by Shaun Hutson
Jess noticed a small white van parked a hundred yards from the building with SKY TELEVISION OUTSIDE BROADCAST stencilled on its side.
Spike had called others apart from her she thought as she drew nearer to the cluster of uniformed figures barring the way into the Crystal Tower.
She hesitated and watched the little group for a moment, noticing that a small gathering of passers-by, obviously attracted by the arrival of so many emergency vehicles in such a short space of time, had begun to collect close to the high temporary fence that surrounded the approaches to the Crystal Tower.
She took some pictures of the group just for the hell of it and then noticed with delight that the two policemen were moving away from the building entrance, one of them towards this steadily growing throng and the other in the direction of a nearby police car. The paramedics had disappeared back inside the Crystal Tower so, for the time being the entrance was unguarded.
Jess took her chance.
She slipped through the main door and into the spacious lobby of the building the sound of her heels echoing on the cold stone floor. She was struck immediately by the sounds coming from her left. She could hear voices and what sounded like the mechanical grinding of machinery. With one hand on her camera she headed towards the sounds, moving up a small flight of steps and around a corner until she found the source of the noises.
There were several men in uniform, some of them firemen others paramedics and policemen. She could also see others dressed in dark blue overalls and even a couple of men in expensive looking suits who seemed to be directing operations like soldier ants amid a swarm of workers in a freshly disturbed nest. All of these men were moving about amongst each other talking and pointing agitatedly in the direction of what Jess swiftly realised was a bank of lifts. She took several shots of the organised chaos around the lift doors then moved closer, trying to see through the melee of uniforms.
It was from one of those shafts that smoke was billowing.
Jess took more pictures.
‘Who are you?’
The voice came from behind her and she spun around to see a tall man with rimless glasses and pinched features standing before her. He was wearing a charcoal grey suit that fitted him perfectly but looked less than impressive because of the flecks of dandruff on the shoulders.
‘How you get in here?’ the man persisted and Jess detected more than a hint of an accent. Eastern European she guessed.
‘I’m with the Health and Safety Department,’ she lied effortlessly. ‘We heard about the accident and they sent me down here to get some pictures.’
The man looked at her blankly for a moment then shook his head.
‘Where is identification?’ he said, sharply.
‘I left it in my car,’ she told him, shrugging. ‘I only need to take a few more pictures and I’ll be out of your hair.’
The man looked puzzled.
‘How many were injured?’ Jess went on, nodding towards the lift shafts. ‘I was told four.’
‘Two killed,’ the man said, frowning. ‘Not four.’
‘Do you know their names?’
‘Identification,’ the man snapped. ‘Now.’
Jess knew she was on a loser now.
‘I’ll go back to my car and get it,’ she told him, stepping away but turning one last time towards the lift shaft from which the smoke was still rising.
As she did she saw two paramedics emerging carrying a stretcher. Exactly what was on it she couldn’t be sure but, from where she was standing it looked like a mound of raw meat wrapped in dark material.
Jess pointed the camera in that direction and fired off several shots.
It was then that the man in the charcoal suit grabbed her by the shoulder.
EIGHT
It was Jessica Anderson’s turn to protest.
The man in the charcoal grey suit half-lifted and half-pushed her towards the lobby muttering something in his own language as she struggled to wriggle free of him.
‘Take your fucking hands off me,’ she snarled, pulling away and almost dropping her camera.
‘You are reporter,’ the man rasped dismissively.
‘So what if I am?’
‘I should have told police,’ he continued as they reached the lobby.
‘And you should be careful I don’t call immigration,’ Jess hissed as he pushed her away.
‘Now get out of building, whore,’ he snarled.
She glared at him for a moment then quickly aimed the camera at him and took his picture.
‘Fuck you,’ he said and watched as she walked towards the main doors, brushing at the sleeve and shoulder of her jacket in the process as if to wipe away the imprint of his clutching hand.
When she hesitated he took a few menacing steps in her direction but Jess merely waved a dismissive hand in his direction and walked out. She headed for the pavement beyond the high wire fence, pausing to light a cigarette. Once lit she checked the photos she’d taken, scrolling through them and nodding to herself approvingly. She paused at the ones of the misshapen mass on the stretcher.
She increased the size of the image but still it was difficult to make out exactly what was being removed from the shaft. From the quantities of crimson she pretty sure that the pulverised mess was the remains of a man but there was little in the picture to identify it as such for sure. She took a long drag on her cigarette then blew the smoke out her gaze still fixed on the shots she’d taken.
‘Very moody,’ a voice behind her said. ‘Very Annie Liebovitz.’
She turned in the direction of the voice, a smile flickering on her lips.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘Same as you, my job, or what passes for it,’ Alex Hadley told her, returning her smile. He nodded towards the cigarette she was smoking. ‘Have you got one of those to spare?’
‘I thought you’d given up,’ she told him, offering him the packet and her lighter.
‘I have. Well, given up buying anyway,’ he said, taking one of the Silk Cut and lighting it. ‘I just bum them where I can.’
