Death on Site Read online

  Death on Site

  The second Francesca Wilson and John McLeish Mystery

  ‘A worthy successor to this author’s prizewinning first novel’

  (Mail On Sunday)

  High-flying civil servant Francesca Wilson and her lover DCI John McLeish are on holiday in Scotland when they witness a near-fatal climbing accident. The victim turns out to be Alan Fraser, a highly experienced rock-climber and also a professional scaffolder – hardly a man to make elementary mistakes when it comes to safety. Weeks later, at work on a major London construction site, Fraser has another fall and this time it’s a fatal one. Detective John McLeish does not believe in coincidence and sets out to discover why someone would want Fraser dead and how a dedicated mountaineer (planning an expedition to the Himalayas) could be made to literally lose his grip.

  JANET NEEL is the maiden name of Baroness Cohen of Pimlico. She read Law at Newnham College Cambridge and qualified as a solicitor in 1965. She worked in the USA designing war games and in Britain as a civil servant in the Department of Trade and Industry; then moved into a career in merchant banking and also founded and financed two successful London restaurants. She was appointed to the House of Lords in 2000 and sits as a Labour peer with a particular interest in trade, industry, taxation and communications. Married with three children, Baroness Cohen lives in Cambridge and is Chairman of the Cambridge Arts Theatre. Her first crime novel as Janet Neel, Death’s Bright Angel, won the Crime Writers’ Association’s John Creasey Award in 1988 but she has also written novels as Janet Cohen.

  The Ostara Crime imprint aims to collect and republish quality crime writing for new readers. The Series Editor is Mike Ripley, an award-winning crime writer who was also the crime fiction critic for the Daily Telegraph and then the Birmingham Post, reviewing almost 1,000 crime novels in 18 years. He now writes the monthly ‘Getting away With Murder’ column for Shots Magazine (www.shotsmag.co.uk), the UK’s leading website for fans of crime writing and has been the editor of Ostara’s Top Notch Thrillers imprint since its launch in 2009.

  Also by Janet Neel:

  To Die For

  A Timely Death

  Death’s Bright Angel

  Death of a Partner

  Death Among the Dons

  O Gentle Death

  Other Ostara Crime Titles

  Christine Green Deadly Errand

  Christine Green Deadly Admirer

  Christine Green Deadly Practice

  Denise Danks The Pizza House Crash

  Denise Danks Better Off Dead

  Denise Danks Frame Grabber

  Lesley Grant-Adamson Patterns in the Dust

  Lesley Grant-Adamson Guilty Knowledge

  Lesley Grant-Adamson Wild Justice

  David Serafin Saturday of Glory

  David Serafin The Body in Cadiz Bay

  David Serafin The Angel of Torremolinos

  James Melville The Wages of Zen

  James Melville The Chrysanthemum Chain

  James Melville A Sort of Samurai

  James Mitchell Sometimes You Could Die

  James Mitchell Dying Day

  James Mitchell Dead Ernest

  DEATH ON SITE

  * * *

  JANET NEEL

  Ostara Publishing

  First published 1989

  Copyright © 1989 Janet Neel

  Ostara Publishing Edition 2015

  The right of Janet Neel to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN 9781909619296

  CIP reference is available from the British Library

  Printed and Bound in the United Kingdom

  Ostara Publishing

  13 King Coel Road

  Lexden

  Colchester CO3 9AG

  www.ostarapublishing.co.uk

  FOR MY BROTHERS

  GILES AND ALEXANDER NEEL

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Epilogue

  1

  It had been one of those days so characteristic of the Highlands in early August, wet and still, with mist covering the tops of the hills; and the couple in heavy boots and hooded anoraks and soaked jeans, trudging down the long path along the floor of the valley, stopped in a patch of sun to rest and to take off the heaviest of their clothes. As they did so, the fleeting sun lit up brilliantly a tiny scarlet-jacketed figure high on a stretch of rock in a gully several hundred feet above them. Detective Chief Inspector John McLeish, on leave from his desk in C Division at New Scotland Yard, stared transfixed at the climber, forgetting about his own aching legs and soaked clothes. The faraway figure worked its way up the sheer cliff, moving with a dancer’s grace, and John McLeish strained his eyes to see.

