The Verge Practice (8 page)

She turned and saw Sandy Clarke at the door, observing her.

‘He drew fantastical prison scenes, terrifying and sublime. And that . . .’ Clarke pointed at the model, ‘. . . is Charles’s last masterpiece, the Home Office project; not quite so terrifying, perhaps, but possibly sublime.’

‘It’s a prison, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, a radically new kind. Designed not just to punish or rehabilitate, but to change the man. I paraphrase, I’m not altogether au fait with the theory, but that’s the essence of it. The building, along with the regime, the training programs, the medications and so on, is designed to reconstruct personalities, to make new men.’ He said this with a slight sceptical lift of the eyebrow. ‘Charles was fascinated by the idea. No, more than that, obsessed with it. He even spent some time in gaol as part of his research.’

‘Not new women?’

Clarke smiled. ‘This one is just for men. I believe they represent the bigger problem and the more testing subjects.’

Brock had been listening to this in silence. Clarke’s words reminded him of a report he’d read about a new Home Office program, a radical response to an ever-expanding and recalcitrant prison population. He hadn’t realised it had been taken so far.

Clarke had a book in his hand, which he offered to Brock.‘If you want to know more about our work you should have a look at this.’

‘Thanks.’ Brock examined the glossy hardback, thick and square, titled
The Verge Practice: Complete Works and Projects, 1974 –1999
.

He had been skimming another book lying open on Verge’s drawing board. On one page was a set of plans, titled ‘Ledoux, Prisons, Aix-en-Provence, 1787. Engravings from Ramée.’ The plans were each a perfect square divided into four quarters, and looked remarkably similar to the basic arrangement of Verge’s Home Office model. Turning the page he had come across a section underlined in pencil.

He had read it, then taken notes.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Clarke said. ‘You’re thinking how ironic it would be if Charles ended up as the first inmate of his own masterpiece. I think we’ve all had that thought.’

‘You don’t see him as a suicide then?’

Clarke shook his head firmly. ‘No. Never.’

It wasn’t until they were back in the car that Kathy realised that she was going to be late for her committee. Well, there was nothing to be done about that, and the Verge case was much more interesting anyway.

‘Odd that Clarke should have thought I was implying some kind of premeditation on Verge’s part,’ Brock said. ‘I hadn’t meant that at all, but that was the way he took it.’

‘Yes, I noticed that too. Almost as if he’d been expecting someone to raise it.’

‘Or half believed it himself. What kind of man would that make Verge?’

‘Cold-blooded, sick? But as everyone keeps telling us, killing her like that was so much against his own interests.’

‘Self-destructive as well as obsessive . . .’ Brock pondered, pulling his notebook out of his pocket. ‘Did you notice that book lying on his drawing table? There was a passage there that was underlined.’ He searched through his notes. ‘I hate it when people mark beautiful books like that,’ he grumbled. ‘Yes, here . . . Sometime in the 1780s the architect Ledoux was doing research for a prison he was designing. He was studying all the latest theories of incarceration, and he paid a visit to a Doctor Tornotary, a scientist, anatomist and amateur criminologist, who collected the bodies of dead criminals for dissection. This is what he wrote:

He sat me down in the middle of a select collection of heads, ranged in order. ‘You who are an artist, who have studied the conformation of the human body and its relations to the brain and stomach,’ he said, ‘judge the characters, vices, and crimes of these humiliating remains of the dignity of man.’

After having reflected, I assembled my thoughts: ‘The first and the second,’ I said, ‘were assassins; the third died of anger.’ This was enough. He ran to his records, leafed through them: ‘Ah,’ he cried, ‘I am not indeed mad.’

‘What do you make of that? Why did Verge mark that passage?’

‘Perhaps I should put it to my committee.’ Kathy checked her watch. A jam had formed around the road-works at London Bridge.

‘I think I’ll have a talk to his doctor,’ Brock said.

