Novels by jasoncopper32

Larch Tower stood at the river end of the old docks, eleven storeys of grey concrete and dark glass that nobody had touched in six years. After the collapse, Hatherley Developments had stopped work, boarded up the doors and wrapped the site in chain-link and warning signs. The tower had been left to stand there unfinished, a monument to something the town preferred not to talk about.What was left of the scaffold had gone into the basement. Dougie remembered it clearly. A clean-up crew had cleared the street within two days, before the inspectors had even finished their photographs, and dumped every twisted pole and coupler into the underground car park. Then someone had locked the gate behind it. Superintendent Mortlake's investigation had never even asked for the key.Zane went in on Saturday night, with Dougie and Kwame beside him and Monday's bulldozers ticking closer in the back of his mind.The padlock on the basement gate had rusted solid. Kwame cut through the chain with a pai

The fire started a little after three in the morning, at the back of the house, where someone had poured a line of petrol along the foot of the wall and thrown a match.Zane woke to the smell before the sound. He was on his feet and on the landing before he understood why, and by then the back of the house was roaring. Smoke rolled up the stairwell thick and yellow. Somewhere below, glass burst in the heat."Out!" he shouted. "Everybody out, now!"His mother's door was the nearest. Rosa was sitting up in bed, coughing, groping for her glasses on the nightstand. Zane didn't wait for her to find them. He lifted her off the mattress in her nightdress, wrapped the blanket round her and carried her down through the smoke with her face pressed into his shoulder. The heat at the bottom of the stairs was like an open kiln. He kicked the front door wide and set her down on the pavement, then turned straight back.Maren and Kwame were already halfway down the stairs with Ivan between them. Kwam

Vince Whelan's house stood on the good side of the river road, a new-built place with stone lions on the gateposts and a lawn like a bowling green. He had bought it last spring. On Friday morning he was out on the drive in his shirtsleeves, washing the second car with a soft sponge and whistling, when his nephew walked through the gate.The sponge stopped moving."Zane!" Vince dropped it in the bucket and came forward with his arms out and his face arranged into delight. He was Ivan's younger brother, softer in every way, with a gold watch and a belly that pushed at his shirt buttons. "Look at you. Rosa said you were back, and I've been meaning to come round all week, I swear I have. It's just been one thing after another. You know how it is."Zane didn't take the embrace. He held out a folded sheaf of paper instead.Vince looked at it. He didn't need to unfold it. Zane watched him recognise the bank's letterhead through the paper, and watched the delight slide off his face like water

Archie Jarvis was twelve years old, and his heart had been failing for half of his life.For six years, the Hatherleys had paid for his care at the Linwood Clinic, a private place on the edge of town with carpeted corridors and nurses who knew every child by name. The bills went straight to Hatherley House. Nothing was ever written down about why, and nothing ever needed to be. As long as Dougie Jarvis kept his story straight, his son kept his bed.On Thursday morning, the woman in the billing office called him in and told him, kindly and with real regret, that the account had been closed overnight. Archie could stay until the end of the week. After that, the clinic would need to discuss other arrangements.Dougie's phone rang before he reached the car. It was Rowland Hatherley, and he sounded like a man who hadn't slept."You've heard, then," Rowland said. "Don't panic. It's temporary. The thing is, Dougie, your statement's a bit thin now that he's out on bail. I think if you sat wit

The visiting room at Halston Remand smelled of bleach and old radiators. Zane sat at a bolted table in a grey prison sweatshirt and watched the door, expecting his mother or Kwame's lawyers. When it opened on Tuesday afternoon, it was Maren Hatherley who came through it, in a plain coat with her hair pulled back and no helmet to hide behind.She sat down across from him. For a while she just looked at her hands on the table, and he let her."I was seventeen," she said finally. "You know that. I used to do my homework in the corner of my father's study, because it was the only quiet room in the house and nobody ever noticed me there. That's where I was when Rowland came in with your report."Zane didn't move."He read it out. Your warning about the steel, every line of it. My father laughed. He said engineers always want the best of everything because it isn't their money. Rowland said the cheaper supplier could deliver in a week and save them more than a million. My father said do it.

By Monday morning, half of Tannery Row's old neighbours had found a reason to walk past number nine. They came back from the streets across town where Hatherley money had moved them, old women in headscarves and men Ivan had once laid bricks beside, pretending to admire the bunting while they craned for a look at the man the jeweller had bowed to. Rosa had given up shooing them and made a pot of tea instead. Three of them were crowded into her kitchen when the police cars pulled up.Superintendent Mortlake didn't knock. He came through the open door with two uniformed officers behind him, a thick man in a brown raincoat, heavier than Zane remembered and greyer around the jaw. He looked at the teacups and the neighbours and the man sitting at the head of the table, and he smiled as if all of it had been arranged for his benefit."Zane Whelan," he said. "I'm arresting you for the manslaughter of three men on the site of Larch Tower."One of the women by the stove made a small sound and