The Verge Practice Part 31

'I just had a call from Suzanne. She happened to mention that the children had met up with someone we know, someone on the force, she a.s.sumed. Yesterday afternoon, they were coming home from school, and he met them outside the shop.'

Kathy visualised the children in their school uniforms outside the front of Suzanne's antiques shop and home on the High Street in Battle, wondering what this was leading to.

'He called them by their names, and said that he was a good friend of ours, and that he'd heard they were very interested in the Verge case. He said he'd heard they'd made their own dossier of the case, and it was a very good piece of work.'

Now Kathy understood. She felt a chill as she recalled the t.i.tle page of the sc.r.a.pbook that had been taken from her car, with the children's names, ages and address.

'Could they describe him?'

'Oldish man, funny accent, and he spoke to them in an odd way, with the left side of his face turned away.'

'Oh G.o.d.'

'It's a threat, Kathy, or a warning.'

'Yes.'

'That's what Todd was up to.'

'What can we do?' And that, Kathy realised, was the big question, the reason why Brock was immobilised instead of calling all h.e.l.l down upon the head of George Todd.

'Sharpe won't let me act on this without some confirmation,' Brock said. 'I'll go down there now, and try to get something concrete from the kids. Maybe Sharpe will agree to an identification parade.' He said it without conviction.

'At the least I can get Suzanne to take them away somewhere safe for a while.'

For how long, she thought, and what then?

'I'm sorry, Brock. I feel this is my fault, with the sc.r.a.pbook.' 'Nonsense, it was sheer bad luck. At least it confirms that Todd is tied up in this. If the worst comes to the worst, I'll take the b.a.s.t.a.r.d away for another little holiday, and beat the truth out of him.'

'What can I do?'

'Nothing. Absolutely nothing.' He got to his feet and began shoving doc.u.ments into his briefcase. 'I'd better go.'

Kathy felt helpless. 'I'll see you on Monday. You won't do anything till then, will you?'

He smiled grimly. 'Don't worry. Have a good weekend.'

Later, sitting alone in her office, she came to a conclusion. She picked up her phone and rang the number of a twenty-four hour ticketing agency.

26.

In view of the tools she was carrying, Kathy had checked her bag in at Heathrow, though she had brought little else. After retrieving it from the carousel at El Prat, she made for the car-rental desks on the ground floor and hired a little Seat like the one she'd had before. Thinking of her current bank balance, she decided not to pay extra for additional damage insurance. It was the last Sat.u.r.day in September, the sky outside was pale blue, the temperature mild, and a fresh easterly breeze spiked the jet-engine fumes with the tang of salty sea air. She wound the window down and headed south. By two p.m. she was driving along the waterfront of Sitges.

It was only ten days since she'd been here, yet it seemed like another period of her life entirely, a time of innocence, of unforgivable naivety. There was the cafe where she had written the postcard to Leon, imagining that they would return here together, perhaps-who could tell?-on a honeymoon. And all the time that she had been playing the detective in Spain, thinking that she might find the answers that had eluded everyone else, she had been oblivious to the unravelling of her own life. On the very same Sunday that she had come to Barcelona, Leon had gone with Paul Oakley to Dublin. On the Tuesday, when she'd been looking for clues in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, he had returned to London, and on the Wednesday, while she was writing her postcard, he had been removing his stuff from her flat. She felt a sense of bitter satisfaction now at the cruel synchronicity, as if she'd deserved to be hurt, for being so unaware, so smug.

Not any more. This time, right or wrong, she would set the agenda. She turned the car and drove to the Apollo-Sitges Fitness Club.

It had an abandoned air, the front door closed, an empty c.o.ke bottle standing on the front step. She rapped on the door and noticed a sign hanging behind its gla.s.s panel. Its printed letters announced that it was 'tancat', and beneath, in a felt pen scrawl, 'closed'. When she walked down the side lane to the rear yard she found an empty dustbin, and plastic bags blown against the foot of the roller door. She tried the intercom and found that it was dead.

Kathy returned to her car and drove back to the seafront. She had missed lunch and felt hungry. She took a seat at the Bar Chiringuito overlooking the beach and ordered sardines, bread and mineral water from an old man who bustled about as if run off his feet, although she was the only customer. Afterwards, she drove through the town until she found a cinema, and fell asleep watching a love story she couldn't follow.

