Death on Site

by Janet Neel

  McLeish nodded to young Woolner, who was improvising an effective screen, and turned back, painfully, to the body from which Alan Fraser had already departed. The red-blond hair underneath the broken helmet moved in the evening breeze, giving a momentary illusion of life, but the face was already set in death.

  ‘Aah, Christ!’ he said aloud, in misery, feeling pressure behind his eyes. He found a handkerchief and blew his nose with trembling hands. He waited till he thought he could stand up without stumbling or crying with rage, then looked up into Woolner’s sympathetic, enquiring face.

  ‘Sir? We have two cars with radio here.’

  ‘I’m coming, give me a minute.’ He was still hardly able to speak or move. He felt as if a giant animal were pressing on his shoulders and back, too heavy to shift. He thought of Francesca, who was wheeling and dealing in Doncaster and must be told the news before she heard it elsewhere, drew in a deep breath and steadied himself. He looked again at the broken body, the back arched over the pile of joists, the helmet pushed down over the forehead by the impact of the fall and said goodbye silently. Then he got shakily to his feet and turned to the task of finding the person or persons, so far unknown, who had, this time, succeeded in effecting the murder of Alan Fraser.

  10

  ‘Chief Inspector?’ Jimmy Stewart had been standing in the doorway of his office watching the big, dark bloke behind the desk for a full minute before realizing the policeman was oblivious of his presence. ‘Sorry to bother you, but I’ve a late shift on and I’ve to decide what to do with them, whether to keep them on or send them away. Do you want them kept?’

  McLeish reluctantly stopped making notes. ‘No, it doesn’t make any odds if you send them home, provided we are sure we have everyone’s address. I’d like you to stay, and everyone who is left in the canteen.’

  ‘Young Michael Hamilton’s away at St Mary’s, you know. The nurse didn’t like just to send him back to the caravan.’

  ‘Yes, that’s all right.’

  Jimmy Stewart, interested, considered the bent head. ‘You’ve talked to him, then?’

  The dark head came up and Stewart wished he hadn’t asked, although the bloke behind the desk was a good bit younger than him.

  ‘Briefly, yes. And there is a man by his bed. I take it all the Vernons have gone home, too?’

  ‘Aye. But Nigel Makin is still here if you want him – in his office in this building.’

  ‘I thought we’d taken over all your offices?’

  Stewart, feeling relief at this sign of humanity, said that Nigel Makin’s office was no bigger than a broom-cupboard, so the assembled police forces had been good enough to spare it to them.

  ‘Sorry, but I didn’t want to let people disperse before we’d had at least a preliminary go round the course.’

  Jimmy Stewart nodded, wondered whether to risk any of the questions in his mind and decided against it. The speed with which the investigation had got under way had been impressive. The bloke currently occupying his office, who had appeared from nowhere as Fraser fell, had assembled in the canteen all the visitors plus Fraser’s scaffolding team, the canteen staff and the top management, and had stationed a uniformed policeman at the door. He had commandeered a site secretary and dispatched the rest of the site to continue work, with two uniformed policemen on the gate to dissuade anyone from leaving. Within about twenty minutes, so it seemed to Stewart, the site had been taken over by police: young, uniformed men, looking about sixteen apiece, and older tougher ones in plain clothes, some of whom he recognized as being from the Edgware Road CID. Within two hours the group in the canteen was down to six people, all the others having been interviewed by three separate teams who had taken over the site offices. No doubt about this chap, who looked enormous behind his cramped desk, being in charge of the lot. They all deferred to him, even the tall man in a good suit who had come to look at the body for half an hour or so before an ambulance had finally been allowed to take it away.

  Stewart hesitated in the corridor of the Portakabin, the office door still open, and squinted up into the powerful lights which were cutting through the gathering darkness of this September night. He could just see the police group, helmeted and moving gingerly, as they crawled about the scaffolding platform from which Fraser had fallen. He looked down the site and under the light saw a small group of his staff, deprived of their offices, huddled with the resident engineers, blue helmets mixed with green. He pushed his own helmet back, deciding, reluctantly, that he would do better to call off this shift and send everyone home. With the offices full of police, his staff and the engineers had nowhere to operate from – control would inevitably be lost and papers would go astray. And he would lose half the site shortly, anyway, unless he got the canteen back into action: the men had been working for over three hours since the five-thirty break, and they should have another break at nine-thirty. He was already on borrowed time … but it would be difficult to arrange again for the road to be closed for twelve hours; you were looking at three weeks’ delay there, and, bugger it, he had a job to do, too. He stepped back into his office and shut the door decisively.

