Death on Site

by Janet Neel

  5

  Two days later on a bright Tuesday morning Sally Vernon, sitting at her father’s right at breakfast in the hotel lounge, was well aware that she was courting difficulty.

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘You and Nigel are fishing today, aren’t you? I don’t really want to spend all day there, but I’ll come at lunch-time. Is that all right?’

  ‘Whatever you like.’ Robert Vernon, who liked to read his newspaper uninterruptedly at breakfast, turned over a page definitively, but Sally persevered.

  ‘Nigel wants me to be there all day, but you know I’m bored by a whole day. Please Dad, just help.’

  Her father looked at her over the paper in exasperation.

  ‘Just tell him you don’t want to come till lunch-time. Have you had words?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said, thankful for the formula. ‘I just want to go back to bed and get some sleep, then I’ll turn up in a better mood. Please Dad, just tell him.’

  ‘Your mother won’t let me do this sort of thing for you when you’re married, you know.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad. I’m going back to bed. Tell Nigel I’ll meet you at lunch.’ She finished her cup of tea hastily, kissed her father and walked away. Her father watched her thoughtfully, from behind his paper, noticing sardonically that every man of his own generation in the dining-room was watching her hips more or less covertly as she swung through the room, elegant in designer jeans and a T-shirt.

  In her bedroom Sally undressed and put on a black silk nightdress cut like a petticoat but stopping at mid-thigh, and considered herself carefully in the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe. Typical of Scotland that the only mirror should be too small to see yourself at full length and placed on the inside of a wardrobe door which swung closed unless you held it open. She smiled at her reflection, brushing her hair so that it fell almost to her shoulders, liking the contrast of the pale blonde hair with the exiguous black nightie and her fair skin.

  She checked her watch, then looked carefully out of the window through a gap in the curtain and smiled to herself as she saw her father, her step-brother and Nigel loading fishing gear into the Range Rover, Nigel looking rather sullen. He glanced up towards her window and she stepped back involuntarily, although she could not have been seen. She waited until the car left, then pulled on a dressing-gown, made a phone call, and settled down with a magazine to wait.

  Twenty minutes later there was a knock on the door and she slid out of bed to open it to Alan Fraser.

  ‘We’ve got ages,’ she said as he pulled her into his arms.

  ‘Christ, my ribs. Ye’ll have to be gentle with me Sally.’

  ‘Take that sweater off, it’s scratching me.’ She helped him ease off the heavy Arran sweater, hand-knitted she observed jealously, and started on the buttons of his shirt. He held her breasts through the silk, feeling for the nipples, watching with pleasure as she breathed short.

  ‘I left off my vest,’ he said, grinning as she ran her hands gently over his ribs and she giggled.

  ‘Well, a string vest isn’t very sexy.’

  ‘There are some that fancy it,’ he observed, watching her go pink. ‘Ouch! Stop that or I’ll not be able.’ He kicked off his shoes and pulled off jeans, underpants and socks in one and reached for her, pulling her on to the bed. He wouldn’t let her take control, despite the fact that his ribs were obviously hurting, and she forgot in her pleasure to worry about it. He asked whether it had been all right for her afterwards but then he hardly needed to, she thought; he must have known that it worked. She turned over gently, so she could look into his face and was stricken to see how pale he was.

  ‘Is it your ribs?’

  ‘Worth it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you let me try?’

  ‘I will next time,’ he promised, eyes still closed, and she stroked the swollen cheek.

  ‘How were the Calendar girls?’

  ‘Delicious. All four of them.’ His eyes remained stubbornly shut and she dug him sharply in the ribs.

  ‘Stop it, Sal. How long have we got?’

  ‘Till lunch. I promised to meet Dad then.’ And Nigel, she added silently, but the quirk of Alan’s mouth told her that he too had made that deduction.

  ‘What are you doing this afternoon?’ she asked hastily.

  ‘Taking John McLeish up the hill.’

  ‘Will you be able to climb?’ she asked jealously.

