Death on Site

by Janet Neel

  ‘Done well for yourself there, Fran,’ Fraser agreed. ‘He likes it, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Oh yes. Loves it. Which is why I knew he’d have to go this morning. Ah, the cars.’ She blew her nose, finally and definitively. ‘Where are you two off to?’

  ‘We’re staying with a climbing mate for a couple of days till we get fixed up on a site. We’ll be in a caravan if we end up on the Western Underpass.’

  ‘Let us know, Alan. We could give you supper if you get tired of fry-ups.’

  She set off to fetch her own car but Alan took her keys, drove it off for her, and made sure all her kit was loaded in, which she received placidly as a tribute to John McLeish.

  7

  ‘I’m enquiring about a Mr Patrick O’Connor, please, admitted last night. My name’s Stewart and I’m his guv’nor from the Western Underpass site, Vernon Construction … Yes, I’ll wait.’

  The speaker hooked the phone between his shoulder and his ear, indicating economically to the mini-skirted girl who appeared in the doorway that a cup of coffee would be welcome. He pulled towards him a tray of papers and started work. ‘He’s holding his own, is he?’ Stewart listened, wincing, to a weary voice at the other end delivering a dispassionate recitation of the injuries sustained by Mr O’Connor on falling fifty feet from the scaffolding which he had been engaged in erecting. ‘I thought he’d make it – he fell soft, hit the sand and missed the reinforced steel we had waiting by maybe six feet,’ he observed to the unseen voice at the other end. ‘Was he pissed, doc?’ The voice grew wary and Stewart sighed. ‘All right, all right, I’ll let the insurance company sort that out. Thank you for your trouble.’

  He shook his head, made a note, picked up his coffee and walked over to the window and stood watching the site outside. He was standing in what had been the living-room of a substantial Victorian villa, its proportions destroyed by a desk placed across the fireplace facing out into the room, by telephone and light wires crudely draped around its once elegant marble. Crowded into the rest of the room was a dining-table large enough to seat ten, surrounded by ten unmatching chairs.

  The bright September sun lit the whole disheartening scene, revealing the layer of fine dust that drifted in even through closed windows and despite the half-hearted efforts of the elderly general labourer who was dabbing at the furniture with a filthy duster. The villa itself, surrounded by a fringe of Portakabins, sat facing out over a hundred-yard-wide stretch of scarred clay, reaching further than the eye could see right out into the West London suburbs. The villa looked ridiculous and forlorn, but Jimmy Stewart had seen only a viable building which would save the expense of buying more Portakabins.

  As he watched, one of the big pile-driving machines started up, the noise very clear even through a closed window. The eight o’clock hooter went off, and men scattered on the site, all helmeted, Vernon Construction employees in yellow, Vernon Construction engineers in green, and the client’s consulting engineers in blue. He reached for his own helmet, which uncompromisingly stated him to be site agent, and made towards the door, banging into one of the ten chairs and cursing as he did every morning. He walked into the villa’s dining-room, uncomfortably full of men in working clothes, his eye skimming them automatically to see if any of them looked useful.

  Today being Saturday, men came sightseeing from other sites to find out if the bonus was better than where they were. You could pick up some useful labour on a Saturday, and he just hoped the lad who had been wished on him by Head Office as industrial relations officer and site personnel man knew how to do that. He pushed his way into a small boarded-up section of the room, and both men occupying the tiny partitioned segment of the room visibly jumped. Stewart raised his eyebrows at the man he knew, Douglas Allen, a young personnel trainee who looked permanently a bit too pleased with himself for Stewart’s taste and who was at that moment looking particularly self-satisfied.

  ‘Mr Stewart, this is Alan Fraser who has a team of three men working with him. I’m just going to take him out to the foreman scaffolder on Section I.’

  ‘I’m a foreman scaffolder, myself, and I’ll see the general foreman,’ said the bright-haired man.

