Death on Site

by Janet Neel

  ‘Was she cross with you for not telling her all this at the time?’ McLeish asked with interest.

  ‘Now you mention it, yes, rather,’ Perry said, amused. ‘But she said at once that I must tell you, and it wasn’t just raking up old gossip. Hamilton was in neck-and-neck competition with Alan for a place on the K6 expedition – anything, including an old scandal, might have made a difference. And he was on the tower with Alan when he fell.’

  McLeish held open the door of the site office for Perry, thinking hard. ‘Would Alan have known this history? He wasn’t exactly in the public school net?’

  ‘Well, they’d known each other for yonks, hadn’t they? Mickey’s parents were summer visitors. I don’t mean Alan was gay – quite the reverse, let me tell you, he was having a thing with one of the girls who was with Sheena on the Calendar shoot – but they were close friends. Hamilton probably had told him. Or someone else might have – as I said, quite a lot of people knew about it nine years ago.’

  McLeish decided that, as he had thought before, the siblings’ view of Perry as the least clever of them was wrong. He might not be as academically able as the rest but he was much the most perceptive about human relations. It was all too possible to envisage a younger Hamilton, shaken by the whole incident, confiding in a friend from a different world. Might Alan Fraser have used that knowledge nine years later to give himself the edge in a competition for a coveted place on a climbing expedition?

  ‘The thing about Alan is – was – that he was the sort of bloke people told things to.’ Perry was sitting on the edge of Stewart’s desk watching the crane. ‘Just like making a film,’ he observed with interest; ‘endless men armed with clipboards standing around under huge arc lights while three blokes actually do something. Sorry, I got sidetracked. I well remember confiding in Alan myself that summer in Scotland when I was fifteen – I was in a state, my voice had gone, I wasn’t sure I would ever sing again, and there were Tris and Jeremy making records, loved by all, piling up the cash. Talk about green-eyed.’

  McLeish was listening, fascinated, having never before heard this golden star express any doubt at all about himself.

  ‘So I wept all over Alan, who was only a couple of years older. I can’t remember what he said to cheer me up but I felt a lot better afterwards.’

  He paused, still not looking at McLeish. ‘But if you think about what fifteen-year-old boys are like, John, it was fairly remarkable that I felt able to tell my troubles to anyone, never mind a contemporary. Alan was like that.’

  Yes, indeed, McLeish thought, and remembered with pain how easily he had been able to talk to the dead man who had been some five years younger than him. So others must have felt like that: Alan Fraser was probably a walking repository of other people’s secrets, as those detached personalities often were, and it was possible that he had been killed to eliminate the knowledge in his head.

  ‘Thanks, Perry,’ he said. ‘I must look all that up – I’ll have to talk to Hamilton again anyway.’

  ‘He has no form, John, no one was charged. So somebody has to have told you. If you have to say it was me, then you have to.’

  ‘It’s more than likely Hamilton will tell me himself.’

  ‘Unless he killed Alan?’

  McLeish agreed this was a reasonable caveat, and said that he was now going to go home.

  ‘Can I drive you? The Car and Biff are in some unsavoury back street around here – I left him fending off offers of Illegal Substances.’

  ‘If you’ve brought that Rolls down here, sunshine, you’d better go and find it again. The local lads have probably got the wheels off by now. I’ve got my own car here, thanks.’ He stepped back to let Perry through, momentarily anxious lest he kiss him as he invariably kissed his brothers, and saw Perry’s eyebrows peak in amusement.

  ‘Sleep well, John,’ he advised, patting him on the shoulder. ‘See you soon.’

  By ten o’clock the next morning McLeish had survived an interview with his Chief Superintendent, who was uneasy, as he had been the day before, about leaving him in charge of the case because of his personal involvement. McLeish had sat tight, watching his superior work himself once more through the logical steps which in the end came down to a) it was plainly a case for CI, given the earlier history in Scotland; b) investigations must start quickly; and c) there was no one else at CI above the rank of detective sergeant who had any time at all. The Division, always under pressure, had been further hit by the defection of one of McLeish’s fellow DCIs, a quiet well-liked chap in his fifties, who had come in the day before, looking like a ghost, and while assuring his secretary that he felt fine, had cried out and sunk to the floor in the throes of a major heart attack. He was now in intensive care. Even the Chief Superintendent, it was felt, would have to accept this, however reluctantly, as disqualifying him from taking on a new case.

