The Verge Practice Part 20

'Yes.'

'I'll go and pick it up now. We've also tracked down a retired plastic surgeon who may have been in the building that the McNeils now think they saw Charles Verge disappear into. I may need you to talk nicely to Captain Alvarez to get him to do a proper check on the man. He's reluctant . . .'

'Read my fax,' Brock said enigmatically. 'You're flying back tomorrow? Fine. See you soon.' He rang off.

When the pa.s.sport photograph of Martin Kraus had arrived from Barcelona, Brock had immediately obtained a warrant and taken a couple of cars to the house near Greenwich Common. According to Sandy Clarke's secretary he hadn't been into the office that day. Apparently he had done this a couple of times lately, taken paperwork home to deal with in peace. Then she had added, hesitantly and with the proviso that she hoped the Chief Inspector would treat this as confidential, that he may not know about Mr Clarke's wife leaving him. He had told her the previous day, and he'd obviously been very upset and had said he might take the next day or two off.

Bees were humming among the hollyhocks that Denise Clarke had grown in the small cottage garden at the front of the house, a protective buffer against the city whose fumes nevertheless seemed to hang around the place. The house was silent and no one answered the doorbell. They went around to the back, where an officer broke a windowpane in the back door and so gained entry to the kitchen.

A bottle of brandy, almost empty, stood on the scrubbed pine table next to an empty gla.s.s and a medication packet, also empty. A small ormolu vase of roses stood nearby, its petals fallen in a ring around its base. There was also a laptop computer on the table, power on but asleep, its light winking.

The smell of city traffic was as strong inside the house as out, as if they were stuck in the middle of a rush-hour jam instead of a leafy backstreet. Brock called out Clarke's name, but his words sank into m.u.f.fling silence. 'Okay,' he said to the men at his back, and they moved forward to search the house. As he made towards the living room, Brock pa.s.sed an alcove in one wall of the kitchen, beside the Aga, and he noticed that the traffic smell was especially strong here. Drawing on latex gloves, he went into the alcove and found a small laundry room and beyond it a door. When he opened it he was met by a nauseating gust of saturated exhaust fumes. There was no window, but in the dim light he could make out the dark shape of a car.

He shut the door quickly against the stench and called for a.s.sistance.

The ignition was on, they discovered after they had opened the garage door to dispel the fumes, but the vehicle had long since stalled or run out of petrol, and the engine was cold. One end of a hosepipe had been neatly taped to the exhaust, the other to the rear pa.s.senger-side window, which was cracked open a couple of inches. Sandy Clarke sat slumped in the driver's seat which had been tilted back, his head cradled by the seat's headrest and his mouth open, so that he looked rather as if he was in the dentist's chair, waiting for the drill. The medical examiner would later discover that the larger muscle groups of the chest and thighs were locked in rigor, while the smaller ones in the face and hands were not. On this basis, and a rectal temperature of 13C, he suggested an approximate time of death twenty-four hours earlier.

When Brock returned to the kitchen he had one of the team, who had more computer skills than he did, bring the machine to life. The man tapped a key and the screen flickered awake to reveal text, headed with the words, in capitals, 'A CONFESSION'. Afterwards they determined that the doc.u.ment had been saved at seven thirty-six p.m. on the previous day, Monday the seventeenth of September, and a copy of it was found on a disk in the s.h.i.+rt pocket of the dead man. It was this doc.u.ment that formed the bulk of the message that Brock had faxed to Kathy a couple of hours later, while she was exchanging personal insights with Linda over a gla.s.s of sangria in the square below the cathedral of Barcelona.

17.

A CONFESSION.

I, Andrew Christopher Clarke, being of sound mind (sound enough at least to recognise the inevitable when it stares me in the face), confess to the murder of Charles Verge and Miki Norinaga on the morning of 12 May.

It will be impossible for innocent people (more innocent than me) to appreciate the relief that I feel on finally putting those words down. I am not made of the stuff that successful murderers must be built of. For four months I have lived with my guilt, have risen after each sleepless night to the horror of it, have felt it grow inside me, hour by hour, fed by the innocence of everyone around me, and especially of my dear wife Denise, whose disgust I regret most bitterly of all, whose forgiveness I now know I shall never have.

Lately I have felt this guilt to be so heavy that it must surely be stamped on my features, visible to the detectives who know of such things and who have been grinding their way with such agonising slowness towards me. I feel them coming closer now, and to them I offer this explanation.

