Death on Site

by Janet Neel

  ‘I made an idiot of myself ten years ago nagging Alan here to stay at school and do the Highers, as if he were one of the boys, and as if it were my business,’ she said doggedly, flushed red over her cheekbones. ‘He has evidently not forgotten.’ She swung on Fraser, her natural force of personality fully engaged. ‘Could we start again, do you think, Alan? When I was a child I spoke as a child. Plainly you were right about what you should have been doing. And I bought your book in hardback – what more can I say?’

  She spread her hands in appeal, watching him anxiously, and after a slow couple of seconds he grinned at her, and leant over to kiss her cheek. McLeish who would have been perfectly prepared to hit him, bruises or no, had he not responded to Francesca’s apology, wondered momentarily if this old quarrel had been fuelled by some sexual attraction between them, but decided, seconds later, that he need not worry. These two had quarrelled, whatever the ostensible cause, strictly because they were too like each other: able, proud, used to leading in any situation, rotten at taking advice and difficult to deflect from any path, however ill chosen. Neither of them was the slightest attracted to the other now, and wouldn’t have been as a teenager.

  ‘I’ll forgive you. You saved my life, anyway, you and the boyfriend here.’ It was said straightforwardly, with due acknowledgement but no particular gratitude, and McLeish reflected that members of climbing teams attempting the most dangerous ascents must owe each other their lives many times over. ‘You’ve taken to the hills, then, Fran?’

  ‘Under pressure,’ she said demurely, slanting her eyes at McLeish, and Fraser transferred his attention.

  ‘You work for the Home Office, I’m hearing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Fraser considered the monosyllable, and glanced thoughtfully, as Duncan Mackintosh had, at McLeish’s broad shoulders. He decided, visibly, to leave his enquiry for the moment and turned to greet a dark, stocky, middle-aged man with hair cut very short who had been waiting patiently at the edge of the group.

  ‘I hear you were up the hill, too, the day, Alec? Alec McKinnon here is the police force for the glen, Mr McLeish.’

  ‘Aye I was.’ McKinnon shook hands punctiliously with McLeish. ‘In borrowed boots, so I’ve blisters everywhere. I was catching up in the office, and I’d taken my boots out of the car that morning. It was a fatality reported, and I’d to get up there fast. The Fiscal has decided in his wisdom that an officer has to inspect all fatalities on site.’

  McLeish nodded in professional recognition. A slight silence ensued, broken by Fraser saying that the Vernons were back, had Francesca met them when she was here before?

  ‘I never met any of them, but Robert Vernon was a business friend of my father’s. He very kindly organized me a holiday job on one of his sites when I was at Cambridge. The year after I was last here, in fact.’

  Her audience blinked – including McLeish, accustomed as he was to Francesca’s network of contacts.

  ‘What were you doing on a building site, the typing?’ Alan Fraser enquired unwarily.

  ‘I was hired as an assistant to the engineers, but I found it boring. So I helped out in the labour office – hiring people, sorting out minor things, negotiating bonuses. You learn a lot about a site that way. In fact, I ended up as the deputy to the labour relations man after his assistant was carted off with DTs.’

  Her audience considered her respectfully.

  ‘Did you get on all right with the men?’ Alec McKinnon asked.

  ‘Of course I did. The Irishmen are shy of women, anyway, but everyone was incredibly gentlemanly. It’s a lot rougher being a woman in HM Government service, I can tell you.’

  ‘It’s a huge firm now, Vernon Engineering, isn’t it?’ McLeish asked, deciding that he would sort out this bit of Francesca’s chequered career with her at a later stage.

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s a big construction company – two of the biggest sites in London, as well as five or six engineering companies in the Midlands.’

  She stopped as the group’s attention was distracted by a blonde girl in the ubiquitous jeans greeting Alan Fraser.

  ‘Hello there, Sally,’ he said, rather over-heartily, and McLeish considered her. She was extremely striking, with fine blonde, newly washed, straight hair falling limply to her shoulders, and a long fringe covering a bumpy forehead. He smiled at her, taking in the elegant, beautifully fitting T-shirt and immaculate navyblue jeans. Very sexy, he thought, admiring the slim waist emphasized by a heavy leather belt. Huge brown eyes looked seriously back at him as they were introduced, and he waited to hear her speak to discover whether she was local or one of the fishing set.

