Death on Site

by Janet Neel

  He walked over to the bed, unsmiling now. ‘And I don’t want to be messed around.’ He sat down on the bed and turned her to face him. ‘We’ve been engaged for six months, and I don’t want to get married in a scramble and have everyone think you’re in the club.’

  She pulled herself free of his hands and sat up straight in the middle of the bed, thinking that the whole conversation was about Alan Fraser but neither of them was prepared to mention his name.

  ‘I just want some time to think.’

  He looked exasperated to the point of fury and she was momentarily frightened but he had himself in hand.

  ‘Give us a kiss,’ he suggested and, disarmed and relieved, she moved into his arms. He started to make love to her, holding her down uncomfortably, ignoring her complaints, and she finally responded with equal ferocity.

  ‘You’ll have to have another shower. We’re going to be very late.’

  ‘They’ll forgive us. You can have a shower first.’

  Neither of them spoke again of the issue lying between them as they hurried into clothes, but as he held open the door of the flat for her, he put his arm round her. ‘It’ll be all right, Sal. You’ve just got cold feet.’

  Robert Vernon had begun to be irritable about his daughter’s late arrival, and was making his son uncomfortable by figeting round the brightly lit room, fiddling with the various ornaments and objects which covered every surface. It was a large room and in its original shape had been generously proportioned. The addition of a substantial bar, with shelves containing every drink known to the Western world and flanked by four bar stools, had gone a long way to destroying the proportions, and the inclusion of a vast wall-fixture which held a large TV and banks of equipment for reproducing music had completed the job. Thousands of pounds’ worth of the latest hi-fidelity equipment was being deployed in playing extracts from the current revival of South Pacific.

  Bill remembered his mother observing maliciously to friends that her ex-husband was the only really rich man she knew whose house contained not one single object that she would want to steal. He mentally conceded the justice of this statement as he watched his father pick up and regard with pride a massive phallic objet d’art covered, regardless equally of expense and the dictates of artistic taste, in silver gilt. Of course, he reminded himself, it wasn’t meant to be art; it was a duplicate of the object presented to the relevant sheik in commemoration of the Raj al Oued sewage works. Nor had his stepmother been of the smallest assistance; herself the daughter of a small shopkeeper, her taste ran to Victorian painting and was represented in this room by a substantial oil, even more substantially framed, of a large spaniel gazing slightly cross-eyed at a small puppy, the whole entitled ‘Motherhood’.

  He stood up as his stepmother came into the room and kissed her, realizing that, while he had been brought up to see her as the person who had robbed his mother of all that she wanted, this was a pleasant, infinitely capable woman who wished him well, and who indeed had insisted that he be treated the same as her own daughter. It probably made no difference to Dorothy Vernon what he himself thought: she had stepped only once outside the canons of her sound Methodist upbringing to take the one man she had ever wanted, and then only when she was convinced that his wife had forfeited every right to him. The fact that he himself was not successful in the business mattered not at all – he was Robert’s son and he was treated as such, unless of course he transgressed her standards of behaviour.

  She turned towards him now, her pale, grey-blonde hair freshly set in a perm of the style favoured by the Queen, her wide, slightly popping, blue eyes, matched by her sapphire-and-diamond earrings and necklace.

  ‘We’ll not need all that lemon. I must speak to Luigi.’

  Bill watched, amused, as she jabbed at the bell, rings flashing on the stubby, beautifully manicured hands. He removed himself tactfully to the other side of the room as she complained to the Italian who ran her household, a complaint which he received with both seriousness and respect. Neither of them obviously saw anything incongruous in the wife of the chairman of one of the UK’s largest companies, concerning herself with wasteful use of lemon.

  ‘You’ll have to watch all that, Bill, if you want to run a business of your own, or they’ll rob you blind. It’s not dishonesty with Luigi, of course; he’d not be with me if he wasn’t as honest as the day is long. But he’s careless. He likes things to look nice but you can do that without waste.’

  ‘What happened to the chap you used to have? Norman?’

  ‘Oh, him.’ Dorothy Vernon put her glass down with a snap. ‘Did Robert never tell you? I caught him taking wine home with him. He left that day.’

