Read Online The Verge Practice by Barry Maitland - Free Book Online

crypt, with iron rings attached to huge stone piers. It was hung directly over the model, which was a large grey and white construction beneath a clear Perspex cover. Kathy looked back up at the etching, trying to work out if there was supposed to be a connection, when a voice behind her said, ‘Piranesi, eighteenth century.’
    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