Death on Site

by Janet Neel

  McLeish felt that anyone might reasonably have taken a scunner to a site where their foreman had fallen to a sickening death in suspicious circumstances before their eyes, and said so, mildly. Jimmy Stewart visibly thought about the whole question again, and agreed that it might have been a discouraging experience.

  ‘They’re away to Ireland, anyway,’ he observed, ‘so they really did take a scunner. They could have been down the road on another site the day after they left here, we’re all short of steel-fixers and scaffolders.’

  ‘They’ve gone back to Ireland?’ McLeish enquired.

  ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps I should have told your people?’

  ‘No, it’s all right, we can get them back if we need. Lost their bottle, though, didn’t they? I suppose they did actually go?’

  Jimmy Stewart said drily that his information came from the core of the farewell party that had paraded to put the Doolan brothers on the boat train. McLeish leant against the gate, wondering about the Doolans. Neither had been in Scotland but on the other hand both had excellent access both to Fraser and to his thermos. It was, he decided five minutes of rumination later, simply flying in the face of instinct and experience to see the Doolan brothers as sufficiently well organized and knowledgeable to have sought to murder Fraser by that particular method. So why had they made a run for it as soon as they could? Once you discounted superstition or grief – although you could easily be wrong to leave either out of consideration – you were left with the likelihood that they were avoiding trouble of some sort. And trouble there was in plenty, with a major theft of materials still unresolved. If Alan Fraser’s gang had all been involved in that, then the Doolan brothers’ run for home made a lot of sense. They could go to ground over in Ireland for a very long time if they felt like it. It was becoming increasingly important to find out how Nigel Makin’s researches were coming on.

  14

  ‘Yes, of course, Chief Inspector, I’m coming up to the Western Underpass site later in the morning, and I’ll stop off at Edgware Road if that’s convenient. About noon?’

  John McLeish put the phone down on Nigel Makin’s flat London accent and logged the arrangement in his diary. He had spent the night with Francesca after he had seen Bill Vernon’s statement signed off, and was feeling restored by having had time away from the case. He glanced at his notes, remembering that Mickey Hamilton was seeing the sponsors’ committee for K6 this morning, being presumably sure of a place if there was one. He thought about Mickey, grimly. The old rule about considering who benefited from a death was ignored at your peril: Mickey had now got an undisputed run at a place on an expedition which he had passionately wanted. He had loved Fraser, no doubt about that; but perhaps that had not been strong enough to overcome the jealous rivalry he felt, combined with the realization that Fraser was never going to return his love in the same way.

  Mickey was highly credible as a suspect, not only on grounds of motive, but of means – he had done two years in medical school and would have known how much antihistamine was needed to render Alan Fraser helplessly dizzy – and of opportunity. That was not quite enough for an arrest, yet, unless some supporting evidence could be found. Two detectives were even now touring major chemists with pictures of all six suspects, and you never knew what that might turn up. Forensic had opined that the thermos which held three cups of tea had probably also contained thirty antihistamine tablets, their taste masked by the four tablespoons of sugar with which Fraser habitually laced the tea in his thermos. Two of the largest packets sold over the counter would have been more than enough and, as McLeish knew, Francesca, who had to take three or four a day in the main hay-fever season, regularly bought that many. Indeed, he remembered that when she had cleaned out the bathroom cupboard she had produced thirty-odd pills from the various shelves and a further twenty from the recesses of two handbags. He could still see the packets neatly rearranged on a top shelf.

  Still, there was nothing to do at this stage but let Mickey run free, although, as McLeish admitted to himself while he gulped his coffee, if he were offered the place on K6 it would be a very difficult piece of judgement as to whether or not to arrest him. Once out of England, Mickey could easily disappear, leaving CI looking like Slipper of the Yard, a fate which any senior policeman would go a very long way to avoid.

  His secretary put her head round the door. ‘It’s Francesca for you. She says, please, it’s urgent.’

  ‘Put her through.’ Francesca, a fellow public servant, never interrupted him unnecessarily.