  ‘We’ve never got anyone as good as him since, though.’ Robert Vernon had come back from his telephone call. ‘For fifteen years the house and the farm ran like clockwork.’ He put an arm round his wife’s shoulders. ‘I wanted to give him hell, promise him jail the next time round, and keep him, but Dorothy wouldn’t have it.’

  She looked at him with impatience; it was obviously an old argument. ‘He’d have done it again. If you knew the trouble my father had with people stealing from his shop – grown men and women – you’d not speak like that, Robert. People either respect other people’s property or they don’t, and there’s no half way. If you find you’ve got one who doesn’t know what’s right, you’ve to get rid of him.’ She twitched a cushion straight, irritation in every line of her body, and both men were relieved when the bell rang and Luigi could be heard admitting Nigel and Sally.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum, I was late off site and needed a bath.’

  Dorothy Vernon kissed her and Nigel, observing drily that it hadn’t mattered to her but her father had got in a twitch. Robert Vernon rose above this.

  ‘You want to hear where I’ve been invited?’ he asked, generally, as Luigi dealt with drinks.

  ‘Buckingham Palace?’ his daughter asked, pertly.

  ‘I’ve been asked to come and have a talk with a Mr Westland in the Department of Trade and Industry.’

  ‘Why, Dad?’

  ‘Well, I’d mentioned – to young Francesca Wilson, in fact – that I was concerned about where the government was getting its advice on industry, and she mentioned that they need people to advise on engineering. I’ll tell you something else, too. You know that boyfriend of hers – big chap, went climbing with Fraser? Well, he’s a copper.’

  ‘A what?’ It was Nigel Makin, who asked.

  ‘A policeman. A Chief Inspector no less, at New Scotland Yard.’

  ‘A detective or uniformed branch?’ Bill Vernon asked.

  ‘Oh, a detective. Francesca says they never tell anyone what he does when he’s on holiday because everyone wants to talk about his job, so they just say he’s Home Office. She told me, she said, because senior people in her Department know and she wouldn’t want to put me at a disadvantage.’

  ‘I knew about him,’ Sally said, and instantly wished she hadn’t, as Nigel looked sharply at her.

  ‘Francesca tell you?’ Her father sounded disappointed.

  ‘No, no,’ she hurried to reassure him, trying to ignore Nigel. ‘Alan Fraser and Mickey Hamilton were on the same train as them, coming back to London, and apparently a police car was waiting to pick him up. So John McLeish had to tell them then, and Alan mentioned it to me.’ She looked sideways at Nigel and was not at all reassured to see him looking dead-pan.

  ‘We’d maybe better ask him to see if he can find out where the steel went to off the Barbican and the Western Underpass?’ he said to Robert Vernon.

  ‘Scotland Yard won’t be interested in that,’ Bill Vernon objected. ‘You’ll have to settle for the local flatfeet if you are serious about trying to catch up with the losses at the Barbican. But you’re joking, aren’t you? That steel will be well away by now.’

  ‘If you let people get away with theft, Bill, you might as well give your business away and have done with it.’

  ‘And they’ll do
it to you again somewhere else.’ Dorothy Vernon refilled Nigel’s drink.

  ‘Oh, they’ve tried,’ he assured her. ‘We lost a bit at the Underpass while I was elsewhere. I’ll see it doesn’t happen again.’

  Bill Vernon got up and ostentatiously took Sally over to the other side of the room. ‘Got a bit of a bee in his bonnet, hasn’t he? Why isn’t he busy getting married?’

  She looked at him surprised; they had never been particularly close and he did not usually ask her personal questions.

  ‘I’m not sure I want to,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure what I want.’ She glanced back into the room. ‘Dad says you’re going to buy a farm in Scotland? Perhaps I’ll do that too, or something like that.’

  ‘You can’t – you’re the heiress to the business!’ Bill was amused and scandalized. ‘Alan Fraser won’t be any good to you,’ he said, suddenly. ‘Too much of a rover. Look, Sal, he’s got another girl, you know.’

  He watched, not unsympathetically, as tears filled her eyes.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘A model. He met her in Scotland. Sorry, Sally. I’d rather not have told you, but I thought you ought to know.’

  She nodded and stared out of the window, fingering the enormously expensive, pale-red, heavily padded silk curtains which Dorothy Vernon always bought. Her step-brother stayed by her side to give her time to compose herself.