  ‘That bit is called something impossible in Gaelic, but the lads here mostly call it the Wall.’ The tall, slim girl who had been trailing just behind him all down the hill leant heavily against him. ‘I may not survive the rest of this,’ she said warningly, and he smiled down into her wet, mud-spattered face. Short dark hair was plastered to her forehead above wide dark-blue eyes and a long straight nose.

  ‘They’d not know you at the Department of Trade and Industry,’ he said, with love. ‘How do you know what that bit is called anyway? I thought you never went out on the hills at all when you were here with the boys all those years ago? I thought you spent the two weeks in the bar?’

  ‘Unfair to go on about it,’ she said with dignity, sitting down on a soaking rock and taking off her right boot. ‘I’ve done very well today; we must have done ten miles in awful pouring rain, and I’ve hardly whinged at all. My feet hurt now. Both of them.’ She took her left boot off, and started methodically on her socks. ‘Don’t stand there looking like a tree, darling John – help me, or find a Mars Bar or something.’

  John McLeish, six foot four in his socks and built like the rugby player he had once been, sat down obediently and rummaged in his rucksack, producing a squashed Mars Bar which he divided between them by the simple dint of biting off half of it and handing over the rest.

  ‘You’re a good girl,’ he told her, watching her with the pleasure of a missionary with a promising convert. ‘Not the same girl I took up a hill a week ago.’

  She looked at him reproachfully, but he had turned to watch the distant climber, grinning to himself as he remembered the débâcle of the first walk of their holiday. She had insisted on walking in old gymshoes and a tracksuit inherited from one or other of her four younger brothers. Within two miles of starting, she had been reduced to misery by the typical Highland downpour, finding that neither the gym shoes nor the tracksuit were any protection at all against the wind and the rain, and that her ankles turned on the slippery rocks. A most unlikely performance for the competent Francesca Wilson, at twenty-nine one of the Department of Trade and Industry’s rising stars, and undisputed leader of her brothers. He had forced her to keep going, there being no other alternatives on that route, somewhere between amused and appalled by her descent into childish rage as she got wetter and more miserable. They had arrived back, furious with each other, at the cottage lent to them by one of the endless Wilson cousins.

  They had made it up later, in bed, but McLeish, brooking no argument, had driven her forty miles round the coast to the nearest climbing shop the very next day and had stood over her whil
e she bought proper boots and a weatherproof jacket, commenting the while on the dangerous idiocy of those who walked in these fierce hills without proper clothes.

  He turned his head now to watch her stoically wringing out her socks and batting hopelessly at the midges that gathered in clouds round them both. She was never going to be fast on a hill, he had caught her too late, but she would be able to keep up with him if he waited about a bit. She replaced her socks and boots, stood up, and leant against him while they both watched the distant climber hang near the cliff-top.

  ‘Nothing to stop him falling at all,’ Francesca said, with wonder.

  ‘Yes, there is. He’ll be using a sling – just to tie himself on while he does a difficult bit, not to help him climb.’ As McLeish spoke, cloud rolled down again on the ridge, hiding the climber.

  ‘John. Darling, do you tell me now that you are really a rock climber? I’m absolutely not going to start doing that.’

  ‘I did a lot years ago, but I’m a bit old now to take it up again seriously, and I was always a bit heavy.’