  ‘The fact that Robert Vernon and his wife were there makes it more difficult – you don’t suspect them, I take it?’

  ‘They were there, both in Scotland and at the site, sir,’ McLeish said patiently. ‘Six people were around both yesterday and in Scotland on the day that Fraser fell: Mr and Mrs Vernon, their daughter Sally, his son Bill, plus Nigel Makin, Sally’s fiancé. And, of course, Mickey Hamilton, Fraser’s oppo, who is in St Mary’s.’

  ‘Hamilton must be the best bet, surely?’ The Chief was sounding hopeful.

  ‘He’s where I’m starting.’

  His superior regarded him balefully. ‘You just keep me in touch, John, you hear? Yes, Mary, I’m coming – I’ll be somewhere in Devon the rest of today and the night, John. We’ve got that rapist, or the lads think we have, and it turns out he’s one of the local bigwigs, wouldn’t you know it? Right, I’m off.’ He stood up, a square, round-headed tough, six inches shorter and fifteen years older than McLeish. ‘Don’t get yourself in a mess, John,’ he advised. ‘You find you’re too close to it, tell me and we’ll find someone else.’ He bent a basilisk look on McLeish and dared him to wonder aloud precisely who else? ‘Autopsy through yet? No? Idle buggers. All right, Mary.’

  McLeish stood aside so as not to impede his headlong progress and watched as he marched down the corridor still giving instructions to his secretary who was running to keep up with him.

  He went soberly back to his own office to find six telephone messages stuck to his blotter. The first was from Francesca and said simply that she would be in her office at the DTI by eleven. The next asked him to ring a colleague in Forensic; that would be the preliminary autopsy results and could wait for five minutes. The third sent his eyebrows right up – Sally Vernon was asking to see him, at any time today, and was at home waiting for his call. The fourth was from Dorothy Vernon, asking only that he would ring the same number. He looked at both those messages twice, uneasily, and decided to leave them for a few minutes too. The fifth was from Sergeant McKinnon at Carrbrae, offering his presence forthwith if required, giving a list of places where he would be reached that day, and confirming that he had been to see Fraser’s mother and grandmother. The final message was from the man on duty at St Mary’s: Mickey Hamilton had been passed, if not fit, at least as not needing a hospital bed, by the doctor on duty that morning and was wanting to discharge himself; would DCI McLeish please advise?

  Of these, only the last one was urgent. Unless he was planning to issue a warrant for Hamilton’s arrest, he had no power to cause him to be kept anywhere he did not want to be. A decision needed making quickly to spare the man on the spot embarrassment. McLeish got through to him and asked to speak to Hamilton.

  ‘I don’t have to stay here.’ Hamilton sounded shaky and frightened.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ McLeish agreed. ‘You are one of the people I most need to talk to, since you and the Doolan brothers were closest to Fraser when he fell. I’m basing myself at Edgware Road; they’ve given me a room there. Could we meet there, say, in an hour and a half, and we’ll try and get clear what happened?’

  ‘
I told you what happened last night.’

  ‘Not really. You were too shocked to be making much sense, so I only spent about ten minutes with you. I need to go over the whole thing, if you are feeling well enough.’ He listened to the silence at the other end.

  ‘I must go back to the caravan and get some clothes.’ The voice sounded strained, and McLeish sighed.

  ‘You were sharing with Fraser, weren’t you? You’ll find that some of my blokes are there doing a search through his kit. They’ll let you in to get your things.’

  ‘Oh God.’ Hamilton sounded daunted.

  ‘Tell you what,’ McLeish offered. ‘Let me talk to the chap on duty outside your room. He can take you to the site, and bring you on to Edgware Road.’

