Death on Site

by Janet Neel

  ‘Come back to bed?’ he suggested.

  ‘Certainly,’ she said, obligingly. ‘But later I must find a piano.’

  Later the day had, if anything, worsened and he waved Francesca off to the hotel, dressed up to the eyes in bulky waterproof clothing, promising to follow her in due course. He had intended to sit down quietly with a lot of unpaid bills and unanswered letters, but found himself restless and soon followed her over to the hotel, through steady, persistent rain. The hotel lounge was full of people sitting heavily in the deep, uncomfortable armchairs, reading year-old magazines and day-old papers with unfamiliar names. He added his dripping jacket and overtrousers to the overloaded coat-hooks and walked across to the bar and recreation room, an ugly single-storey extension jutting out from the edge of the hotel’s formidable Scots baronial exterior.

  The sole recreational facilities appeared to consist of a slightly warped table-tennis table, and a piano at the far end on which Francesca was playing a minor scale, over and over, at increasing speed. Sally and Bill Vernon were playing in bad-tempered partnership against their father and Nigel Makin. It was clear that Robert Vernon was the only person really trying, and he was arguing every point in an increasingly exasperated fashion. The four gratefully stopped play as they saw him.

  ‘Get Francesca to play something with a tune to it, young man, can you?’ Robert Vernon said irritably. ‘She’s been playing that same scale for the last hour.’

  McLeish, who knew that Francesca was unlikely to have realized there was anyone else in the room, nor, if she had, would have thought anyone would mind listening to scales, said he would try. He advanced on her with the intention of reminding her of her obligations to society, but she stopped playing as he came up and lifted her face for a kiss.

  ‘I’m done,’ she said, cheerfully. ‘I was terribly stiff, and my hands were sore from climbing, but it was better towards the end. I must find Hamish and apologize for yesterday.’

  ‘You weren’t that bad, surely? He’s used to beginners.’

  ‘No, it’s not that. I had dreadful hay-fever yesterday, it just came on me, and I couldn’t stop sneezing and weeping, so when we stopped for lunch I took two of my antihistamine pills. I didn’t tell you, but when we started again after lunch I suddenly felt dizzy, and everything went round me, and I clung on and screamed for Hamish, who steamed across to grab me just before I fell. I got down, on a rope, with Hamish placing all my hands and feet, and I went home and slept for three hours until you got back. It didn’t occur to me until I was in the middle of G minor just now that it must have been the pills. What a stupid thing to do, and really very unfair to Hamish!’ She grinned companionably at Sally Vernon who had drifted up with the rest of the table-tennis four. ‘I was terrible.’

  ‘So was I,’ Sally agreed, with fervour. ‘Worse than you.’

  McLeish opined, dead-pan, that from his vantage point there had been little to choose between the two of them, but on the whole he thought Francesca had been a shade the worse.

  ‘Only with the assistance of hay-fever,’ she pointed out reproachfully, amusing him as always by her innate competitiveness. She then had to explain what had happened to the rest of the group, now augmented by Alan Fraser, Mickey Hamilton and the long-suffering Hamish, revealed as a fading but still remarkably good-looking blond man in his late fifties.

  ‘I should have noticed you were taking something,’ he said, the Highland courtesy to the idiot tourist very marked, but Francesca rightly would have none of it, and said it had been particularly stupid of her, since the bottle clearly stated that the pills could cause dizziness.

  ‘My only excuse is that I am usually sitting at a desk when I take them, and I don’t seem to get very dizzy doing that. Anyway, sorry, and thank you for preventing me falling off.’

  ‘Will you play something for us, then?’ Hamish asked, sensibly changing the subject, and McLeish, possessed of an indifferent baritone and no real desire to expose it, faded quietly away towards the hotel lounge to find some coffee, leaving the group hunting through the piano stool for music. He got his coffee, placed himself in one of the less uncomfortable chairs, and was just reaching for a six-month-old Illustrated London News when he realized that Alec McKinnon, the local police force, was placing himself in the next-door chair. He offered him a cup of coffee, and waited to see what he wanted.