  ‘Darling, I’ve got a difficult question. We were discussing offering Robert Vernon a government job, and all was going fine when Bill Westland said what about this murder investigation? He’d picked up somewhere – not from me, but you know what he’s like – that Robert Vernon might be involved, and he didn’t want to offer anything until he knew it was all right. I mean, it is all right, isn’t it? No need to hang around?’

  McLeish sighed. ‘It’s too soon, darling, to say that anyone’s in the clear.’

  ‘But Robert?’ Francesca was incredulous. ‘Why would he want to kill Alan?’

  ‘I shouldn’t be discussing it, Frannie, but maybe he didn’t want Alan as a son-in-law.’

  There was an appalled silence at the other end of the line, and McLeish followed up promptly: ‘It may be non-sense, but you know that the list of suspects has to be limited to the six people who were in Scotland and on the site, and Robert Vernon is one of them. No one can say yet he’s in the clear.’ No, indeed, they can’t, he thought, not after that disconcerting hesitation under questioning.

  ‘He wouldn’t have killed Alan himself, no matter what.’ The clear voice was confident and McLeish grinned to himself.

  ‘Might have got someone to do it?’ he suggested, more out of curiosity than out of conviction. There was a pause.

  ‘Just possibly.’ Francesca sounded shaken but thoughtful. ‘He’d be more likely to have used money than personal violence, I would think. My Dad always said he was a hard man, but then you’d have to be in that trade, starting from nowhere. All right, Detective Chief Inspector, I hear what you’re saying. Just remember HMG needs him, always supposing that he isn’t a killer. Are we having supper tomorrow?’

  They made one of their necessarily elastic plans and McLeish left for Edgware Road.

  Nigel Makin arrived exactly on time, dropped by a Vernon Construction driver, and could be seen finishing off a telephone call from the car before sending the driver on with a pile of papers. McLeish and Davidson waited in an interview room for him to be brought in by a uniformed policeman.

  ‘Since we spoke briefly at Western Underpass, I have talked at more length to Mr and Mrs Vernon, Mr Bill Vernon and to Miss Vernon and Michael Hamilton,’ McLeish began, formally, the introductions completed. ‘I have said to all of them that we are treating Alan Fraser’s death as murder, and linking it with an attempt on his life in Scotland last month.’

  ‘So, all of us who were in Scotland as well as on site when it happened are on your list of suspects.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do you also know that Sally – Miss Vernon – terminated our engagement earlier this week?’

  ‘She told us, yes.’

  Nigel Makin gazed at the blank and unpromising side wall of the interview room, and unexpectedly fished for a handkerchief and blew his nose. McLeish let the pause stretch, both he and Davidson sitting absolutely still.

  ‘He’d never have married her,’ Makin observed, to his hands. ‘But he’s messed us up completely by getting himself killed. I didn’t kill him – I knew he’d go off to K6 if he got the place.’ He looked at McLeish directly. ‘I’ll tell you what I was doing, and I’m not proud of it. Fraser was there or thereabouts on a couple of fiddles, one at the Barbican in February, one here in the last four weeks. I’ve been trying to nail him, but I couldn’t quite do it.’ He inspected the side wall again. ‘And then I thought, bloody hell, why don’t I just leave it al
one, let him take whatever cash he got as his share and get off to K6 or wherever it is, out of Sally’s way? So I’d decided to stop trying to find the fiddle, just to make bloody sure it didn’t happen again and let anyone I thought might have been involved know I had my eye on them – get Stewart to move one or two people. Anything, just so Fraser would disappear to the Himalayas.’

  He scowled at McLeish. ‘Now the whole thing’s buggered. Fraser’s dead, and Sally’s pregnant – yes, she told me this morning but I understand everyone else but me knew two days ago. I wanted to leave the company but Robert Vernon’s asked me not to do that. Well, I owe him that, so I’m staying, at least for a bit. But I’d rather have Fraser alive and on his way to the Himalayas than dead.’

  McLeish let that verdict stand in his head, and wondered whether Makin had really not known that Sally was pregnant until that morning. Makin’s thesis – that Fraser was more of a barrier to him dead than alive – made sense, and this was a logical, well-trained successful man, on the edge of a major managerial breakthrough. There was, however, no predicting the effect of having a much-loved fiancée break off an engagement; the additional misery of knowing that she was possibly pregnant by a rival – if he had known – might have been the final straw.

