by Damien Boyd
‘There’s a floor above us?’ he asked, pointing at the ceiling.
‘Yes,’ replied Crew. Impatient now.
‘Have you got the police in there, Jim?’ The voice came from behind Crew, the owner dwarfed by his frame.
‘This is Aziz, Inspector. The facilities manager.’
Aziz squeezed past Crew. ‘We wanted to know when we can put someone else in here, please?’
‘Not yet, Sir. We’ll let you know when you can,’ replied Martha.
Aziz sighed. ‘It’s a waste of a room.’
‘Where’s her dumper truck?’ asked Dixon, turning to Crew.
‘It’ll be out on site.’
‘I’d like to see it, please.’
‘You’re joking?’
‘The cab is her place of work.’
‘Give me a minute.’ Crew stepped back into the corridor, dialling a number on his phone.
‘Has someone checked it?’ asked Dixon, turning to Martha.
‘No, Sir. Not that I know of anyway.’
‘What about the ceiling tiles?’ he asked, looking up.
‘They’re fixed,’ replied Aziz.
Dixon reached up and prodded the corner of one with his finger. Glued, just like the carpet tiles. Each tile was square and held in place by a steel frame; seriously low budget stuff, but then it was temporary accommodation.
‘Let’s try them all,’ he said, prodding the next one.
‘Surely, SOCO will have—?’
‘I don’t know what SOCO have done, Sergeant. Only what I’ve done.’
Crew reappeared in the doorway, a large frown etched on his forehead as he watched the prodding of the ceiling tiles, Martha using the edge of her mobile phone.
Aziz looked at Crew and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I told them they’re fixed.’
‘Her truck is over at the Agard compound, Inspector. It hasn’t been touched since she parked it there herself. They haven’t got anyone else to drive it yet, so it’s just sitting there.’
Dixon allowed the silence to hang in the air, while he and Martha checked the last of the ceiling tiles.
‘Right then,’ he said. ‘Can you take me over there?’
Chapter Twenty-Three
Dixon tightened the hard hat, trying to stop it flopping about every time he turned his head. It would make it awkward climbing the ladder too.
The yellow dumper truck towered over him; he counted twelve rungs on the ladder just to get access to the cab.
‘It’ll take a hundred tons at a time,’ said the man in the Agard hi-vis jacket, the company logo emblazoned across his back. ‘Surprisingly easy to drive though.’
He waited for Dixon to adjust his hat.
‘Well, up you go.’
‘I’ll wait down here, Sir,’ said Martha, standing at the bottom.
Crew was watching him through the windscreen of the EDF Energy Land Rover, a red flag mounted on a long pole on the roof fluttering in the breeze.
Dixon was halfway up the ladder before he was level with the tops of the tyres. He looked down; first floor window height, maybe. Certainly in his little cottage.
‘Big, innit?’ said the Agard man on the ladder below him.
Dixon stepped across on to the metal landing at the top of the ladder and looked around at the almost lunar landscape, bare earth as far as the eye could see.
‘We’ve shifted four million tons of earth so far and it’s all here,’ said the man, stepping off the top rung. ‘It’ll be landscaped and grassed over. Never know it was here in a couple of years.’
Dixon peered into the cab. It was mounted in the middle of the truck, with two black leather seats inside, one for the driver, the other set back behind.
‘It’s got all mod cons.’ The man unlocked the door. ‘Air conditioning, power steering, obviously, and—’
‘Nobody’s been in since Amy parked it here?’
‘No.’
‘May I?’
The man stepped back, allowing Dixon into the cab.
‘And only she drove it?’
‘That’s right. Next year when the site is working twenty-four-seven we’ll have another driver at night. We’re training them at the moment, but for the time being it was just Amy.’
Dixon sat down in the driver’s seat and pulled down the sun visors, half expecting a set of keys to drop down.
‘You’ve been watching too many American films.’
Hardly.
Then he felt around under the seats, and behind them.