  ‘It was good of you to go so quickly to young Fraser’s aid,’ McKinnon started formally, then elaborately found himself milk, sugar and a biscuit while McLeish waited patiently. McKinnon sighed. ‘Ye work at the Home Office, I think ye said?’

  The question was courteous but carefully phrased, and McLeish, under cover of the general noise from the bar, explained promptly who and what he was. ‘I have my warrant card, of course.’

  ‘No, no.’ McKinnon waved the suggestion away, embarrassed but, as McLeish realized, in no way surprised.

  ‘Did the Wilson cousins tell you Francesca had a copper for a boyfriend?’

  ‘No. We’d a message from your people in London.’ McLeish blinked at him, taken aback. ‘You’re young for your rank,’ McKinnon observed, ungrudgingly. ‘It’s customary for forces to let each other know when someone of your seniority is going to be in their part of the world for any length of time.’

  McLeish nodded, mildly alarmed. He was used to being recognized everywhere in the Met area, it was part of the family atmosphere; but it was a new thought that he was now going to be known wherever he went, at least to senior people in the local force. He realized that McKinnon was waiting for the answer to some unspoken question, and said that, strange as it was that someone of Fraser’s experience should have fallen from a climb he knew like the back of his own hand, there had been nothing to suggest it was not an accident.

  ‘Miss Wilson – Francesca – said to me that she had seen another person up on the ridge in a yellow anorak?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, she mentioned it to me at the time; but when I looked the mist was down. She has long sight, and it was she who saw Fraser fall, and where he fell, too.’

  McKinnon sipped at his coffee, then put the cup tidily aside. ‘I wondered, you see. That lad had a lot of luck. He fell 200 feet down a cliff, and he was only knocked out. And you two had seen him – all right, Miss Wilson had seen him – and you then got to where he was lying very quickly indeed, by all accounts.’ He paused, and finished his biscuit, and gave McLeish a quick sideways look. ‘Before anyone could have climbed down to him, if there was anyone up there who had wished him harm enough to have dropped something on him in the first place.’

  McLeish stared at the steady, unexcitable, square-shouldered fifty-year-old, now placidly munching on a sugar lump, and felt the curious sensation of having missed a step in the dark.

  ‘Of course, I may be having a wee flight of fancy and trying to make life more interesting for myself and the boys up here,’ McKinnon suggested, peacefully. No one, McLeish thought grimly, could possibly be less excitable.

  ‘No evidence,’ he said a minute later, having reviewed the events of the day.

  ‘No. If the lad had been killed, as by all accounts he should have been, we’d not even know what he thought. And the damage would have been just the same whether he had fallen or been pushed in some way.’

  Or, indeed, if someone had finished him off as he lay there on the hillside, McLeish thought silently. Nor would it have taken much to kill him, semi-conscious as he had been.

  ‘What is Fraser’s family?’ he asked, to give himself time to think.

  ‘His father was a seaman, lost off his ship when Alan was only a wee boy. His mother came back here – she was a local girl – and she and the grandmother brought him up in that butt and ben you see on the hill there.’

  That’s it, McLeish thought, enlightened; that’s why he is like Francesca. It’s another fatherless child, that same pride and driving competence, and the same carefully concealed need to be loved that informed Francesca’s life. He came ba
ck doggedly to the main issue.

  ‘Who would want to lay for young Fraser?’

  ‘More than one father in this district. But no one I’d point to, and no one I think would feel badly enough to do it. Well, never mind, the lad’s alive and well, thanks to you and your young lady. Indeed I’m sorry to worry you with it on your holiday but I thought I ought to have a word. If ye think of anything now, ye’ll find me at Carrbrae tomorrow and the day after.’

  McLeish agreed to ring if anything at all occurred to him, and as he walked with McKinnon to the hotel door, he found himself glad that Carrbrae was fifteen miles away. It was difficult not to resent the intrusion into his and Francesca’s longed-for holiday, particularly when, thinking about it calmly, he could not see how anyone could have dropped anything on Fraser. He settled down again in his chair, drifted off into sleep, and was woken half an hour later by two middle-aged ladies tripping over his feet.