  ‘I expect you want to know where I was and what I was doing both times, though?’ Makin offered and McLeish agreed, taking him patiently through his movements.

  ‘I can remember exactly what I was doing at the time when Fraser came off that cliff,’ he said, surprisingly. ‘I’d had a miserable afternoon. I’d had lunch with Sal, and she just wasn’t with me, I knew. I went off and walked and fished after lunch – I didn’t want to be with anyone, I’ll be honest with you – so I didn’t go with Robert. I didn’t catch any fish either, and I came back, walking, oh, at about seven o’clock. The first thing I heard was that Fraser was in Oban, injured, and I was dead pleased, I can tell you. Then we heard he’d been picked up by a tourist and was hardly hurt at all. And he was back two days later, good as new.’ His eyes focused on McLeish who was trying to look as much like a chair as possible. ‘It was you of course, I’d forgotten. You liked him, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ The monosyllable echoed in the room, and Makin waited to see if he was going to go on.

  ‘No one saw me – I suppose I could have pushed him off a cliff or whatever it was happened to him.’

  McLeish left it after a few further questions. The Scots might pick up some corroborative evidence or they might not. If Makin had tried to kill or injure Alan Fraser that day, it was sensible and realistic not to try and establish an alibi. Neither Robert nor Bill Vernon had an alibi, come to that, and Dorothy Vernon’s statement that she had been having a rest before supper could not, in the nature of things, be proved either. Sally Vernon had at best a partial alibi, and Mickey none at all.

  About the events on the Western Underpass, Makin’s memory was even sharper. ‘I’d had a lousy couple of days then as well,’ he said sourly. ‘Sally had broken off our engagement the day before, and I’d rather not have been on that site at all – but the costing system still isn’t right and you have to get it right early, you lose a fortune on groundworks if you don’t. Anyway, I’d decided to stay and work on late; the sooner I could get off that site the better. So I got Bill Vernon to agree to stay as well – he’s not one to put himself out, particularly now he’s going to be a rich man, but he did agree. I decided to get a meal in the canteen. It isn’t much good, but I don’t care what I eat when I’m working.’

  ‘Did you know the senior Vernons would be there?’

  ‘No. Everyone knew Robert was coming to see the site but he isn’t interested in canteens. I wouldn’t have expected to see him there. I don’t think anyone knew Dorothy – Mrs Vernon – was coming. Bill didn’t know, he was with me. I don’t know if Sally knew, I hadn’t spoken to her.’ He thought for a minute. ‘Even if I had known Mrs Vernon was coming, I wouldn’t necessarily have expected to find her there. No, I’ll tell you, the other one I didn’t expect to see there was Fraser. I knew he was meeting you at six, you see, and I thought he’d not bother with tea.’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Stewart rang me and asked me to deliver the message – well, he didn’t know, did he? I didn’t want to say no, so I took it and of course I recognized the name. I didn’t give the message to Fraser myself – I might have hit him if I’d had to talk to him – so I passed it on to Bill Vernon. He passed it to Hamilton. Gives me the creeps,’ he added, obiter dictum.

  ‘What time was this?’ McLeish asked grimly.

  ‘Just before dinner. Eleven-thirty or so?’

  ‘You didn’t talk to Sally that day?’

  ‘No I didn’t. I stayed out of her way.’

  But Bill Vernon might easily have told his sister about the meeting, though, McLeish thought. He had faced the realization the day before that his meeting with Alan Fraser might have precipitated a tragedy, and at least three of the main suspects had known of that meeting. He took Nigel Makin patiently through the events of tea-time, but, not surprisingly, his attention had been on his own problems at the time and he had not registered much detail. Or if he had, he wasn’t letting on. No, he had not known Fraser was a regular user of antihistamine; why should he? And no, he himself did not suffer from hay-fever and had not had occasion to use antihistamines of any sort.