  ‘How do you do?’ she enquired politely, and that particular question was answered. She sounded like Francesca, so she was a tourist – Sally Vernon? He remembered Duncan Mackintosh pulling off the road two days before to let through the blue Range Rover. Daughter, then, to Robert Vernon and Vernon Engineering. He turned to refuse his fourth drink of the evening, civilly offered by McKinnon, and found when he turned back that Francesca and Sally had edged out of the group and were establishing each other’s origins, and answering some of the questions in his mind.

  ‘I met a Bill Vernon in the shop yesterday. Is he your brother?’ Francesca was asking.

  ‘Oh, Billy. He’s my half-brother. Good bit older than me.’ Sally Vernon made it clear she would willingly have denied even that kinship.

  Not as much of a sexpot as all that, McLeish thought, with that small, firmly closed mouth and the considering attention she was giving Francesca.

  ‘I work for Dad’s company on the Western Underpass at the moment.’ This pretty, soft blonde girl, so carefully presented, was quite as authoritative as Francesca, he realized. ‘I’m just finishing the civil engineering exams – I’ve done the practical. My mum made me do it. She was Dad’s secretary, and she says she had to marry the boss to get where she is. She wants me to get there on my own.’

  Francesca laughed in recognition. ‘I’ve got one of those mothers. Mine shovelled me into the Administrative Civil Service so that I could have a training at my back when I was left a widow with five children under eleven.’ She frowned at McLeish and he moved hastily away to join Alan Fraser who was watching the girls from further up the bar.

  ‘He’s rather a dish, your boyfriend,’ Sally observed, watching him go.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Francesca sounded surprised. ‘Broken nose, of course – rugger players being like that. The real looker is Alan Fraser – cocky creature that he always was.’

  ‘I like him very much,’ Sally Vernon said stiffly, and Francesca said hastily that indeed he was very attractive.

  ‘That’s my father over there, just came in.’ Sally nodded to the end of the bar where a grey-haired, stocky man was getting instant service.

  ‘How are you after your adventures, then, Alan?’ he was saying, his tone absolutely assured and just this side of patronage, rather like a Chief Superintendent asking after the welfare of a newly joined constable. McLeish wondered about the man who felt able to address this local celebrity in quite that way.

  ‘Ah, Mr Vernon. You’ve not met John McLeish, who is a visitor like yourself and who rescued me yesterday. John, this is Mr Vernon, Sally’s father.’

  Robert Vernon put neatly back in his box, McLeish thought, shaking hands, with the reminder that here he was just a visitor and father to a pretty girl. The man himself, however, was unconscious of the by-play, and was calling authoritatively for drinks. He had the same bumpy forehead and high cheekbones as his daughter but, unrelieved by the fine blonde hair and huge brown eyes, the effect was totally different. This face glared out of boardroom portraits of Our Founder, or belonged on a senior Commander of the Met, the one who could be promoted no further because he was just too rough, however effective. He was in his sixties, probably, but had lost none of his edge or drive.

  ‘Alan here works as a scaffolder when he’s not climbing,’ Robert Vernon explained briskly to McLeish.
‘He’s been on one of my sites and I hope he’s coming back to another of them.’ The voice was authoritative, but odd in some way, with the vowel sounds very carefully produced.

  ‘It would depend on the bonus, Mr Vernon.’ Alan Fraser was giving away no points. ‘I work with Mickey – down the bar there – and we pick up another pair to make the gang. I’m due to meet them in London next week.’

  A scaffolding gang, McLeish reflected, could probably command their own price in this year when all London and much of the south-east seemed to have become a giant building site. Alan Fraser placidly accepted a drink – a malt whisky – and nodded to two men in their late thirties, both unmistakably tourists and fishermen in thornproof tweed plus-fours. Robert Vernon turned from the bar and greeted them, then introduced them to McLeish.

  ‘Mr McLeish, my son Billy – and Nigel Makin, who is Sally’s fiancé.’

