Death on Site

by Janet Neel

  Robert and Dorothy Vernon were working in neighbouring offices in the house in South Molton Street that housed the small Head Office operation of Vernon Construction and Engineering. The main power-centre of the empire was in Hounslow, a brand-new building, purpose-built by and for Vernon Construction and Engineering – open-plan, air-conditioned and uniform, with every desk and divider the same. The firm’s founders worked in the West End, in high-ceilinged rooms, thickly carpeted, with graceful, curved windows framed by silk curtains, and large, expensive, Swedish desks. Framed photographs of Dorothy Vernon placing the first brick of a housing estate, and Robert Vernon turning the key of a power station, hung on the walls, but Dorothy’s office was humanized by a large Lichfield photograph of Sally, which Dorothy was considering thoughtfully. Her daughter looked at her out of the frame, blonde hair falling round bare shoulders, the eyes very alert. The photograph had caught her character; you could see that this was a girl who had to be led, not driven – just like her father. She got up and walked into the next-door office and sat while her husband finished his phone call.

  ‘You’re going to the Western Underpass this afternoon, aren’t you? Do you have to?’ She stretched out a hand to take his and he looked back at her.

  ‘I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have you, Dolly. Yes, I do have to. It’s bad to cancel these things.’

  ‘You’re looking very tired. I don’t want you getting ill. Shall I come with you?’

  Robert Vernon pressed her hand. ‘That’ll be nice – I thought you had a committee?’

  ‘I’ll cancel it.’ Dorothy Vernon was Deputy Chairman of Vernon, and the title was in no way honorary. Having worked for the firm for forty-two years, thirty of them with Robert Vernon, she knew more about its operations than most of its senior executives, and deployed her formidable body of knowledge and her shrewd, hard head very effectively. She was responsible at Board level for all matters of personnel, public relations and employee relations and, as Robert Vernon acknowledged, could have run any department including finance, if he had not wanted to see her sometimes.

  ‘Are you going to come round the site with me?’

  ‘Mm. But I’d like to have a look at the canteen – were you doing that? No? Well, I’ll come with you for some of your tour and then ask to be taken there.’

  ‘I’ll get Janet to tell Stewart – he’s the agent,’ Robert Vernon offered.

  ‘Don’t do that. Don’t even tell him I’m coming. James Stewart has never taken site canteens seriously. If he’s warned, he’ll do just enough tidying to make it look all right, and I hear it’s a disgrace.’

  Robert Vernon grinned at her. ‘You mean this is going to be a war? I thought you were coming to see after me?’

  She nodded amused but resolute. ‘So I am, but I’ll just give Stewart a fright while I’m there. Sally will be around, of course.’ She sighed. ‘And Alan Fraser, I suppose; he’s got his living to earn, whatever’s happening. Nigel is supposed to be down there, too, going through the tender with Bill. Well, you don’t have to meet Mr Fraser.’

  ‘He’ll be a hundred feet up a scaffold if he’s doing his job,’ Robert Vernon pointed out. ‘I’m not going to avoid him.’

  ‘He knows you are coming?’

  ‘Well, Stewart knows, and he’s a cunning devil. I told him it was informal and to make no special preparations. That means all the site will know. I’m due at three-thirty and the car’s leaving here just after three. Let’s have some lunch.’

  On the Western Underpass site, general foremen on every section were hurrying labourers to tidy the site, as they had been doing for the last twenty-four years. A civil engineering site as cramped as the Western Underpass, which goes right through a crowded London borough, is particularly resistant to order, and every man had been pressed into service to help tidy up. On Section I, where everything else had been reduced to order, six labourers under the charge of their ganger marched up to the piles of tube awaiting erection and determinedly started to arrange them in neat piles.

  Alan Fraser, forty feet up, watched them for a minute, then swarmed down to threaten vengeance on any man who touched his store of scaffolding tubes. He listened, disbelieving, to the ganger’s explanation of his reasons and resignedly signalled his group to come off the scaffold and help arrange the tubes and the clips so that they looked more orderly, all four men working flat out and angrily. They usually reckoned to make their basic hourly rate again in bonus, and their rhythm had been disrupted and time lost. This sequence of event and emotion was being repeated all over the four-mile site, so that by the time Robert and Dorothy Vernon arrived at three-thirty the site looked like a textbook illustration, and the labour force, as Jimmy Stewart observed, was working like a set of one-armed paper-hangers to catch up with the day’s work.

