Death on Site

by Janet Neel

  They eyed each other across the table until she blushed and looked away.

  ‘Moreover,’ he went on severely, ‘Peter is in hospital, as you know. If I now go on leave and there is a crisis, there is no one for the next three weeks between you and the Permanent Secretary.’

  ‘The colonel is dead, I take it, and the gatling jammed also?’

  ‘Oh yes, all of that. The dreaded Paul Tucker will be in charge, since David Llewellyn is busy in his constituency and is off on a freebie to Turkey.’

  ‘You mean a fact-finding mission. How can he do such a thing and leave us with the awful Tucker?’

  ‘I suppose he feels that with the House not sitting there are limits to the damage Tucker can inflict.’

  Francesca opined that this was doubtful reasoning, and that their normally popular and reliable Minister for Industry must have suffered a brainstorm to feel it safe to leave the conduct of the Department’s business in the hands of a blatantly incompetent and lazy Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State.

  Rajiv agreed that her strictures were probably justified and watched her thoughtfully as she pulled his in-tray towards her and riffled efficiently through it. She looked across at him. ‘Go Rajiv. It’s no good cancelling leave, there is never a good moment to take it again. I’m here, I’ve had a good holiday, and nothing here is too dreadful, so far as I can see. I have nothing better to do: John was snatched off the train to do that rape and murder case in Croydon – I saw him for an hour on Sunday and I’ll be lucky to see him again before next weekend.’

  Rajiv stood up decisively on the other side of the desk. ‘You have persuaded me, Fran. Your first job, before you do anything irrelevant like reading the files or starting any work, is to take part in a delightful discussion organized by Sir Jim. He has decided that we ought, as a Department, to be developing a list of people suitable for appointment to government jobs.’

  ‘We have one. Has he never seen it?’

  ‘No, no, Fran. A different list with lots of new names on it. He is convinced apparently that out there, somewhere, are many top-flight industrialists longing to be appointed to the various delectable government jobs available. Our failure to serve them up is viewed as Unhelpful.’

  ‘I see.’ Francesca considered her mentor of ten years’ standing and decided calmly not to tell him she had found a major contribution to any such list. ‘Well, I dare say I can weather that. Go on, you’ll need to pack, and I have to catch up before this meeting.’

  8

  Three weeks later, on a Tuesday morning, the ten o’clock hooter echoed, and all over the site men dropped down off scaffolding, put down shovels, turned off machinery, and made for the site canteen. An engineers’ meeting on Section I was kept going by the force of character of the man who had called it, but most of the staff were also stopping work for coffee, or breakfast. Bill Vernon and Nigel Makin, shut away in a tiny, cramped office in the Portakabin adjoining the villa, decided that they both needed a proper breakfast.

  ‘Give it twenty minutes,’ Nigel advised, glancing out of the window. ‘Let them get the lads fed.’

  Since morning break on a building site lasts thirty minutes, this warning was sensible; the canteen staff, struggling to get food on to the plates of a regular clientele of 400 men within fifteen minutes, would give irregular visitors to the canteen very short shrift.

  ‘Have you seen Sally this morning?’ Bill asked, with some malice. Nigel Makin had been nitpicking his way through the ground preparation costs on Section I, which seemed likely to be twice those allowed for in the estimate and two and a half times the price which Bill Vernon had finally agreed in last-minute negotiations with the Department of Transport.

  ‘No.’ The monosyllable was unexpressive and Nigel Makin did not seem inclined to be deflected. ‘I’m seriously bothered by those costs, Bill. Not only did we need almost twice the depth you people originally estimated – that’s 70 per cent more square yards of muck – but I can’t see how all that steel got used. Even given the extra 70 per cent, we’ve used close on 2,000 tons of rebar and rewire more than we ought to. That’s a lot of steel. It’s been growing legs and walking off the site. It’s another one like the Barbican, and I’ve got to stop it. We lost 2,000 tons there in February, before the production controllers could sort out what was happening and organize an investigation. Now it’s been happening here recently, when we had sickness and holidays among my people here. Bastards. They watch you all the time.’