Daylight was fading when she emerged from the theatre. The streetlights were lit, groups of young people strolling, window shopping, wearing jumpers or jackets against the cool evening breeze. When she got back to her car she pulled on her black tracksuit top with the hood, and packed her tools in a small backpack that she slipped under her seat. She took her time making her way back across town, letting the sky turn completely black, and parked a block away from the gym. It was a neighbourhood of small hotels, out of season now, and houses on narrow lots.

Shrubs and trees spilled over the dividing walls, and there was a smell of pine resin in the night air. She met no pedestrians and almost no vehicles on the street as she approached the unlit building.

She pulled on latex gloves and used the rubbish bin in the yard at the end of the lane to haul herself up onto the parapet of the rear building. On the way up she examined the burglar-alarm box mounted over the side doorway, and thought it looked new. She crouched behind the parapet, catching her breath and getting her bearings. The sky was clear of cloud, and there was a pale light from a half moon as well as the reflected glow from streetlights.

It looked to her as if the building had been constructed in two stages. The gym at the front, facing the street, would have been the original part-once a garage, perhaps, or a workshop. It had a pitched roof spanning the width of the plot, and Kathy recalled the industrial steel trusses she had seen inside the gym. The rear half of the building looked more recent, and had a flat roof, on which Kathy was now squatting. Windowless, its natural light was provided by rows of square roof lights raised on kerbs above the granulated roof surface. As she moved forward to have a closer look at them, she caught sight of a lit window in a neighbouring building, the white light of a TV flickering soundlessly inside.

The roof lights looked strong and new and, Kathy guessed, alarmed. Their plastic surface was thick and translucent, so that when she shone her flashlight the beam couldn't penetrate to illuminate the interior below. Kathy imagined the filtered milky light that would come from them, as if the people beneath didn't want the sight of a cloud or the sound of a dog barking to disturb whatever they did down there.

She walked the length of the flat roofed section and came to the triangular gable of concrete blockwork that formed the back wall of the gym. There were roof lights in that section too, she recalled, remembering daylight in the gym, but there they were formed simply as panels of clear corrugated plastic inset into the metal roof sheeting.

Peering over the edge of the gable she could make them out, paler rectangles in the dark sloping surface. She climbed onto the pitched roof and edged forward to the nearest one, crouching low so that her silhouette would stay below the ridgeline of the roof. Though she was reasonably fit, the unfamiliar movements and the strain of trying to do everything in total silence were having their effect. She was breathing heavily, her heart pounding, her fingers and ankles aching from trying to keep a grip on the corrugated metal roofing. As she eased her backpack off she imagined it sliding down the smooth pitch, and herself following it into the void.

She thought the larger screwdriver might do the job, and managed to force its blade under the edge of the plastic sheet. But the metal roof gave her no leverage, and she had to pull the two parts of the crowbar out of her bag, screw it together and lay it alongside the edge of the plastic to act as a fulcrum. She put all of her weight on the handle of the screwdriver, and felt the sheet begin to rise, then switched tools and used the jemmy to try to force it up. There was a creak of protest from the restraining screws, then a sudden explosive bang as they gave and the plastic sheet jerked open. Kathy froze, feeling her arms trembling from the effort.

There were no shouts, no sounds of doors opening or dogs barking. She lay against the metal sheeting, letting her breathing return to more like normal, then carefully put the tools back into her bag and slipped it back over her shoulder. The ache in her ankles had spread up to her thighs now, from the tensing of her legs against the roof, and she thought she should have begun with stretching exercises, and how ridiculous it would be to pull a muscle breaking into a gym.

She lifted the edge of the plastic roof light sheet and squeezed her head and shoulders inside, looking for the winking red light of a movement detector. Nothing. She pointed a pocket torch into the darkness. The beam picked out a steel truss right in front of her, and in the dimmer distance a row of exercise bikes on the floor below, their handlebars erect like bulls' horns. It wasn't too far to the ground, she thought optimistically, perhaps twelve feet from the bottom chord of the truss, maybe only ten. She reached out to take hold of a vertical bar of the truss, and began to wriggle herself and her pack through the gap beneath the edge of the sheet, swinging one foot then the other onto the bottom chord, an inverted T in section and uncomfortable to stand on, but strong enough to take her weight. She pulled the roof sheet down behind her as well as she could, and stood clinging to the steelwork of the truss, feeling like Spiderwoman. Then she lowered herself to hang from the bottom bar and dropped to the floor.

