she got the impression that the excitement caused by their possible sighting of the runaway had been thoroughly appreciated. Both women were prepared with documentation; Kathy with a file of the earlier interview transcripts and the plans and photographs supplied by the Barcelona police, and Audrey McNeil with her own collection of holiday snapshots, city guides and souvenirs.
‘It’s a wonderful city, so exciting, so much to see,’ Audrey enthused. She was in her early sixties, Kathy guessed, hair silvering and eyes sharp. ‘Wonderful buildings, the street life, the food… Well, to be honest I think tapas is overrated, and Peter says I do a better paella than any of the restaurants we tried, but anyway…’ She poured tea as she rattled on. ‘I have a Barcelona bridge partner now. We get on like a house on fire. Play practically every day. A grandmother like me, and the same age.’
It seemed Audrey spent much of her days, and nights too, playing bridge on the internet. She handed Kathy her pictures of Barcelona, describing each in turn and eventually coming to the only one that seemed relevant.
‘Now this is the Casa Mila, which is on the same street where Peter saw Charles Verge, the Passeig de Gracia. You see the sculpted shape of the balconies, almost like it’s made of clay, or bones? It was designed by Gaudi, the famous Barcelona architect, who was run over by a tram. Peter is a great fan of Gaudi. He took pictures of all his buildings, including the great church of the Sagrada Familia of course, dozens of them.’ She turned to another packet but Kathy stopped her and guided her attention back to the Casa Mila.
‘That was taken from right outside the building?’
‘Yes. Peter was insistent that we cross the street to try to get further back, to get the whole building in, but the trees got in the way and he didn’t take that shot in the end. So we crossed back over again and continued down to a cafe near the metro station, and it was on our way there that we saw him.’
Kathy unfolded her plans and got Audrey to trace the route. ‘We worked out that it must have been this block here that we saw him, going into the entrance on the corner, there.’
‘Okay, now in your earlier statement it’s Peter who really describes the figure you saw, and you agree with him. I wondered if you could try to picture the scene again now and tell me what you saw.’
‘Well, the trouble is that I took no notice until Peter said something like, “Oh, look at that chap over there, it’s the famous architect Charles Verge”, and then I looked and just caught a fleeting glimpse of him as he disappeared into the shadow of the entrance. I wouldn’t remember it at all if Peter hadn’t gone on about how important he was, and I got a bit irritated because frankly I’d never heard of him, not then. Now, of course, everyone has.’
‘All the same,’ Kathy persisted, sure she was wasting her time, ‘could you close your eyes and picture the scene, and just replay it in your mind? Don’t say anything, just try to visualise it, then tell me what you see.’
Audrey closed her eyes and sat motionless for a moment. Her lips pursed as if recalling the memory of her irritation with her husband, then her face relaxed a little and she made a gesture with her hand, as if tracing a movement in front of her. She opened her eyes and shrugged.
‘Not much help, I’m afraid. I got a glimpse of someone dressed in black, that’s all.’
‘Black jacket?’
‘Yes, I suppose so. Peter said afterwards it was a black leather jacket.’
‘Forget about what Peter said, Audrey. I just want your impressions.’
‘Well he was probably right. I think it may have been a bit shiny in the sunlight, just before he disappeared inside the building. And black trousers and black hair.’
‘Length of hair?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Just now, when you had your eyes closed, you moved your right hand to the right, as if you were following his movement. Is that what you were doing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Only, if you were walking down the Passeig de Gracia here…’ Kathy pointed to the map, ‘…on the same side as the Casa Mila, surely he would have passed in front of you going from right to left, from the kerb to the building, that way, yes?’
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.