  ‘With my ribs you mean?’ It took her a few seconds to realize she was being teased and she pulled his bright hair. ‘Oh yes, he’s not bad, but he’s not in training and he’s older, too. He went well on Saturday, and yesterday but he’ll be stiff the day. And he and Francesca are likely doing the same thing as us this morning.’

  She lay beside him considering the bruised profile. ‘When are you going to London?’

  ‘Next week some time. I’ll get the best paying job I can. I don’t mind trying your site if the bonus is right, but I’ve got to get the money – I’ve only just so much time. Or don’t you want me there? Will I be in the way with you and Nigel?’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to go on with Nigel.’

  Alan sighed and squinted down at her as she lay against his shoulder. ‘I’m going to K6 in September, Sal. Climbing is the only thing I want to do. I’ll get out of the way now, if that’s what you want.’

  She lay still, having elicited precisely the response that she had feared.

  ‘Sal.’ His arm tightened round her. ‘I’m not a marrying man. The married lads, they’re always torn in two between the climbing and the wives. Look at Bonington – he promised the wife not to go to Everest. I could never do that.’

  He moved out of her arms, swung his legs out of bed and winced as he bent to pick up his shirt. She reached urgently for him and stroked his back, laying her face against his shoulders.

  ‘At least we have till September.’ She felt him relax against her. ‘Come back to bed. I’ll make us some tea – they give you kettles here.’

  She pulled on her dressing-gown and plugged in the kettle, thinking hard. If she wanted this man – and she did, with a passion that none of the other men she had been sleeping with since she was sixteen had ever aroused – she would have to go carefully. She made the tea, knowing that he took pleasure in watching her doing domestic tasks and took it over to him.

  ‘It seems odd that I’ve known you five years and never been to bed with you till this summer,’ she said conversationally, as they finished drinking. ‘I suppose you were always otherwise occupied? Or didn’t you fancy me?’

  ‘Ah, Christ.’ He put his cup down and reached out for her. ‘Come here and we’ll try it your way this time.’

  The fishing party had arrived at intervals at the side of the river just above the falls. The day was cloudy but brightening so that the sun came through the clouds at intervals. Nigel Makin had arrived in a bad temper – justifiably, Robert Vernon conceded, in view of Sally’s behaviour. He had, however, other things to do this morning and as he dispatched Nigel briskly upriver he called to his son to stay by him for a minute. He sighed inwardly as Bill backed clumsily out of the Range Rover, and thought bitterly of his first wife Susan, Bill’s mother. That spoilt daughter of the County had been outraged when, furious at her barely concealed affair with a noted trainer, he had divorced her and married Dorothy. To add to his offence he had refused, absolutely, to meet her exorbitant demands for financial support. She had retaliated by keeping his son away from him for the best part of ten years by every means known to lawyers, and when she had belatedly realized the unwisdom of this strategy, had nagged him ever after to give Bill and her more money.

  It was, of course, difficult to judge how much Bill had been behind this change of strategy. God knows he showed no other signs of any business ability. He had taken an extra two years to qualify as a quantity surveyor and had not shown any particular promise either on sites or in head office; he was pleasant enough but without the drive or
the persistence needed to carry through a difficult contract. Robert Vernon sighed inwardly as his son dropped two rugs and a rod and turned anxiously to face him.

  ‘Sorry, Robert.’

  Being called Robert rather than Dad annoyed him too, but unreasonably; it had been Susan not the child of eight that Bill had then been who had insisted on eliminating any acknowledgement of the biological relationship between them.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. I wanted to talk before we started fishing.’

  The look of anxious apprehension deepened, and Robert Vernon gritted his teeth. He reined himself back, hearing his wife Dorothy telling him forthrightly that he handled Bill badly.