It will be apparent to most people who have been familiar with the Verge Practice over the past couple of years that relations have not been harmonious between the partners. After the debacle of the Labuan a.s.sembly project (I'm sure someone will explain that one to you, Chief Inspector), it became increasingly clear to me that the partners.h.i.+p had lost its way so badly that it risked collapsing altogether. An architectural firm such as ours, which operates in the stratosphere of international practice, relies absolutely upon its reputation for high-quality innovative design. That is what our clients buy from us, and if the magic touch fails us, then our viability is punctured as fatally as a high-alt.i.tude balloon. Charles had that magic touch. When his devotion to Miki, indulging her ridiculous pretensions to great talent, crippled his gift, I saw the writing on the wall. I tried to reason with Charles, tried to tell him that Miki was destroying us, but he wouldn't listen.

Then I said that I wanted to withdraw from the practice, but he wouldn't hear of it, and said that he wouldn't agree to me pulling out my share of the firm's capital. He believed the Marchdale Prison project would triumphantly restore our reputation. Good G.o.d, a prison of all things! I shuddered to think how the architectural press would savage him for it. There would be no mercy for a second Labuan.

Knowing how stubborn they both were, I could see that they would go on fighting each other until the balloon finally smashed to the ground, its goodwill and a.s.sets totally spent. I began to contemplate the need for a parachute. Around the beginning of last year I got in touch with a private investigator who had expertise in company fraud on an international scale, and a reputation for discretion. He a.s.sured me that he could create the fict.i.tious ent.i.ties necessary for me to remove as much as possible of my own share of the capital of the practice over a period of time and without immediate detection. My aim was to reveal to Charles and Miki what I had done once the funds were safely out of their reach, and to resign forthwith, without further claim on the practice a.s.sets. I felt sure that, to avoid scandal, they would accept the situation as a fait accompli.

I was, after all, only taking what was mine. They could then go on to destroy themselves and the Verge Practice to their hearts' content.

I instructed the investigator (whose ident.i.ty I have no wish to betray) to proceed with the creation of a company called Turnstile Quality Systems Limited and its sole director Martin Kraus. He advised that there would be certain advantages in having Kraus as a foreign national, and I enjoyed the irony of having him born in Barcelona, like Charles.

All went according to plan until May of this year. By then I had transferred a significant amount of money to TQS and was looking forward to completing the arrangements by July, when I would sever my connections with the Verge Practice, well before the completion of the Marchdale Prison, when I antic.i.p.ated that things would start to go from bad to worse, as far as our reputation and the value of our a.s.sets were concerned. But then I had the disastrous encounter with Miki Norinaga on the evening of 11 May.

My account to you of what happened that evening, Chief Inspector, was true as far as it went (I could hardly avoid confessing to having s.e.x with her in the light of your DNA evidence). However, there was more to it than I explained. As I told you, she caught me at a vulnerable time. I was tired, and annoyed with Charles for having gone abroad at such a critical time in the compet.i.tion for the Wuxang City project. Miki, on the other hand, was keyed up, energetic and decisive, and her seduction of me was almost rapacious. Afterwards, when she explained what was going on, I realised that it was also very calculated. She told me that Charles had been unable to have satisfactory s.e.x with her for months, and that in every other respect their personal and professional relations.h.i.+p had deteriorated to the point that she no longer felt able to continue.

She said that she believed Charles was a spent force, both as a man and as an architect, and that it was necessary for the design control of the practice to pa.s.s to her. She wanted Charles effectively to retire from an active role, and she wanted my support if he refused to agree.

I was astonished at her boldness. Here was a young woman just half a dozen years out of architecture school bidding to take control of one of the world's leading practices. I wanted to laugh in her face and tell her that, in my opinion, the problem with the Verge Practice was her, not Charles. But I was cautious, knowing how vindictive she could be to people who crossed her, and so I simply argued that, with or without my support, Charles would never agree to stand down from the firm he had created.

She sensed my equivocation, I suppose, no doubt as she had antic.i.p.ated, for we had never been natural allies in the past. Her manner became harder and more threatening.

She had heard a rumour, she said, from someone who had been to the Atlanta conference, that after Charles had left for home I had taken his daughter on a trip, and when we returned we had what her informant described as a 'sheepish look'. And then, in no time, Miki went on, Charlotte was pregnant.

