The Bricklayer's Son Owns The Desert

CHAPTER SIX: WHAT MAREN KEPT

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." She swallowed. "That was all. Two minutes, maybe less. Then they talked about golf."

"And after the collapse?"

"I asked him." Her voice thinned. "I went to him the night the men died and I asked what would happen to the engineer who had refused to approve it. He knew straight away what I'd heard. He didn't shout. He just told me that if I ever repeated a word of it, I'd be sent to a school abroad and I'd never be allowed home again. Not for holidays. Not ever." She looked up at last. "I believed him. I was seventeen, and I believed him, and I kept my mouth shut."

"So you fed my parents instead."

"It was the only thing I could do that nobody in my family would notice." She gave a short, unhappy laugh. "A girl on a motorbike once a month. They never even asked where I went."

She reached into her coat and took out a folded sheet of paper inside a plastic sleeve. She laid it on the table and slid it across to him. He turned it over and saw his own name written four times in pencil, getting better each time.

"I know you're the Foreman," she said quietly. "I've known since Saturday. You don't need me, not with what you have. But you should have this from a Hatherley."

Zane looked at the form for a long moment. When he raised his eyes, something in his face had changed, and she seemed to have no idea what to do with it.

"I needed you," he said. "For six years, you were the only one who kept them fed."

She looked away quickly, at the wall and the guard and the clock above the door. When the bell went for the end of visits, she stood up without another word, and he watched her go.

By Wednesday morning, Sundrift's lawyers had flown in overnight on Kwame's instructions, three of them in dark suits who had never lost a hearing they cared about. They put the pencilled form in front of a judge in the same courtroom on the second floor of the town hall. Beside it they laid Maren Hatherley's sworn statement, signed that morning in their offices and witnessed twice.

Mortlake argued for an hour. The judge listened to all of it, then granted bail before lunch.

Zane walked out of the town hall at three o'clock that afternoon. The case was not dropped. Mortlake made sure to tell him so on the steps, with his hands in his raincoat pockets and his voice pitched for the reporters.

"Bail isn't innocence, Mr Whelan," he said. "I still have a witness who watched you sign."

Maren did not go home.

She had packed one bag on Tuesday night and wheeled her motorbike out of the garage before dawn, because she had known, even then, that she would not be coming back. By the time she left the lawyers' offices on Wednesday, her phone was full of messages. Her bank card was declined at a petrol station on the ring road. Then a text arrived from the housekeeper, who had looked after her since she was a baby, short and careful and plainly written in a hurry.

Your father found the empty box in the archive. He's had your accounts frozen and taken your car keys off the hall table. He's told all of us you are unwell and not to be disturbed. Please don't come back tonight.

Maren read it twice in the petrol station car park. Then she put her helmet on and rode around the town for two hours, because there was only one place left to go and she was afraid of what would happen when she got there.

She came down Tannery Row at dusk with the engine low, the way she always had. Before she had even climbed off the bike, the front door of number nine opened. Rosa Whelan stood in the light of the hallway with her sewing glasses pushed up into her hair. She had known the sound of that engine for six years.

Maren took off her helmet and stood at the gate with her one bag, and for a moment neither of them said anything.

"I'm sorry," Maren began. "I didn't know where else..."

"Come inside, love," Rosa said. "The kettle's on."

That night, after Ivan had gone up and Rosa had made up the narrow bed in the back room, Zane and Maren sat across from each other at the kitchen table. The sewing machine had been pushed to one end. Between them sat a pot of tea neither of them was drinking.

"There's one more thing," Maren said. "The last thing I know."

Zane waited.

"Dougie Jarvis isn't lying for money." She wrapped both hands around her cold cup. "He's lying for his son. The boy is sick, really sick, and the treatment costs more than Jarvis could earn in ten lifetimes. My father pays for it."