  ‘I suppose you were.’ She considered him, noticing again how a week of hard walking had put on muscle, so that he looked even bigger than he did in everyday life and office clothes. She sighed, squatted down to tighten a bootlace, and stood up, wobbling slightly. Ten miles over hard ground had left her legs feeling like cottonwool; she would have welcomed a proper rest but, with the midges out, it was impossible to stay where they were. She looked across the small stream, a minor river today, full to bursting, and scanned up the cliff to the top of the ridge where she could now just glimpse the red-anoraked figure. Disheartened by being unable to envisage any scenario in which she might have enough strength to climb a rock face following a long walk, she started down the hill, still watching the distant climber. For a second she could not understand what her eyes were telling her, then she stopped in her tracks, shouting for McLeish who was already well ahead.

  ‘John! He’s gone.’

  McLeish stopped and peered up to where she was pointing, but the mist rolled down again.

  ‘He sort of somersaulted,’ Francesca said, incredulously. ‘Look, there he is – he’s fallen right down the cliff – there!’

  McLeish, scanning the cliff, could see absolutely nothing and said so, but handed her the binoculars, standing behind her as she lined them on the spot. He took them from her, carefully. ‘Just on the left of that long piece of rock above the corrie. He’s almost hidden but you can see a patch of red. What do we do, John?’

  ‘I’ll go to him,’ he said, handing her back the binoculars. ‘You hurry down as fast as you can and get help. Give me the map so I can mark where we are, and turn everything out of your rucksack that might be useful to a casualty – warm clothes, space blanket, food.’

  Francesca, who had become accustomed to being treated as a not very experienced member of the Uniformed Branch when her lover decided to get something done, handed over two chocolate bars which she had been hoarding for the last stretch, a crêpe bandage, the map, and a spare sweater. ‘There’s someone on the ridge – up there – I saw them just as the chap fell. Wearing a yellow anorak. I’d better wave or something to indicate you are on your way, in case he tries to climb down and help. Oh, damn and blast, the mist’s down again.’

  McLeish strained to see where she was pointing, but the mist was covering the top of the ridge. ‘I’ll get going. You go down as fast as you can on the path, but be careful. You’re tired and your legs are gone, and you are the only one who can tell them below that there has been an accident, and where it is. Hang on, Francesca – show me yourself where we are on the map.’ She produced it meekly, noticing that in this real emergency he was unconsciously speaking more slowly. In dealing with mixed groups of policemen, evidently you made quite certain that even the stupid ones at the back knew exactly what they were supposed to be doing.

  McLeish kissed her briskly and turned and plunged off, going as fast as he dared across the flooding stream, picking his way over the rocks, and clearing the last stretch with a jump that landed him in a bog. Francesca started walking stiffly down the path as he ran up the first slope, which was thickly covered with an uncompromising mixture of three-foot-deep heather and scattered boulders. She watched him with anxious affection, as he ran across the hill with the easy spring of someone who had done this from childhood, noticing that instead of looking bulky and clumsy, as he often could in a city, he was absolutely the right scale for this desolate, rock-strewn country where you could walk all day without seeing another human being and where the elements were an enemy to be considered seriously. She stubbed her toe on a rock and stumbled, then steadied herself and concentrated on the path ahead, remembering, as McLeish had meant her to, that she was the fallen climber’s lifeline.

  John McLeish, going as fast as he knew how, was grimly calculating the chances of dealing effectively with what he was about to meet. The climber must, he reckoned, have fallen at least 200 feet. He was most likely dead, but possibly dying or just barely salvageable with a broken back or skull fractures. Not a lot to be done except keep him company, alive or dead, and wait while Francesca alerted the mountain rescue team and they gathered themselves together and got up the hill. Allow her an hour to get down and find them, unfit as she was; allow another hour for the team to be gathered by telephone; and an hour and a half for them to get there – whichever way you looked at it, he was in for a three-and-a-half-hour vigil. So was the casualty.

  McLeish cleared the lower slope at a run but had to slow as the hill steepened. The climber was probably still 500 feet above him, he decided, breathing deeply as he pulled up into a small corrie cradling a lochan, and glanced up at the steep, stone-covered slope above it. He forced himself up as fast as he could, boots slipping on the wet scree, feeling the ten hard miles he had already done pulling at his calf muscles. He pressed on, counting his steps to keep himself going fast, and lifted his head only when a few minutes later he found himself at the top of a minor ridge. He stopped, fleetingly, to catch his breath and to glance at his watch – only fifteen minutes from when Francesca had shouted to him.