Maybe my shock at her veiled accusation betrayed my guilt. At any rate, she ignored my denials and began to speculate about how Charles would react to the news that his old friend and partner had seduced both his wife and his daughter. Her ruthlessness was very disturbing. Although I was almost twice her age, I felt like an innocent compared to her. I tried to prevaricate, saying I needed time to think things over, but she wasn't having any of that. She wanted me to be there in the apartment the next morning, waiting with her to confront Charles as soon as he arrived back from the States, no doubt frayed after the overnight flight.

I had no choice but to agree.

It was only when I returned to my office to collect my things and go home that the full implications of all this came home to me. If open warfare for control of the practice broke out between Charles and Miki, they would each demand my support against the other, and they would both regard my attempts over the previous year to disengage myself financially as a form of treachery. The man who had set up the bogus ident.i.ties for me had warned me that there were tax implications to what I was doing, and that I would be in trouble with the Inland Revenue if they got to hear of it. If Miki made good her threat to tell Charles about my sleeping with her and Charlotte, I could hardly expect him to go easy on me. I would be faced with personal and public disgrace.

Over the next hour I did the hardest thinking I have ever done in my life. Whichever way I looked at the problem, there seemed only one inescapable outcome.

There was no way now that either Charles or I could manage Miki. She was a law unto herself, and would destroy us both, therefore she would have to be eliminated.

It was a shocking thought, but unavoidable.

For a while I thought of trying to stage some kind of fatal accident for Miki, but my imagination failed me. I had so little time, and the longer I delayed going home the more suspicious my movements afterwards must seem. I cursed Charles for having married the d.a.m.n woman and creating this impossible situation. He should be the one to deal with her, not me. And even as I framed that thought, another followed. Why not? Perhaps he will.

It had the force of utter conviction, as when, at the end of a long and draining design session, one simple, clear idea emerges as being the surprising but inevitable solution.

Charles would return the next morning, quarrel with Miki and murder her, then disappear, his flight demonstrating his guilt. All of my problems would vanish along with him.

The thought of doing such a thing to Charles made me feel physically sick; but then, I had already betrayed him twice, and all of this was his fault, really.

As I was turning this over in my mind, distracting myself from the horror of it by concentrating on the details of what would have to be done to make it work, a terrifying thing happened. My mobile phone rang, and when I answered it, Charles spoke to me. I literally jumped in my seat, as if he must have been listening in on my terrible thoughts. He was at LAX, he said, waiting for his flight home, and he wanted to check on the progress of the Wuxang presentation. I managed to frame some reply, and then an idea struck me. I said there were some other things that we needed to discuss urgently, and I suggested picking him up at Heathrow so that we could talk about them on the way back. That was the first irrevocable step that I took.

If he'd said no, that he would be too tired after the flight and to leave it until later in the day, perhaps I would have done no more. But Charles was indefatigable, of course.

I couldn't sleep that night, rehearsing the details in my mind. The next morning I rose early, packed some things that I would need into the car, and left without disturbing my wife. I got to the office and went straight up to Charles and Miki's apartment. Miki had been asleep, and asked me why I was so early. I said there was something we needed to discuss urgently, and she returned to the bedroom to get dressed.

I went to the kitchen, took a carving knife, and followed her into her room. She was naked and smiled at me, flirtatious, asking what I wanted. I pushed her back onto the bed and drove the knife into her heart.

I had tried to antic.i.p.ate the messiness of a stabbing murder, and was wearing old clothes that I would later discard far away. I had worn gloves since leaving the car, and tried very hard to avoid leaving traces. I took one of Charles's handkerchiefs from a drawer, stained it with Miki's blood and took it away with me in a plastic bag.

When I returned to my car in the bas.e.m.e.nt car park I changed into fresh clothes and shoes, and set off for Heathrow.

A year or so ago, we carried out a feasibility study for the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions into the possible uses of vacant government land in and around London. There is an amazing number of such pockets of unused land-inaccessible former British Rail yards, redundant Ministry of Defence sites, surplus storage depots-which the government was keen to sell off if some kind of viable use could be dreamed up for them. When I collected Charles from his flight, I told him that we had now been approached at short notice to do a full master plan for one of those sites, provided we could submit a preliminary report by Tuesday. I said I wanted to take him to the site in question to bounce a few ideas off him, and would then get the work under way. When we got there I was thankful to see that the place was as derelict and overgrown as when I had last visited it. We got out of the car to have a look round, and I then bounced off him not ideas, but a sizeable lump of concrete. He crumpled without a murmur. Nearby, I found a sheltered spot of soft ground and used the pick and shovel I had brought to dig a grave for him. I removed his outer clothing and buried him.