  ‘You’re arresting me!’

  ‘No, I’m not, I’m just trying to get you to Edgware Road in the easiest possible way. Do it how you like – only I need to talk to you today.’

  The pause lengthened, and McLeish hooked the phone between his shoulder and his ear and shuffled the other five messages into order. If Hamilton decided not to accept the offer of an escort, he would nonetheless be followed and dissuaded from doing anything other than come straight to Edgware Road.

  ‘All right, have it your way.’ The voice was grudging but no longer so shaky. ‘I’ll call the copper outside the door, and you can tell him what to do.’

  ‘Thank you,’ and McLeish economically instructed Detective Constable Andersen, whom he knew from his time at Edgware Road.

  The autopsy was clearly next in importance, so he rang through.

  ‘You’ll have it written by late this afternoon, John,’ the voice assured him, cheerily. ‘We might not have found it so quickly if you hadn’t told us what happened before he fell. No wonder he turned giddy – he was full of antihistamine – quite a lot still in the stomach. You know, John, the stuff that people take for hay-fever. No, you can buy the pills over the counter, there are lots of proprietary brands. They’re all a bit different, but we’ll be able to tell you which later today. They all come labelled that they can cause dizziness or drowsiness and shouldn’t be used if you are in charge of machinery – or if you are a hundred feet up, building a scaffolding tower, as they doubtless do not think to tell you. What? No, no, far too much for him to have taken in the ordinary way. He was given it, all right.’

  McLeish thanked him and rang off, shaken, with an echo in his mind. He picked the last message off the bottom of his pack and got through immediately.

  ‘Fran? Darling, nice to have you back, but just listen, will you? Get the mob out of your office.’ He waited while Francesca cleared her office which, as he could hear, was as usual full of people. She had a bigger permanent staff than he did and she had been out of her office for twenty-four hours.

  ‘You remember when you went climbing with Hamish and turned giddy because you took antihistamine? Who was there when you apologized to Hamish?’

  ‘Is that what happened to Alan?’

  ‘Seems so.’

  ‘Oh God, oh God. Someone got the idea from me!’

  ‘Frannie, stop. Whoever it was would have thought of something else.’ He cursed himself for not having realized how far ahead he was in his thinking, and for not breaking the news more gently.

  ‘Sorry to spring it on you,’ he said, lamely. ‘I’d just got the autopsy result you see.’

  ‘It’s OK.’ She had herself in hand, and was back in the hotel’s recreation room, the old piano beneath her hands. ‘You were there; and Robert Vernon, Sally, Bill and Nigel Makin were playing table tennis. Then, later, when I apologized to Hamish, everyone was there – you remember it was wet – all the Strathclyde boys, Perry, Alan himself, Mickey … and Dorothy Vernon had come down by then. But it doesn’t really matter who was and wasn’t there. You know what the claque is like – by evening everyone in the hotel and doubtless away to Carrbrae would have known that a tourist had to be half-carried down off the rock because the fool had taken antihistamine tablets to clear her head.’ She stopped, and McLeish heard her blow her nose.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said, sadly.

  ‘Can we have lunch?’

  ‘I’m sorry again. I’m taking a statement from Mickey Hamilton. Ring up Peregrine.’

  ‘He rang five minutes ago and offered, but I was waiting for you to call. I know he saw you last night.’ She was fighting tears, he could hear, and his heart was wrung. ‘I’ll do that, though. I need him.’

  It’s not him you need, it’s me, John McLeish thought furiously, and I’m not available and won’t be till God knows when. What a bloody job this is.

  11

  ‘Sally, your father and I would both rather we had Ted Hughes here.’ Dorothy Vernon was sitting by the side of her daughter’s bed, holding her hands. ‘Now, stop crying, this is no time to give up. You rang up Francesca’s boyfriend – I must stop calling him that, I mean Chief Inspector McLeish – but he hasn’t rung you back. What are you going to say to him?’