  He was moving restlessly, watching the site from the window, scowling at the bristling steel edifices, boxed around with scaffolding, that were beginning to emerge from the ground and marking out the line of the flyover which would take one set of traffic away to the south-western suburbs and the old road through Southall.

  ‘It’s the same pattern,’ he said, the pale-blue eyes narrowed as he watched a lone scaffolder picking over steel. ‘Nothing much goes adrift for weeks, even while we’re still fencing the site; they wait till we start really building up materials, then 2,000 tons disappear in three days. What I ought to do is to start matching records to find if we’ve got any of the same people here as were on the Barbican in February, but I just don’t have the time.’

  Bill Vernon shifted. ‘Don’t we always lose materials?’

  ‘Not 300,000 quids’ worth we bloody don’t, Bill.’

  ‘Who are they selling it to?’

  ‘There’s half a dozen sites around here that won’t be too particular about where their materials come from. We’d never be able to identify it – it’s bog standard material.’

  Bill Vernon found himself remembering a film about the Spanish Inquisition in which the camera, for reasons either of censorship or economy, had remained focused on the face of the inquisitor rather than the horrendous injuries being done to his victim. In the film the inquisitor had been a thin dark man with burning eyes, but in real life of course an inquisitor was just as likely to have been a lightweight of less than six feet with mousy-brown hair and pale blue eyes. Nigel Makin’s methods would necessarily be different, society having moved on a bit from the sixteenth century, but he was inspired by the same moral force.

  Bill suggested that they might now go across to the canteen, and they both jammed helmets on as they left the Portakabin offices. They walked into the canteen and joined the tail end of the queue. Two hundred men were seated at the crowded tables, and the windows were misted with steam, not one of them open despite the fact that it was a warm September day. The whole smelled strongly of grease and baked beans. Possessed of healthy appetites, the two men were undeterred by their surroundings and both emerged at the end of the line with two fried eggs, bacon, sausage, canned mushrooms, tomatoes and baked beans plus a generous helping of chips. They edged their way towards a table whose occupants looked up momentarily from the task of shovelling in food. From long practice, Bill Vernon just managed not to wince at the smell of stale sweat; site labourers are travelling men living away from their families and wear the same ancient trousers and shirt during a whole week’s work. They throw the lot away at the end of the week and buy another pair of trousers and a shirt from Oxfam or a secondhand-clothes stall after their Saturday lunch-time session in the pub. Since it was now Thursday, the smell was ripening and the atmosphere in the canteen was distinctly polluted.

  ‘Didn’t know you ate here, Bill, with the real workers?’

  Bill Vernon, mouth full of egg and baked beans, nodded wordlessly to Alan Fraser at the next table. He was sitting with his team, all of them leaning back in the uncomfortable battered steel chairs, drinking tea. Fraser, Bill observed, though dressed in ancient, torn jeans, heavy working boots and an old shirt, covered with cement dust, still somehow looked as if he were dressed for a film, as if make-up girls hovered not too far in the background, prepared to renew the smudge on his forehead where he had pushed that bright red-blond hair back under his helmet. Mickey was also too elegant for his surroundings, and both of them looked like greyho
unds against the thick-set, pale-skinned pair of Irishmen who were running to fat, their heavy belts with the scaffolders’ keys sitting uncomfortably under the convex curve of their bellies.

  Just at that moment Sally Vernon walked in and stopped at the counter. Every man in the room watched her with interest. The handful of girls working on the site mostly found the canteen too squalid and uncomfortable, so she was an unusual sight. She hooked her pale blonde hair back behind her ears, picked up her cup of tea and turned to look round the canteen, making no attempt to conceal that there was one only person she was looking for. She smiled widely and happily as she saw Alan, and walked over to join him, the smile fading only briefly as she took in Bill and Nigel also.