She sprawled on all fours, but felt thankfully intact.

Checking again for alarm sensors, she felt the guilt pangs of the novice burglar. The musty smells of the gym accused her; she was an intruder, an illegal, beyond the pale of decent bodybuilders. And looking around, her eyes growing accustomed to the dim light filtering down from the roof, she realised she wasn't going to be able to climb out the way she'd come in.

The door at the back of the gym hall was neither wired nor locked, and she found herself in the corridor that led to the fire exit in the external wall to the alley. That would have to be her way out. Across the corridor was the door to the rear half of the building. She used the screwdriver and jemmy in combination again to try to force the lock. As she applied pressure she imagined the possibilities. The door might be bolted on the other side, it might be alarmed.

As she gave a final jerk it sprang open with a crash and she tensed, waiting for the siren howl or clanging bell, but none came.

Her torch showed a short corridor ahead, with three identical doors on each side, each with a circular porthole window, and beneath that an empty slot for a name. She tried the first door on her left. It was empty, but the furniture and fittings it had once contained had left their traces.

There were the imprints on the vinyl floor sheeting of four heavy casters where a bed had been, the scuff marks of a side chair, the blank rectangle of a bedside cabinet. On the walls were brackets and connections for a TV, a light, headphones and a call b.u.t.ton.

Kathy continued to the end of the corridor, pushing open the door to a further suite of rooms. There was what had probably been an office, two storerooms with empty shelving, and a room that might have been an operating theatre, with mountings on the ceiling for heavy lights and a washbasin with extended lever taps such as a surgeon might operate with his elbows. Every fitting, every notice on the pin boards, every paper roll in the toilets, had been scrupulously removed, and from the smell of cleaning fluid in the stale air, every surface had been scrubbed.

She made her way back to the fire exit and pushed the bar. Still no alarms sounded. The night was cool and she could hear the faint murmur of surf and the moan of a siren. When she reached the street she noticed a blue lamp flashing above the front door of the gym, and realised she must have triggered a silent alarm. The siren's howl was louder now. She turned and jogged to her car, keeping to the shadows close to the garden walls. Once safely inside, she did a quick U-turn and headed back through the city to the highway beyond.

27.

Plan B. When she got back to Barcelona, Kathy drove into the centre of the city and parked near the hotel where they had stayed ten days ago. She wondered about asking if they had a room, but she guessed it would be expensive and postponed a decision, though it was now gone ten p.m.

She approached the Placa de Catalunya on foot along a narrow twisting lane, and, turning a corner, suddenly found her way blocked by a police car and a small knot of people.

She recognised English accents. A man was saying loudly, '. . . all over me, then this other bloke offered to help. Next thing he'd taken my wallet . . .'

As she got closer Kathy saw that his shirt was covered in some brown liquid, and a foul smell hung in the air. A woman said, 'We were warned about this!'

The two cops, looking bored, made room for Kathy to get past.

'They looked so respectable,' the woman complained, and Kathy thought, yes, you just can't tell who's a thief these days.

'Hey!' A man's voice, calling after her. She turned and saw one of the policemen wave at her. He began to walk towards her. For a moment she thought of running, but instead gave him a smile. He looked stern and pointed at the pack slung over her right shoulder, then waved an admonishing finger. He made a gesture like someone s.n.a.t.c.hing it, then mimed wearing it properly on her back, with both straps. She grinned and thanked him, and he gave her a wink. Clearly she was more interesting than the tiresome middle-aged tourists who were making such a fuss.

She found a place in a cafe overlooking the square.

There were shiny aluminium tables and chairs spilling out across the broad pavement, the outdoor ones packed by under-thirties who were maintaining running conversations with the crowd pa.s.sing by. Kathy chose a table in a corner inside, where the light was bright enough to study the book she had brought in her backpack, The Complete Works of Luis Domenech i Montaner.