  ‘I didn’t kill him, and I’m worse off with him dead,’ Nigel Makin repeated uncompromisingly at the end. ‘I thought he was probably bent – and now he’s gone I’ll find and sort out anyone else who was in that particular fiddle. But I’ve had fifteen years in this trade without killing anyone, and I didn’t start with a pretty boy like Fraser.’

  McLeish found himself resenting that crack on behalf of the dead man; Fraser had been a good deal more than a pretty boy, as indeed the short obituary in The Times had made clear.

  ‘Well, he wasn’t after your girl,’ Nigel Makin said bitterly, and McLeish realized that his face must be giving away more than he intended.

  ‘I do see that,’ he said, formally. ‘He was a good climber, though.’

  ‘I understand that.’

  It was a handsome concession and McLeish took it as such, and found himself liking the man better than he had before.

  ‘This fraud, on the site – are you looking for a lorry fiddle?’

  Nigel Makin’s head came up and he inspected McLeish with interest. ‘Yes, I’m sure that’s how it was done, on both sites. Fraser, Hamilton and their gang were on the sites, though actually they weren’t there on the night the stuff was delivered – or not delivered.’

  ‘Were they somewhere else waiting for it, maybe?’ McLeish decided to test Perry and Francesca’s hypothesis, and Nigel Makin’s eyes widened.

  ‘Of course they bloody were, weren’t they?’ he said, softly. ‘Clocked off my site for a few days, or maybe they were even still on the clock for some of it, but were actually somewhere else. I’ll look for that.’ He considered, eyes slightly crossed, looking through McLeish. ‘But the bugger who did a false count on the lorries had to be on site, and it’s him I’m after now; Fraser’s dead and his gang will be away. Still that’s useful.’ He nodded briefly to McLeish, and had to be restrained from leaving without waiting for his statement to be typed up.

  McLeish stood by Davidson, who was threading paper into an ancient Edgware Road typewriter. ‘Ye’ll remember that Sally Vernon is a rich young woman, as well as his ex-fiancée?’

  ‘I’d not forgotten. I’m not sure he minds all that much about the money – he’s on near enough £60,000 a year and share options, according to his guv’nor.’

  ‘I’d still mind on a couple of millions if they came with the girl I wanted to marry.’

  ‘Yes, all right, Bruce, but killing Alan Fraser doesn’t seem to have left Mr Makin in pole position.’

  ‘Mebbe not just yet awhile. But the wee girl’s pregnant and she’s no father for the bairn.’

/>   One had, McLeish thought, to make substantial allowances for Bruce Davidson’s admirable, Scots working-class upbringing. Nonetheless he had a point; with Alan Fraser dead, Nigel Makin might well find himself back in the field.

  ‘If there was a fiddle on site,’ he said, ‘who else of this lot have been in it?’

  ‘If Fraser was, then Hamilton, I’d guess. They’re partners.’

  ‘And rivals. But you’re right, Bruce, partners on site, whatever was going on. The Doolans were in it, too; that’s why they’ve scarpered. Hamilton’s already got one strike against him, with a dodgy bit in his youth and being gay as well.’

  ‘It keeps coming back to him, doesn’t it?’ Bruce Davidson observed, neutrally.

  ‘What are you betting, Bruce?’ McLeish was wont to apply this test at some stage during an enquiry; he found it sharpened his thinking as well. Davidson considered, and wrote in the cover of his notebook, crossed out a couple of numbers and substituted others.

  ‘I’d say 7 to 4 on Hamilton; Makin 5 to 2; the wee girl and her father both 3 to 1; 5 to 1 Bill Vernon; 10 to 1 Mrs Vernon.’

  Yes, so do I, McLeish thought, grimly. Not only was Alan Fraser in direct competition for the coveted K6 place but he knew an uncomfortable amount about Mickey and could have found a way to use it – an anonymous note to the committee would have been all it would have taken. On this thought, there entered a sergeant bearing a message.

  ‘I hope it makes sense, sir.’

  ‘Yes. Yes it does.’ He showed the note to Davidson.

  ‘So Hamilton got the place, after all. What are you going to do, John? They’ll need to be away in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘As things stand, he can’t go and that’s all there is to it. He must know that; that’s why he’s telling me.’

  ‘Daring you to stand in his way? It’ll cause a row.’