  ‘I need the canteen, you see, if I’m to keep the shift on.’

  The big policeman looked back at him and you could see he was a careful bloke, for all he was young.

  ‘Yes, I do see.’ He pulled himself to his feet bumping his knee on the desk, and plunged past him down the corridor, knocked at the door of the next office and went in. He emerged a minute later, summoned Stewart to follow him, and walked over to the canteen. The staff were sitting in a closed, suspicious group at the end-table, the four men playing cards and the three women knitting. At another table sat the remaining two members of Fraser’s gang, looking pinched and cold, slumped like sacks of potatoes.

  ‘That’s all right, I’ll take these two with me and put them in an office to wait. You get the canteen open. Give everyone something to eat. We’ll be through in the offices in an hour.’ He nodded, collected the two Irishmen and walked out, leaving Stewart to jolly the canteen staff into action. The phone was ringing as McLeish walked back into the office and he snatched it up.

  ‘Which of the boys is it, John, just tell me?’

  He blinked at the phone and slowly remembered that he had left a message at the hotel in Doncaster for Francesca to phone him urgently. Of course she had thought first of her brothers.

  ‘Sorry, darling, it’s nothing to do with them. It’s Alan Fraser. He’s been killed in a fall on the Western Underpass.’

  He listened to the shocked silence at the other end of the phone and realized he might have broken the news more gently if he had not, somewhere, resented the fact that her first thought had been for her brothers. ‘I’m sorry. I was there, I saw it,’ he said, in exculpation.

  ‘Oh, darling. My poor John. I’ll come back, I’ll get the milk train from Doncaster.’

  One of the advantages of a girl with four brothers, on the other hand, he thought, his head aching suddenly with unshed tears, was that she was unmoved by male macho behaviour. He would be wasting his time trying to tell her this death was all in a day’s work.

  ‘Don’t come back,’ he said. ‘I’ll be fully occupied tomorrow – I just didn’t want you to see it in the papers.’

  ‘I’m coming. Henry can cope here, now I’ve introduced him.’ The clear voice was definite. ‘What are you doing tomorrow, anyway? Is it Croydon again?’

  ‘No. We’re treating this one as murder, and it’s mine to do.’

  ‘Murder?’

  ‘Better not talk on the phone.’

  ‘Oh, Christ. Darling John, are you sure you haven’t gone OTT because you loved him? People do fall off scaffolds.’

  ‘The lads in Wester Ross found a yellow anorak hidden on the hill yesterday,’ McLeish said, between his teeth, and waited out the silence on the phone.

  ‘Ah. There was someone above Alan on the hill that day, then. And everyone else at your end has been asking you, a)
are you sure about this? And b) if you are sure, ought you to be doing it because you are involved? I’m sorry, darling. Kind men have just looked up the milk train for me and it is impossible – I’ll come down on the first train tomorrow, and at least I’ll be in London.’

  ‘I’d be glad to have you,’ he conceded, cheered as always by her swiftness of comprehension.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘Finish here – it’ll take an hour or so – then go home, then start again from the Yard in the morning. I can’t operate out of these offices permanently.’

  ‘I know you don’t want to talk on the phone, but how did he fall? Was he pushed?’

  ‘No, he fell. The autopsy may tell me why.’

  The silence at the other end of the line was eloquent in its distress for him. She broke it first. ‘I agree, it’s hopeless to talk on the phone. I’ll brief Henry, get to bed, and I’ll be on the seven o’clock train.