She ordered a long black and turned to the plans of the house of the hospital superintendent of Sant Pau. It wasn't a large house, quite modest really in terms of the number of its rooms, but compensating in the extravagant flourishes of its details. She traced the route that she and Linda had taken through the house, from the front door through the hall to the main salon at the rear where they had met Dr Lizancos. From the plan she saw that there was also a dining room, kitchen and maid's room on the ground floor, and a staircase leading from the hall to the upper floor, containing three bedrooms. There was no cellar or any room indicated as an office or study, but there was one unidentified feature, a turret room at roof level, circular in plan and accessed by a spiral staircase rising from the top of the main stairs. The lizard's lair, Kathy thought. She memorised the plans and the intricately ornamented elevations, paid for her coffee and set off once again.

The street was deserted, the house in darkness when she reached the front gate. She eased it open cautiously, trying to remember if it had squeaked on her first visit, and then she was in the deep shadows of the overgrown garden, making her way carefully along a meandering path. The dark outline of the house rose above her, its pinnacles and gargoyles bristling against the night sky.

The path took her round to a small rear lawn. There were the windows of the salon, and above them those of the main bedroom, all in total darkness. Beyond the garden wall a motorbike spluttered, a horn blared, but within the shroud of the garden nothing stirred.

Kathy retraced her steps to the front of the house, visualising its layout. And there, in the far corner of the front elevation, almost obscured by a thick canopy of foliage, rose the turret, capped by a conical spire like that of a fairytale castle. As she worked her way closer, past an arbour and a waterless fountain, she saw that this side of the house was clad in a dense fabric of ivy. Gnarled and thick, it draped the wall like a.s.sault netting. A cat burglar couldn't have asked for better. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Kathy breathed, let down your hair. She grasped two handfuls and tested her weight. The plant held it easily. She raised one arm higher and began to climb.

Halfway up she was able to stand on a ledge formed by a stone moulding to catch her breath before moving on to reach the main parapet, above which the turret rose skyward. She found that by standing on the lip of the parapet she could reach one of the turret's windows, a leaded framework of small diamond panes. She selected one and used her small screwdriver to bend back the lead until she could prise the gla.s.s free. She reached inside for the handle, opened the window and hauled herself inside.

It felt a little like being at the top of a lighthouse, with windows overlooking the city in all directions. Heavy drapes were bunched at intervals, and she slid these closed so that she could use her torch without attracting attention.

A bench ran all the way around beneath the windowsills, interrupted only at the entrance from the head of the spiral stairs. Beneath the bench were cupboard doors, their dark green panelling picked out in scarlet. There was one office chair, incongruous in tubular steel among the medieval fitments. Even more incongruous was the video player.

Kathy imagined Dr Lizancos sitting up here, a wizened Captain Nemo at the controls of his Gothic Nautilus.

She tried the cupboard doors; all were locked. Regretfully, she jammed the head of the larger screwdriver in the edge of one and levered it open, splintering the frame.

Inside was a pile of old files. They looked like medical records, but were all in Spanish, which she couldn't decipher. The names of the patients, if that's what they were, seemed to come from all over Europe-German, English, Scandinavian. Dates were spread over the eighties and nineties.

The second and third cupboards yielded scores more files. Kathy was becoming concerned at the damage, and more importantly the noise her forced openings were making.

The videotapes were in the fourth cupboard. They were numbered. She picked the one which looked the newest and slid it into the player, pressing b.u.t.tons. The screen came alive with lurid colour and she sat down.

At first she thought it was a p.o.r.nographic film. The fat sausage of a man's p.e.n.i.s lay slack between his open hairless thighs, in large close-up. Some fingers appeared from the side of the screen to lift it up. More fingers prodded the t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. The fingers were covered with creamy coloured latex.

The fingers disappeared and there was a long pause, the p.e.n.i.s lying limp, as if the camera were waiting for it to stand up and perform some sort of trick. Then the fingers reappeared, this time holding a gleaming scalpel. Both Kathy and the camera recoiled slightly.

'Oh my G.o.d . . .' she breathed, as the blade touched the flesh and soundlessly began to slice.

It was the most shocking thing she'd ever seen, but she couldn't drag her eyes away, watching the blade cut and cut until the whole organ came away.