Jess watched him as he sucked hard on the cigarette then handed her the lighter again.
‘They’ll kill you, you know,’ she told him. ‘That’s what everyone tells me.’
‘At least they’re quiet,’ Hadley offered. He nodded in the direction of the Crystal Tower. ‘So what are you doing here?’
‘I got a call to say there’d been another accident in there,’ she told him, gesturing towards the tower. ‘I came down to check.’
‘Who told you, Spike?’
She nodded.
‘Fucking hell, he must be the richest man in London,’ Hadley grunted. ‘Every newspaper and TV station around pays him for information.’
‘He’s reliable.’
‘He should be after all these years. It’s a wonder he’s not deaf by now listening to those police and emergency broadcasts every night of the fucking week.’
‘It was you who put me on to him in the first place.’
Hadley raised his eyebrows.
‘Do you want to get a drink and we’ll have a chat about what’s going on in there?’ He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘There’s a place just up the road we can go.’
‘You don’t drink any more,’ Jess reminded him.
‘Come on.’
Jess hesitated.
‘Are you coming?’ Hadley enquired.
‘I should get home,’ she insisted.
He was already walking slowly up the road. Jess waited a moment longer then followed, hurrying along until she was walking next to him.
‘I’ll get them in,’ Hadley told her sucking on his cigarette.
Jess nodded and walked on.
NINE
Alex Hadley was approaching his fifty-third birthday but looked older. He was a thick set man with short greying hair and a thin face that made him look malnourished. There were bags beneath his eyes but the pupils themselves still carried a s
park that seemed to have deserted the rest of his frame.
He had the longest fingers Jess had ever seen and those fingers (pianist’s fingers Hadley liked to call them) were now clasped around a mug of tea that he was staring into as if the answers to all of life’s great mysteries lay at the bottom.
The café where they sat smelled of strong coffee and fried food. There were two large metal urns perched on the counter one filled with tea the other with coffee. Above these hovered a veil of thick steam that hung there like some kind of toxic cloud over a recent nuclear accident. On the wall above was a chalk board menu with an array of fare on it guaranteed to give any health food fan a heart attack. Fried bacon, fried eggs, fried sausages, fried bread. Everything was fried it seemed. Jess was glad she hadn’t asked for cake to go with her tea in case that was fried too. There were pieces of cake rotating slowly in a cabinet in one corner of the café none of them looking very fresh. This place conceded nothing to modern fads where eating was concerned. There was no de-caffeinated coffee available. No vegetarian option. Some places offered a healthy option on their menu. The healthy option as far this café was concerned simply involved eating elsewhere. This eatery was twenty years behind the times Jess thought but that was probably why Hadley liked it because so was he.
She’d known him for more than ten years, ever since she first joined the paper. He’d been one of the top dogs then. An important man within the paper itself and also within the industry but not any more. He’d had his day and looking at him now across the scratched and scored Formica tabletop Jess could see every disappointment and setback was etched into his features. It wasn’t pleasant to see and even less so because she remembered him for what he’d been. She didn’t like what he’d become. She felt sorry for him but she realised how much Hadley would have hated that reaction if he’d known. He needed a break not her pity.
‘You really know how to show a girl a good time,’ Jess said, smiling and motioning around the café.
‘My speciality,’ he said, sipping at his tea.
‘You know that asking a woman of thirty-five to have a drink with you at your age officially qualifies you as a dirty old man,’ she grinned.
‘Fuck off,’ Hadley grunted. ‘It never used to bother you.’
Jess lowered her gaze for a moment then drummed on the mug with her nails before looking at Hadley again. He was gazing at a couple in their twenties who were seated at one of the other tables. Both of them had iPhones in their hands and were glancing at the screens as if they’d just discovered a cancer cure.
‘Dickheads,’ Hadley murmured, nodding towards the couple. ‘Probably checking their fucking Facebook pages.’ He shook his head. ‘What is it with people now?’
‘You have to keep up with all the social networks,’ Jess said, smiling. ‘Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and all that.’
‘Fucking Twitter,’ Hadley rasped. ‘A bunch of nobodies writing bollocks so a bigger bunch of nobodies can read it. The only tweet worth reading, ever, would be “I’ve just cured cancer.” That’s it. All the rest is bullshit.’ He looked again at the couple nearby and then merely sneered. ‘Just once I’d love to tell one of them, “look, nothing in your boring, meaningless little life is worth putting on there for the other boring meaningless twats to read. Your life is pointless, just get used to it. Nobody is interested in what you do from one minute to the next and if you think they are then you’re dumber than I thought you were.”’ He took a swig of his tea.
Jess smiled thinly but the undisguised venom in Hadley’s voice was a little unsettling.
‘You still haven’t told me what you were doing around here in the first place,’ she reminded him, trying to change the subject.
‘I was out walking about as simple as that. I saw the emergency vehicles pull up so I hung around to see what was going on. It was a coincidence, pure and simple. Not everything’s planned you know.’ He drank more tea.
‘Why were you walking about at eleven at night?’
