Death on Site

by Janet Neel

  ‘Is there anything else you can think of that might be helpful?’ he asked unhopefully, and watched as Mickey politely appeared to rack his brains without producing anything useful. He gave it up, and explained that Mickey’s answers would be produced as a statement which he would be asked to sign.

  ‘Are you going to talk to any of the K6 people?’ Mickey asked abruptly, and McLeish saw a chance.

  ‘Not yet. But, as you must see, if they say they would have taken Alan rather than you it does give you a motive.’

  ‘I didn’t kill him.’

  ‘Then you have nothing to worry about.’

  ‘You might upset the sponsors.’

  ‘I’m not going to talk to them unless I have to.’ McLeish watched Mickey bite his nails.

  ‘They probably would have taken Alan if he was available and there was only one place, just because he is better known. I don’t mind telling you that, if that’s what you want to know. But I could have got on as well – I could have contributed a bit of my costs and they did – do – badly need one more climber.’

  ‘So, unless there were some other reason for not taking you – like your arm for instance,’ McLeish suggested, smoothly watching the flicker of alarm in the brown eyes, ‘you would have reckoned your chances?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Mickey was alert now, watching him carefully. ‘But I’ll agree that they are better with Alan gone.’

  McLeish nodded. By agreeing that Alan had stood at least partially in his way, Hamilton had rendered it formally unnecessary and prejudicial for McLeish to talk to the K6 committee right now.

  McLeish left him to wait while his statement was typed and decided to let Davidson cope: if Mickey had murdered Fraser to get his place on K6 then he wasn’t going to flee the country, or not until the whole expedition left in three weeks’ time. In the mean time, there were other people to interview.

  12

  Robert Vernon, occupying himself with telephoning his managing directors while being driven to the Department of Trade and Industry, knew he was causing agitation. Anxious men all round the United Kingdom were being contacted in their cars and hauled out of their meetings. In one case, where disquieting rumours had been reaching Head Office, the earnest candour with which the secretary explained the difficulties attendant on getting her boss to a telephone had left Robert Vernon grimly convinced that Jarvis was even now being sought frenziedly through the afternoon drinking-clubs of Birmingham. He made a note, and looked up to find that his driver was parked on Victoria Street outside the DTI’s glass frontage, carefully avoiding the eye of a traffic warden. Robert Vernon reluctantly decided that the errant managing director would have to be let off the hook this time; in the hour or so that he would be with these types at the DTI, that competent young woman would most certainly have found her wandering boss, dried him out, and provided him with a decent briefing. Time, however, to go and see that office without giving any notice.

  He got heavily out of the car, aware that he had been distracting himself with work to avoid thinking about his daughter, and found himself explaining his business to a middle-aged uniformed messenger with an uncertain command of the English language.

  ‘That one, there,’ he said, exasperated, as he read his own name upside down on a pink slip of paper among a dozen laid out in a random pattern on the table-top inside the glass cubby-hole. The man looked at him in wild surmise and picked up a wholly different piece of paper. Robert Vernon sighed and suggested he ring Miss Francesca Wilson. The man’s face cleared happily and three minutes later Francesca appeared, demurely grey-suited.

  ‘Thank you, Charlie,’ she said kindly to the messenger. ‘Can I take the chitty?’ She reached into the box, extracted the right slip and took Vernon across worn flooring and up the stairs to the central lifts. The whole operation, he thought, looked incredibly run down and shabby, and he was signally unimpressed by the company in the lift. Francesca was nicely turned out, though wearing much less make-up than the girls in his office, but the rest of this shower looked like a dole queue gone live; not a decently cleaned pair of shoes among them and two dirty collars. His gaze shifted to a smallish older man hunched into the far corner of the lift, whose grey hair had needed cutting for months and who had cigarette ash and what looked like mince down the front of his jacket.

  ‘I want you Francesca,’ this personage said malevolently. ‘Your colleagues are producing for me great nonsense on these rescue cases.’