  ‘I was told I would find you here,’ she said smoothly to them all. ‘I usually come in for a cup of tea around this time, anyway.’ She smiled confidently at the two Irish members of the team who were showing every sign of alarm, asked for the sugar, and sat back.

  ‘Glad you’re here, Sally. I wanted to check what time we are due tonight.’ Nigel Makin sounded strained, and watched her steadily as Fraser gazed thoughtfully out of the window.

  ‘Not till eight o’clock.’

  ‘I’ll pick you up then.’

  ‘All right. You’re not really going to eat all those baked beans, are you?’

  Nigel Makin, successfully distracted, started to explain about the necessity for a good breakfast while Fraser got unhurriedly to his feet, collecting his gang. He looked down momentarily at Sally. She looked back at him, unsmiling, and Bill Vernon found himself holding his breath. He slid a glance sideways at Nigel Makin and saw that none of it had been lost on him either; he was pale and his mouth was set in an ugly, dead straight line.

  ‘Have you heard any more about K6?’ he said hastily to Alan Fraser, and realized as he spoke that this was also an inflammatory issue.

  Fraser stopped, and looked over Bill’s head at Mickey, who replied for him. ‘There’s room for one of us. The sponsors are seeing us both tomorrow. They already know Alan; they don’t know me.’ This, dispassionately offered, chilled the group into silence.

  Fraser lifted a hand in farewell, and swung on to the scaffold, looking, Bill thought enviously, quite different from anyone else. He clambered upward, scowling slightly, alongside Mickey Hamilton.

  ‘How’s the arm, Mick?’

  ‘Will you stop asking about it? I don’t ask about your ribs.’

  The furious response took Fraser by surprise. ‘Sorry, Mick. Pair of crocks, the both of us; we just need to keep it from the competition. The sponsors will never know.’

  ‘These sponsors – it’s a Quaker company isn’t it?’

  ‘Old man Shackleton is, yes; I read it somewhere. He’s chairman. What’s the worry, Mick – do you think he’ll be prejudiced against Piskies?’

  Mickey Hamilton, reared as an Episcopalian in Edinburgh, laughed unwillingly. ‘No. I just wondered what they were like about people who had a spot of bother in the past.’

  Both men considered the point, and Fraser said, reluctantly, that he thought old man Shackleton was unlikely to be tolerant of misdemeanour of any sort, despite his Quaker persuasion.

  ‘Hardly anyone knew about my problems anyway – it was nine years ago. You must be one of the few around, Alan.’

  ‘That’s right. And I’d forgotten about it till you reminded me. No one’s going to go back nine years to catch up with you. Stop worrying, Mick.’ He passed a length of steel.

  Mickey Hamilton nodded, taking it from him smoothly and putting on a clip. Handing the clip awkwardly, he drew breath sharply at the pain in his arm. He glanced sideways to check whether Fraser had noticed, and was reassured to see him totally engrossed in advising the Doolans on the placing of the next section.

  Over at the Department of Trade and Industry, Francesca was eating an early lunch in the canteen, a room which, while six times the size of the Western Underpass Section I canteen, also smelled of stale fat and baked beans. She was at a big table at one side, sitting with eight men older than herself. One of them, her godfather Bill Westland, a Deputy Secretary responsible for six of the Department’s most difficult divisions, was holding forth to his entire table about the difficulties of finding any half-way respectable business men to take on any of the advisory, non-executive posts for which Ministers in their wisdom had seen fit to provide.

  ‘It’s no good Jim going on at us. We know we badly need some decent commercial judgement on the Board of British Engineering, and what am I being offered by my colleagues? Peter Rawlings, who retired from the Treasury last year and has never seen a factory, I shouldn’t think. Angus Macfarlane – admirable chap, must be over seventy now.’

  ‘You could have Fred Jennings,’ the other Deputy Secretary present volunteered. ‘He’s just turned us down for the insurance regulation jobs because he wants something more active.’