  Jimmy Stewart’s eyebrows went up and he took a long, unhurried look at this cocky customer. A glamour boy, with red-blond hair that shone in the dusty, tired room, and blue eyes; tall and light, but with heavy powerful shoulders; young for a foreman scaffolder, who are part of a site’s aristocracy, but recognizable anywhere as a scaffolder, even without the distinctive scaffolder’s tools carried slung from his belt. It was something about the slight swagger with which all scaffolders strode around the site, the heavy keys dragging their belts off their hips, like cowboys in a Western.

  ‘What’s your problem, lad?’ he asked, pleasantly.

  ‘Not my problem. I hear your scaffolders are a load of dossers, but I know your general foreman on that section and he’s all right. I hear you’re a foreman short since yesterday, too.’

  This statement, addressed as to an equal, caused Stewart to raise another eyebrow. A foreman scaffolder, however conscious of his market position, usually demonstrated some deference to a senior site agent. A fellow Scot, of course, West Coast; but there was something about the man that was more than the Scots lack of deference to authority.

  ‘Will I do instead of the GF?’ he asked with interest.

  ‘Why not? The gang is in there.’ He jabbed a finger at the waiting-room. ‘We’ll stand up some steel for you.’

  Jimmy Stewart belatedly glanced at Douglas Allen who said, stiffly, that in the particular case of a scaffolder this was probably a sensible procedure.

  ‘Where’s he come from?’ Stewart asked, watching out of the awkwardly placed window as Fraser marched his group over to a stack of scaffolding poles.

  ‘His home address is given as Culdaig. He’s on subsistence, living on the caravan site,’ Douglas Allen reported efficiently, ‘and his mate is Michael Hamilton, home address in Edinburgh. The other two are brothers – Irish, addresses in Cork.’

  Stewart nodded, and stood quietly beside Douglas Allen and watched. Alan Fraser had been joined by a dark man – as tall as he but slighter, pale-faced with deep-set brown eyes, and by two heavy-set Irishmen, recognizable anywhere by the way they walked, as if pulling booted feet from Irish mud. Their shoulders were hunched and their arms held slightly away from their bodies as if to balance themselves. All of them took off their jackets, in a leisurely way, revealing the scaffolders’ tools dangling from their belts, and moved towards the pile of eighteen-foot scaffolders’ tubes. Hamilton rolled an eighteen-foot length of tube off the pile, grabbed it by the middle, heaved it vertically into the air and dropped it on to the spike, not a movement wasted. Fraser’s red-blond mop of hair flashed in the sun as he stood up another eighteen-foot length. One of the stocky men wordlessly put out a hand and took the tube as the younger man bolted on a cross-bar. The other Irish brother moved in to help, and as Stewart watched appreciatively the makings of a scaffolding tower appeared under their hands. After ten minutes Fraser casually checked the bolts and nodded to his group. ‘All right,’ Stewart called, ‘you’re on.’

  ‘How’s the bonus? I’ve done £200 a week where I am, but we’re getting buggered around by the engineers.’

  ‘You got a certificate?’

  ‘Oh, yes. We’re a company.’

  Jimmy Stewart nodded. No one on a building site who could possibly help it was on a PAYE system. They all had a certificate under the Act that enabled them to be paid gross of tax, on the basis that they would be responsible for the earnings of everyone they employed. God alone knew what actually happened to the tax.

  He continued to watch Fraser. There was something about him which compelled attention; he had just that faint air of being used to the limelight. He had stopped, hands on hips, and was looking up at a scaffolding tower erected ready to enable the shuttering carpenters to put in the framework into which reinforcing steel would be fixed
and concrete poured to make one of the myriad pillars which were going to support the roadway. He said something to the dark chap and was up the scaffold in a flash, thirty feet above the ground in seconds, leaning out to tighten a bolt. He went over three bolts, then shouted down to his oppo, who swarmed up towards him carrying a length of steel as casually as if it was a hammer. Fraser took it, bolted it in, shook the structure, and climbed down, jumping the last six feet.

  Jimmy Stewart, curiosity thoroughly aroused, intercepted the two men as they came past the villa.

  ‘Find a bit loose then?’

  ‘Should have been bolted in again above thirty feet. It was a bad job. It would be worth going over all that lot in this section. Don’t mind checking them for you this afternoon, if you like.’

  ‘That’d be useful. Travelling man are you?’