  He looked up and saw a great scar of earth and broken heather just below the rocks at the top of the main ridge. His eye followed the scar down to where a man lay, only about fifty feet away, face down, stretched out, scarlet anorak rucked up to his armpits exposing a naked back, arms stretched out in front of him, a handful of uprooted heather still clutched in his right hand. McLeish, galvanized, ran and knelt beside him, tearing off his own rucksack. The fallen man was still wearing a climbing helmet, and his rucksack was still on his back, or rather on the back of his neck, pushed up with the anorak, shirt and string vest. The face was covered with blood, as were his hands and arms, and he was very cold. But he was alive. As McLeish took his fingers away from the pulse in the neck, the eyelids flickered and the man groaned.

  ‘Don’t try to move,’ McLeish said, gently.

  One eye opened, painfully, and a singularly bleak gaze fixed itself on him. ‘I can move my hands.’ The voice was a croak, and McLeish watched with respect while the man carefully moved his right hand and arm, wincing, then his left.

  ‘Pins and needles.’ The words were barely audible, and McLeish nodded. No paralysis high up, then.

  ‘What about the legs? No, don’t try too hard.’

  ‘I can feel them.’ The climber drew up his right knee gingerly, then his left, and cried aloud with pain. ‘No, it’s not broken, it’s just cramp.’

  McLeish had his hands over the calf muscle, feeling for the lump made by the cramp, but there was a further two minutes of agony for the casualty while he got the spasm out. Incredibly, the man’s back seemed to be all right.

  ‘Jesus, I’m cold.’

  ‘Can you sit up if I help?’ McLeish supported him as he struggled painfully to push himself into a sitting position, and felt the strength of the muscles in the back and arms as he helped. As he sat him up, he gently tugged
down the rucked-up clothes to keep the biting little wind that had sprung up from chilling him further.

  ‘Christ, my head.’ The casualty reached blood-stained, torn hands to his climbing helmet but McLeish told him sharply to keep still and undid the buckles which had dug into the man’s neck, leaving huge weals and providing an instant explanation for why he was having difficulty speaking. He lifted the helmet off carefully, revealing bright red-blond hair above a battered, swollen, blood-stained face which, even in that state, suggested youth and good looks. He fished out the emergency kit he had made Francesca buy a week earlier, and unfolded the casualty blanket, which looked like a giant sheet of aluminium foil and performed much the same function in insulating an injured climber. He wrapped it hastily round the man, and observed with satisfaction that it rendered him glitteringly visible against the grey-green heather and dark grey rocks. The climber, hunched over, winced under his ministrations and McLeish apologized.

  ‘I think I’ve a rib or two broken – I’ve had that before, and that’s what it feels like. Thank you for coming.’ He swallowed painfully, and McLeish hastily poured some tea from the thermos that he had been carrying to keep Francesca going. Even in that thread of a voice, McLeish thought, watching him gulp it painfully, you could hear that he was a local lad. He dug in his rucksack for some chocolate, and when he turned back to offer it found he was being watched.

  ‘I’m John McLeish,’ he said, speaking slowly. ‘I’m on holiday here, and I was walking with my girlfriend. She saw you fall, and she’s gone down the hill for help. We’ve likely several hours to wait, so I want to get you as warm as possible.’

  ‘I owe you both, then. I was by myself, and no one would have known where to look. My name’s Fraser, Alan Fraser.’ He was shivering uncontrollably and McLeish gently wrapped a spare sweater round his shoulders and unwrapped the second emergency blanket to go on top of the sweater. ‘I’m not going to be let forget this. Tourists fall off that climb, whiles, but I’ve been here or hereabouts all my life.’