  An hour later John McLeish had done all he could. Everyone near Fraser on the scaffold, or who had seen the fall, had been interviewed briefly, as well as the group who had eaten tea with him. Fraser, it appeared, had been working rather slowly, but nothing untoward had happened until he had suddenly swayed on his feet, clasped at a bar, and before Mickey, working near him, could get close enough to grab him, he was gone. The two Irishmen, whom McLeish had interviewed personally – brothers, classically christened Patrick and Michael Doolan – had been working ten feet above. They had sworn, tearfully, that neither of them had dislodged anything which could have fallen on Fraser, pointing out that this was a recognized hazard for inexperienced scaffolders and just did not happen to people like themselves. There was not much to drop either, as Michael, the more intelligent of the two, had pointed out – really only a choice of a scaffolding key or a bolt, either of which would have bounced off Fraser’s helmet; that was what a helmet was for.

  ‘You’d want to drop a length of steel on your man to push him off,’ he had said, sweating slightly with anxiety and conviction, ‘and that’s happened before, but no one dropped any steel today.’

  Mickey Hamilton, trembling and clammy with shock, had not been all that clear as a witness, but he was certain he had not seen anything fall. Fraser had just handed up a length of steel to the Doolan brothers, told them that he was going off-site for a bit and to cover for him – and had fallen a few seconds later. All three men had apparently been in such a state of shock that this evidence was not wholly dependable, but McLeish had his own reasons for thinking it unlikely that this had been an accident caused by a fellow scaffolder’s careless move.

  He was organizing papers into a set of envelopes when Jimmy Stewart put his head tentatively round the door. ‘You can have your office back any minute, Mr Stewart. I’m sorry to have kept you out of it.’

  ‘I’ll be glad of it,’ Stewart said drily, ‘but it’s not what I came for. There’s a man at the gate asking for you, not one of yours – I mean, not police. The lad you have on there didn’t feel he should leave the gate, or let him in, so he asked me to carry a message. He’s called Perry Wilson – he says he knows you.’

  McLeish looked at him blankly, then realized what had happened. Francesca, prevented from arriving instantly by the small matter of a 200-mile journey and no trains, had organized a substitute for herself. How old did she think he was? he wondered, torn between love and exasperation. He told Stewart he would come himself and walked out into the night with him.

  He had been working with the window tightly shut and the noise seemed very loud as he emerged. The road that ran along the edge of the side and fed traffic into the main road had been closed; police barriers could be seen to left and to right, and the closed road was bridged by a giant crane, with men swarming round it. The whole scene was lit more brightly than the day by arc lights. As McLeish watched, alarm hooters sounded, the dozen men who had been clustered round some object on the other side of the road retreated, and all the bobbing helmets moved well clear, blue helmets grouped together, apart from the green. The crane engine whined, and infinitely slowly a huge concrete beam rose from the ground, steadied and started to move sideways, its progress barely perceptible across the road.

  ‘That’s the casting yard over there,’ Stewart shouted in his ear. ‘We cast those beams on site – they’re too big to shift round the country – but there isn’t room on this side of the road so we do it over there. Every three weeks we close that slip road and take the beams over. Blue helmets for resident engineers – look at them, we must have every one of Rickett’s top brass here, waiting for us to drop one.’

  ‘Would it break?’

  ‘If it started to swing – see that now?’ Stewart fell silent.

  The beam had developed a very slight pendulum action and a man on the ground was semaphoring violently to the crane-driver perched high above the site, lit up in his cabin. The note of the crane changed and everyone waited, watching, while the pendulum stilled. When the beam was completely steady the crane started again in its infinitely delicate task.

  ‘Let it get swinging, you see, and it’ll break the chains and come off. It might not break itself, though likely it’ll come off one end at a time and would break – but it’d break whatever it fell on. Or whoever; that’s why you have everyone standing clear. Though it’s not usually on jobs like this you get the accidents – it’s the odd ones, like drivers backing into people on site.’

  ‘Or people falling off scaffolds.’ McLeish completed his thoughts for him, deciding that a man whose entire site had been disrupted while he was trying to do a job as delicate as this one deserved some minimal explanation. ‘We had information that someone was laying for Fraser, that’s why I’m not treating it as an accident.’

  ‘Ah.’ Stewart suddenly looked quite different, as if his whole perspective had changed.

  ‘Keep that to yourself.’