  ‘Sal,’ he said, cautiously, ‘look, he goes to K6 in a few weeks, doesn’t he, whatever any of us want? Why ruin your chances for – what – six weeks?’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ She was no longer tearful but mildly contemptuous. She turned back definitively to the rest of the group, deployed on the heavy leather chairs and chesterfield sofas which Robert Vernon had bought twelve years ago when Vernon Engineering reached a £500-million turnover for the first time, and went round to the bar to fetch herself a second large drink.

  9

  John McLeish, with the aid of a secretary, was clearing his desk at New Scotland Yard of its accumulated piles of paper, files, and odd messages written on scraps of paper.

  ‘Oh, God,’ he said gloomily as his secretary bore in a further pile and hesitated as they both contemplated two already toppling in-trays. ‘Just put it down by the side, Jenny, I’ll get through it. Most of it’s rubbish isn’t it?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘A lot of it is,’ his secretary confirmed. ‘There are three things marked “Addressee’s eyes only”, which are about your pension – I rang up and asked in case there was a deadline for reply.’

  ‘Mm.’ A good secretary was beyond price and McLeish roused himself to say so, conscious that he had barely addressed a word to her that was not an order over the last two weeks. He sat down with coffee and started through the in-tray, wastepaper basket at his right hand ready to receive most of the offerings being circulated. He arrived at the communiqué about his pension rights and realized after a third reading that he was none the wiser. It was clear that a decision of some sort was required of him and that its consequences, in what he felt was the improbable event of his actually reaching the age of sixty-five in the employ of the Metropolitan Police, might be far-reaching. Or might, on the other hand, not matter at all. He had no idea which. He looked at the papers irresolutely, then remembered that he had available to him an excellent source of advice on all matters connected with a public service bureaucracy.

  He had reached for the telephone before he recalled that Francesca was on her way up to see a machine-tool manufacturer in Doncaster whose cash flow was unlikely to permit him to meet the next month’s wages bill unless the DTI helped. He sighed, and tried to read the communiqué again. He had got to the second paragraph when the internal phone rang smartly.

  ‘I have a Sergeant McKinnon calling you from Carrbrae, in Scotland.’

  McLeish stared at the phone, his mind switching slowly to the hotel in Culdaig with Alec McKinnon gently but persistently picking at the details of Alan Fraser’s fall. He listened, frowning slightly, to the soft Highland voice courteously hoping he had a good journey home and enquiring after Francesca, and remembered his manners enough to ask after mutual acquaintances in Scotland.

  ‘Well, it was Duncan Mackintosh that was there, you see.’ Alec McKinnon sounded relieved to have found an opening. ‘He was away up the hill, looking for a student who had sprained her ankle, and he had Roddy Moffat with him – I don’t think you met him, but he’s often here, he’s a plumber in Strathclyde – and it was Roddy who saw the jacket.’

  ‘The jacket?’

  ‘You remember, Francesca saw someone in a yellow jacket on the ridge the day Alan Fraser fell? Well, Roddy saw a patch of yellow on the hill yesterday and he went to look in case it was the student, and he found this jacket tucked under a rock. The wind had caught it and a sleeve was flapping. Well, he knew the jacket, it was his own and he’d lost it from the hotel the day young Fraser was hurt. It was an old one, but it was patched on the side.’

  McLeish managed with an effort to remember that this chatty Highlander was not a member of his staff and waited patiently for the essential parts of the story to ensue. Roddy Moffat, it transpired, had expressed great pleasure at getting back a favourite jacket and had to be prevented from speculating publicly about the motivation of a person who would take the wrong jacket and abandon it on the hillside when he realized his mistake.

  Duncan Mackintosh had brought Mr Moffat and the jacket straight to the police at Carrbrae, where he had been sworn to silence and the jacket bagged and labelled. Would the Chief Inspector not agree that it did look as if someone had been laying for Alan Fraser that day? Someone who, realizing he or she had been seen by Francesca, had abandoned the only item of clothing that would have been identified at that distance?

  McLeish, who had got the point three sentences earlier, agreed that it was a circumstance suspicious in itself but not conclusive.

  ‘I know it’s difficult to believe that a body would cause Fraser to fall, because he might have been killed,’ the Highland voice said apologetically. ‘But I thought you ought to know.’