5

K
athy hurried into the room, forty minutes late.

Everyone was sitting round a table studying documents, and they looked up and stared at her. For a moment she felt exactly as she had on the first day of primary school, when her mother had got lost on the way and they’d arrived long after the classes had started. Then a man at the head of the table got to his feet and offered his hand with a warm smile. ‘You must be Kathy. I’m Desmond. Welcome. I’ve been appointed the chair of this working party.’

Desmond was West Indian and in police uniform, the twin stars of an inspector on his shoulders. He introduced her to the others, and she shook their hands in turn. There was one other person in uniform, Shazia, a woman constable wearing the new Hijab headdress for Muslim officers.

Next to her was Rex, wearing a Sikh turban, then a young white man with cropped hair, narrow glasses and a cool, slightly myopic gaze. He was Nathan, apparently, and next to him was Jay, a young white woman, also with cropped hair and narrow glasses. Finally, Desmond introduced her to a man seated by his right hand, Robert; the oldest person in the room, Robert was a middle-aged administrative officer appointed to service the working party. He gave Kathy a small, incurious smile, as if he already knew all about her.

‘I’m sorry about the short notice for the meeting,’ Desmond went on. ‘It’s been sprung on all of us. Apparently time is short. I hope it didn’t put you out too much.’

‘No, I’m sorry I’m late. I’ve just been put on a new case and I got caught up.’

‘I hope it’s something interesting,’ Shazia, the WPC, beamed enthusiastically.

‘Yes, it is.’ Kathy hesitated and they all looked at her expectantly. ‘The Verge inquiry, actually.’

‘Oh, how exciting! Has there been some new development?’ ‘No, just some changes in the team.’

‘Well, at least they’ve put a woman on it,’ Jay, the other woman, chipped in. ‘The men wouldn’t want to catch the bastard. They all believe his wife must have deserved it.’

Desmond coughed tactfully. ‘Let’s get back to business, shall we? Robert has prepared a package of material for each of us, and we’ve been scanning through that.’ He indicated a plastic folder sitting at the remaining empty chair. Kathy took her place and opened the package, heart sinking at the thick wad of material within—agenda, terms of reference, summary of background, briefing papers, photocopies of press cuttings and statements . . .

She paused at a page outlining the CVs of the members of the working party. Desmond was in the personnel department of the Metropolitan Police, and Shazia had recently joined the Race Hate Unit at Rotherhithe. Rex was a civilian member of a community policing committee, Nathan was a lawyer with a large private charity and Jay represented a body called Gay Victim Alliance. Looking at the six names, Kathy thought how careful someone had been with the selection. There were three men and three women, three white and three coloured, three police and three civilians. It was a masterpiece of balance; whatever happened, no one could accuse its convenors of bias, except perhaps in age, for they were all young.

‘Let’s turn to the agenda, shall we?’ Desmond suggested.

‘I’ve put the program as the first item, because that is the most critical thing at present. Our immediate deadline is the next meeting of the Joint Conference in three weeks.

Each of the working parties will be expected to present an interim working paper at the conference, with some initial analysis and ideas . . .’

There was a buzz of consternation round the table.

‘Three weeks?’ ‘That’s ridiculous!’ ‘Are you joking?’

‘I know, I know,’ Desmond said soothingly. ‘It’s just unfortunate how the timing has worked out. Believe me, I’m as concerned about it as you. As chair, I’ll be the one who has to present our paper.’

Rex had been silent up to this point, but now he cleared his throat loudly and the murmur died away. Kathy noticed that he was resting his clenched fist on a newspaper folded to a large colour photograph. She recognised it because it had been in the paper she’d been reading on the tube into work that morning, a picture of the family of an Asian boy trampled by a police horse during a riot up north over the weekend.

‘We cannot be steamrolled,’ he said, in a deep, powerful voice that held everyone’s attention, ‘by some ridiculously short, artificial deadline, into producing half-baked ideas.