  ‘That’s right. I need a place on the caravan site, and I need every penny I can earn.’

  ‘What are you doing with it? Getting married?’

  ‘Get away.’ The man laughed. ‘I’m a climber. I’m hoping to get on a Himalayan expedition in October.’

  ‘Ah.’ Well, that explained it, thought Jimmy Stewart resignedly. He loathed working in London because of the vagaries of London labour, and here he was with a good foreman scaffolder who was only doing it as a hobby. Typical.

  ‘This is Mickey Hamilton – he’s a climber, too.’

  ‘How do you do.’

  Jimmy Stewart blinked at the clear Edinburgh accent. ‘Just a hobby for you lads, is it?’

  ‘No, I’m trained, I’ve been on sites since I was sixteen. Mickey here used to work on sites in vacation from his university and I trained him. He’s all right, but he’ll not make a foreman.’ Fraser was laughing at him. ‘You ask the general foreman on Section I, he’ll tell you. Any steel I put up won’t wave in the breeze like that mess there.’

  They had stopped by the office door and were idly watching a police car whisk across the tangle of roads by the fence and nose its way through the gate.

  ‘Can’t keep those buggers off the site,’ Jimmy Stewart observed, and stood his ground as a stocky man got out of the back and headed into the office. ‘You lads get away to your dinner. You’re on to check these towers this afternoon, OK? That copper will be wanting me to fill up forms about the lad who fell off yesterday.’

  Alan and Mickey waved a farewell to the Doolan brothers who constituted the rest of the gang, and walked across the road to the pub, dodging traffic. The dusty room was shabby; the pub itself had been long overdue for renovation before the urban motorway contract had been placed, and the owners had decided there was little point replacing the dirty plush curtains or shabby carpet during the three years the construction contract was expected to last. These were men who understood their business, however, and they had put substantial money into creating one bar running the whole length of the big room and the latest and most efficient cellarage and beer delivery system. Eight people, including a hand-picked Irish tenant and his wife, worked flat out behind the bar every hour of licensing hours. It was probably the most popular pub in London, with a turnover which gave credence to the popular view that the whole building site was administered from the pub: Jimmy Stewart, as a known customer, would find a gin and tonic placed automatically before him, unless he indicated otherwise as he walked in, and all the major subcontractors could depend on having their particular tipple put out for them at the lift of a finger.

  Alan Fraser and Mickey Hamilton, moderate drinkers both, smiled at the prettiest of the barmaids, Deirdre Kelly, a cousin to the tenant and imported from Dublin, and asked for a pint of beer each and two pint glasses of water.

  ‘Sally Vernon is over there,’ Mickey Hamilton said, with an edge to his voice, ‘attempting to attract your attention.’

  Fraser looked round in a leisurely way and raised his glass to a corner table, indicating that he would be along to join them in his own time.

  Deirdre glanced at him with interest. ‘Boss’s daughter, isn’t she?’ she enquired, putting four pints neatly in front of a silent quartet who had just arrived and who were indicating wordlessly that she should not hesitate to pull the next four. She did so, watching Fraser, and placed them just as the quartet arrived at the end of their first pint. Building labourers are always thirsty; hard work and dust and the heat of the sun dehydrate the human system very quickly, and on a hot September day most of the customers were sinking two pints or more of liquid before they could even taste it.

  ‘Yes, she’s a trainee engineer.’

  ‘Well for some.’ The barmaid, pink and pretty, with clear fresh skin, black hair and black eyelashes, was the object of much attention and could have had her pick of the site. She looked curiously at the slight blonde girl whose long, fine, fair hair was sticking to her scalp where she had taken off her site helmet. ‘She’ll be worth a few bob.’

  ‘She’s not as beautiful as you.’ Mickey Hamilton raised his glass to Deirdre but she was unimpressed, watching appreciatively the way Alan Fraser’s wide shoulders moved as he fished for money to pay for their drinks.

  ‘Give me another one, please, I’ll take it over there. And for my friend here.’ He picked up the drinks and walked over to the corner, the barmaid’s eyes following him.

