details over the phone.’
‘All right, go on.’
‘I went into his office and found the note with the details of the account he wanted credited. During the course of the day I made arrangements over the phone to transfer thirty thousand pounds from my personal cash management account to that account. I remember that it was at a Barclays branch, in Barcelona. I don’t have a note of the account number any more, but my bank must have a record. I had forgotten the name of the recipient until you mentioned it this afternoon. It was M. Kraus.’
On screen Brock was leaning forward to say something to Tony, who was shaking his head.
Brock said, ‘Yes, well, we’ll get you to obtain those details from your bank for us, Mr Clarke. Go on.’
‘That’s basically it. At the time I didn’t attach any particular significance to it. I expected to see Charles on the Monday. When he didn’t come to the presentation and then we found Miki’s body, the shock drove the business out of my mind for a while. It was only later that day, when I was actually being interviewed by the police, that I remembered it. I was talking about something else, and it suddenly hit me in mid-sentence that perhaps the thirty thousand Charles had asked for was for himself, to help him disappear. I had to decide right there, in the middle of talking about something else, whether to mention this. I remembered how insistent he had been that I tell no one about it, and I decided to err on the side of loyalty to my friend and say nothing until I had had a chance to think it through. Once I’d made that decision, of course, it became impossible to go back on it without making myself appear to be involved. I’m sorry. I suppose I assumed you’d find out where he was without my help anyway. I realise now I should have said something.’
Very glib, Kathy thought.
‘You’re suggesting that Martin Kraus is an alias for Charles Verge?’ Brock asked on screen.
‘I’ve no idea. Maybe it’s the name of an intermediary, someone who can pass the money on to him.’
‘And what about the payments to Martin Kraus’s company, Turnstile Quality Systems, that we asked you about earlier?’
‘I know nothing about those. That’s the truth. I acknowledge that it looks like my signature on the cheques, but I have no recollection of writing them, and I can’t believe I could have done so on such a frequent basis and for such amounts without remembering. The whole process was irregular. Why were the invoices not processed in the normal way through the office?’
‘Indeed. They were addressed directly to you.’
‘But I never saw them!’
‘You’re suggesting fraud?’
‘Well, what else can I suggest?’
‘By your partner, Charles Verge?’
Clarke pursed his lips in frustration and fell silent. At last he said, voice weary, ‘It doesn’t make sense. If Charles wanted to draw large sums from the firm he only had to discuss it with his partners, Miki and me. We could have come to some arrangement, restructured the capital so he could liquidate some of his share against future earnings. But he never said a word, not to me anyway.’
‘But the fact remains that, according to you, Charles knew Martin Kraus, the nominal beneficiary of these payments.’
‘Yes. But it just doesn’t make sense,’ he repeated. ‘I mean, it was bound to come out, wasn’t it? I’m surprised the accountants haven’t picked this up before now.’
‘They say,’ Tony broke in, ‘that’s because it was done by someone at a high level in the firm. Someone who could bypass the normal processes.’
‘Well, it wasn’t me.’
‘Have you anything else you want to tell us, Mr Clarke?’ Brock asked.
‘There is something else, yes. When I decided to keep quiet about the thirty thousand, it also led me to, well, sanitise my account of Charles’s recent behaviour, out of the same sense of loyalty. The fact is that I was becoming increasingly concerned about his mental and physical state.’
‘In what way?’
‘It’s hard to specify a precise event, more a gradual change. Something was going badly wrong with his marriage. I can’t say exactly what, and I’ve learned over the years that it’s unwise to interfere, but there was a certain tension that developed, and quite heated arguments about design directions, almost violent and sometimes embarrassingly public. Miki increasingly adopted the pose of an injured prima donna, while Charles sank into a kind of angry despair.
‘I tried several times to suggest that he see his doctor for help, but he shrugged me off. He threw himself into the Marchdale Prison project as if it were a life raft, but he was so manic about it that that alarmed me too. He became more and more moody and erratic. It got to the point where I was nervous about him dealing with our clients on his own.’
Clarke reached for a jug on the table and poured himself some water. It was hard to see on the video, but there was the sound of a slight rattle of glass against glass as if his hand were unsteady. He drank deeply, then blew out his cheeks. It was a gesture of relief, Kathy guessed, as if he’d reached that stage in an interview where the subject has got the main business off his chest. Now he gets chatty, she thought, happy to offer cooperation just to get out the door.
‘You said you were concerned about his physical state, too?’
‘Well, he changed, looked different. Sort of puffy around the face, and grey from lack of sleep. He began to dress carelessly, as if he wasn’t bothered any more how he looked. Most unlike him. Towards the end he seemed to find no pleasure in anything. Well, except Charlotte’s…’ His voice tailed off into a bout of coughing, and his face became red.
‘Charlotte’s child, yes,’ Brock said drily.
‘No, I mean, as if he really didn’t belong any more, not following the details at meetings, forgetting appointments, driving his secretary mad.’
‘Any signs of violent behaviour?’
‘Anger, yes. Especially towards Miki.’
‘Did she ever talk to you about their deteriorating relationship?’
‘Not directly. Sometimes, when they were having a quarrel over some point of design, she would try to draw me in on her side, talking as if it was common knowledge between us that Charles’s judgement was becoming unreliable. I found it acutely uncomfortable.’
‘But she didn’t mention threats or violence towards her?’
‘No.’
‘And on the evening of the eleventh of May, Miki didn’t say anything specific about his return?’
‘I told you, I had a feeling that there was something she wanted to tell me, but she never got it out. Just that reference to having married the wrong partner, as if she’d discovered that Charles was flawed in some way.’
Brock leaned forward with the remote and stopped the tape. ‘There’s a bit more but nothing new. What do you think?’
‘I think Clarke is good at presenting facts to his advantage. He realised he had no choice but to tell you more about Martin Kraus, and to shift the blame onto Verge, who can’t speak for himself.’
‘We’re checking what we can at the moment, phone and bank records, passport and immigration, but it’s the first solid lead we’ve had. Depending on what Barclays can tell us, I’m thinking that I may send Tony over to follow the money trail at that end, with Linda Moffat as interpreter of course.’
‘Lucky them,’ Kathy said automatically.
‘And I’m thinking that if we really can establish a link to Barcelona, then the McNeils’ supposed sighting becomes particularly important. If they did see Verge, on the run, what was he doing there, who was he meeting? If it wasn’t the travel agent, who was it?’
‘Yes,’ Kathy said doubtfully. ‘I wish I could be more confident about them.’
‘You think they’re mistaken?’
‘I think, between them, they may be confused about exactly where they saw him, even which side of the street. And if there’s doubt about where they saw him, there’s got to be doubt about who they saw.’
‘Then we’ve got to eliminate that doubt, one way or the other. Which means taking them over there and walking them up and down that street until they stop being confused. And for that they’ll need a chaperone, a