  Robert Vernon gaped disbelievingly as Francesca courteously assured this aged derelict that she would attend upon him late that afternoon.

  ‘Gerhard Bukowsky – Sir Gerhard – Chief Statistician,’ she explained as they got out on the seventh floor.

  ‘I thought you had to be British to work for the government,’ was all Robert Vernon could find to say.

  ‘For the Foreign Office or the Security Services it is a requirement that you be born a Brit, but not otherwise. It doesn’t seem to do the FCO much good, I’d have to say.’

  Robert Vernon, mentally reviewing the Foreign and Commonwealth’s roll of British-born traitors, could only agree with her. They had arrived by then in an office where the people looked more what he expected. A brisk, conversant young man courteously offered him tea and apologized for the momentary delay, since Mr Westland was still on the telephone. Robert Vernon regarded him with suspicion, in case he sat down at a typewriter, but he showed no signs of doing so. A very large man, not tall but substantial, appeared at the door of the office and welcomed them in; must be carrying all of seventeen stone, Robert Vernon thought disapprovingly.

  ‘Robert, this is Bill Westland. Mr Vernon, Mr Westland.’

  ‘Very good of you to come. I’ve asked Francesca to join us, if that is all right?’

  Francesca smiled at him serenely as Robert confirmed that this would be acceptable. He settled down prepared to give Bill Westland a hard time.

  ‘Francesca – normally a reliable sort of girl – tells me you may be willing to help us with some of our major commercial problems, Mr Vernon? In a non-executive capacity.’

  Clever bugger, Robert Vernon thought, admiring and disarmed, and allowed that this was true.

  ‘You will understand of course that it is the Secretary of State who makes all these appointments, and we are trying to put together a short list for him.’

  ‘A very short list,’ Francesca observed, pouring tea, and totally missing the swift suppressive glare from her senior officer.

  ‘Like that, is it?’ Robert Vernon asked, grinning.

  ‘You have to put up with being messed around,’ Francesca said cheerfully. ‘But we do need you.’

  ‘I doubt if I could have put it any more clearly myself,’ Bill Westland said, clipping his words and favouring her with a basilisk glare that silenced her. ‘But perhaps we could discuss the areas of most interest to you?’

  With Francesca effectively out of action, he and Robert Vernon sparred round each other, achieving understanding if not agreement, and parted amicably with protestations of mutual esteem after forty minutes. In the courteous flurry attendant on finding his briefcase, Francesca observed sotto voce to her godfather that the good Mr Vernon was angling for Chairman of British Engineering, had he not observed?

  ‘Yes, of course, but I have to clear lines. Well, thank you again, Mr Vernon. Francesca, will you see Mr Vernon gets past the dragons all right on the way out?’

  Francesca, relaxed now that she knew she had indeed brought off a major coup, trotted to the lift, moving fast to keep up with Robert Vernon who was noticing that this time the place was full of older women in brown cardigans looking like superannuated librarians. Having got the feel of the organization by now, he decided gloomily that they were probably all senior advisers of unimaginable distinction.

  ‘You going to be working here when you’re sixty, Francesca?’ he enquired with interest, as they got out of the lift.

  ‘I’d rather turn out like that than be locked up at
home with two sets of twins,’ she said, effortlessly following his line of thought, and he laughed aloud.

  ‘Someone’s got to have the babies – you’re as bad as my Sally.’ He scowled thinking of his Sally, and Francesca watching him covertly said how awful it had been about Alan Fraser; she herself had been told late last night, but she understood all the Vernons had actually been on the site.

  ‘Yes,’ Robert Vernon said heavily. ‘I’m just off home to sit with Sally while she sees your young man.’

  ‘You needn’t,’ Francesca said, bristling slightly. ‘Sit with her I mean – John’s very orthodox, and he wouldn’t bully her.’

  Robert Vernon did not comment, and they walked on in silence.

