for a moment, then stepped back and began to peel off the gloves.

Kathy followed her into the lobby of the house. One wall was made of polished stone, and chrome-plated columns of cruciform cross-section supported the floating roof. In front of them the floor was cut away to reveal levels below, and Kathy realised that the terrace was the roof of the house, built into the side of the hill. It was like a prototype, she thought, for the Thamesside offices, with tiers of floors and double-height spaces facing a spectacular outlook. As they descended a spiralling steel staircase, Kathy could understand why Madelaine Verge, wheelchair-bound, could no longer live here.

‘This is stunning,’ she said.

Luz Diaz said nothing, leading her through an intermediate level that obviously served as her studio. Decorators’ drop cloths were spread over the polished timber floor, in the centre of which stood a large, almost-bare canvas on an easel. Ms Diaz threw the gloves to one side and picked up a packet of cigarettes, not bothering to offer them to Kathy. She held the cigarette between the fingers of a cupped hand, almost a fist, which she brought to her mouth to draw on. Her hands were large, Kathy noticed, more like she would have expected a sculptor’s to be.

‘Sit,’ she said, breathing smoke.

Kathy sat, but Luz Diaz did not, instead examining Kathy, feet apart, cigarette-wielding fist cocked, like a bullfighter assessing her next move.

‘Thanks for seeing me at such short notice, Ms Diaz,’ Kathy began.

‘You say you were in the neighbourhood?’ the other woman said suspiciously.

‘Yes.’

‘To see Charlotte Verge?’

‘And her grandmother, yes.’

‘Madelaine is here? Why did you see them? Has something happened?’ The English was good but strongly accented, and Kathy had to attune to it and the smoker’s timbre.

‘As I said on the phone, we’re updating our files on the inquiry.’

‘I read in the paper this morning. There is a new detective in charge, yes?’

‘DCI Brock, yes.’

‘And you work for him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why is this?’ Diaz demanded. ‘What has happened?’

‘Look, won’t you sit down, Ms Diaz? This isn’t a formal interview. I just want to keep our paperwork up to date.’

‘About me?’ She frowned, ignoring the suggestion to sit, pacing now without taking her eyes off Kathy, as if sizing up some object she might be about to paint, or lunge at.

Kathy felt uncomfortably at a disadvantage. This was why it was better to get them to come to the station, she thought. ‘Has anything happened during the past month that we should know about?’

‘Happened? Like what?’

‘Has Charles Verge tried to contact you?’

Diaz waved her smoking fist dismissively. ‘Of course not.’

‘It would be natural, wouldn’t it? You were good friends, and you live close to his daughter.’

The other woman turned away, her mouth a tight line of exasperation. ‘This is how you think. I came here to work in peace. I don’t like to think that you are watching me. Maybe I should go back to Barcelona until this is all over.’

‘You were good friends, weren’t you?’

‘You mean, were we lovers, is that it? That’s what those cops in Barcelona went on about. It’s the only kind of relationship between a man and a woman they understand.’ She took an angry suck at her cigarette.

‘So what was your relationship, exactly?’

‘We were both professionals, and we admired each other’s work.’ She finally took a seat, as if reconciling herself to having to talk. ‘I first met him at the opening of a show I had in a gallery in Barcelona. He was knowledgeable about contemporary painting and had definite opinions. He was very generous in his praise of my work and bought a small painting. Then he contacted me a week later to say that he wanted to recommend me to a client of his to do a big canvas, bigger than I had ever done in my life, for the lobby of a new building he was doing. He said my work and his would go together very well. I was flattered. The commission fell through, actually, but we became friends and when he was in Barcelona he would often come to my exhibitions or my studio.’

‘So you’ve known him since the time of his first marriage.’

‘Yes, about ten years. It has been a difficult period in his life, a time of change. He was very successful, sure, but first there was the divorce, then his affair with Miki. With me he enjoyed to talk. We had rapport. People said we looked like brother and sister together, and maybe that was it-we were both single children, you see.’

She shrugged and stubbed out the cigarette.

‘How did you come to buy this house?’

‘I explained all this to the other officers, in London. They checked the paperwork, didn’t they? It was just chance, really. The house had been empty for several years since Madelaine moved out, but Charles couldn’t bear to sell it because of what new owners might do to it. He brought me to see it one day when I was in London, the spring before last, and I fell in love with it. I had inherited some money at the time, and I had been looking for a new house and studio, and I thought how perfect this would be. The great window faces north, you see? The light is perfect for painting, and I needed somewhere where I could spend time away from the distractions of my scruffy little place in Barcelona. And he was right about his architecture and my painting being made for each other. Here they could be one. So I told him that if he would sell it to me, I would promise to change nothing.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘He was in Barcelona in early April, we met briefly.’

‘What did he talk about?’

‘Mainly about his daughter. He had just heard that she was to have a baby, and he was very happy about this, but also worried about her not having a partner to help her. Charlotte had recently split up from the father, and then she discovered that she was pregnant.’