  It was an impressive combination which Robert Vernon read effortlessly. He forbore to comment, getting quite enough entertainment for the day from watching Stewart’s alarm as he saw that Dorothy Vernon was also present and his subsequent furtive efforts to get a message out of the room.

  ‘Will you have tea, Mrs Vernon?’ Stewart was enquiring hopefully, secure in the knowledge that new cups and saucers and a respectable tray had been purchased that morning.

  ‘I will, James, but later. I’d like to go and see Section I – that’ll be the car-park end, furthest from here, won’t it?’

  She waited placidly for Stewart’s driver and odd-job-man, pressed into clean clothes and a haircut for the occasion, to appear with the Land Rover, and hopped in beside him and Stewart. He had time only to glare at his secretary, but she was a resourceful girl and had wasted no time in getting a phone call to the section to warn them of the honour that was about to be theirs.

  ‘I see it’s a tea-break,’ his visitor observed. ‘I’d like to take tea in the canteen, if I may.’

  Jimmy Stewart, who had decided to accompany her rather than Robert Vernon, started to explain, aghast, that this was an unscheduled tea-break as Section I would be working late and high tea had been laid on. ‘The police are letting us close the road from six this evening till six tomorrow morning, so we’re doing a ghoster,’ he confided. ‘I mean an overnight shift.’

  Dorothy Vernon, who had known what a ‘ghoster’ was for forty years, thanked him for the explanation and asked if he would escort her to the canteen. He looked despairingly from her unyielding face to the streams of men making for the canteen door, and braced himself, summoning up his courage to offer her his arm over the potholes in the site. An overlooked piece of loose reinforcing wire lay snaked across their path and he broke into a sweat, but his red-headed Scots foreman-scaffolder, dropping casually off the deck, scooped it up without breaking stride and dropped it on the newly constituted steel-scrap pile.

  ‘Good afternoon, Alan,’ his guest said pleasantly, and the scaffolder stopped in his tracks.

  ‘Mrs Vernon,’ he said, taking off his helmet in direct contravention of site rules, for which Stewart forgave him from the bottom of his heart.

  ‘I am taking tea in the canteen.’

  Young Fraser, Stewart was grimly pleased to notice, looked as appalled as he felt himself, but rallied and accompanied them down the path. One might have known, Stewart thought, mentally abandoning his career with Vernon Construction and relocating himself to the big Laing site in North London or the Wimpey site beyond Southall, that the canteen would be at its worst. It operated largely on a part-time staff of local women, many of whom had left to receive children from school at three-thirty; this particular meal was therefore being served by about half the regular staff. The September heat had compounded the problem by bringing every man off the site to get a drink of tea, and two canteen hands were struggling to meet that demand. A long queue had built up with only two as opposed to the usual five, good women serving the inevitable fried collection of chips, sausage, bacon, tinned mushrooms, tomatoes and eggs. Someone had put out a minor conflagration just before the tea service sta
rted, and a faint pall of yellow smoke and a strong smell of burning hung over the counter. It was the end of a long working week and the smell of working clothes sweated into for five days was almost palpable in the airless room.

  ‘Will you get Mrs Vernon what she would like, Fraser, while I find us a table?’ He favoured Fraser with a menacing glare and shot off to the other side of the room, clearing a table by sheer force of character and opening the nearest three windows as he went. He saw a familiar face and hailed it with relief.

  ‘Nigel, will you watch this table? Mrs Vernon is here and she’ll need somewhere to sit. And could you find some better chairs?’

  Nigel Makin, appreciating the emergency, pushed aside the nearest disintegrating steel chairs, and commandeered two better ones. He cleaned off the table with a handkerchief, just as Bill Vernon arrived, grinning and armed with a mug of tea and a doughnut. ‘I see Dorothy’s here. That’ll send the balloon up.’

