Barry Maitland: The verge practice

‘That was the one compromise I insisted on. Of course Charles wanted absolutely bare walls, but I said I must hang my photographs, so in the end he had to settle for designing the stainless-steel frames.’ She chuckled affectionately at the memory.

All of the pictures seemed to be of Charles, either alone or with other important people. In one he was accepting a medal from the President of the Royal Institute of British Architects, in another shaking the hand of President Clinton.

‘Many of these are other world-famous architects.’ She emphasised other. ‘There he is with Kenzo Tange and the Emperor of Japan in Tokyo. There with Peter Eisenman in New York, and there with Frank Gehry in Bilbao. Over here he’s receiving the Erick Schelling Prize in Architecture. He was going to get the Pritzker, you know, if not this year then the next. I’m quite certain of it.’

The photographs recorded Verge ageing, from slender youthfulness to a more powerful middle age. In the most recent picture, taken on a rooftop with a group of Arabs, he seemed to have lost weight.

Miki Norinaga didn’t appear anywhere, but there was one extraneous figure, a thin man with glossy black hair shown in a grainy black-and-white enlargement running in a singlet and shorts on a racing track.

‘My husband, Alberto, Charles’s father. That’s him running for Spain in the 1948 Olympics in London. That’s how I met him. One day I was sitting in the tube with a girlfriend, and there were these two very charming young men sitting opposite us, with running shoes tied round their necks. We got chatting, and they said they were going to run in the Olympics. That’s the way it was then, so informal and casual. The athletes simply got on a bus or a tube with their kit and turned up for their event. We fell in love straight away. By the time the games were over we were engaged. We got married three months later in Barcelona and Charles was born in the following year. Alberto was an architect, too, you know. He was very progressive and becoming very well known in Spanish circles when he died suddenly eight years later.’

Brock felt he was being indulged, or perhaps indoctrinated into the Verge story by a very committed curator and archivist.

‘You’re obviously very proud of your son’s achievements.’

‘Oh, I am. I make no apology for that. He was an outstanding man. Posterity will confirm his talent. That’s why this appalling lie must be laid to rest.’

‘What lie is that?’

‘That Charles murdered his wife.’

‘Didn’t he?’

‘Of course not! The idea is quite preposterous. He was not a stupid man, Chief Inspector, and he did not lose control of himself. If he had had some dreadful quarrel with Miki, he simply would have walked out. The idea that he might have murdered her in this gruesome fashion and then run away is absolutely unbelievable to anyone who knew him. Apart from any moral scruples, he would never have acted so extravagantly against his own best interests.

Believe me, I knew my son.’

She said this with a fervent insistence, but still as one presenting a purely rational argument.

‘Then where is he now, Mrs Verge?’

‘He is dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘Murdered, as surely as Miki was murdered. Indeed, that’s why she was killed, to hide the fact of Charles’s murder and make him appear the guilty party.’

She saw the frown on Brock’s face and renewed her attack, leaning forward in her chair with frustration. ‘It’s perfectly simple; if you want to murder someone without drawing suspicion on yourself, you make him disappear and then kill his wife and make it look as if he did it and fled. It’s the obvious conclusion, isn’t it? The police always suspect the close family members first. The point is that Charles was the real target of the murderers, not Miki.’

‘Murderers? More than one?’

‘I would assume so. I imagine it was a professional job.’ She said this scornfully, as if nothing but the best in the way of murderers would be good enough for her son.

‘Instigated by whom?’

‘By someone who stood to benefit greatly from his death. Chief Inspector, the work that Charles was involved in was not only wonderful architecture, it was also business on a very large scale. At the time of his disappearance he was the leading contender to design and build a new city for two million people in the province of Zhejiang in China. It would have meant enormous contracts, not only for his practice and that of other consultants, but also for British construction and engineering companies. Of course, when Charles disappeared the Chinese went elsewhere. They appointed an American firm.’

‘And you’re suggesting that the Americans murdered your son?’ Brock had to make an effort not to sound incredulous.

‘Why not? They can be very ruthless, the Americans, where business is concerned. But it may not be them. There were probably half a dozen other major projects coming Charles’s way that someone would have killed for, either for money or prestige. The point is that this is a far more plausible motive than the one your predecessor insisted on pursuing so single-mindedly. All along I have been trying to point this out to him, without the slightest success. Instead he has stubbornly focused on the idea of a lurid family scandal, like a salacious schoolboy.’

This was going too far. Brock was about to point out coolly that she might be assumed to have a vested interest in this other explanation, when he stopped himself. Did she really prefer to have her son dead in order to preserve his reputation? Looking at her tight-lipped intensity, at the hall-of-fame pictures covering the walls, he rather thought she did. The alternative was probably just too painful.

So, instead of challenging her, he simply said, ‘I’m sure Superintendent Chivers would have looked carefully into your suspicions, and I shall certainly talk to him about them.’

She didn’t look convinced. ‘It happened on the Saturday, May the twelfth, I’m sure of it. I believe they were waiting for him in his apartment when he returned from America. Sandy Clarke, his partner in the practice, picked him up at the airport and brought him home, and he was never seen again. I think they had already killed Miki and set up the whole thing. When he arrived they killed or drugged him, then took him down in the private lift to his car in the basement and drove him away. The abandoned car and clothes on the coast were meant to look implausible. I mean, no one could imagine Charles killing himself in such a way-such bathos!’

‘How would he have done it, Mrs Verge?’ Brock asked quietly. She seemed about to protest at such a question, then changed her mind. She had thought about this, he could see.

‘He had a beautiful glider,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose you know anything about gliders.’

‘Actually I do. I used to fly them myself, at a club down in Kent.’

She cocked her head and offered him a little smile. ‘How interesting. Superintendent Chivers had no idea what I was talking about. Charles was passionate about it. He used to take me up, you know, even after I was reduced to this…’ She slapped the arm of her chair. ‘We shared the sense of liberation, of escape from the drudgery of gravity. You do know what I mean, don’t you? To glide through great cities of cloud at dusk, to pass under the rim of a cumulus and rise into the vast dome… He was inspired by the architecture of clouds, by the infinite possibilities of light and space and form.’

‘Yes, I do know what you mean,’ Brock said, hearing the phrases that had most probably come from Charles, and the almost sensual agitation in her voice. ‘And you feel that’s how he would have chosen to make an end of things?’