‘Is this your office?’ Kathy asked, puzzled.
‘No. I visit once a week to offer advice and work on new projects with some of the people who come here.’
She was a slight woman with grey hair cut short, wearing a shirt and jeans. From the brief file entry Kathy knew that she was the same age as Verge, fifty-two, and had met him in the master’s program at Harvard he’d attended after completing his degree in England. An American, she still had a distinct New England accent, although Kathy assumed she had now spent as much of her life in the UK as in the USA.
Kathy was about to speak again when the sound of argument suddenly billowed up from below.
The architect’s mouth tightened. ‘Look, this isn’t a very good time. And I really don’t see how I can help you.’
‘As I said on the phone, I just wanted to talk to you about your former husband.’
‘Yes, but what exactly?’
The woman was impatient, and Kathy felt the pressure rising from below. ‘I’d like to understand him better.’
‘Understand what? He’s fifty-two years old. You want me to summarise that in a sentence?’
‘You were married to him for twenty years…’
‘Well, maybe I didn’t understand him either. Maybe that’s why we split up. Look, I haven’t seen him in eight years. Talk to the people who’ve known him recently-his mother, Sandy Clarke, his people at work …’
‘Yes, I’m doing that.’ Kathy felt that she wasn’t getting anywhere. ‘Was he ever violent to you?’
‘Only with his tongue, which was bad enough.’
‘Do you believe he could murder someone?’
‘Yes, if he put his mind to it.’
‘But that makes it sound deliberate. Everyone points out how disastrous this has been for him, that it must have been impulsive.’
For a moment Kathy felt that the other woman might have said something, but there was a sudden turmoil from below and she jumped to her feet.
‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you. I have to get down there and sort things out.’ And then she was disappearing down the staircase. Kathy shrugged and took a last look around at the threadbare room with its peeling wallpaper, and thought about how different this was from the Verge Practice offices.
10
A brisk north-easterly breeze gusted up the long slope of Greenwich Park, ruffling the hair of the little boy in the pushchair. Despite the wind the morning was mild, the sun glinting through a silvery sky and casting a shimmer of light on the surface of the river and the glassy towers of Canary Wharf beyond. Sandy Clarke stooped and lifted the child, setting him on his feet. Like a mechanised toy, the little legs immediately began pumping and the toddler hurtled off across the grass.
Clarke had surprised both his wife and himself when he had announced over breakfast that he wouldn’t be going in to the office that day. He added that he had paperwork he could do better in the peace of home, but that was fiction. In truth, it was simply an impulse, something to do with the claustrophobic atmosphere in the office and his inability to sleep these nights. And something, too, about the day itself, mild yet misty as if on a cusp between summer and winter, the past and the future, very like that other turning point, in May, when everything had changed forever.
When their daughter had arrived with their grandson later in the morning he had insisted on taking the child to the park, and now, watching him chasing tiny butterflies caught in the breeze, he found himself overwhelmed by a terrible sense of loss. The force of it made his eyes momentarily water and filled him with a desire to flee, not to some other place but to another time, twenty years before, when he had walked another child, his daughter, on this same grassy hillside. He had been cocky then, confident and strong. Now he felt like an impostor, as limp and undeserving as the used condom lying by his foot. They had worked on small buildings in those days, houses and office conversions, projects for which you could hold every detail in your mind. Now they tendered for whole cities. What madness was that, to imagine that you could design a whole city? All you made was a shell, an imitation of a real place. Had Charles felt that too, that their lives had insidiously progressed from the tangible and real to the grandiose and fake? For a moment Clarke was certain that he had, that Charles’s tragedy-all their tragedies-boiled down to that.
But all lives have a trajectory, he thought, an axis running inevitably onward, regardless of our doubts. The thought of axes, of intention and certainty, was comforting, and appropriate, too, in this place criss-crossed by organising lines. His eye strayed down to the great central axis of symmetry of the Queen’s House and Wren’s Naval College, so firm and bold. It continued, he knew, back up the hill to the south, and along Le Notre’s formal avenue to the gates of the park and then out across Blackheath to the spire of All Saints, and it also continued northward, aligning across the river to the distant Hawksmoor church of St Anne’s in Limehouse, hidden now by the modern piles on the Isle of Dogs. And even this grand four-mile-long axis paled into insignificance alongside the greatest axis of them all, the invisible meridian running through the Old Royal Observatory up there on the hill, the axis of zero longitude encircling the whole globe.
Clarke’s distracted musings on axes and life were interrupted by a figure approaching across the grass, striding as straight and purposeful as if following some invisible axis of its own; a bulky figure, hands thrust into the pockets of a black coat flapping in the breeze. Clarke recognised the cropped white hair and beard and braced himself. ‘Deliver me, Lord,’ he breathed in prayer, ‘from eternal death on that dreadful day…’
‘Morning!’ Brock hailed him as he came in range. ‘Beautiful day.’
They strolled across the slope, following the trail of the little boy. Clarke felt a great calm descend on him, and when the policeman didn’t seem inclined to broach the reason for his being there, Clarke saw no need to prevaricate.
‘You’ve come about the DNA test, I take it?’
‘Yes indeed.’
‘It was positive, was it?’ He took a deep breath, picking up the scent of distant chimneys. ‘I didn’t doubt it.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us before?’
Clarke bridled. The arrogance of these people was without limit, poking into everyone’s lives, requiring everything to be confessed. ‘It was and is none of your damn business, that’s why!’
The detective looked mildly puzzled. ‘When exactly did she tell Mr Verge?’
That stopped Clarke in his tracks. He felt the blood drain from his face. ‘Dear God… She told Charles? She swore…’ He tried to think clearly. ‘But of course, she’s told you too, I suppose.’ How absurd that he hadn’t realised that all along.
The policeman was looking distinctly unsettled now. He gazed at Clarke beneath lowered brows and said finally, ‘Look, Mr Clarke, let’s make a clean breast of it, eh? What have you got to tell me?’
Clarke gave a bitter laugh. ‘You want a confession, do you? I should have thought that was hardly necessary if you’ve got the tests, and she’s told you anyway.’ But the anger faded quickly. What was the point? ‘Very well, for the record, I acknowledge that I am the father of Charlotte Verge’s child.’
‘Blimey.’ Bren Gurney sat down beside Kathy who was watching the interview on the CCTV screen. ‘He was poking Verge’s wife and his daughter? We’d better check out his old mum, make sure Clarke wasn’t going for the triple crown.’
Brock was letting Clarke find his own pace. Since agreeing to make a formal statement the architect had behaved as if the act of confession had brought some relief. The question of a DNA test to confirm the parentage of Charlotte’s unborn child had apparently been preying on his mind for some time, and when the police had asked for a second DNA sample he had assumed that it was for this reason.
‘It was a farce, really. A farce that turned into a nightmare. I’ve never been caught out this way before. That it should happen at this stage, and with Charles’s daughter…’ He lifted his hands in a gesture of appeal to Brock, man to man. Brock looked up from the report of the DNA test in which he seemed to be more interested, and nodded sympathetically.