The Bricklayer's Son Owns The Desert

CHAPTER TEN: THE THURSDAY BOOKING

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 pair of bolt cutters in one long squeeze, and the gate screamed on its hinges as they pushed it open. Their torches swept across a low concrete cavern with a skin of black water on the floor. At the far end, heaped against the wall like the bones of something huge, lay the scaffold.

It took them most of the night.

They worked in silence, mostly, hauling poles out of the tangle one by one and laying them in rows on the dry ramp, checking every joint and every coupler under the torchlight. Dougie worked hardest of all. He didn't stop to rest, and he didn't look at Zane once. Every so often he would pick up a bent pole and stand holding it for a moment, as if it weighed far more than it should.

Kwame found it a little before four.

He crouched at the bottom of the pile with his torch clamped under his arm, turning something over in his big hands. Then he stood and held it out into the light without a word. It was a bolt from one of the ledger couplers, as thick as Zane's thumb, and it hadn't snapped.

Every other bolt they had found was torn, the metal stretched and ragged where it had given way. This one was different. Most of the way through, the face was bright and smooth and flat, scored with fine curved lines. Only the last thin sliver was torn.

"Grinder," Kwame said quietly. "Somebody cut it nearly through and left just enough to hold. Until it didn't."

Zane took it from him and turned it in the light. He had cut steel with a grinder a thousand times. He knew exactly what he was looking at.

Behind them, Dougie made a sound like a man who had been struck. When Zane turned, he had sat down on an upturned crate, and he was taking something out of the inside pocket of his coat. It was an old site diary, the kind every manager carried, with a cracked green cover and pages swollen from rain. He had brought it with him from home and hadn't said a word about it all night.

"I haven't opened this in six years," he said hoarsely. "I couldn't."

He turned the pages slowly, his fingers shaking, until he found the week. Then he held it up for Zane to read.

The collapse had come on a Wednesday. On the page for Wednesday, in Dougie's blocky capitals, was the usual list of crews and deliveries, and nothing else. But the page for Thursday had been filled in too. The top lift of the scaffold was booked for the whole day, for one bricklayer working alone, to lay the final course on the parapet.

The name in the booking was I. Whelan.

"I wrote it in myself," Dougie whispered. "I never once thought about it. Not once, in all these years."

Zane stood in the dark with the cut bolt in his hand and read the name again.

The scaffold hadn't been cut to fall on three strangers. It had been cut to fall on his father, alone at the top of the tower on a Thursday morning, with no one else on the lift and no one to see. Somehow it had given way a day early, and three other men had died in his place.

Ivan was awake when Zane reached the hospital on Sunday morning, propped up against the pillows with the oxygen mask hanging loose at his throat. His colour was better. His eyes were clear. Zane closed the door behind him, pulled the chair close to the bed and told him everything, the basement and the bolt and the page in Dougie's diary.

His father didn't look surprised. He only looked tired, as if he had been carrying something up a long flight of stairs for six years and had finally been allowed to set it down.

"They framed you to bury what they'd tried to do to me," Ivan said. "And I let them." He turned his bandaged hand over on the blanket and looked at it. "The day you left, a man rang me. I never knew his name. He promised me that you would live as long as I kept my mouth shut. So I kept it shut. I let the whole town call my son a killer, and I never said a word."

Zane sat with that for a long moment. There was no anger in him, only a grief so heavy that it was hard to breathe around.

"And the house?" he said at last. "Why would anyone burn a house to get the land under it? They could have waited. You're an old man with a broken arm. Sooner or later, you'd have had to sell."

Ivan turned his face slowly toward the window. Far below, across the rooftops and the river, a thin smudge of smoke still rose above Tannery Row.

"They didn't burn it for the land, son," he said. "They burned it so they could dig." His voice dropped. "I poured those foundations myself, thirty years ago, before you were born."

He closed his eyes.

"What's under them is the reason Barclay Hatherley is rich."