  ‘Bill, look,’ he started awkwardly. ‘When your mother divorced me she got a bloody good settlement for herself and a separate one for you.’ He paused, cursing himself. Dorothy had told him not to start with a recital of the benefits Bill had already received, and one look at the shuttered, sullen face in front of him reminded him how sound her judgement had been. ‘Be that as it may,’ he plunged on, resolutely, ‘the business is ten times the size it was then, and although it bloody well pinched me at the time, the cash you got doesn’t look that much to me now. So I’m going to give you enough to make it up to the same as Sally’s getting next week when she’s twenty-five. You’ll get 200,000 shares in Vernon Construction, which allows for what you got before. They’re yours absolutely, no trusts, and there may be more when I go, of course; but, as I said to Sally, there won’t be much more until then unless it’s for grandchildren.’

  He stopped and reviewed the speech, pleased with himself. Vernon Construction’s shares stood at over £10 and the gift he had just made put Bill into the millionaire class. He looked at him with the affection any donor feels for the object of his generosity and realized with horror that his son was chalk white and leaning against the big Range Rover. Had he been such a lousy father that this cash, which Bill must have known represented only about two per cent of his own holdings, caused the lad to pass out?

  ‘Sorry, Robert, 200,000 shares? That’s two million pounds. Oh God, I never expected anything like it. I can buy something up here.’

  ‘Course you can. Make a nice holiday home.’

  ‘No, that’s not what I meant. I’m no good in your business – you know that. I can buy a farm – I’ve been saving for one and now I can do it. You don’t mind, do you?’

  Robert Vernon gazed at him, taken aback. ‘What sort of farm?’

  ‘A sheep farm in the Borders. This bit is beautiful all right,’ a dismissive gesture wrote off the West Highlands, ‘but the land’s no good.’

  ‘How much have you got already?’ Robert Vernon sat down on the tailboard of the Range Rover, motioning his son to join him.

  ‘About a hundred thousand, and the flat, of course, but I’ve got a mortgage…’

  ‘You’ve done well – I thought you’d spent most of what I settled before, when you were at the university.’

  ‘Oh well, I had some lucky investments as well.’ Bill Vernon looked away, leaving his father to decide that he might have been too quick to dismiss this son of his as a financial fool. He knew the settlement he had made had been worth only £25,000 when Bill had reached twenty-five, ten years before. Somehow he had parlayed this into £100,000 plus a London house in Chelsea worth an easy £300,000.

  ‘How much were you trying for?’

  ‘I wanted £500,000, but £2 million-odd means I can buy a big enough farm to be sure I can make a decent living. I don’t know yet what I’ll buy now – this just changes everything. Thanks Robert, thanks a million. Thanks two million!’ He snorted, somewhere between laughter and tears and blew his nose.

  Robert Vernon put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t think it had anything to do with your mother,’ he said, resolutely ignoring Dorothy’s warning voice inside his head. ‘It was Dorothy who said it was only right to do the same for both of my children.’

  The shoulder on which his hand rested stiffened. ‘Sorry, forget that. Your mother’s all right; it’s just that she tried to bleed me white when I didn’t have the cash.’

  ‘I do know. She gets worried about being poor and old.’

  ‘She’ll not be poor, Bill, not while I live. We may not agree on what constitutes poverty but she’ll not want.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  Ah, thought Robert Vernon in a flash of insight, that’s what a father is to him, it’s someone who looks after his mother – that’s why I’m Dad all of a sudden. I maybe should have given the bitch a bit more cash all these years, and maybe I will give her a bit to go on with, same as Dorothy is suggesting.

  ‘You’ve just not found your place in Vernon Engineering, Bill,’ he said, judiciously, warmed by the acknowledgement, ‘but that’s not to say you’ve failed. You’ve always tried hard and, what’s important, you’ve always been straight, not tried to bend the rules or gone in for anything not quite right with customers. That matters to me more than anything, you know; to deal with people I know are straight. I’m not one of the people who needs a son to follow me.’

  He smiled benevolently on his son who looked at his feet and went perceptibly red.