  ‘I expect she’s very upset?’ Francesca ventured, and wished she hadn’t, as he gave her a suspicious sideways glance. ‘I mean, she’d known Alan for some years, hadn’t she? And she was actually there – awful for anyone. John was very upset and he’d only met him this summer.’

  Robert Vernon’s face relaxed. ‘That’s true, right enough. Yes, it was a bad shock to her.’ He paused and added carefully that she had found Alan Fraser particularly attractive.

  ‘Indeed he was,’ Francesca confirmed tranquilly.

  ‘You didn’t fancy him?’ Robert Vernon asked with interest.

  ‘No, I didn’t. I was just wondering why. I guess it’s mostly because he was younger than me and I have four younger brothers – I mean, I’m immune to anyone younger. Viewed objectively, not much of a bet as a boyfriend either – he’d have been half-way up a mountain whenever you wanted him, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right. And a one for the girls, by all accounts.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s right. You remember, my brother Perry took him off to Ardnacraig to see the Pollock Calendar shoot? He was apparently a tremendous hit. Gail Smith – that dazzler who does the Levi ads – was very smitten. He’d been seeing her in London.’

  She put out her hand to shake Robert Vernon’s in farewell and he held it thoughtfully.

  ‘Difficult bloke altogether.’

  ‘If you mean bloody-minded, yes. That’s why we quarrelled all those years ago – I knew he ought to go back to school for a year and get his Highers. Boys always get restless and want to leave school when they’re sixteen, and you just have to jolly them along. No chance, no way, no one could make him, even though it would have been to his advantage.’

  She was looking pink and annoyed even at the memory of this tussle, and Robert Vernon nodded. ‘I found that with him myself,’ he observed and Francesca looked at him enquiringly, but he was not willing to expand.

  ‘I must go, Francesca. Thank you for arranging that,’ he added as an afterthought. He wrung her hand and hastened out of the door, leaving her wondering what in the conversation had disconcerted him. She watched him go, remembering Alan in the bar after a climb with her John, both of them laughing, John pale with exhaustion but a deeply happy man, and felt ashamed of herself. Whatever her own reservations about Alan, he had been much loved.

  John McLeish was also thinking about Alan Fraser as he and Bruce Davidson were eating their first Big Macs, a second round cooling in their boxes in the car. A bag of apples also awaited their attention, courtesy of Francesca, who had been so appalled by his description of the average detective’s diet that she had taken to pressing health-giving supplements on him.

  ‘Have an apple, Bruce. Fran says we’ll get scurvy or rickets if we don’t eat properly.’

  ‘Ye’re under her thumb, John. She’ll be seeing ye have the school milk at break next.’

  ‘What else has she given me?’ McLeish decided to ignore that.

  The bag turned out to contain a promising-looking crunchy bar which, in the event, was constructed from the sweepings from a threshing-floor stuck together with treacle. He ate an apple hastily to try and get rid of some of the grit but he was still picking bits of chaff from his teeth, with Davidson who had refused one grinning smugly, as he arrived at the Vernon stronghold. A uniformed driver took his car away – still covered with the fine cement dust that hung everywhere in the air around the Western Underpass site – and another man showed him up.

  They were received by Dorothy Vernon, nicely dressed in a suit he would have had difficulty describing, but with the usual flash of diamonds at her ears.

  ‘Come in, Mr McLeish.’ She had called him John in Scotland but made an easy transition to formality, and he introduced Davidson.

  ‘You won’t mind if Robert and I sit with you while you are talking to Sally? She’s still very upset.’

  ‘Certainly, if that is what she wants.’

  Dorothy Vernon gave him the sharp look of one whose requests to men of his age did not usually receive qualified answers, and he smiled patiently back at her. She showed him into a smaller room where Sally, dressed, very pale and swollen-faced, was sitting in a large leather chair. Her father’s study, McLeish realized, easing himself into another vast chair while Bruce Davidson established himself in a corner.

  Dorothy Vernon made to sit, but Sally stopped her. ‘I’m OK, Mum. I’d rather just do this myself. Honestly.’ The bright brown eyes, so like her father’s, glinted in the tear-stained face and Dorothy Vernon yielded, reluctantly.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ she offered, clearly seeing a way in.

