The Bricklayer's Son Owns The Desert

CHAPTER THEEE: THE HELMET

Zane didn't sleep much in Brookhollow. Two days after he came home, he was sitting at the kitchen window before sunrise, a cup of tea going cold in his hands, when he heard the motorbike.

It came down Tannery Row with its engine low and stopped at the gate. The rider wore black from boots to helmet, the visor dark as a beetle's back. They swung off the bike, carried a bag of groceries and a white envelope up the path and set both on the step. Upstairs, a floorboard creaked as Rosa got out of bed. By the time she reached the door, the bike was already turning out of the street. She picked up the bag the way she might lift a sleeping child and stood on the step, looking at the empty road.

Zane was out the back before it reached the corner.

The hire car Kwame had arranged was parked two streets away, a grey saloon nobody would remember. He kept well back, letting the single red taillight pull him through the sleeping town. The bike crossed the river on the old iron bridge and began to climb the hill, where the houses grew larger and the walls grew higher, until there were no houses at all, only gates. It slowed at the tallest of them, wrought iron gilded at the tips, with a stone H set into each pillar.

Hatherley House. The gates opened for the rider without a word from anyone.

Zane drove past, parked under the beeches further down and walked back along the wall until he found the service lane. The garage stood at the end of it, a long stone building that had once been stables. One of its doors was rolled halfway up, and a light was on inside. He ducked under it and waited in the shadow between a vintage Jaguar and a tool bench.

Two minutes later, the rider wheeled the bike in and killed the engine. She pulled off her gloves first, then the helmet, and shook out a tangle of dark hair.

He knew her face. He had seen it in the society pages, at charity galas and ribbon cuttings, always at the edge of the family photograph and never quite smiling. Maren Hatherley, Barclay Hatherley's youngest. She had been seventeen the summer Larch Tower fell.

She saw him and went still. She wasn't surprised, he realised. She was furious, and her knuckles had gone white around the helmet strap.

"You shouldn't have come back," she said, her voice low and tight. "Do you understand where you are? My brother will put you in a cell or in the river, and he won't lose a minute's sleep over which."

"Why are you feeding my parents?"

She didn't answer. She set the helmet down on the seat of the bike and stood looking at it, one hand still resting on its curve. Outside, a sprinkler hissed into life on the lawn. The silence went on so long that he thought she wouldn't answer at all.

"Because somebody in this family should," she said at last.

Then she lifted her chin, and whatever he had glimpsed in her face was gone. "Get off this property. The guards change at six, and they walk this lane. If they find you here, I can't help you."

Her eyes flicked to the door, to the lane beyond it and back to him. He held her gaze a moment longer. Then he went, the way he had come, and halfway down the lane he heard the garage door roll shut behind him hard enough to rattle in its frame.

Rowland Hatherley came down to Tannery Row that afternoon in a white suit, as if he were on his way to a wedding and the street was a puddle he had to cross to get there. Two men walked behind him, and a black car idled at the corner with its engine running.

Ivan was in his chair in the yard, his arm resting in a sling Rosa had made from an old pillowcase. Zane stood at his shoulder, and Rosa watched from the doorway with a dish towel twisted in her hands again. Across the road, workmen were hammering stakes into the empty lot where the chapel used to be and stringing bunting between them.

"You'll have noticed the preparations," Rowland said pleasantly. "On Saturday we break ground on Riverglass. The press will be there, and the mayor. And our guest of honour, Benedikt Ostrander." He let the name settle. "President of the House of Ostrander, Mr Whelan. The most famous jeweller in the world."

He didn't need to say the rest. Everyone in Brookhollow knew it already. The banks had laughed at Riverglass for two years, until Ostrander's money walked in and the laughing stopped. Without him, there were no glass towers, only a field of rubble and a family with a great many debts.

"He'll be standing right there," Rowland went on, pointing at the lot directly facing the Whelans' gate. "Looking at this."

He took a folded contract from his jacket and dropped it in Ivan's lap, beside the splinted arm.

"Sign it before Saturday," he said, "or Saturday is the last day this house stands."

Ivan didn't touch the paper. Rowland hadn't expected him to. His attention had already moved to Zane, and he looked him up and down slowly, from the dusty boots to the scar through his eyebrow, the way a man looks at something he has stepped in.

"Still digging holes, runaway?"

Zane said nothing. He didn't look away, and he didn't move, and after a while Rowland's smile began to show the strain of holding itself up. He laughed, tapped the contract once with a manicured finger and walked back to his car.

Ivan waited until the black car had gone before he spoke. "You were quiet," he said.

"I was listening," Zane said.

The hammering across the road stopped at dusk. The contract went on the kitchen table under the sugar bowl, where Ivan left it without reading a word, and the bunting stirred in the dark outside like something waiting.

At a quarter past eleven, Zane's phone lit up on the bedside table with a number he didn't know.

Don't stand at that gate on Saturday. Rowland wants you angry in front of the cameras. M.