Audrey frowned in thought. ‘I suppose so. Well… maybe he did. I don’t know.’ Her irritation was surfacing again. ‘You’ve got to realise that I didn’t take much notice at the time. I mean, if Peter had said it was Elton John or Fergie or someone interesting I’d have paid attention, and anyway, it was a whole week later that we realised it might be important and had to think back. I mean, our whole time in Barcelona was packed with interesting sights, and this was just one little incident, over in a flash.’
‘Of course,’ Kathy said, conciliatory. ‘Police hope for the impossible from eyewitnesses.’ It was quite obvious that Audrey McNeil could tell her nothing new. ‘So Gaudi’s church is impressive, is it?’
‘Actually, it’s very weird,’ Audrey said, and opened the packet of photographs.
After a decent interval Kathy said she would have to go to keep her appointment with Mr McNeil. He had officially retired from his structural engineering practice, Audrey had said, but still went in one day a week, to the irritation of his partners. Kathy followed her directions to the city centre and found the offices in a neat Georgian terrace not far from Peterborough’s cathedral. The place was very different from the Verge Practice’s glossy building. A receptionist and a couple of other staff were packed into a series of small rooms along with a purposeful jumble of hard hats, surveying equipment and computers.
‘Audrey any help?’ her husband inquired, lifting a pile of files to the floor so that he could sit on the other side of the desk.
‘Oh, it’s always useful to hear it direct, rather than just reading it from files,’ Kathy lied.
‘Nothing, eh?’ he beamed smugly, and in that smile Kathy thought she might have seen the source of his wife’s irritation. ‘Well, I doubt if I can add anything new either, but fire away.’
Kathy got him to repeat his account, then said, ‘So you saw him get out of a taxi over to your right, then walk across in front of you from right to left.’
‘That’s it, yes. I was concentrating on his face, trying to decide if it really was him. He looked younger than the photos I’d seen in the magazines, and his hair was a bit longer, but when your people showed me the most recent picture they had of him, I knew he was the one.’
‘It’s just that Audrey seemed to feel that she saw him go into a doorway to her right, not her left.’
‘Well, that doesn’t surprise me.’ The grin spread over his face again. ‘Do you know that it’s now been scientifically proven that the only thing women can do that men can’t is have babies, and the only thing that men can do that women can’t is read maps.’ He chuckled. ‘If I’m ever forced to get Audrey to map-read for me in the car and she says, “Turn left here”, I turn right, because I know that’s what she means. You get my drift? Don’t get me wrong, Audrey can be sharp as a tack, but she gets right and left mixed up. And she hardly had time to register him. But she did notice his hair, come to think of it. Did she mention that? I was telling her how he was England’s leading architect and she got a bit cross with me going on about him and said something like, “Well, that’s as maybe, but he needs to wash his hair. It’s greasy.” I’d forgotten that until now. But it’s not surprising, is it? I mean, if he’d been on the run for forty-eight hours?’
Kathy went through the maps and photographs in her file with him, but he had nothing new to add. In fact, she had the impression from his answers, too quick and too confident, that he was determined to be absolutely consistent with what he’d said before. As she made to go he tried to interest her in visiting Peterborough Cathedral, a few minutes’ walk away. ‘The only remaining early example of a painted wooden ceiling in a major Romanesque church,’ he enthused. She said she had to be getting back to London, but he insisted on walking her past the west front of the cathedral in a roundabout way back to her car, and explaining the theory that the odd spacing of the great arches was derived from musical intervals described in the Boethius de Musica, a work familiar to all educated men in the twelfth century, apparently. Kathy was careful not to get him started on Gaudi’s church in Barcelona.
On the road back to London she thought about the McNeils’ statements, wondering what she could report to Brock. Despite Peter McNeil’s confidence, she wasn’t convinced that the man he’d seen was Charles Verge. She’d never been to Barcelona, but she guessed that it must contain thousands of shortish men with black hair who looked a bit like the missing man. The building that McNeil had seen Verge going into had yielded nothing, and there had been differences in the recollections of husband and wife.
Driving south now, the sun was in Kathy’s eyes, glittering from the glass and metalwork of oncoming vehicles. She recalled Audrey’s comment that the leather jacket had appeared shiny in the sunlit street, just before it disappeared into the shadows of the doorway. Presumably the sunlight had also picked out his greasy hair, which she’d forgotten noticing. But that couldn’t be right.
She turned off into the forecourt of a filling station and took the street plan of the Passeig de Gracia from her file. As she’d thought, it ran almost due north-south, with the Casa Mila, the metro station and the assumed sighting of Verge on the east side. But it had been about ten-thirty in the morning, and surely the east side of the street would have been in shadow, the west side sunlit? Yes, she remembered the photograph of the Casa Mila, the facade in shade. And Audrey had thought that the man had walked across the footpath from left to right, as would have been the case if they’d been walking southward down the west side, not the east. It was as if the two McNeils had been describing completely different incidents, on opposite sides of the street. Which was about par for eyewitnesses.
She reported this to Brock when she returned. He shrugged as if he’d expected no more. ‘This is how it is with taking over an old case, Kathy,’ he grumbled. ‘Faded memories, second-hand accounts. But at least the Clarke lead seems to be bearing fruit. That was a fortunate discovery, the forensic report on the pillow. Leon tells me you were helping him when he found it.’
Kathy nodded, still uncertain exactly what Leon had said. ‘Is someone in trouble for missing it the first time?’
‘Hard to say. It was probably just one of those things that happen when there’s a turnover of people. The important thing is we’ve got it now.’
‘And Clarke has been up to something?’
‘There are several things I’d be very interested to hear his explanation about. I think we should be ready to speak to him quite soon.’
Dusk was falling, shop windows throwing bright pools of light across darkening pavements as Kathy drove south across the river to keep the appointment she had made with Gail Lewis. The architect had asked her to come to an address in Clapham, where she would be working all that afternoon and evening. It was a shopfront, Kathy discovered, with a sign reading ‘South London Housing Aid’. Inside a woman was working at a word processor on a desk in the middle of the room. She looked up and smiled at Kathy as the doorbell tinkled, then looked beyond her to someone passing by on the street outside and gave a wave. There were posters and leaflets on the walls, with information on housing cooperatives and housing associations in the London area.
It was very hot in the office, and the woman’s black skin glistened with perspiration. ‘Hello, how can I help you?’ she asked, seeming oblivious to the sounds of a violent argument going on beyond the partition behind her.
Kathy asked for Gail Lewis and the woman put her head round a door in the partition and said something. The noise died for a few moments, then started up again as a woman came through the door and shook Kathy’s hand.
‘Let’s go upstairs.’
They climbed a steep staircase to a small bare room with a drawing board and T-square set out on a table, and Gail Lewis offered Kathy a seat.