I then returned to the office, had a good wash and made myself visible in the drawing studios before retiring to my office.

For the rest of that day I set about fabricating Charles's trail. It struck me as fortuitous that we had opened a bank account in Barcelona for Martin Kraus. I transferred money into it, as I described to you, as a kind of insurance in case TQS and Martin Kraus came to light, as of course they eventually did, hoping to make it appear that they were Charles's invention. That afternoon I took a bag with Charles's clothes, his bloodied handkerchief and a suicide note I had written for him, and drove down to the south coast in his car, leaving it on a meter which would, I hoped, guarantee its discovery on the Monday. I then caught a train back to London. I knew that the supposed suicide would probably not be believed, but that didn't matter so long as the hunt was for him, rather than for me.

In a way, that was the easy part, driven along by adrenaline. The difficult bit, as I soon discovered, was living with the knowledge of what I had done, and watching the investigation going on around me, waiting for some dreadful flaw to reveal itself. For instance, I found that I had mislaid one of my driving gloves, and was terrified that I might have left it in Charles's car. When the designer of a building makes a mistake he can always say to his client, as Frank Lloyd Wright famously did to one of his who complained that the roof was leaking, "Move your chair". When the designer of a murder makes a mistake, the result is deadly serious, as I have learned.

It became a terrible irony that I had been the one who had planned to break free of the Verge Practice, yet now I was the sole surviving partner, obliged to stay with the plummeting balloon for fear of betraying my part in events.

After a couple of months of the investigation, I began to feel that I might indeed escape. Then they brought in the new team under DCI Brock, and the whole nightmare began again, from the beginning. And this time things began to unravel. After the interview last Friday, I realised that the game was up. Nothing could save me.

I've gone on too long. There is no point in delaying further.

Sandy Clarke

18.

In her hotel room, Kathy read the fax for the third time.

She felt cheated, and not only by Sandy Clarke. The McNeils, Dr Lizancos, Carlos with the black spiky writing, had all in their various, innocent ways embellished Clarke's false trail, even though Alvarez and Jeez had warned her against it. She'd cheated herself, that was the really annoying thing, because her idea had seemed more interesting.

And, just to compound her frustration, she discovered one further twist in the false trail before she turned in for the night. Sorting through her bag she found the slim file on Luz Diaz she had borrowed from the CGP. Reminding herself to return it before she left, she flicked through the pages. Though mostly in Spanish, it included the summary in English which had been sent to London following the interview that the Barcelona police had conducted with Luz on the twentieth of July. Two officers had visited her at the small studio apartment she rented. She had been cooperative and, they felt, credible. Afterwards they had spoken to her landlord, an elderly man living on the ground floor of the same block. He confirmed that she had lived there for six years, had paid her rent regularly and been a model tenant, quiet and extremely private. If she had any male visitors, he wasn't aware of it.

The only supporting doc.u.ments that Kathy could understand were some copies of Luz's recent telephone bills.

They were remarkable for their brevity. The artist had hardly used the phone at all. Some of the listed calls had been annotated with pencilled notes identifying the number-a taxi company, an art gallery, the airport. One was marked 'Sitges'. It began with the digits 93 894, just like Dr Lizancos's second number, and when Kathy checked her notebook she found it was the same. A year ago, Luz Diaz had made a call to the Apollo-Sitges Fitness Club. What did that mean?

Needing someone to talk it over with before she spoke to Brock, she phoned home, but got only the answering machine. When she tried Leon's mobile there was no response. She had a shower and went to bed.

The following morning she had her last big breakfast in the hotel cellar, then checked out and caught a cab across town to the car-hire office, where she picked up a little red Seat Cordo. Despite Clarke's revelations, she had decided to go ahead with her trip along the coast. There was nothing she could do to help Tony and Linda, and she was intrigued by the two references to the Apollo-Sitges Fitness Club.

She drove carefully through the city traffic, adjusting to driving on the other side of the road and trying to follow the route, drawn for her with a ballpoint line on a city map, towards the airport autovia. When she reached the A-16 she switched on the radio and picked up speed, opening the little car up to one hundred kilometres per hour, the sun s.h.i.+mmering off the roofs of industrial buildings and low-flying aircraft, and occasionally, in the distance, the glittering sheet of the sea.