  Billy must have thrown to his mother’s side, McLeish decided, being a long drooping chap with thick dark hair, smooth-faced, blue-eyed, wide-mouthed, and with none of his father’s or sister’s attack. Nigel Makin, on the other hand, was a tougher proposition, a light 5’ 10" or so, with the look of an athlete, smooth mouse-coloured hair cut very short, rather small blue eyes, long nose, thin mouth with the corners tucked firmly in. A hard man, McLeish thought, and was in no way surprised to discover that this Nigel was the newly appointed managing director of the civil engineering side of Robert Vernon’s firm.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Makin said incredulously, peering down the bar. ‘Is that not Francesca Wilson down there, talking to Sally? Tall, dark girl. She was a great success on the Abbey Road site, everyone wanted to watch her climb ladders.’ He sounded patronizingly amused. ‘What is she doing now?’ he asked McLeish.

  ‘She is on the industrial rescue side at the DTI. One of their high flyers.’

  ‘Bit like being a well-respected employee of the National Coal Board.’ Makin spoke with all the contempt of the industrialist for the civil servant.

  Francesca caught the tone if not the full comment as she arrived. ‘Ah, Nigel, how nice to see you. Did you pass those exams in the end? Yes? What a relief for you that must have been.’ She smiled on him maliciously as he choked on his beer and turned to greet Bill Vernon, whose face lit with pleasure. Nothing there to worry about, however, McLeish thought, and saw that Robert Vernon had reached, regretfully, the same conclusion.

  ‘Never mind talking to Billy, you’ve plenty of time for that, Francesca. Come and talk to me. My God, you’ve grown up like your Dad. I could hear him then, as clear as if he were still with us, God rest him. What are you doing as a civil servant? Who’s the boyfriend?’

  By mutual consent the group moved hastily down the bar, leaving them to it.

  ‘I’m a quantity surveyor,’ Billy Vernon explained to McLeish, clearly ruffled by his father’s interruption.

  Nigel Makin, on his left, was being just a shade too civil to the black-haired man who had arrived with Alan Fraser. ‘All you climbers are the same, aren’t you, Mickey? Alan here is going back on the hill tomorrow, battered as he is; and you’ve been back too, I hear, despite your arm.’

  ‘My partner, Mickey Hamilton,’ Fraser explained to McLeish in introduction. ‘Had a bit of bad luck two months ago and broke his arm in two places. Give you trouble today, Mick?’

  ‘Good as new,’ Mickey said firmly, but he was holding his drink awkwardly and his right shoulder was hunched defensively. McLeish said something conciliatory about these things always taking time, and asked how it had happened, noticing as he listened that this was a Scot, but not a local boy. He was from Edinburgh, it emerged, and educated at an English boarding-school. Plainly finding something reassuring about McLeish, he explained that he too was going south with Alan to earn some cash as a scaffolder. He had started to train as a doctor, but had found that the only thing he wanted to do was climb. A conventional Edinburgh family, reacting much as one might expect, had refused to support this ambition financially, and so, like Alan, he worked for cash where he could, sometimes as instructor in a mountaineering school and sometimes, with self-taught skill, as a scaffolder.

  ‘Of course, with two months off I’ll need to earn a bit, and fast,’ he was saying, the pale face anxious and strained. ‘I did a bit of examination marking, but it doesn’t pay well.’

  McLeish unostentatiously got their drinks refilled, and kept to himself the thought that scaffolding was hardly the recipe for curing a still-unhealed broken arm. Employed virtually from the day he had left Reading University, when he had gone straight into the Met as a graduate entrant, he reflected that he had never had to consider the problem of keeping body and soul together when one’s earning capacity was entirely tied up with one’s physical fitness, and when the thing one most wanted to do was physically dangerous. How did these top climbers manage?

  ‘I wish now I’d finished a medical training – you’re always welcome on expeditions, and if you break anything, well, you can still see patients,’ Mickey observed in partial answer to McLeish’s unspoken query. ‘Or you can find a rich wife. Or you can write, like Alan. Not that he does most of it, but he’s well known enough for them to provide a ghost writer. Oh, good evening, Mrs Vernon.’