  ‘Who is that singing in there, just now, do you know?’ The plumper of the two, having apologized, was listening, entranced and he listened too. Someone was singing ‘Ye banks and braes o’ Bonnie Doon’ in a clear high tenor, perfectly produced, every word audible. Two lines later, McLeish sat up, incredulous, and sweeping the two ladies aside, marched grimly over to the door of the recreation room and pushed it open.

  A crowd of about thirty was there assembled, mostly climbers, uniformly square and sunburnt, huge mugs of beer clasped in large brown hands, but also a sprinkling of children and teenagers, plus Sally Vernon, Bill Vernon, Alan Fraser and Mickey Hamilton. There too, infuriatingly, was Francesca’s brother Peregrine, who should have been safely immured in a recording studio in West London. He was standing by his sister at the piano, not a hair out of place, looking as usual like something out of a film, singing to the silent crowd. Francesca was playing for him, a tricky running accompaniment to the simple melodic line, chewing the inside of her cheeks as she did when concentrating. Perry was totally concentrated, apparently making no attempt at dramatic presentation and letting the words speak for themselves, but his audience was frozen in place by the grief and the sense of loss he was communicating.

  Ye banks and braes o’ Bonnie Doon,

  How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?

  How can ye chant, ye little birds,

  And I sae weary, full o’ care?

  The golden tenor voice sang on, and you could see the roses bloom, and feel the warmth of the wind that could make no headway against the cold of loss and misery. How did Perry, grown to a dazzling adult from a gilded child, who had been secure in this extraordinary gift since his childhood, understand anything about loss and rejection, McLeish wondered.

  Perry reached the last line, every word clear. ‘Departed never to return,’ he sang, drawing out the two repeated notes on ‘return’. He let the last note fade, biting off the final ‘n’, and after a measured few seconds turned and smiled at his sister at the piano. She put her hands in her lap, and smiled back at him in perfect accord, and McLeish stayed by the door while the audience came out of its trance and applauded vigorously.

  ‘John, look who’s here!’ Francesca appealed to him, radiant and perfectly confident that he would share her pleasure in having one of her brothers turn up in the middle of his holiday.

  ‘Just passing, were you Perry?’ McLeish asked grimly.

  ‘Yes, actually,’ Perry said, meticulously shaking hands. ‘Sheena is another hour away from here, up the coast.’

  McLeish, the wind taken from his sails, asked what on earth Perry’s staggeringly elegant model girlfriend was doing in this part of the world?

  ‘The Pollock Calendar. Michael Valentine is doing the shoot just up the coast from here. She doesn’t want me there until six because it’s a shooting day, so I thought I’d stop off and see you both.’ He smiled on them, confident of his welcome, and turned aside politely to sign his name for the wide-eyed teenage daughter of a stolid English family who plainly could not believe her luck.

  ‘But Perry,’ Francesca obviously had not absorbed the ostensible reason for his presence, ‘the Pollock Calendar? I didn’t know Sheena did that sort of modelling. Isn’t she, well, a bit thin for it?’

  ‘This year, the Calendar is going to be an artistic triumph, Fran.’

  ‘Ah. You mean they are all going to wear clothes? Like last year when everyone was dressed in tiny little overalls, sheltering behind giant wrenches or cuddling up to lengths of downpipe? She’ll freeze in this climate.’

  ‘No, darling, she and the others are being Scottish ladies in scenes from Scottish history, dressed to the eyebrows in historical clothing.’

  ‘How is anyone to know it is the Pollock Calendar then?’ Francesca who disliked Perry’s dazzling girlfriend, was enjoying herself. ‘In what portion of the historical clothing is the plumber’s wrench to be disposed? I’m sorry, Perry, I don’t seem to have grasped this at all. The one thing I do understand is why you have come rushing up here. Michael Valentine always looks very fanciable in his photographs – rather Sheena’s sort of thing, I would have thought.’

  ‘Bitch,’ her brother observed, entirely justifiably. ‘But yes, you have a point, I thought I’d better visit. Biff is driving for me – the Car is out there – and I thought we could have lunch and then go on slowly.’