  ‘You’re just boat happy – the rest of us have to live here. Sally around?’

  ‘Haven’t seen her.’

  Dorothy Vernon’s presence in the queue was beginning to attract attention as Stewart panted back to her. Fraser, who clearly had the makings, was suggesting that she might like to sit down and he would bring her tea and cakes.

  ‘No, no, I like to see how the canteen is laid out. And how are you, Michael?’

  One of the little mysteries he would sort out afterwards, Stewart thought resignedly, was how the wife of Vernon Constructions’ chairman knew his latest foreman-scaffolder and his oppo. He listened to the conversation, which appeared to be about mountain-climbing, observing sadly that Mrs Vernon was noting every detail of the canteen operation while she kept up her end of the conversation. He closed his eyes momentarily as one of his general labourers, press-ganged into helping out behind the counter, shovelled an errant couple of slices of bacon back on a plate with a thumb black with ingrained dirt before thumping the plate down on the glass counter. As he opened his eyes again he saw Sally Vernon, and dropped back in the queue to enquire savagely if she had known her mother had planned to honour the site today.

  ‘She didn’t – I saw them last night and only Dad was coming.’

  He nodded, then considered her more carefully. ‘You all right, Sally? You’re looking a bit rough.’

  ‘I’m all right, Jimmy, I think I’ve got a cold.’

  ‘Your mother’s seen what she came for,’ Stewart said, resignedly. His gaze swept the battered chairs and the rickety tables with formica peeling off them, all unmatching and bought cheaply from three other sites. He squared his shoulders and shepherded Mrs Vernon and her daughter, together with his two scaffolders who were plainly trying to avoid joining the group, over to the window table.

  Mrs Vernon refused a place looking out of the window and settled herself facing into the room. During the polite manoeuvring, the wad of filthy newspaper which had been placed under one leg of the table to make it stable, became dislodged, so everyone’s tea slopped as they sat down. Dorothy Vernon’s gaze rested on her half-filled saucer, and the way she looked away without comment struck a chill right through Jimmy Stewart. Bill Vernon hastily introduced a distraction by pointing out that the big crane was moving. This took Mrs Vernon’s attention outside the canteen for a blessed minute while Stewart ducked under the table and got the leg wedged so no further disaster could take place.

  ‘Will Phase I be finished by the time you need to go to K6?’ Bill Vernon was enquiring, mysteriously, as Stewart surfaced.

  ‘Mostly. There’s only the one place on K6 at this moment anyway – Mickey and I are battling for it.’ It was Fraser who replied.

  Whatever this one place was, Stewart observed that Fraser expected to get it. He was just about to enquire quietly of Sally Vernon what all this was about when he realized that the others around them were staring at the canteen door.

  ‘It’s Dad,’ Sally Vernon said, redundantly, as her father strode over towards the table. Behind them a young surveyor scrambled to fetch tea from the counter. Jimmy stood up to give Robert Vernon his chair. Fraser and Hamilton, he saw out the corner of one eye, had seized the opportunity to fill their thermoses from the pots of tea on the table and Fraser was hunting for sugar. They passed the pot up to the Doolans, who filled their thermoses and then passed it on to Bill Vernon and Nigel Makin who also had thermoses with them. Stewart looked round to introduce his scaffolders to Vernon, but found himself pre-empted.

  ‘We’ve met.’ It was a previous acquaintance which seemed to have given pleasure to neither party, Stewart observed: Mr Vernon was looking stony and Fraser embarrassed.

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Stewart said involuntarily, feeling aggrieved. Bad enough to have two Vernon children on site; at least you could see them and keep them a bit isolated from the site gossip. To find that the chairman of the company had acquaintance among the scaffolders, who are the heart of a site and privy to every plot and rumour, was a bit much. He anxiously searched his own conscience for things that were not going right, and had just identified enough problems to make him thoroughly uncomfortable when he became aware that the tea-party was breaking up. He sprang to his feet, narrowly avoiding knocking the table over, and led the group towards the door.