I didn’t agree to join this committee on those terms.’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ Jay nodded her cropped head vigorously. ‘Of course, Rex, but I don’t think . . .’ Desmond tried to calm things down, but the Sikh hadn’t finished.

‘There are a number of basic issues we have to address before we can even begin to think about producing statements. Such as the make-up of this committee.’

Kathy realised she wasn’t the only one who’d been studying that. But how could he object to it?

Desmond clearly thought the same. ‘Well, I wasn’t involved in the selection process, Rex, but I must say, looking at who’s here, that it seems extremely well balanced.

I think Robert and whoever else was involved have done a pretty good job.’

‘The fact that it’s so evenly balanced makes the position of chair especially crucial. Presumably the chair has a casting vote, right?’

‘The aim is to reach consensus, Rex. I would hope that we don’t ever have to get to the stage of taking votes . . .’

‘All the same, the chair is important, symbolically and practically.’ Rex was sitting very upright and still, not meeting their eyes, but staring down at the newspaper by his hand as he spoke. ‘And right away we’re giving the wrong message by having the committee chaired by a member of the police. I thought the whole point of this exercise was to listen to the community?’

‘Yeah,’ Jay agreed, watching Rex with interest.

‘But the community just isn’t going to give credibility to policies coming from committees set up and chaired by the police, with a few token community reps to make them look respectable.’

Desmond took a deep breath. ‘I wasn’t involved in the decision-making process that led to my appointment as chair. Can you throw any light on the thinking behind that, Robert?’

Robert looked mildly surprised to be brought into the scrap, but he smiled benignly and said, ‘Well, I rather think that the argument is that this whole exercise is being carried out by the Metropolitan Police in order to improve its performance and level of service to the community at large.

So it is essentially a police process, informed by the highest possible level of input from community representatives, whose contributions will of course be absolutely crucial.

The chair of each committee must have an understanding of the context within which new policies will be framed. In other words, the chairs must understand how the police service operates, and must be able to present the ideas of their committees in a way that the police hierarchy can understand and take on board.’

Rex suddenly rose to his feet, snatched up the newspaper report of the weekend riots and threw it onto the table in front of Robert. ‘I think we all understand very well how the police service operates, thank you. And if the police hierarchy is so bloody stupid that they can’t understand the words of ordinary members of the community without having them dressed up and interpreted, then I’m not interested in having my name associated with this bit of whitewashing.’

He turned and marched out of the room.

The meeting sat in stunned silence for a moment, then Desmond got hurriedly to his feet and ran after the departed Rex. Robert looked shocked, unused, perhaps, to displays of naked anger in his usual line of work, or possibly contemplating a committee-selection disaster. Everyone else was silent, reluctant to speak out now in front of the bureaucrat. Robert must have sensed his isolation, and with an embarrassed little cough rose to his feet. ‘Excuse me,’ he murmured, and made for the door.

‘Well,’ Jay said, ‘maybe this’ll be more interesting than I expected.’

Brock’s visit to Charles Verge’s doctor was less contentious.

The surgery was in a quiet cul-de-sac mews in Belgravia, and the doctor had a grave dignity to suit. ‘I made a statement some months ago, Chief Inspector. I don’t really see what I can add.’

‘We’re going back over some of the old ground just to make sure nothing was missed.’

‘You’re still no nearer to finding Charles, then? I really don’t think I can throw any light on where you might look.’

And as Brock took the doctor back over his earlier statement, he tended to agree. Charles Verge had been his patient for over ten years, during which time he had seen his doctor two or three times each year, for an annual check-up and for other minor ailments—a recurring tennis elbow, some lower back pain, a couple of viral infections, and a spell of about a year following his divorce when he had been prescribed an anti-depressant. The only remotely unusual thing about the record was the fact that Verge hadn’t seen his doctor at all in the twelve months leading up to his disappearance, a longer gap than any previously.