Before long she reached the exit for Sitges Centro and turned off the highway towards the town, crossing under the railway line and continuing on through residential streets until she came to the seafront. After the density and bustle of Barcelona, the town had a pleasantly relaxed scale.

Cream and pink hotels lined the front, overlooking colonnades of palm trees and the beaches beyond. Girls walked arm in arm along the boulevard, boys played beach volleyball or danced on windsurfers in the light breeze.

Kathy parked her car and strolled along the front. She thought she sensed an end-of-season mood, as if the bars and restaurants that lined the footpath had an air of fatigue after a long, hot summer. After a while she turned off into one of the narrow streets that ran up into the old town, pa.s.sing shops selling sandals, straw hats and souvenirs, and climbing finally to the cl.u.s.ter of little museums and monuments on the point overlooking the Mediterranean. As she tried to take an interest in the odd collections of artworks and artefacts, she felt like a fraud, a tourist by default, extemporising until it was time to return to reality. She bought the most brightly coloured postcard she could find, ordered a short black at the next cafe she came to, and wrote a little message to Leon: 'One day we'll come here together.'

There was a payphone in the corner of the cafe, Kathy noticed, and on a shelf beneath it a well-thumbed directory.

She went over and turned the pages to the As, jotting down the address for the Apollo-Sitges Fitness Club. The name was in English, she saw, presumably aiming at the tourist market. Perhaps Dr Lizancos was the owner, coming each week to check on his investment. The cafe owner gave her a stamp for the postcard, and unfolded a street map to show her where the Apollo-Sitges was located, in the newer area of the town to the west, and a couple of blocks back from the waterfront.

What with the big breakfasts, Kathy felt like some exercise. Why not? she thought. The worst that could happen was that she'd b.u.mp into Lizancos and he'd complain to Alvarez that she was hara.s.sing him. She walked back to her car, dug a T-s.h.i.+rt, track pants and trainers from her suitcase, and put them into a carrier bag.

The receptionist, a very muscular young man with hair as blonde as Kathy's and a name tag identifying him as 'Sigfried', eyed her navy suit trousers and white blouse, clearly wondering where she'd come from. 'Here on business?' he asked, in a strong German accent.

'Just pa.s.sing through. A friend recommended you.

Luz Diaz, from Barcelona. She's a member, I think. You know her?'

'I don't recognise the name. Are you interested in members.h.i.+p?'

'No, I don't think I'll be back for some time.'

'Okay. Just one session then, huh?'

'Thanks. I haven't brought a towel, though.'

'No problem.' He fetched one from a cupboard at his back, and led Kathy through to the gym. He pointed out the machines, the spa and the changing rooms in a bored voice, then left her to it. The place didn't seem very large, or very busy, with just a couple of men there labouring with weights. There was no sign of Dr Creepy, Kathy was pleased to see. Probably in a back office doing the books.

They clearly didn't have many female clients, for the women's changing room was tiny, with barely half a dozen lockers. Kathy put her clothes in one and returned to the gym to get started with stretching exercises and a spell on a treadmill. She stayed there an hour, working her way round the machines, and in that time the two men left and no one else arrived. At one point, when she was struggling with the preacher curl and regretting the big breakfasts, the German came in and began lifting weights at a bench in front of a large wall mirror. The trapezius and deltoid muscles of his neck and shoulders were ma.s.sively developed beneath golden skin, and she wondered if he was working them for her benefit. Then the phone sounded from the front office and he strolled out, leaving her to herself once more.

Kathy got up from her machine, wondering what Luz Diaz's interest in this place had been. Was it the gym, or something else? Had Charles Verge ever been here? She picked up her towel and walked to the back of the room, where there was a door marked as a fire exit. It gave onto a short corridor with an escape door at the far end. There was one other door in the corridor, unmarked and on the opposite side to the gym, but when Kathy tried it she found it locked. She returned to the changing room, showered and left.

The gym was housed in a single-storey building whose stuccoed walls were washed terracotta. A laneway ran down one side of the building, and the wall onto the lane was windowless, punctuated only by a single door, part way along. This, Kathy realised as she was throwing her bag into the back of her car, must be the fire-exit door she had seen in the corridor at the back of the gym. What was odd about it was that there was at least as much building beyond the door as on this side of it. She relocked the car and made her way down the lane.

