Free The Verge Practice by Barry Maitland Page A

you? He’s probably sunning himself on some distant beach, and really, what good would be served by dragging him back here and going through all the trouble and expense of a trial and a gaol term, eh? He did a terrible thing, and he’s lost everything as a result. He’s no danger to anyone now.’
    Brock guessed that a lot of people shared the doctor’s opinion. Large sections of the press seemed to mask this view with only the barest of nods to notions of justice.
    ‘I doubt if the victim’s family feels that way, doctor.
    Thanks anyway for your help. Oh incidentally . . .’ a thought seemed to strike him, ‘. . . you wouldn’t know if Charles Verge had a doctor in Barcelona, would you? He visited there quite frequently.’
    ‘Sorry, no idea. But it’s not likely that there’s a medical explanation for any of this, is it?’
    ‘No, you’re probably right.’
    Brock turned and strode away, taking a deep breath of the warm afternoon air and catching just a hint of the tang of turning leaves and approaching autumn.
    When he got back to his office he opened the book that Clarke had given him on the work of the practice. It was obviously a high-quality production, printed on thick paper with a fine satin surface. The greater part consisted of beautifully printed photographs and plans, with a couple of introductory essays—the first, according to the dust jacket, an analysis of Verge’s work by an internationally acclaimed author of numerous seminal works on architectural theory.
    If Brock had hoped for enlightenment from this he was quickly disappointed, for the text was, to him at least, largely incomprehensible. He had always held that, if the giants of modern theory—Darwin, Marx and Freud—could write lucid prose, then so should everyone else, but he realised that he was in a minority. After struggling to comprehend the private meanings and convoluted phrasing of the first couple of paragraphs, he gave up and, like most other people he assumed, turned his attention to the pictures.
    The essay was peppered with little images—a Mongolian yurt, a Zeppelin airship, grain silos, a Japanese teahouse, a seashell, a glider—but what these had to do with Verge’s philosophy of architecture Brock wasn’t certain. He noticed a phrase that Madelaine Verge had used, ‘hybrid architecture’, which apparently had something to do with yin and yang and postmodernism and generally having the best of all possible worlds. He turned with relief to the photographs and plans of Verge’s buildings. The sequence of plans was introduced by a quote from Le Corbusier, ‘The plan is the generator’, and although Brock found it impossible to interpret how they worked, for there was no lettering on them to identify the function of the rooms, he was struck by their abstract beauty, like densely worked cartoons or X-rays, some long and spiky, others gridded and square. The accompanying photographs were impossibly ravishing, like images from a fashion magazine or cookbook.
    Leon was cooking when Kathy returned to her flat in Finchley that evening. He had been doing this a lot lately, and despite the resulting debris that made the small flat seem even more crowded, she’d encouraged it, although it made her feel bad, since she only provided takeaway pizza.
    Also, she wasn’t sure of his motives. Sometimes she felt he was trying to prove that living so long with his parents hadn’t left him incapable of looking after himself, but at other times she wondered if it was insurance, in case it didn’t work out between them. His own explanation was that it was therapy, and tonight she could believe it. He’d had another sticky day, he said, his black hair flopping forward over his eyes, voice barely audible above the thump of the knife chopping the parsley. Two kids, pre-teen, found with some syringes under a pile of cardboard boxes that someone had set alight. With some alarm, Kathy realised that he was preparing roast chicken.
    She