The Bricklayer's Son Owns The Desert

CHAPTER SEVEN: BOUGIE'S BOY

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 with it, you'd remember more. How he laughed when he signed. What he said about the men. The money comes back the day the new statement goes in."

"I've told them everything I saw," Dougie said.

"Then see more," said Rowland, and rang off.

Zane found him an hour later in the clinic car park, sitting in a rusted estate car with his forehead resting on the steering wheel. Maren had told him the name of the clinic. The rest had only taken a little asking.

He knocked on the passenger window. Dougie lifted his head, saw who it was and went white. For a second he looked as if he might start the engine and drive straight through the barrier. Then the fight went out of him, and he leaned across and unlocked the door.

Zane got in and shut it behind him. For a while neither of them spoke. Rain had started, thin and grey, ticking against the roof.

"Go on, then," Dougie said finally. "Say it."

"Say what?"

"Whatever you came to say. That you'll ruin me. That you'll have me in the dock beside you." His voice cracked. "I don't care anymore. They've stopped paying for my boy."

"I know," Zane said. "I'm not here to threaten you."

He didn't explain. He took out his phone, made one call in a language Dougie didn't understand and got out of the car again. Dougie sat there in the rain and watched him walk away without looking back.

By evening, a private ambulance had carried Archie Jarvis ninety miles north to the Royal Cardiac Unit at St Aidan's, the best heart hospital in the country, with a consultant waiting for him at the doors. A letter from Sundrift Mining arrived at the ward before he did. His care was paid for in full, every operation and every night, for as long as he needed it. The final line said that the arrangement did not depend on anything his father chose to do or say.

Dougie read the letter three times in the corridor outside his son's new room. Then he found Zane in the visitors' café downstairs, sitting alone with a cup of coffee he hadn't touched.

"Why?" Dougie said. His hands were shaking. "I swore you into a cell. Why would you pay for my son?"

Zane looked up at him.

"Because Archie never lied about me," he said.

Dougie stood there for a long moment. Then he sat down heavily on the chair opposite, put his face in his hands and stayed that way until his breathing steadied.

"Get your lawyers," he said.

They met in a family room on the cardiac ward, because Dougie wouldn't go further than a corridor away from his son. Two of Sundrift's lawyers sat across a low table with a recorder between them, and Dougie told them the truth in a flat, exhausted voice that never once rose above a murmur.

Zane had never approved the steel. Rowland Hatherley had come to Dougie's site office two days before the collapse and told him the approval would be going through in Zane's name, and that Dougie should make sure the paperwork was filed before anyone asked questions. And when the case was reopened last week, it was Superintendent Mortlake who had sat him down and told him exactly what to say. Mortlake had chosen the words himself, right down to the line about watching Zane approve the steel with his own hand.

"I said it the way he told me to," Dougie said. "Word for word."

Across the river, Riverglass was coming apart.

The House of Ostrander had said nothing since Saturday. It hadn't withdrawn and it hadn't explained, and its silence had frightened the banks more than any statement could have done. On Thursday afternoon, two of them pulled their funding within an hour of each other. The others asked for more time to review their position, which everyone at Hatherley House understood to mean the same thing, only slower.

Rowland sat in his office with the blinds down and his phone face down on the desk. He had rung Ostrander's people eleven times, and they had been polite every time. He had searched every database and register he could think of for the name Zane Whelan and found nothing but an old arrest record and a missing persons notice his mother had filed. He couldn't work out whom he had crossed, or how, or what a man like Ostrander could possibly owe a bricklayer's son.

All he knew was that the man at the gate had never flinched.

On the cardiac ward, the lawyers switched off the recorder. One of them began sliding papers into a leather case, and the other stood and reached for his coat. Dougie stayed where he was, staring at the blank wall.

He said one more thing, so quietly that they almost missed it.

"There was a man on the scaffold the morning it fell. Before the shift started." He lifted his eyes. "He had a grinder. He wasn't one of ours."