‘If you don’t mind we’ll talk at my board,’ Lewis said, leading the way between plan-chests and tables to the far corner. ‘I’m expecting a call that I really need to take, and I’ll want to refer to my drawings. Would you like a coffee?’
Brock said yes, and the young man called after them, ‘I’ll get it, Gail.’
They sat in her workstation, partly screened from the rest of the office by the tilt of her drawing board, to which a half-finished plan on tracing paper was taped. Wanting to get a better sense of the woman before he got down to business, and remembering the banks of machines in the Verge draughting studios, Brock said conversationally, ‘You don’t design on a computer, then?’
‘I still prefer a pencil,’ she said. ‘At least for the early stages. I think better with a pencil in my hand.’ She picked one up, clicking the lead forward, and took a notepad from the side table, as if she were about to interview him. ‘I’m puzzled by why you should want to see me, Chief Inspector. You’re in charge of the case, aren’t you? I’ve seen your name in the papers.’
The case, as if there could be no question why he had come.
‘That’s right. You may have read that we’re closing down the investigation, but we just want to make sure there are no loose ends.’
‘One of your officers spoke to me not long ago. A woman, I can’t remember her name.’
‘Sergeant Kolla, yes. You were caught up in some other business at the time, I think, and she wasn’t able to cover all the points she wanted to raise with you.’
‘What do you want to ask me about?’
‘I’m still puzzled by the relationship between your former husband and his partner, Sandy Clarke. I thought, having known them both over an extended period, you might be able to throw some light on it for me.’
Two little creases appeared between her brows as she considered this. ‘The papers say that Sandy Clarke murdered Charles and Miki, and confessed to this in a suicide note.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And you’re quite satisfied that’s true?’
‘We are.’ He saw her eyes narrow at something, his choice of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, perhaps, sensing him distancing himself. ‘There doesn’t seem much room for doubt.’
‘And now that the case is closed you decide to come to have a chat with someone who hasn’t spoken to either of them for years.’
He was saved from responding to that by her phone. ‘Excuse me.’ She reached for it. ‘Hello? Yes, put him on.’
Brock watched her straighten in her seat, heard her voice take on a brisk authority.
‘Steven? Thanks for getting back to me… Yes, it is important; it’s about the bathroom tiles. I’ve spoken to the supplier and they’ll be on site on Monday… Yes, Monday. They’re diverting another order for us, but there are no type EG30s, so we’ll have to change some of the details…’
She spread a drawing from the side table across her board and put on a pair of glasses. The young man appeared with mugs of coffee and biscuits, and Brock waited while Lewis went through the details and brought her call to an end. She finally put the phone down, smiling to herself as she took off her glasses. ‘Got you,’ she said, then glanced over at Brock. ‘Sorry about that. He was hoping to use the missing tiles as an excuse for his delays. Where were we?’
‘You were going to give me a portrait of Charles Verge and Sandy Clarke.’
‘Actually I was going to ask you again why you’re here. Are you having second thoughts?’
‘The coroner will have to bring a finding on the death of Sandy Clarke. Until that’s done, I’m open to any ideas, no matter how unlikely.’
‘You haven’t found Charles’s body, have you?’
Brock felt transparent, rather as he imagined the builder at the other end of the phone must have felt. ‘No.’
She regarded him gravely for a moment, then turned her attention to her coffee. ‘While I was waiting for you to arrive I remembered an essay I once read, about how architects could learn about problem-solving from the great detective.’ She said the words with an ironic emphasis, and he wasn’t sure if she was having a dig at him. ‘It was about how they both have to cope with masses of pragmatic detail, but in order to do that they have to stand back from the detail and form an overall vision of the case, a theory or paradigm. That’s why Sherlock Holmes sat at home playing the violin while others scurried around collecting boring facts. Are you here to collect facts or play the violin, Chief Inspector? Because if it’s the first, I don’t think I can help you.’
‘I’m not sure I follow.’
She reached behind her to a shelf laden with heavy volumes bearing titles like Specification, Standards and Timber Code, and pulled down a thick manual. ‘This is the design brief for a district library we’re doing at the moment-not a big building.’ She let it fall open and scanned the page. ‘The Assistant Librarians require an office at twelve square metres per person, with four power points each, a carpet grade B on the floor, a lighting level of five hundred lux and sound reduction index of thirty-five decibels between rooms. There are over two hundred pages like that, of facts that make up the essence of the problem. But how do you generate a solution from facts like that? You can’t just pile them all up, room after room, and hope they somehow sort themselves out. In any case, many of the facts contradict each other, or are open to interpretation, or will have changed before the building’s finished. So you need something else, a big idea, that’s somehow truer and tougher than the data, but is also faithful to it. Would you say your job is like that?’
‘It sounds familiar.’
‘The trouble is, your big idea may be wrong. I once did a house for a couple who were friends of ours. There were several unusual things about the brief-their interests, the site and so on-and I arrived quite quickly at what I thought was the right answer. They liked it, and we went ahead. But I knew something wasn’t quite right. I’d got there too quickly, the whole thing had been too easy somehow, too glib. You know what I mean?’
Brock nodded. He knew exactly what she meant.
‘One day, in an idle moment, I started doodling, and a different answer, the right answer, appeared on my board. It was too late to do anything about it, we were committed, and I couldn’t say anything to the clients. The other scheme was built, and they were perfectly happy with it-but I knew, and I felt terrible, like a detective who’d sent the wrong man to the gallows. I had the same feeling when I read the reports about Sandy.’
She paused, setting her pencil down on the edge of the drawing board midway between them, almost as if offering it to him. ‘You’re worried you’ve got the wrong answer, aren’t you? You think Charles is still alive.’
Brock didn’t reply for a moment, and the sound of rain splashing outside the windows in the courtyard filled the silence. Then he said, ‘What made you so sure, about Sandy?’
‘Just what I knew about him. He was a very steady, calm, practical man. He had to be to stick with Charles all those years. Oh, I know he had a roving eye, but there was never any suggestion of coercion or violence. He had a kind of self-possession, rather old-fashioned, like Gary Cooper or someone, that appealed to women. I daresay Charles and Miki together might drive many people to distraction, but the idea of Sandy plotting a fiendish double murder is, well, unbelievable-to me, anyway.’