The Verge Practice by Barry Maitland

awake and sat up.
    ‘He’s changed his face,’ she said.
    ‘What? Who has?’ Leon muttered.
    ‘Charles Verge. He’s had plastic surgery or something.’
    ‘Very likely . . .’ Leon turned over and buried himself under the bedclothes.
    She subsided back onto her pillow. Then another disturbing thought occurred to her. Just when had Verge marked the passage in the book?

6
    F irst thing the next morning, Brock held another team meeting. In the grey light of day Kathy felt that her bright idea about Verge was blindingly obvious and hardly worth passing on. In any case, Brock was taking a different tangent.
    One of the experts who had provided support to Chivers’ team was a financial specialist from SO6, the Fraud Squad, and he had joined them that morning as Brock quizzed them on the details of their investigation of possible sources of funds for Verge on the run. As they explained where the trip-wires had been set up to warn of any of his close family or friends providing financial help, it became apparent that there was one possible major gap, the Verge Practice itself, whose income and assets represented the largest legitimate source of funds for the fugitive. The problem was that the firm was involved in so many financial transactions, large and small, with suppliers, consultants, contractors and sub-contractors in many different parts of the world, that it was impossible to monitor them all in detail. Superintendent Chivers had restricted checks to the most likely channels—Verge’s company credit card and cheque book accounts—but that wouldn’t help if he were getting assistance from someone inside the firm.
    ‘What sort of person, Tony?’ Brock asked the Fraud Squad man, who, in a black suit and with a pale expressionless face, looked as if he wouldn’t have been out of place in a convention of undertakers.
    ‘Almost anyone, sir,’ he said with an air of regret. ‘The ones able to authorise larger payments would be the most obvious—his partners, the finance manager, accountants, people like that. But anyone who knew the accounting system could probably slip something through to a dummy account if they put their mind to it. The girl who looks after the stationery, the bloke who approves the travelling expenses or maintains the computers.’
    ‘He’s got a lot of loyal staff there he might have contacted, chief,’ Bren observed. ‘And it’s not as if they’d really be stealing from the firm. I mean, it is his money, after all.’
    ‘How would we set about looking?’ Brock asked.
    Tony said, ‘If they were sensible, it could be hard to detect. They could use a number of small creditors to avoid being conspicuous, and change the names every few months. We should get every payment verified by at least two people, and we might look for coincidences or anomalies. Maybe payments to several different people but all to the same bank branch, or with the same VAT number. An added complication is that the firm does a lot of foreign business. With their overseas projects, VP often forms one-off partnerships with locals to manage the contracts, and these could provide a way of getting money overseas.’
    They discussed it for a while, until Brock, becoming impatient with the technicalities, finally said, ‘Tony, I want you to brief Bren and a small team on how to make a start—where they should look, what they should collect, what questions they should ask. Bren, get a warrant before you go, and threaten them with Tony’s heavy mob if they seem to be hiding anything. Make your presence felt, Bren.
    Make it very obvious what we’re doing. If anyone there is in touch with Verge, we want to get them worried.’

    There were reports of extensive roadwork delays on the A40, so Kathy headed north-west instead, picking up the M1 until it reached the M25 and the open country beyond Watford, where she turned off the main roads into hedge-lined lanes. There was an abrupt release from the pressure of heavy