  ‘What’s your next step?’ McLeish decided the Scots could do their own thinking on this one instead of trying to shift the mess on to his overloaded plate.

  ‘I ought to be on the next plane down to have a wee word with Fraser and warn him that there may be someone laying for him. He’s working as a scaffolder on the big Western Underpass site.’ The voice was as unhurried as ever, but all trace of diffidence had gone. ‘Then when I got back here, I’d start finding out who was here the day. But I’d warn Fraser first.’

  Yes, indeed, McLeish thought, digging his pencil irritably into the blotter.

  ‘I don’t think I could just have a word on the telephone, even if I could find him to speak to,’ Alec McKinnon offered when the silence became unbearable.

  ‘No, no, you couldn’t.’ McLeish accepted the inevitable. ‘It’s a day and a half of your time, though, isn’t it? Would it be helpful if I had a word with him – I know where he is, and he knows now I’m in the Force. I can go down and buy him a drink, tell him what you’ve told me, and get him to ring you. I’ll also put him in touch with the local station near the site – it’s Edgware Road, my last posting – and they can keep an eye out.’

  He listened grimly to McKinnon’s thanks. ‘Then it’s over to you to see what you can find up there,’ he pointed out, firmly. ‘I’m just a friendly messenger.’

  They said goodbye; McLeish summoned his secretary and asked her to get a message to one Alan Fraser on the Western Underpass site, inviting him for a drink at the King’s Head at six p.m., without disclosing that McLeish worked at Scotland Yard or indeed was connected in any way with the police force. He buried himself again in his work, and had disposed of one and a half trays by the time his secretary, flushed and exasperated, returned to him. Bruce Davidson, looking amused, was with her.

  ‘I’m sorry John,’ said Jenny, ‘but it’s impossible. The site won’t even say
whether this Mr Fraser works there or not, and Vernon’s Head Office says that only the site has the records. They say it is not the policy of the firm to confirm whether people work on their sites without the man’s express consent, given in advance.’

  McLeish looked at her blankly, but Davidson was laughing. ‘It’s a casual trade, John, all sorts of blokes are in it. They’ll not want to be bothered with phone calls on site – they’d more likely be from bookies or debt collectors or women trying to catch up with blokes who’d left them with a baby. It’s like that thing they had in the Middle Ages – sanctuary. Once you’re in, no one can get at you. Like the army, too.’

  McLeish gazed at him. ‘I must be tired, I should have known that. Sorry, Jenny. Well, since we know he’s there, I suppose I could just hang round the site at going-home time?’

  Jenny and Davidson considered him doubtfully. ‘There’s probably more than one exit,’ Jenny pointed out. ‘It’s a big site.’

  ‘Where’s he living?’ Davidson asked sensibly.

  ‘Ah. On the caravan site.’

  All three of them contemplated the vision of John McLeish asking his way round the caravans attached to a major construction site.

  ‘You’d probably end up boiled for soup,’ Davidson advised, gloomily. ‘And you’d stick out like a sore thumb.’

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ McLeish stated. His subordinates both fell silent, watching him think.

  ‘Important, is it?’ Davidson asked, casually. McLeish considered him irritably, and said that in fact it was important, he had agreed to do an errand for another force and he ought to do it today. ‘In fact,’ he said, arriving at a decision, ‘get me the top man on the site – the manager – and I’ll talk to him.’

  In five minutes he found himself talking to Jimmy Stewart and explaining with some embarrassment that all he wanted was a drink on police business which in no way reflected discredit on Fraser, and that he had failed to get a message through any less exalted channel. Stewart agreed to pass a message as discreetly as possible to Alan Fraser, bidding him to drink with John McLeish at six p.m., and observed that he hoped Fraser would turn up. McLeish, realizing that there was no way of convincing this hard man that Fraser was not necessarily the suspected link man in the latest bullion robbery, got Jenny to telephone to Scotland to confirm that he had arranged to see Fraser, and plunged back into the in-tray, knowing that he was living on borrowed time. The Croydon murderer had been charged that morning and remanded to a prison hospital, this being the only available free space in the London system for the next two days. Inevitably, around lunch-time, someone in the overworked hierarchy above him would realize that his hands were free and find something to put in them.