  ‘Do you want to sit outside, Sally?’ Fraser said, and she smiled lazily and rose in one movement, indicating to the rest of the group that they should stay where they were.

  ‘I’ll see you, Mickey,’ Fraser said. He walked out with Sally into the pub garden, a tiny, crowded terrace, sheltered by a London plane grey with the fine cement dust that covered everything within a hundred yards of the motorway site.

  She smiled at him. ‘Not pleased to see me?’

  ‘Of course I am, I just wasn’t expecting you, you’ve come back early.’

  ‘Oh, well. It was a bit dull up there with you gone, so I came back with Bill and Nigel. Mum and Dad are coming back in a couple of days as well.’

  ‘Nigel’s here, too, is he?’

  ‘Yes, but I’ve told him I’m busy tonight.’ She touched the back of Alan’s hand in open invitation. ‘You could come round to my flat.’

  He considered her soberly. ‘We’d need to be careful.’

  ‘No need. Everyone knows I know you from Scotland.’ She gave him a provocative sidelong look over her beer, and he relaxed.

  ‘I’m still staying with friends.’

  ‘My flat is about ten minutes away.’

  ‘I’ll come later – I’ve promised to tie in some of that scaffold – they’ve had some useless buggers on that site and I don’t want anyone working off those towers until I’ve checked them.’ He sounded as he did when wanting to go and climb, and she, realizing he was immovable, agreed to meet him later.

  Three miles away in the Department of Trade and Industry’s headquarters Francesca was sitting in the office of her immediate superior, Rajiv Sengupta. She smiled at him, admiring the cool look of him in his immaculate suit, and the way his black hair shone, tidy above his expensive shirt. She had known him for ten years, since he had supervised her in Jurisprudence in her second year as an undergraduate at Cambridge. He was, she observed with interest, uncharacteristically in a fuss, picking through the papers on his desk, talking obsessively.

  ‘So, Fran, what we need to establish – damn, I did think I had replied to that particular Treasury idiocy in a way that meant it would not recur – is whether you can manage without me, or whether I should cancel and start all over again. My mother will be furious, two uncles will be disappointed, and my father will probably disinherit me, but all this has to be considered against the needs of the Department.’

  ‘Rajiv, nothing should be allowed to get in the way of your annual return to India. How are they to manage the harvest without you, or the annual sacrifice?’

  Rajiv, scion of a Brahmin family, son of one of the richest men in modern India and nephew to the Permanent Secretaries of two major Departments of State i
n the Indian civil service, grinned at her across the table and loosened his Hermès tie.

  ‘I knew you would see the problem in proportion, dear Francesca. The point is that we really are short-handed here. We have eight rescue cases, all major, under consideration, of which about four are serious. The other four, which are hopeless, will take even more time to deal with.’

  Francesca nodded; for the size of the unit which she and Rajiv operated, and which was charged with giving assistance to firms in difficulty where this would preserve employment in the Assisted Areas, four active cases constituted a solid workload. Eight was a serious overload, particularly since, as Rajiv observed, persuading Ministers to refuse assistance and dealing with the subsequent outcry from all interested parties took even more time and effort than actually rescuing a sick company.

  ‘Three out of four of the current cases are textiles – well, they were all running when you went on leave. Jennifer Freeman in Chemicals and Textiles has mumps, and so has Andrew Michaels, who is the accounting case-officer for two of these.’

  ‘How very odd,’ Francesca observed. ‘Mumps is not particularly infectious – I mean you usually only get it from people with whom you are in very close contact.’

  ‘Frannie, dear, could we, do you think, not make that observation publicly, much as I admire the breadth of your general knowledge?’

  Francesca gazed at him, disconcerted. ‘But they are both married. To other people.’

  ‘Darling, that sounds a little odd, coming from you.’

  ‘Not very nice to go on about it.’

  Ten months previously, Francesca had been brought home rather early from a posting to Washington, in the middle of her much publicized affair with the married junior senator for West Virginia. The fact that this had followed the painful break-up of her first marriage when she was only twenty-seven was generally held to be a justification. Rajiv, however, having known her since she was nineteen, was not going to let her get away with taking a moral stance on the subject of adultery.