  He stood back from the bar to let a pleasant-looking, smartly dressed, older woman come through. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘Thank you, Michael, Robert was getting me one but I see he has been waylaid.’ She regarded her husband, still locked in conversation with Francesca, with untroubled benignity and accepted a very small whisky. She looked enquiringly at McLeish who introduced himself. ‘Ah, yes. The young man who rescued Alan Fraser a couple of days ago.’

  McLeish hastily gave Francesca the credit for having seen Alan fall, and got an approving look in return. He considered her as they talked; clear, pale-blue eyes, slightly protuberant, excellent pink-and-white skin, carefully made up, with her daughter’s pale blonde hair, faded and discreetly restored. A little younger than her husband, he judged, and a force in her own right. Nor was she bothering to disguise the flattened Midlands vowels. McLeish, whose Scots teacher-parents exiled to Leicester had fought a long battle against the accent, particularly resenting their children saying ‘wan’ for ‘one’, decided she probably came from within twenty miles of where he had been brought up. She was chatting easily to Mickey Hamilton about the Western Underpass site, and he realized with respect that she knew a great deal about the negotiations surrounding the contract.

  Francesca joined them just then, grinning from her chat with Robert Vernon, and Alan Fraser came over. ‘You want to come climbing with us tomorrow?’ he said innocently, to Francesca.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ she said, appalled, then blushed as he and Mickey burst out laughing. ‘But you are kind to ask me,’ she added, belatedly. She covered her confusion by introducing herself to Mrs Vernon.

  ‘What about you, John? You done any climbing?’ Alan Fraser asked, grinning.

  ‘A bit,’ McLeish admitted before he had realized what he was going to say, and Mickey and Alan regarded him with interest.

  ‘Come with us tomorrow? We’ll be going gently, crippled as we are. That is, if you can leave Francesca? I daresay she’ll find something to do – clean the house, maybe? We’re doing the Grant stretch on the Coire Dubh – graded Medium to Severe.’

  ‘I ought to be able to get up that,’ McLeish said longingly, and looked down at Francesca, who laughed at him.

  ‘You go, darling. I really would hate it, and I’d hold you all up. I’ll do the shopping and read, and mess around – I need a day off.’

  ‘Just you stay away from boats, there’s a good girl,’ Fraser said evilly, silencing her as they made plans to meet and to find some extra rope for McLeish, who was confessing to having rock boots and basic kit with him.

  ‘I hope you’re not too out of practice for that lot,’ Francesca said with amusement, as they made their good-nights and came out into the grey light that passes
for darkness in the Highlands in August, the hills grey humps against the loch.

  ‘I used to spend every moment I could at it. They’d both be far too strong for me normally, but Fraser’s got two ribs strapped and his hands scratched, and Mickey’s arm is giving him hell. I ought to manage.’

  ‘Alan meant it for a thank you, of course,’ she observed. ‘That’s why I’m not coming – I’d not be any fun if I was as miserable as I was when you brought me down the edge of the Coire last week. Though I suppose I’ll have to learn one day, if you are keen.’

  McLeish hugged her to him, cheered as always by any suggestion that she accepted their relationship as permanent. He had known her for seven months, and had asked her to marry him within three weeks of meeting her, but a bad first marriage had broken her confidence and she shied away from any thought of a second.

  ‘Maybe you can play with that Nigel while I’m off up the hill?’

  ‘Sally Vernon might have something to say to that, given that she is engaged to him. Actually that is odd because it is Alan Fraser she fancies.’

  McLeish considered her doubtfully, since she was notoriously unobservant in matters sexual.

  ‘I’m not doing it by observation,’ she protested, reading his mind. ‘Sally more or less told me. Her father doesn’t approve, because he desperately wants Nigel to stay on and be the next chief executive, next year. I’m not guessing about that either: Robert told me.’

  McLeish enquired severely whether Robert Vernon had been making advances to her, or indeed she to him?

  ‘It’s not that. He worked a lot with Dad, and we were talking about him. He thinks I’m like him.’ She was sparkling with happiness, and McLeish realized how much it meant to her to have talked to someone who had known and appreciated her long-dead father. He kept a protective arm round her as she chattered all the way home, high with excitement and pleasure, under the barely darkened sky.