  As he waited to lead the senior Vernons to whatever shortcoming of his they next planned to uncover, he noticed that Fraser had collected his thermos and was on his way, swiftly and economically, raising a hand in general farewell and sweeping his team with him. Stewart looked after them enviously as they escaped into the warm September evening, putting on their helmets as they went over to the tower they were erecting.

  A long hour later the senior Vernons had retired to the main offices for another cup of tea. The site hooter wailed, drawing catcalls from the men who were not going off-shift but would be continuing overnight. John McLeish heard it as he wedged his car into the pub car-park and walked over to the site fence to watch the exodus; he realized that one section must be going on past the normal working-time. His eye fell on a little knot of uniformed policemen redirecting traffic, and he saw they were closing a road.

  McLeish tilted his head back, shading his eyes against the setting sun as he located a pair of figures about eighty feet up on a bristling tower of scaffolding. He briefly switched his attention to the big crane lumbering infinitely slowly on its crawlers towards the site gates, now thrown wide to let it through, and then looked up again at the scaffolding tower. The two figures were descending. One of them was Fraser, unmistakable anywhere, if you had climbed with him. Suddenly he stopped, still too far away and too high up for any feature to be visible, and pulled himself in, clinging to the tower. McLeish started forward, hair prickling because the movement was so ragged and jerky and uncharacteristic. Fraser paused, then started to descend again, slowly and hesitantly. Then his feet slipped on a bar, his full weight being taken on his arms. The other figure started to scramble across to him, but, as McLeish watched helplessly one hand came off, then the other, and Fraser fell like a stone through the bright September evening.

  * * *

  John McLeish was through the gate and jumping piles of steel to get over to the bottom of the tower before he had realized he was moving.

  ‘Keep back,’ he shouted to the small group standing by the site offices and hurled himself over the rough ground to where Fraser lay, on his back, with his arms thrown up and one leg sticking at an unnatural angle. There could be no reprieve this time, McLeish thought dully, kneeling beside him; he had fallen across a small pile of reinforced steel joists, breaking his back and inflicting God alone knew what other injuries. The blue eyes were open and unfocused, but a pulse still beat in his neck.

  ‘Alan,’ John McLeish said, gently, and the eyes moved to the direction of his voice. ‘It’s John McLeish. Just lie still now and we’ll get you shifted. Where does it hurt?’ He realized he was babbling.

  ‘It doesn’t hurt.’ It was a thread of a voice and John McLeish saw tha
t Fraser was fighting for breath, gulping in air through an open mouth. The lungs would not be functioning, he remembered drearily, with a break high up on the spinal cord.

  ‘You’ll be all right, Alan. You just need some oxygen.’ He looked sideways at a heavy, dark, older man who had arrived at his side; the man nodded and slid away to the offices.

  ‘Can’t move,’ Alan Fraser said, between gulps. McLeish reached for his nearest hand, already clammy and chill, and held it in both of his for the ten minutes it took for Alan Fraser, totally unaware of the frenzied activity around him, to slip away into unconsciousness and die.

  The site nurse and the ambulance arrived a moment later, together with the police car and crew that had been supervising the road closure, and Mickey Hamilton, out of breath and trembling after his descent from the tower.

  ‘He’s gone,’ McLeish said, flatly. ‘He’s not to be moved.’ He placed Alan’s hand gently at his side.

  ‘Sir?’

  He recognized the young constable, neat in his shirt sleeves.

  ‘Yes, Woolner. Put up a screen, don’t let anyone move him or touch anything.’

  ‘What can I do?’ It was the site agent who was asking him. McLeish wordlessly showed him his warrant card. Mickey Hamilton was kneeling at his side, white-faced and dazed, and McLeish indicated to the site agent that he should be gently removed. He looked over to the small group he had shouted at, and slowly realized who they were. Robert Vernon was barking at the office staff to get back out of the way, and Dorothy Vernon was kneeling on the ground beside a huddled figure whose bright blonde hair fell forward over her shoulders. Nigel Makin was also kneeling by her. Bill Vernon, recognizably in a dither, was following his father about.