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.
‘Do you have children, Sergeant?’
‘No.’ Kathy was aware of being probed, while Mrs Verge made up her mind whether it would be more productive to groom or attack her.
‘Perhaps you’re wise. They are a blessing, of course, but also a heartache.’
Especially if they go around stabbing people, Kathy thought. There was something odd about all this, something she was missing. ‘But this seems a wonderful refuge for Charlotte,’ she said. ‘Is it just a coincidence that it’s so close to where you used to live?’
‘Not exactly. Charlotte was born a couple of years after Charles built Briar Hill for me, and when she was a child she had so many happy memories of staying with me there that when her relationship broke down she decided to get out of London and come to live in the area. Charles helped her financially, and now when I come to stay with her we go for drives and catch sight of the house again, and remember those happy days. Someone else owns Briar Hill now, of course. Charles sold it to a Spanish artist, a friend of his, on the condition that she promise to change nothing.’
Not only odd but a little spooky, Kathy thought, as if his mother and his daughter had decided together to live in the past, before all of this unpleasantness had happened. ‘I can understand her resenting me for invading her privacy here to question you about her father.’
‘She does rather regard the police as the enemy, I’m afraid. She thinks you believe the worst of her father, but I tell her that we must try to do everything we can to help you come to the truth of the matter, that Charles is the real victim in all this.’ There was such a calm certainty in the way she said this that Kathy was impressed, despite her conviction that the woman was deluding herself. ‘So how can I help you? And may I say that I was most impressed by your Mr Brock. Much more intelligent than the last fellow. I feel more confident now that we can make some progress at last.’ She smiled.
Grooming then, Kathy thought. ‘I’ve brought a copy of your earlier statements, Mrs Verge, and I’d like to go through some of the points you raised there, but mainly I’d like to get to understand Charles better, as a person.’ Madelaine Verge beamed. Nothing would delight her more, her only regret being that most of the photograph albums were in her London flat, a fact for which Kathy was silently grateful.
When Charlotte returned they were deep in conversation about Charles’s boyhood, his sense of mischief, his stubbornness, his enthusiasm for competitive sports, his oddly inconsistent school results until he suddenly blossomed just in time to get decent A-levels. Charlotte poured the coffee then said that she had work to do.
‘Before you go, dear,’ her grandmother said, ‘would you please fetch me the family album in my room?’
‘It must have been difficult for you, bringing him up on your own, Madelaine,’ Kathy said, the intimacies of Charles’s childhood having brought them to first-name terms.
‘I always felt that I had his father, Alberto, at my shoulder, guiding me. He was a very special man, an Olympic athlete and a very gifted architect. I never made any attempt to guide Charles into his father’s footsteps, but Alberto was always there as a shining example, and I was thrilled when Charles announced that he would become an architect, too. And it soon became obvious that the gift had been passed down, undiminished.’
Charlotte returned with an old photograph album, then disappeared again. It contained pictures from Charles’s childhood, mostly bland and remote, but there was one that caught Kathy’s attention for its strangeness. In it, the small boy was standing encased in some kind of tall, thin construction which Kathy couldn’t make out. It looked something like a giant condom or a syringe, daubed with spots and surmounted by a crown, his face peering out from a hole cut in the middle.