‘Because I’d been inside all fucking day and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I needed to get a breath of air. And I’d run out of milk.’ He smiled but there was no warmth in it.
‘Any work about?’
‘Little bits here and there but not enough and certainly nothing that pays well enough.’ He looked at her. ‘What about you? You look as if you’re doing alright.’
She shrugged.
‘You know how it is,’ she told him.
‘I used to,’ he sighed then sucked in a deep breath. ‘So what was going on in there?’ he asked, nodding in the direction of the Crystal Tower.
‘Another bad accident by the look of it,’ she told him. ‘I saw them carrying at least one body out of a lift shaft. It must have been a workman because the place doesn’t open for a while, does it?’
‘The first week they started work on that place a guy was decapitated by a crane.’
‘Four were crushed when a wall collapsed.’
‘And didn’t somebody fall from the roof?’
She nodded.
‘And now we think how many more tonight?’ Hadley went on.
‘At least two as far as I can tell. I would have had a better look around if some Russian security guard hadn’t thrown me out. He called me a whore.’ She smiled. ‘And in broken English.’ Jess sipped her tea.
‘Russian,’ Hadley told her. ‘He was probably one of Voronov’s personal bodyguards.’
‘Andrei Voronov, the guy who owns the building. He’s a bit of a recluse isn’t he?’
‘When you’ve got as much money as he has you don’t have to speak to people. You know he tried to buy Chelsea before Roman Abramovich did, don’t you?’
‘No, I didn’t. What went wrong?’
‘No one knows for sure. He just backed off. Lost interest. Fuck knows why. He’s so loaded he makes Abramovich look like a charity case. He could have bought Chelsea, Arsenal, Spurs and any other club he fucking fancied.’
‘It’s a pity he didn’t spend some more of his money on security for the tower then. He’s going to lose half his workers before the building even opens.’
‘Like he gives a fuck. He’s Russian remember life’s not so much cheap as worthless there.’
‘But these are English workers who are dying in these accidents not cheap foreign labour no one gives a shit about. Hasn’t anyone questioned him?’
‘Like who, the police? A few accidents happen during the construction of a prestigious new building on the banks of the Thames who cares? Shit happens and besides it’s not as if any of them have been in suspicious circumstances, is it?’
‘But there’ve been so many.’
Hadley shrugged.
‘It happens all the time in other countries and no one gives a shit,’ he muttered. ‘Just because it’s happening in London doesn’t make it special.’
‘But it’s the way they’ve been happening,’ Jess persisted. ‘Accidents that never should have happened.’
‘You’re trying to make a story where there isn’t one, Jess.’
‘Well, don’t you think some of the stuff that’s been going on there is a bit weird?’
‘You always had an over-active imagination,’ Hadley said, dismissively.
‘Bullshit,’ she grunted. ‘More than seventy people have died during the construction of that tower. I think someone somewhere skipped the safety regulations or paid for them to be overlooked. Normally a site would have been shut down with that many fatalities, Unions would never have allowed work to carry on. Someone was paid off, I’m sure of it but how we prove that I don’t know yet.’
‘I think that the stuff leading up to the construction itself was weird, I’m not sure about a series of accidents having as much significance as you’re trying to attach to them.’
‘What do you mean leading up to the construction?’
‘The way Voronov got planning permission so easily when the Mayor of London and half the fucking House of Commons had been so violentl
y opposed to it. Christ, there were even petitions from residents and property owners in the area protesting about the fucking place being built. One day there were ministers all ranting on about how he’d never be given permission to build and the next they were all queuing up to suck his dick, saying what a wonderful addition to the city the building would be and how many extra jobs it would create. That kind of bullshit.’
‘So how do you think he got the go ahead? Bribes? Threats? He’s been linked with the Russian Mafia hasn’t he?’
‘All Eastern European businessmen are linked with Russian Mafia,’ he told her.
‘Do you think he leaned on the right people?’ Jess smiled. ‘Perhaps he made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.’
Hadley managed a thin smile.
‘He did something, whether it was legal or not,’ he told her. ‘Guys like Voronov usually get what they want one way or the other.’
‘Didn’t you do a piece on him a couple of years back?’ Jess remembered.
‘I met him,’ Hadley told her.
TEN
Jess sat forward in her seat.
‘Just the once and with his bodyguards and press agents everywhere,’ Hadley went on. ‘I knew a PR girl who worked for him, she got me in. It wasn’t exactly a candid off the record conversation more a PR exercise when he bought controlling interest in The Ritz.’
‘Didn’t he sell that a couple of years later?’ Jess asked.
Hadley nodded.
‘So what was he like?’ she enquired.
‘It was a press conference, Jess.’
‘But you spoke to him?’
‘Me and about a dozen other journos. He didn’t invite me round for afternoon tea you know.’
Jess smiled and sipped her tea.
‘What was he like?’ she wanted to know.
‘He seemed ok for a guy who’s been linked with everything from the Russian Mafia to human trafficking. He was born here you know or at least some of his family came from this country originally or at least lived here.’