  Sally refused promptly and McLeish murmured that he and Davidson had just had lunch, so Dorothy Vernon left. Formidable woman, McLeish thought; no sign of temper or being thwarted, though it probably didn’t happen to her much these days.

  He considered the girl before him, her blonde hair looking dull, unwashed and lifeless. ‘You know why we are here?’

  He got a nod.

  ‘We are treating Alan Fraser’s death as murder because the autopsy found a high concentration of antihistamine in his blood. In my terms, he would have had to have taken about thirty tablets, and it is not possible he did that by accident.’

  ‘Did he fall in Scotland by accident the day you rescued him?’

  ‘That must now also be open to question.’

  He waited patiently to see if she had anything more to say, then explained that he would be wanting her to tell him as much as she could about the events of the day before. ‘Do you always have tea in the canteen?’

  ‘Only when the site is working late. It is disgusting, that canteen, all greasy food – but it is the only way of getting a meal without going off site. I’d gone to the pub for lunch, and I didn’t want to do that again.’

  ‘Did you know your parents would be there?’

  ‘No. I knew Dad was visiting the site, we all did; everyone had been tidying up for days. Mum decided to come at the last minute. I suppose we might have guessed they would turn up in the canteen since it was the only one on the site, but I didn’t think of it. Nor did anyone else, judging by the state of the place.’ She looked at him, obviously remembering something. ‘I knew you were meeting Alan, though.’

  McLeish stared at her, feeling rather than hearing Davidson stop writing behind him. ‘He told you?’

  ‘No, Nigel did. He was passed the message and asked to get it to Alan – it was just a phone message you see – and he told me. Bill was with him – in fact, he took the message up to Alan.’

  McLeish sat, feeling as if he had turned to stone. Fraser had been killed just before he was due to meet him, and three people who had been in Scotland at the time of the earlier attack knew of the meeting.

  ‘You presumably knew I was a policeman – I mean, there’s no secret about it when I’m not on holiday, and I know Francesca had told your father?’

  ‘Nigel and Bill and I were there the night before last, when Dad mentioned it – I don’t think they knew before that. But I did – Alan told me.’

  A small silence fell and she blew her nose.

  ‘It must have been a terrible shock for you,’ John McLeish offered, using another of the stock phrases to oil an interrogation, and watched with pity as
she started to cry.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said, not looking at him, and McLeish waited helplessly, not liking to ask the obvious.

  ‘I don’t know who the father is either,’ she said, weeping steadily and causing McLeish to glance anxiously towards the door. He waited, stolidly, out of long experience, while she got herself in hand. She looked round for a clean handkerchief and he passed her his own, reminded irresistibly of Francesca who never had a handkerchief, either.

  ‘I mean it could be either Alan or Nigel; Alan more likely, given the timing. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Does your Mum know?’

  ‘Yes. And she told Dad.’

  ‘When did you tell them?’

  ‘Day before yesterday.’

  ‘Did you tell them the full strength?’ McLeish, thoroughly conscious of all the implications of what he was hearing, realized this had come out a little rough, but left it.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wait a minute: did Alan know?’

  ‘Yes. He asked if I was sure it was his. Then he offered to pay for an abortion.’ She started to weep again. ‘He didn’t want to get married, you see. He wanted to be free to climb.’

  McLeish, who very much wanted to get married but who could also well remember a time when he, too, had wished fervently and solely to be free to do what he wanted, decided sadly that he might well in his youth have behaved exactly as Alan had. He sought to formulate his next question, but she was ahead of him.

  ‘I didn’t do it on purpose, you know. And it was much more likely to be his than Nigel’s.’

  McLeish decided that, much though he would like to know what her plans were, they were not germane to the enquiry. What mattered was Fraser’s potential paternity and the reactions this had inspired in other people.

  ‘Were your parents much distressed?’