  ‘So let’s go fishing, eh? I’ve told the lawyers to get on with it – it has to be done carefully because neither of us wants to pay tax we don’t have to, but the shares will be yours in about six weeks.’

  He dispatched Bill to his fishing, thinking that he was unlikely to be concentrating well enough to catch anything, and sauntered upriver to see how Nigel Makin was getting on. Makin had evidently got over his bad temper, and was casting steadily.

  ‘Something over there in the pool under that bank. I think he knows I’m here,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll leave him a while. Any luck yourself?’

  ‘I haven’t been trying. I’ve been having a chat with Bill.’ He watched the younger man for a minute; at thirty-six, he was the youngest MD of a major construction company in the UK. He had turned out to be one of the people who knew how to squeeze every ounce of profit out of a project. His immediate priority after the holiday would be the Western Underpass; even in the first flush of triumph at snatching this prestige job from larger firms, Robert Vernon never lost sight of his objectives.

  ‘I was thinking about the Underpass,’ he offered in explanation and without apology for letting business intrude. For Nigel Makin, as for him, business was the real world and holidays an interruption.

  ‘Be interesting, that. I’m really looking forward to being there.’

  ‘You can’t give it all your time, of course.’

  ‘No need. I can manage it by going there one day a week.’

  This was offered in the flat North London accent with absolute confidence, and Robert Vernon nodded. Makin was a formidably hard worker and had sorted out the notoriously difficult Barbican site over the six months by a rigidly organized system of financial control. After a few furious rows – in which Robert Vernon had not been called upon to assist – the system had worked perfectly. As a resentful member of the production control staff had put it, nothing moved or breathed on site without being recorded by Nigel Makin’s computer.

  ‘What I have been meaning to say is that it’s going to be worth lighting the Underpass site at night,’ Makin commented. ‘I know you aren’t happy about the cost but without lights things will walk. We’ll lose materials and people.’

  ‘I know that. It was the client I was angry with, not being prepared to pay for decent security. There’s some of our profit gone for a start.’

  ‘We’ll get it back.’ Nigel Makin spoke with complete certainty and Robert Vernon looked at him with affection. Getting back expenses imposed by the clients is at the heart of successful civil engineering, and this man had a real relish for the job. ‘We lost thousands – I reckon over £300,000 – in three months on the Barbican. Even the big RSJs grew legs and walked away overnight.’ Nigel Makin was not amused by his own joke, his eyes were narrowed and he looked even more like a wel
l-caredfor ferret than ever. From a business point of view his obsession was entirely reasonable; a situation in which lorry loads of twenty-foot reinforced steel joists vanished into the surrounding streets in one night was well out of control.

  ‘That was a bugger, that site,’ Vernon observed companionably. ‘And you and your team did well to get us out of there with something in our pockets. Of course it’s worth lighting the Western Underpass. And getting some decent blokes. Young Fraser and his partner may be there – if the bonus is good enough, he told me, cheeky bugger.’

  ‘Fraser and Hamilton were at the Barbican, of course.’

  ‘Were they now?’ Robert Vernon mentally came to attention. He scowled at the surrounding heather while Makin discreetly contemplated the middle distance.

  ‘Fraser involved at all?’ he finally, reluctantly, asked.

  ‘Don’t know, but several loads of steel went walkabout one night during the time when he and his gang were around. We asked them, of course, but they never saw a thing.’

  Robert Vernon squinted into the sun, wondering whether it would not save trouble all round to have Fraser kept off Western Underpass, when suddenly the sun went behind a cloud and he could see what the bright dazzle had hidden – his daughter and Alan Fraser swinging down the road towards them. He watched them thoughtfully. Fraser, his red-blond hair like fire against the heather, waved a casual farewell to Sally and turned uphill towards a cliff, at the top of which Francesca and John McLeish could just be seen, sitting and eating lunch. Sally came towards the fishing party, smiling and sure of her welcome.

  ‘Hello, I needed that. I’d got very tired. I came down with Alan because he is taking Francesca’s boyfriend climbing this afternoon.’