  The weather remaining unbrokenly terrible, the party drifted back towards the lounge. McLeish looked hopefully towards Francesca but she had settled down next to Perry who obviously had something to ask her. He watched the two faces, so alike, but yet so different from each other in overall effect. On Francesca, the high cheekbones, deep-set blue eyes and long straight noise looked austere, and serious; on Peregrine the same bones were changed and relieved by the fact that his eyes were less deep-set and were set off by very long black eyelashes, and that he had his dead father’s clear olive skin and some curl in the thick dark hair. Francesca would always look interesting but, off her day, could look downright plain. Perry, on or off his day, was always dazzling.

  Perry, seeing him watching, waved to him to join them. ‘Who is the dark chap, John?’ he said, indicating Mickey Hamilton. ‘I’ve seen him before somewhere. I just can’t place him.’

  ‘Mickey Hamilton – he was at Grantchester ahead of Tristram,’ Francesca said.

  ‘Oh, that’s where I’ve seen him. He’s gay, then?’

  ‘Perry! Just because he was at Grantchester. You mustn’t say that sort of thing!’

  McLeish, despite having his own reasons for thinking that Perry was right in this case, supported her. Perry smiled at him ungrudgingly, and turned to greet Alan Fraser with real pleasure, while McLeish watched, wondering idly how the relationship between Fraser and Hamilton worked. Fraser being evidently about as homosexual as the average tomcat, there must be stresses.

  ‘How are you, mate?’ Perry was asking cheerfully.

  ‘Goodness, how you’ve grown.’ Both young men fell about in recognition of what was obviously an old joke.

  ‘Do you want to have lunch? Then I must away and see the girlfriend up the way here.’

  ‘In the wee brown car?’ Fraser asked, grinning. ‘What is it? A stretched Rolls?’

  ‘Something like that. I read your book, mate, loved it. What are you doing here? What’s the talent like?’

  John McLeish, watching this encounter benevolently, noticed that Francesca was looking just a little green-eyed at having her favourite brother monopolized and suggested everyone might have lunch, hastily including Sally Vernon and Nigel Makin in the invitation. Sally accepted at once and managed to sit herself next to Fraser. Nigel Makin sat down firmly at her other side, putting his hand over hers when asking her what she wanted to drink, and she blushed and looked annoyed.

  ‘So how many of these women are there up the way, then?’ Fraser was asking.

  ‘Four principal models, and one’s mine, mate. Then the usual hangers-on – make-up girls, stylists, wardrobe people.’

  ‘I’ve never been able to im
agine what those do, given that up to this year no one has worn any clothes worth mentioning,’ Francesca observed.

  ‘Would I be in the way if I took a lift in the wee car with you? I’ve an auntie living up there and I could sleep at her house,’ Fraser asked.

  ‘Just so long as you remember which of the girls is mine, you’re welcome. Be nice to have company.’

  McLeish had been watching Sally Vernon, who was by now looking furious rather than wretched. Francesca had been right, there was something there. He considered Nigel Makin who was stolidly eating roast beef and three vegetables and ignoring the conversation, and asked him a civil question about his job, getting an immediately sensible answer. They talked decorously through the meal, McLeish tucking away the facts about the Vernon Engineering empire, so that Makin warmed to him and started to talk about himself.

  ‘I came from the house-building side, but I took over civil engineering as well six months ago. It’s mostly a control problem – costs and materials – but the profit margins are much thinner in civils. We have a land bank so we can make a bigger margin on houses. Civils is project work, you have to make the money by being bloody well organized.’

  They were interrupted by the party breaking up, Perry telling Fraser to hurry, bidding punctilious farewells, and kissing his sister.

  ‘The week after next in London, then. Goodbye, John, very good to see you.’

  ‘Nice of him to stop by, wasn’t it?’ Francesca said, smiling as she waved to the car.

  ‘I take it he wanted something.’ McLeish had no illusions about Perry.

  ‘He did, in fact,’ she admitted, fair-mindedly.

  ‘He nearly always has something he wants when he comes to see you.’ McLeish was aware that he was pushing his luck, and was less than surprised to get a very reproachful look. He laughed and kissed her, and ushered her back into the lighted hotel lounge, out of the grey afternoon. Sally and Nigel Makin had vanished so he was able to bundle her into her weatherproof gear and take her back to the cottage.