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.’
Brock reached for his coffee, then slid it away, feeling nauseous. It was as if his own doubts had found a voice in this woman, stern and unequivocal, and he felt obliged to challenge them. ‘Did you part on bad terms from your ex-husband, Ms Lewis?’ he asked, the words sounding pompous as he spoke them.
‘You mean, am I prejudiced? Of course, we all are. But no, we didn’t part on bad terms, not really. We just reached a point where I realised I had to leave him. You might say I left for professional reasons as much as personal ones, although the two were so mixed together. As we became more successful, I began to realise that we were after quite different things. For me, a good reputation was a means to being able to do good work, whereas for him the opposite was true-the quality of our work was a means to attract publicity and success. He was fanatical about publicity; I couldn’t understand it. He’d lose sleep fuming over some mildly critical comment in a review of one of our buildings, while I’d be lying awake trying to work out how to detail a window. And as the projects got bigger and the clients more prestigious, the differences in what we wanted became more difficult to reconcile. His ambition was like a steamroller, and in the end I decided I had to step out of the way or be squashed. He felt terribly betrayed, of course, the way he did if one of his bright young designers decided to quit. It was an affront to his ego.’
‘You make him sound insecure.’
‘Does that surprise you? I suppose people have told you that he was so full of self-confidence, and that was true. He loved being with people, and drew energy and confidence from them, but on his own, in the middle of the night, he was as insecure as the rest of us-worse.’ She nodded to herself, recalling something. ‘I remember once, it was in New York, we went to an opening at a little gallery in SoHo. There was an exhibition of photorealist paintings, and one of them was a huge watercolour, about eight feet by five, of a hermit crab. It was a stunning image, of this soft little crawling thing pinned beneath an enormous florid shell, like a building it was dragging around on its back. Charles seemed mesmerised by it. Later I offered to buy it for him, but he was horrified at the idea, and eventually confessed that he saw himself as that little crab, forced to live inside the wrong body.’
‘The wrong body?’ Brock remembered the underlined passage about the criminals’ heads in Verge’s office. ‘What did he mean by that?’
‘I think he meant that he’d spent his whole life trying to be someone else, the person that his mother wanted him to be, maybe-his father the Olympian.’
The reference to the painting reminded Brock of something else, and he said, ‘You were acquainted with a number of painters were you? I’m thinking of a Spanish artist, Luz Diaz, who bought the house you and Charles designed for his mother.’
‘Briar Hill. Yes, I heard she was living there, but I’ve never met her. Charlotte told me about her in one of our conversations-we maintain a rather distant mother- daughter relationship by phone. She was always her father’s daughter, and was very angry when I left Charles. I used to think…’
She stopped in mid-sentence, a startled look dawning on her face. ‘I’m being very slow, aren’t I? If you think it possible that Charles is still alive, that Sandy didn’t kill him, then you also think that Charles may have staged Sandy’s suicide-that he’s here, in this country.’ Her surprise turned to alarm. ‘You think he’s come back?’
‘We haven’t got anywhere near thinking that, Ms Lewis,’ Brock said. ‘As I said at the beginning, I’m just trying to cover every angle, for my own satisfaction. As far as the authorities are concerned, there’s absolutely no doubt that your former husband is dead.’
But Gail Lewis wasn’t reassured. As she reached forward for her pencil Brock saw a tremor in her hand. She fiercely clicked the lead.
‘In any event,’ he added, ‘you’ve surely got nothing to be worried about.’
‘You don’t think so? Chief Inspector, if Charles has been crazy enough to slaughter his wife in May, and then come back to kill Sandy now, I don’t think anyone connected with him can feel safe!’
Brock sipped his coffee thoughtfully, then said, ‘You were talking just now about too much data. One of the problems in my line of work is false data, people who tell us lies. You lied to my sergeant, didn’t you, Ms Lewis? You told her you hadn’t seen Charles Verge in eight years.’
She looked startled, then guilty, her face turning pink. ‘How did you…? Yes, you’re right, I did lie. I felt bad about it afterwards, but I just wanted to get back to my meeting, and there was no point… I thought there was no point.’
‘Tell me.’
The woman sighed, shaking her head. ‘I bumped into Charles one evening about a year ago, at the opening of an exhibition. He was at his most charming, the champagne was flowing, and he suggested we have dinner together, for old time’s sake. God knows why, but I agreed. He was a little drunk, and a little tired, and during the course of the meal he came out with all this stuff. His marriage was finished, Miki was a nightmare, Sandy was a shit, the partnership was doomed. The thing was, he was laughing all the time he said it, as if he was describing some ridiculous comedy he’d seen at the movies. He was quite witty, almost boasting about his disasters, and I laughed along with him. He said that he’d like to wipe the slate clean, do away with them all, and start
