The Bricklayer's Son Owns The Desert

CHAPTER FIVE: THE MISSING FINGERTIP

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 put her hand over her mouth. Everyone on Tannery Row had known those three men, and everyone had been at the funerals.

"That case was closed," Zane said evenly.

"It's open again." Mortlake took a folded sheet from his raincoat and laid it on the table beside the sugar bowl. "We have a new witness. Dougie Jarvis, site manager on Larch Tower. He's sworn that he stood beside you and watched you approve that steel with your own hand."

Zane looked at the paper without picking it up. Dougie Jarvis had stood beside him on the ninth floor six years ago, all right. He had stood there and said nothing while Zane tapped the scaffold tubes and called them rubbish.

One of the officers stepped forward with the cuffs. Rosa caught her son's sleeve in both hands and held on as if he were standing at the edge of a drop. Ivan pushed himself up out of his chair and moved between Zane and the handcuffs, his plaster arm held against his chest and his good arm out wide.

"Not in my house," he said. "You'll not take him out of my house again."

"Dad." Zane stood and put a hand on his father's shoulder, gently, and eased him back down into the chair. "Sit down. It's all right." He turned to his mother and loosened her fingers from his sleeve one at a time. "I'll be home soon."

Mortlake smiled at that, as though Zane had told a joke.

They led him out through the yard with his hands behind him, past the neighbours and the beans and the bunting, while the cameras that had gathered for the jeweller's man got something better. Rosa stood in the doorway and didn't make a sound.

Mortlake made sure that Zane would not be home soon. The bail hearing was held that same afternoon, in a courtroom on the second floor of the town hall. The superintendent stood up and reminded the judge, in a voice heavy with regret, that the accused had disappeared the night before his last hearing and stayed gone for six years. The judge didn't need to hear any more.

"The defendant has fled once already," she said. "Bail is refused."

Up at Hatherley House, Maren sat at her desk with the door locked.

She opened the bottom drawer and lifted out a business magazine, its corners soft from handling. She had kept it for two years and had never been able to explain why, not even to herself. The cover story was about the Foreman of the Kessari fields, the miner who had found the Sundrift seam and turned it into the richest diamond operation on earth. There was only one photograph, taken from very far away, of a man in a hard hat and a dust mask standing at the edge of a pit. He might have been anyone.

But the story told how, in his second year in the pits, a shaft had collapsed with forty men inside. It told how he had found a way through, and how he had gone down for the last man himself. And it told how he had left the tip of his left little finger in the rock.

Maren closed her eyes and saw the gate on Saturday morning. She saw his hand close on the top bar as Ostrander crossed the road, and the little finger that stopped short at the last joint.

The runaway her brother laughed at owned the Sundrift fields.

She told no one. She put the magazine back in the drawer and locked it.

Her father had left for the bank at nine, with his lawyers and his worst temper. Rowland had gone with him. Maren walked down to the study, opened the second drawer of the desk and took out the spare key that lived under the cheque books. It opened the archive room at the end of the east corridor, where Hatherley Developments kept every paper it had ever wanted to forget.

The Larch Tower boxes filled a whole shelf. Maren worked through them one by one, under a bare bulb, with dust settling on her sleeves. Site diaries. Delivery notes. The inspectors' report, with its photographs of twisted steel that she couldn't look at for long.

In the last box, behind the inspectors' copy of the approval, she found the original.

It was the same form, with the same signature at the bottom. But when she turned it over, she saw that someone had written Zane's name across the back of it in pencil, four times, one under another. The first was clumsy. The second was better. By the fourth, it was nearly perfect, as if someone had been practising until the hand came right.

Maren stood very still under the bulb.

She knew the slant of those letters, the hard lean to the right and the way the last stroke of every word hooked upward. She had grown up with it. Whenever their father was too busy to be bothered, it was Rowland who signed her school permission slips, and he had been signing them that way since she was eight years old.