‘What are you looking for?’ asked the man.
‘No idea.’
‘There’s a pocket in the back of the seats.’
Dixon slid his hand into both. Empty.
Bollocks.
‘D’you drive one of these?’ he asked.
‘Can do.’
‘Let’s say you wanted to hide a file. Thin, maybe half an inch thick. Where would you put it?’
‘In here?’ The man pursed his lips. ‘Under the floor mats. Either that or the carpet above your head. There’s nowhere else, really.’
Five minutes later Dixon climbed down the ladder empty handed.
‘No luck, Sir?’ asked Martha, as he stepped off the bottom rung.
He shook his head. ‘We’ll have to find another way.’
‘Stop the car,’ said Dixon, spinning around in the passenger seat of the EDF Land Rover, his hard hat on his knee.
‘I’ll pull in here.’ Crew turned into a car park on the left and stopped next to two minibuses, a line of police cadets leaning over the railings, listening to their tour guide. The Viewing Gallery was a raised platform with a grandstand view overlooking the nuclear islands, the reactor on the right starting to take shape, the new sea wall beyond them, the concrete batching plant a mile or so away to the left and Welfare Block East half a mile off to the right. Tiny fluorescent dots, each a hi-vis jacket, moving about amongst the concrete and machines like ants.
‘You get a better view from—’ Dixon left Crew talking to himself as he walked over to the railings and set off back out to the road, crossing between two slow moving lorries and walking along the front of Welfare Block North; workmen still inside fitting it out: more changing rooms and another canteen, by the looks of things.
Footsteps behind him; Crew running to catch up.
‘You’re not supposed to be out here,’ he said, standing with his back to a steel fence to allow the line of lorries to crawl past.
Dixon had stopped at the corner of a fenced off compound, several diggers and a road tarmac machine standing idle on the far side, behind a Portakabin and a van. And three huge piles of steaming tarmac, just tipped off the back of a dumper truck.
‘Who are Hardman Tarmacadam?’ he asked, reading the sign on the side of the van.
‘Highways, Tier 2, road surfacing,’ replied Crew. ‘This road we’re on now has been moved twice already and it’ll move again when Welfare Block North is finished. There’s an office block going here, from memory.’
‘Who’s the Tier 1?’
‘Myles Construction is the Tier 1 for associated developments. Then you’ve got Tier 2s for the tarmac, line painting, drainage, traffic lights, bridges, stuff like that. You can check the supply chain. It’s online.’
‘Where’s the Myles office?’
‘Welfare Block East.’
The beat team office was empty, apart from Louise, sitting at one of the workstations.
‘Dave rang, Sir. He said the HSE file was never archived as it should’ve been. They’ve hunted high and low.’ She stood up, picking up her mug. ‘They said it should be identical to the police file anyway. Dave and Mark are on their way back now. And the CPS are sending over the trial transcript. I asked them about witness statements not disclosed and got the usual flannel.’
‘Blaming it on the investigating officers, I suppose,’ said Dixon. ‘What about damages claims?’
‘The widows of the three men who died sued and the claims were settled b
y Crook’s insurers. They got the fixed sum for bereavement damages and future loss of earnings. Not sure how much they got in all. D’you want me to find out?’
‘Don’t bother.’
Louise picked up the milk carton and shook it. ‘Did you find the missing blue file?’ she asked, filling the kettle.
‘No. If Amy still had it then it’s gone. Unless it’s in her car?’
‘Nope. There’s an email from Scientific.’
Dixon tipped his head, a loud click coming from his neck.
‘We’re still floundering in the dark then?’ asked Louise.
‘You’re forgetting what Steiner said.’ He was waiting for a computer to start up. ‘You’ve seen the transcript from the crane?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Tarmac.’
‘Eh?’