She gave a violent jump as hands gripped her shoulders and the lights came on.

The hands moved down to her biceps, caressing almost, then squeezed so hard she gasped with pain. With no apparent effort they lifted her bodily out of the chair and swung her round to face Dr Lizancos. The old man was breathing heavily from the exertion of climbing the stairs.

He gazed malevolently at Kathy from under his thick lids, then his eyes darted around the room. She saw his suspicion flare into anger as he spotted the broken cupboard doors.

He stabbed at the video to switch it off. His mouth was a pale line, tight with fury. He barked something in Spanish or Catalan to the man who held Kathy, and she recognised a name, Sigfried, the bodybuilder at the gym. He grunted and increased the pressure of his grip. Kathy gasped, aware of her eyes watering, the feeling dying in her arms.

'How did you get in here, lady?' Sigfried murmured in her ear.

She nodded towards the curtain. 'The window, over there.'

Lizancos scurried over to draw back the curtain and examine the missing windowpane, then started examining the contents of Kathy's backpack, hauling out the housebreaking tools wrapped in a towel.

'How did you come to the house?' Sigfried asked.

'Taxi.'

Lizancos dropped the tools and came over to empty her pockets. He examined the contents of her wallet, her pa.s.sport, then held up the Hertz key ring. He glared at her accusingly and the steel fingers squeezed so hard that she thought they must surely snap something.

She gasped. 'Ah . . . In the street outside . . . a block to the left. Red Seat.' The grip eased.

The lizard doctor slithered out of the room, and she heard his feet on the stairs. Sigfried said nothing as they waited, effortlessly maintaining his paralysing grip.

A little later Lizancos returned with a roll of surgical tape and a pair of scissors. He said something and she was pushed backwards into the chair, her arms stretched behind her. Lizancos cut a length of tape and strapped one wrist to the tubular frame, then repeated the process with the other wrist and both ankles. Then Lizancos gave Sigfried instructions and the bodybuilder nodded and left, turning his torso sideways to get the broad shoulders through the narrow doorway at the head of the stairs. Lizancos knelt in front of the broken cupboards to check the damage and their contents, tutting and muttering under his breath.

Sigfried was gone for ten minutes, and when he returned he was holding the copy of The Complete Works of Luis Domenech i Montaner that Kathy had left in the car. He spoke softly to Lizancos and handed him the book, and the old man raised his eyebrow and glanced at Kathy, with a hint of something like respect, she thought. Trying to seize the moment, she said, 'Look, I'm sorry for the intrusion, but you should be grateful I was so discreet. I need to know what Charles Verge looks like now, and where we can find him. Tell me that and you won't hear from us again. It's that simple.'

It was hard to tell if the doctor had understood her words, and she began to speak again, but he ignored her and said something to Sigfried, then turned and left.

There had been a look of resolution on the leathery old face, and Kathy had the feeling that she was running out of time. Sigfried was regarding her impa.s.sively, leaning casually against the bench, huge arms folded. She thought she should try to provoke him. Trying to sound unconcerned she said, 'You don't look the type to be into genital mutilation, Sigfried. Are you sure you know what Dr Frankenstein is getting you into?'

He gave a ghost of a smile and raised his index finger to his lips, indicating to her to shut up. A few minutes later Lizancos wheezed up the stairs again, carrying an old leather doctor's bag. He opened it on the bench in front of Kathy, while Sigfried positioned himself at her back. From the bag Lizancos began to extract a variety of things: disposable gloves, swabs, cotton wool, a stethoscope, and-Kathy stopped breathing-a metal box of what looked like surgical instruments. He fished around some more and produced a syringe in a sterile packet, and a small brown bottle. For some reason Kathy thought of the brown stain on the English tourist's shirt, and thought how fortunate he had been in his a.s.sault.

'You know I'm a police officer, don't you?' she tried.

'Captain Alvarez will be very angry if anything happens to me.'

They ignored her, Lizancos unpeeling the syringe and filling it from the brown bottle. He came to her side, bending to wipe her arm with cotton wool, and as he did so he hissed in her ear, 'I don't think so.' Then he jabbed the needle in.

Kathy began to protest. 'That is the most stupid . . .'

But no more words came.