  ‘We don’t seem to know anybody new,’ Bill Westland said sadly. ‘It’s just the same old weary stage army we pass on to each other.’ He gazed at his baked beans and decided that they were too nasty to go on with. ‘I suppose I’d better take poor Rawlings; no one else is going to.’

  ‘I’ve got an idea for someone for you,’ Francesca said smugly.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Robert Vernon. Chairman and Chief Executive of Vernon Construction. He’s got six engineering subsidiaries, with a £500- million turnover between them, as well as the construction side which is about £1 billion. He’s sixty-three.’

  ‘I’ve seen pictures. Would he be interested?’ Bill Westland had stopped eating and was leaning forward.

  ‘He put it to me that he felt the time had come to give something back to the community.’

  ‘He wants a K,’ three people said, in unison.

  ‘Yes,’ Francesca agreed happily, ‘so I indicated that I might be able to introduce him to senior people in this Department.’

  ‘Where did you find him?’

  ‘On holiday, with his family. We got talking.’

  ‘Would he do British Engineering as a non-executive?’ Bill Westland asked.

  Francesca opined that he probably would.

  ‘Well done, Frannie.’ Westland heaved himself to his feet and beamed at her. ‘Do you want me to ring him? No? All right, fix it with Mrs McPherson and wheel him in. This afternoon would not be too soon.’

  ‘Can I be there, too? It’s me he knows.’

  ‘I daresay I can live with that for once.’

  ‘Sir.’ She grinned at him.

  ‘How’s young John then?’ her godfather enquired paternally.

  ‘Just coming out of that Croydon murder – I mean a man has helped police with their enquiries and will appear in court tomorrow, and so that’s that. We’ve only spoken on the phone for the last week – I was going to take another lover if this went on.’

  Bill Westland told her firmly that men must work and women must weep and that she was not to distract a good man, highly thought of in his field. ‘Time you married him and had some children,’ he added severely, cutting no ice at all with Francesca, who told him briskly that he was out of date: nobody got married these days, and if he checked with Establishment Division he would find that no distinction was made when it came to maternity leave, pension provision, and so on.

  ‘You’re not going to do that to us?’ her godfather said, appalled, while the rest of the table listened, fascinated.

  ‘No, but people are not to nag.’

  Four miles away and four hours later, in her flat near the Western Underpass, Sally Vernon and Nigel Makin were having a conversation along something of the same lines. Nigel had deliberately turned up early to pick her up for dinner, and without fuss had taken her to bed. He was good, she thought, lying back half asleep while he efficiently showered and shaved, even though it had been Alan Fraser she had wanted that day.

  ‘Sally, it’s time we got married. I want children, so do you, you’re qualified now, what are we waiti
ng for?’

  She considered his face reflected in the shaving mirror, which she could see through the bathroom door. ‘I’d like to wait a bit longer, Nigel. Why such a hurry? Are you afraid I’ll spend all my money?’

  ‘No.’ He was unoffended as she knew he would be. ‘It’s yours, you do what you like with it, though you’d do better to let me invest it for you. You can put some into a house, or put up with what I can do on my pay – it’s your choice.’

  She felt as she had before, both admiring and resentful. Nigel’s rock-solid belief in his capacity to rise to the top of Vernon Engineering and his genuine lack of interest in the substantial fortune her father had settled on her ought to have been attractive. But she felt in some part of her being that the possession of that kind of money should get more respect than Nigel was according it.

  ‘Some men would be pleased to have a rich wife,’ she said, and he turned to look at her through the open door.

  ‘Some men would know how to spend it for you, too,’ he said, deliberately, and watched while she looked away.

  ‘Your dad wants me to go to Riyadh for the power-station negotiations in the New Year. We need to get married before then. What about it, Sal?’

  He came back into the bedroom, a towel knotted round his hips, and flipped open his briefcase to look for a clean shirt, apparently confident. But Sally knew that a crisis had been reached, and that he would not come back if she sent him away now. She hesitated, furious with him and herself. He looked up from his briefcase and smiled at her, wryly but not unkindly.

  ‘I don’t want to be pushed,’ she said.