‘Steiner said he’d been paid to come in here and sabotage the tarmac. That means somebody wants Hardman Tarmacadam’s contract. Money is changing hands too, if some of it was given to him to do the deed. Hardman are a Tier 2 company laying the internal roads. They were awarded the contract by Myles Construction, the Tier 1 company with the contract for associated developments.’ He opened a web browser. ‘It’s a bit like when Crook Engineering were awarded the contract for the platforms under the Second Severn Crossing.’
Louise nodded.
‘We know – believe, I should say – that the platforms were sabotaged and the contract was then taken away from Crook and given to Centrix,’ continued Dixon, gathering momentum. ‘On the back of that, we suspect Centrix was behind the sabotage. But in order for the sabotage to have had the desired effect, the person whose job it was to award the contracts must have been in on it, surely? Ray Harper of Centrix is hardly going to go to the risk of sabotaging Crook’s platforms unless he knows he’s going to get the contract, is he?’
‘No, Sir.’
‘Remember it was worth millions.’
‘So, the person in charge of the contracts was on the take?’
‘He must’ve been. The plan doesn’t work otherwise. “Give me a hundred grand and you can have the contract.” I can hear them saying it now. And that same person must be here, inside Hinkley, which explains why Amy came here.’
‘And whatever Stella found in the files confirmed it?’
‘I’m guessing she confronted him and paid the price. It was Amy’s death warrant too, they just had to find her. Remember that article in the HPC newspaper?’
‘The Point.’
‘She was here, so they got Steiner to do the job with the promise of passage on a boat, and then hung him out to dry when her body was found. We were supposed to assume he’d got in here, she’d recognised him and—’
‘She was killed a couple of days after that article was published.’ Louise was opening the drawers in turn. ‘There’s no bloody sugar.’ Then the cupboard underneath. ‘We can’t prove any of this at the moment, though, can we, Sir?’
‘Not yet.’
Updating the Policy Log was a pain in the arse sometimes. No doubt Potter would be checking it from time to time too. Dixon frowned. Give it twenty minutes and she’d be on the phone. Either her or Lewis anyway. Documenting his decision making process; otherwise known as giving them a stick to beat him with if it all went wrong.
It seemed logical though, not that logic had ever played much of a part before. He’d just followed his nose, and it had worked up to now.
‘Floundering in the dark’ was the phrase Louise had used, and Dixon hated it. The investigation needed a clear direction and this was it; whether it was right or wrong would come out in the wash.
Twenty minutes? It took ten, his phone buzzing on the desk in front of him.
‘Yes, Ma’am.’
‘There’s a lot of guesswork in there.’
‘There is.’
‘You’ve got no evidence.’
And this week’s prize for stating the bleedin’ obvious goes to—
‘Not yet, Ma’am. But there’s the statement from Amy’s friend that she came to Hinkley to watch someone connected to the SSC.’
‘What does that prove?’
‘The answer is here, Ma’am. Amy came here, someone paid Steiner to get in here and sabotage the tarmac, then to kill Amy. It all points to Hinkley.’
‘Charlesworth’s had the Home Office on the phone. EDF are going along with it at the moment, but their patience is running out. There have been rumblings at board level and the Home Secretary has already had the Energy Minister on the phone twice.’
Dixon knew the signs. ‘How long have I got?’
‘Seventy-two hours.’
‘This is the list he asked for.’ Crew handed Louise a sealed envelope when she opened the door. ‘It was locked,’ he said, gesturing to the handle with a frown.
‘This is an Incident Room and it’s a murder investigation.’ Dixon spoke without looking up from his computer.
Crew hesitated.
‘Is that everything?’ asked Louise.
‘Er, yes.’
Dixon waited until she locked the door again. ‘Let’s have it then.’
‘What is it?’
‘A list of all the Myles employees with security clearance.’ Dixon unfolded the pieces of paper. ‘One hundred and seventy-seven.’
‘Not many then,’ said Louise, rolling her eyes.
‘We just have to cross-reference it with the SSC employees. How far have you got with a list of their—’
‘Nowhere, I’m afraid. I’ve tried the three companies that formed the joint venture and none of them have kept any records going that far back. Two of them have merged since then as well, which makes it worse.’
