Barry Maitland - The verge practice

‘You seem intent on shooting yourself in the foot, Brock. Almost obsessional about it. Why is that?’ Sharpe stopped pacing and sat down. ‘I’ve assured the three women that neither they nor their gardener will be disturbed again, and that the case is closed. You’ll write to them yourself, today, and confirm this, and apologise for any inconvenience and distress. All right?’

‘Yes, sir.’ He felt ten years old again, in the headmaster’s study, the only one of the Black Hand Gang to have been caught wiping boot polish on doorhandles on April Fool’s Day.

‘And I want a copy of the letters for my file.’ Sharpe filled his lungs and relaxed slowly. ‘Anyway, on a brighter note, your DS Kolla seems to be acquitting herself extremely well on the Working Party committee. Robert is very pleased with her, tells me she’s taken it by the scruff of the neck and made it perform. Excellent leadership qualities, he says. Focused. Sound.’

Sound was Sharpe’s favourite quality, Brock knew. He was in no doubt that his own soundness quotient had taken a dive.

‘You might learn a thing or two from her, Brock.’

He stopped for a double scotch at a pub on the way back, a little place packed with office workers in no hurry to get home. They jostled and laughed too loudly at their own jokes, shouting their orders through the smoke to the girls behind the bar, and after ten minutes Brock felt a little better. He fought his way out onto the street and continued back to the annexe in Queen Anne’s Gate. It occupied a four-storey brick terrace of what had once been indiviual houses, later connected by a warren of doors and corridors and converted to offices, most recently belonging to a publisher. In a few years it would change its use again, Brock thought, and no one would remember or care what he and his people had done here.

He stopped at an office on the second floor when he saw Kathy inside working at her computer. ‘Sorry I was a bit abrupt earlier,’ he said. ‘Was in a bit of a hurry.’

‘Bren said there was trouble.’

As she looked up from the screen Brock was struck by how dark the shadows around her eyes seemed, how hollow her cheeks. Or perhaps it was just the light. ‘A call to order from above. The Verge case is closed. Drop it, forget it.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Oh, maybe they’re right. We had our chance. Look, I’ve got some paperwork to clear up, but do you fancy a meal later on?’

‘Yes, okay. That would be fine.’

After he’d gone she sat for a while thinking about the Verge case, then, inevitably, about Leon, then back to Verge. She thought of Brock’s conviction that they’d got it wrong, his fear that Verge might strike again, and her absurd notion about Todd. It was so easy to see threats and shadows where none existed.

Her phone rang, Brock’s voice, but sounding odd, asking her to come to his office. When she got there she was startled to see the blank, stunned look on his face.

‘You all right?’ she asked.

‘Sit down.’ He shook himself, ran a hand across his eyes. ‘I just had a call from Suzanne. She happened to mention that the children had met up with someone we know, someone on the force, she assumed. Yesterday afternoon, they were coming home from school, and he met them outside the shop.’

Kathy visualised the children in their school uniforms outside the front of Suzanne’s antiques shop and home on the High Street in Battle, wondering what this was leading to.

‘He called them by their names, and said that he was a good friend of ours, and that he’d heard they were very interested in the Verge case. He said he’d heard they’d made their own dossier of the case, and it was a very good piece of work.’

Now Kathy understood. She felt a chill as she recalled the title page of the scrapbook that had been taken from her car, with the children’s names, ages and address.

‘Could they describe him?’

‘Oldish man, funny accent, and he spoke to them in an odd way, with the left side of his face turned away.’

‘Oh God.’

‘It’s a threat, Kathy, or a warning.’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s what Todd was up to.’

‘What can we do?’ And that, Kathy realised, was the big question, the reason why Brock was immobilised instead of calling all hell down upon the head of George Todd.

‘Sharpe won’t let me act on this without some confirmation,’ Brock said. ‘I’ll go down there now, and try to get something concrete from the kids. Maybe Sharpe will agree to an identification parade.’ He said it without conviction. ‘At the least I can get Suzanne to take them away somewhere safe for a while.’

For how long, she thought, and what then?

‘I’m sorry, Brock. I feel this is my fault, with the scrapbook.’

‘Nonsense, it was sheer bad luck. At least it confirms that Todd is tied up in this. If the worst comes to the worst, I’ll take the bastard away for another little holiday, and beat the truth out of him.’

‘What can I do?’

‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ He got to his feet and began shoving documents into his briefcase. ‘I’d better go.’

Kathy felt helpless. ‘I’ll see you on Monday. You won’t do anything till then, will you?’ He smiled grimly. ‘Don’t worry. Have a good weekend.’ Later, sitting alone in her office, she came to a conclu sion. She picked up her phone and rang the number of a twenty-four hour ticketing agency.

In view of the tools she was carrying, Kathy had checked her bag in at Heathrow, though she had brought little else. After retrieving it from the carousel at El Prat, she made for the car-rental desks on the ground floor and hired a little Seat like the one she’d had before. Thinking of her current bank balance, she decided not to pay extra for additional damage insurance. It was the last Saturday in September, the sky outside was pale blue, the temperature mild, and a fresh easterly breeze spiked the jet-engine fumes with the tang of salty sea air. She wound the window down and headed south. By two p.m. she was driving along the waterfront of Sitges.

It was only ten days since she’d been here, yet it seemed like another period of her life entirely, a time of innocence, of unforgivable naivety. There was the cafe where she had written the postcard to Leon, imagining that they would return here together, perhaps-who could tell?-on a honeymoon. And all the time that she had been playing the detective in Spain, thinking that she might find the answers that had eluded everyone else, she had been oblivious to the unravelling of her own life. On the very same Sunday that she had come to Barcelona, Leon had gone with Paul Oakley to Dublin. On the Tuesday, when she’d been looking for clues in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, he had returned to London, and on the Wednesday, while she was writing her postcard, he had been removing his stuff from her flat. She felt a sense of bitter satisfaction now at the cruel synchronicity, as if she’d deserved to be hurt, for being so unaware, so smug.

Not any more. This time, right or wrong, she would set the agenda. She turned the car and drove to the Apollo-Sitges Fitness Club.

It had an abandoned air, the front door closed, an empty Coke bottle standing on the front step. She rapped on the door and noticed a sign hanging behind its glass panel. Its printed letters announced that it was ‘tancat’, and beneath, in a felt pen scrawl, ‘closed’. When she walked down the side lane to the rear yard she found an empty dustbin, and plastic bags blown against the foot of the roller door. She tried the intercom and found that it was dead.

Kathy returned to her car and drove back to the seafront. She had missed lunch and felt hungry. She took a seat at the Bar Chiringuito overlooking the beach and ordered sardines, bread and mineral water from an old man who bustled about as if run off his feet, although she was the only customer. Afterwards, she drove through the town until she found a cinema, and fell asleep watching a love story she couldn’t follow.