  She shook her head at Robert Vernon who was hovering in the doorway. ‘Don’t you go thinking you can treat him as a friend, my girl, he’s a policeman. Ted Hughes says he’s young to be a Chief Inspector, so he’s good. What are you going to say to him?’

  ‘What I told you the day before yesterday.’ Sally’s fine blonde hair was clinging wispily to her neck, and the clear skin was blotched and mottled so that she looked about fifteen years old, and plain with it. ‘The second test was positive, so I’m pregnant. And I don’t know who the father is.’

  ‘There’s no need to make yourself interesting.’ Dorothy Vernon was pale with anger and distress, and had put on too much jewellery; bracelets like handcuffs flashed in the light as she reached to take away Sally’s breakfast tray. ‘There are only the two candidates, aren’t there? And it’s something that’s happened to other women before.’

  ‘It’s more likely to be Alan’s than Nigel’s,’ Sally said, tearfully.

  ‘Did you tell Alan that? I know you told him you were pregnant, but did you tell him he was the likely father?’

  ‘Yes, yesterday morning. Just before I told you. He said he didn’t see it was any more likely to be his than Nigel’s.’ Sally sniffed and reached for her handkerchief. ‘Then he said he was sorry, ignore that, but equally he couldn’t marry me or anyone now, and he’d help me with the money to get rid of it, if I was sure that was what I wanted. And then he said that since it could be Nigel’s maybe I would prefer just to marry Nigel and I need never worry that he’d say anything.’ Tears of rage and distress started to pour down her face again and Dorothy Vernon called to her husband who she knew was still outside the door to get a wet flannel and come and help.

  He mopped Sally’s face tenderly for her, then sat back on the other side of the bed, looking wretched. ‘And he had someone else,’ she said, seizing the flannel and scrubbing at her face.

  ‘I could kill the bastard,’ Robert Vernon said, and both women looked at him in horror. ‘Jesus. I forgot. I’m sorry.’

  Sally Vernon pulled herself together with an effort of will and gently released her hands from her parents’.

  ‘I’ve got to talk to the police, and I don’t mind talking to John McLeish; he was nice to me and he knew Alan. Then I’ve got to decide what to do.’

  Her parents, both tough, competent, extremely successful people, looked back at her helplessly.

  ‘If you weren’t pregnant, would you now want to marry Nigel?’ Dorothy Vernon, practical to the backbone, broke the silence to ask, and her daughter looked back at her with approval.

  ‘The right question, Ma. I wouldn’t marry anyone right now.’

  Robert Vernon was looking explosive but his wife shook her head at him. ‘You don’t want a baby without a husband,’ she stated kindly but firmly, and her daughter looked back at her resentfully.

  ‘That isn’t necessarily true, Mum. I know you waited five years to have me, till you and Dad could marry, but it’s different now.’ />
  ‘No, it isn’t.’ Dorothy Vernon spoke with the flat confidence of unshakeable moral standards. ‘A baby needs two parents who have agreed to stick together in a proper legal arrangement.’

  ‘It might have red hair,’ Sally said, and started to cry again.

  Dorothy Vernon raised her eyes to heaven and bustled her seething husband out of the room with instructions to ring up John McLeish and arrange for him to come round, and to get their personal solicitor, Ted Hughes, over. Robert Vernon agreed to call the Yard, but refused the solicitor. ‘He can see her with you in the room, Dolly. I don’t want even Ted Hughes in on this. She’s done nothing wrong.’

  Dorothy Vernon shut the bedroom door gently behind her and turned to face him.

  ‘That young man turned her down flat the day before yesterday, and she’s not used to that. It’s my fault as much as yours, don’t think I’m putting the responsibility on you, Robert, but she’s not been crossed much. And she’s pregnant, and you and I know that does funny things. I don’t know how that lad fell off a scaffold with no one within ten feet of him, but there’s something funny. The police aren’t treating it as an accident either.’

  Robert Vernon looked at her, then stopped to take her in his arms. She was very pale except for spots of red over her cheekbones and she was looking ten years older.