‘Typical.’
Dixon glanced down the list. If he was right, then the person he was looking for was a decision maker. He snatched a highlighter pen off the desk and began working down the job titles.
Interesting, some of them. He wondered what a ‘director of strategic engagement’ was. Whatever it was, a director was worth following up, as were the managing director, chief executive, chairman, finance director, operations manager – the list ran to seventeen in total, each with the word ‘director’ or ‘manager’ in the title. It was as good a place as any to start.
‘We need the security files for this lot,’ said Dixon, handing the list to Louise.
‘Personnel files too?’
‘No. I don’t want to let them know we’re looking at them yet.’
‘Leave it with me,’ she replied. ‘Crew gave me his extension number somewhere.’
In the meantime, Google would have to do. The Myles Construction website wasn’t particularly illuminating, the information for shareholders giving the names of the board members, but that was it. Dixon downloaded the company annual report, soon deleting it. He tried Companies House, which gave much the same information. Then he googled each of the directors in turn, scrolling through pages of press releases and LinkedIn profiles.
‘I never got the hang of LinkedIn,’ he said under his breath; louder than he thought, obviously.
‘It’s like Facebook but for business people, that’s all,’ said Louise, her head popping up from behind her computer. ‘Instead of connecting with friends and family you connect with other business people. It’s an online networking thing.’
Dixon curled his lip. He remembered an email coming round when he was training to be a solicitor, quickly consigned to the trash folder. Networking – standing around with a glass of wine in his hand in a room full of people who were equally disinterested, making small talk, before the obligatory exchange of business cards. He’d been once, to some lunch club or other, before he’d wised up to it.
He clicked on the LinkedIn profile for the managing director. ‘You’ve got to sign up to view their profiles,’ he said, clicking the Back button.
‘I’m a member, Sir,’ said Louise. ‘If you want me to do it.’
‘Try the managing director first.’ Dixon was standing behind her, watc
hing her log in. ‘You haven’t completed your profile,’ he said.
‘Not yet.’ She typed in the name and hit Enter. ‘There he is, Sir. John Hart, managing director, Myles Construction Plc.’
He took pride in his profile, more so than Louise anyway.
‘Can you print it off?’ asked Dixon.
‘I can save it as a PDF file and then print it.’
‘Do that for each of them then, and we’ll see what we get.’
He was listening to the whirr of the printer, reading the transcript of Liam Crook’s interview, when Louise appeared next to his workstation and dropped a bundle of paper on to his keyboard. ‘I haven’t stapled them,’ she said.
‘What is it with people putting their CV online for the whole world to see?’
‘It’ll only be the bits they want people to see,’ replied Louise.
‘Even so.’ Dixon was flicking through the pages.
‘What’s a CIMA?’ she asked.
Dixon hesitated. ‘Chartered Institute of Management Accountants.’
‘What’s a management accountant?’
‘They do company accounts, that sort of stuff.’ The finance director, Philip Scanlon CIMA. ‘He’s “results driven, self-motivated and resourceful”, it says here. Who wrote that, I wonder?’
‘He did.’
Dixon glanced down the page. Educated at Bristol Grammar School and Staffordshire University. ‘What d’you notice about his work experience?’ he asked, handing the page to Louise. He watched her eyes scanning the page.
She grinned. ‘Really?’
‘Vanity,’ muttered Dixon, shaking his head.
Scanlon had worked for three companies, each listed with dates and job title. Myles Construction as finance director since 2015; for twenty years before that he was finance director with an engineering firm in Bristol, and before that procurement manager 1992 to 1995, Danson SSC Plc.
Idiot.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Steiner’s dirty work.
That was one way of looking at it; one way of spinning it. Dixon preferred Jackman’s take on it though, even if he had been Stella’s solicitor. The fact that the same people had crossed Steiner was his problem.