  ‘I will, yes. There’s your visitor.’ He pointed to the gate where two figures could be seen, chatting comfortably. They resolved themselves into young Woolner from Edgware Road, getting in a bit of overtime, and Peregrine, dark and tidy, propping a piece of paper on the gatepost as he wrote on it. As they arrived he handed the paper to Woolner, who could be seen thanking him.

  ‘Making you sign a statement?’ McLeish asked with interest.

  ‘Not yet,’ Perry said, amicably. ‘How are you, John? I am sorry to hear about all this.’

  Woolner, rather pink, was shoving the paper in his tunic and explaining that he had younger sisters for whom he had solicited Mr Wilson’s autograph. McLeish led Peregrine firmly away.

  ‘It’s good of you to come, Perry, but I could probably have got home to bed by myself.’

  The younger man considered him, unembarrassed. ‘She didn’t tell me to come, you know; she just rang me to make sure I’d heard, since I knew Alan too. I came to keep you company.’

  Oh God, McLeish thought, both touched and embarrassed, I have become a Wilson brother. When I am thought to be in trouble or distress, one of this quartet will come lolloping through the snow with a keg of brandy round his neck. He decided he had never been sufficiently grateful for his own, more distant family relationships.

  ‘I also came’, the St Bernard by his side was saying earnestly, ‘because I am worried about something and Frannie said I must tell you at once.’

  Please God, not drugs, not now, McLeigh prayed fervently.

  ‘Mickey Hamilton. I met him briefly with you and Frannie in Scotland, remember? She ticked me off for saying, perfectly truthfully, that he was gay, and so indeed was half of Grantchester Coll. when he was there. He is here – I mean, he was scaffolding with Alan?’

  ‘Yes, Perry. You do think he’s gay?’

  ‘Oh yes. I don’t know if he always was or whether he got into it at school, but he was involved in a huge scandal during his last year at Grantchester. It was one of those rows that had everything: drugs, small boys – well thirteen-year-olds – a creepy local nobleman
with a triple-barrelled surname, Saturday evening parties at his country house – the lot. It was kept quiet, of course, and I think no one was actually expelled, if only because most of the older boys involved were leaving anyway, so they just went home a bit earlier. The aristocratic poofter shot himself: that was public, of course. The name’s escaped me since all this is nine years ago. Two masters got the push. And the Head retired early, three months later.’

  ‘It does come back to me. I hadn’t realized the school had been so much involved. How do you know all this, Perry? Oh, of course, Tristram’s football shirt.’

  Perry, always quick on the uptake, said he absolutely agreed that Frannie must be made to stop wearing up all their old clothes, their poverty-stricken, anxious youth being well past, and that he would willingly buy all her clothes for her if she would let him.

  ‘The point is, however,’ he went on firmly, ‘and Charlie and I still congratulate ourselves on this, that Tristram had actually left the school when the scandal broke. He left after his first year there and went to Teversham – Charlie’s school. He was having trouble at Grantchester – the place was an absolute hotbed, the Head was queer as the proverbial coot and that set the tone. So we fixed him up a place at Teversham – my own school not being considered quite adequate for one as clever as Tristram – and he moved there after his first year. Charlie had a word with his housemaster, too, at Grantchester, to make sure he came to no harm in the mean time.’

  ‘How old was Charlie?’

  ‘Oh, turned seventeen. That was why we thought he had better do it, rather than me.’

  McLeish enquired, fascinated, where in all this the Wilsons’ perfectly competent mother had been, and where indeed their older sister? Perry sighed. ‘We told Mum some of it afterwards. She’d only have got rattled, poor old bat, she is one of four sisters, no brothers, and she didn’t really understand about boys or boys’ schools. And Frannie had just gone up to Cambridge and was lost to us for a bit. Anyway, we fixed it, I mean Teversham was very glad to get Tris, he’s a very good tenor and did them proud. Got a minor scholarship to Magdalene, after all. But what I’m trying to tell you, John, is that although we heard about the whole thing from boys who had been in Tristram’s year, lots of other people knew. The school had gone totally to pot, most of the older boys were involved. One of that particular sixth form, who is in Fran’s Department, failed his positive vetting to work for the Secretary of State even eight years later.’