At the back of the building the lane turned into a yard, big enough for vehicles to manoeuvre. The back wall of the building, in the same terracotta render, contained a wide steel roller door, and beside it another door, also metal, with an intercom speaker mounted beside it.

Kathy was considering this when she heard the sc.r.a.pe of activity on the other side of the roller door. She stood motionless as a motor began to whine and the door began to rattle upwards. She saw the snout of a black Mercedes and beside it two pairs of legs. There was an absurd moment, which seemed to last much longer than its actual couple of seconds, when the people on both sides were aware of each other's presence without being able to see their faces. Then the door rose above shoulder level and Kathy found herself facing Dr Lizancos.

The lizard eyelids popped open as he recognised her, the leathery lips gawped apart. He appeared to be gripped by a panic attack. Then he whirled around and ran, while his companion, a middle-aged woman in a crisp white dress, stared after him in surprise. The door rumbled into life again and began to slide downwards. Kathy had a final impression of the woman's flat-heeled shoes turning away and her voice calling after Lizancos before the door hit the ground and the place reverted to silence.

Afterwards, driving back to Barcelona, Kathy wondered if she'd misjudged the old man. Perhaps he really was as respectable as he'd made out, not sinister at all. She imagined the effect on his elderly nerves of the door rising and her standing there motionless in the bright sunlight, like an avenging angel. Or maybe he had some other reason to be alarmed. What did he use the other half of the building for? Whatever it was required a location that was anonymous, windowless and secure. Maybe he had a laboratory in there, and was cooking up special pills for the clients of the gym.

When she arrived at the offices of the CGP she half expected to face a dressing down from Captain Alvarez, but it seemed there had been no complaint from Sitges, and everyone was relaxed and happy to see the case of the missing English celebrity resolved outside of Spanish jurisdiction. She returned the Diaz file, and Jeez helped them load their bags into the hire car, and shook their hands, lingering over Linda's.

Kathy asked Linda to direct her to Montjuic on the way back to the airport, so that she could return the visitors' book to the Pavello Mies van der Rohe. The same young woman was behind the counter and Kathy thanked her, explaining that the whole thing had been a mistake. The girl was disappointed, and Kathy, feeling mildly guilty about the whole absurd episode, asked to buy the silver pen she'd noticed before, as a souvenir for Leon. While the woman was wrapping it, Kathy admired the covers of the architectural books on display on the shelves. The images were gorgeous, with l.u.s.trous planes of colour basking beneath perfect skies, and entirely devoid of people. One in particular caught her eye, featuring an ornate skyline in brick and decorative glazed tiles. She thought it looked familiar, and when she checked the inside flap she saw that it was of part of the Hospital de la Santa Creu i de Sant Pau. The book was t.i.tled, in Spanish and English, The Complete Works of Luis Domenech i Montaner.

She turned the pages and came to the hospital superintendent's house, now owned by Dr Lizancos. On impulse, and ignoring the formidable row of zeros on the price label on the back cover, Kathy handed the book to the girl. It would be fun to show Leon the pictures of the spooky house when she described her encounters with the strange pioneer of closed rhinoplasty.

There were long queues at the check-in counters at El Prat airport, and the flight to London was delayed for two hours. By the time they got to Heathrow it was late, dark, and raining. Kathy, Linda and Tony travelled into central London together on the tube as far as Leicester Square, where Kathy changed to the Northern line to Finchley. She felt tired and grubby as she finally struggled into the lift of her building. The palm-lined marine drive of Sitges already felt unreal and remote, and she longed to have a bath and curl up in bed with Leon. But when she opened the front door she found the flat in darkness, and when she switched on the lights she saw immediately that the table was bare, his computer gone.

Her first thought was that they had been robbed, but then she saw a note in Leon's handwriting propped against a small pile of unopened mail. It read, 'Kathy, had to leave.

Sorry. Will talk when you get back. Love, L.' Then a PS scribbled underneath with a different pen, 'Sorry I didn't have time to get the car window fixed'.

It sounded rushed. Maybe his dad's had a relapse, she thought, and reached for the phone. As she waited for someone to answer, she realised how bleak the flat was without him there to welcome her home. Then she noticed his house key beside the pile of mail, and her heart stopped.

She heard his mother's voice. 'h.e.l.lo?'

'Ghita? h.e.l.lo, it's Kathy.'

'Oh yes. We were in bed, actually. We thought you might have phoned earlier.'

Why? 'My flight was delayed. Is something wrong? Is Morarji all right?'

'He's fine, thank you.'