The Body at the Tower

Seventeen

Palace yard, Westminster





It was an odd, sluggish, unbalanced sort of morning, with heavy air pressure and little prospect of that much-needed storm. Keenan didn’t turn up for work at all, to general puzzlement and Reid’s poorly disguised relief. It was less certain how Harkness viewed this absence. He ought to be livid; demand an explanation; discipline such a sloppy foreman. But nothing in Harkness’s treatment of Keenan so far made this likely. If anything, Harkness seemed to avoid looking in the brickies’ direction altogether, in order to avoid the fact of Keenan’s absence.

The site engineer seemed to have had a bad night: he was waxy of complexion and the half-moons beneath his eyes were a deep purple, rather than the usual greeny-grey. He had a habit of rubbing his fingers through his beard when anxious, and today there were times when he appeared to be grooming himself like an ape, so frequently did he rake the hair on his chin. And there was the nervous twitch. Always that twitch. Certainly, Harkness was suffering. But the untimely death of one unpopular worker would never explain the extent of his anxiety. No: his concerns were clearly much larger than any sort of petty crime or disciplinary problem on site.

The new Houses of Parliament were notoriously unlucky. One of its designers, the brilliant A. W. N. Pugin, had died some seven years before and its architect, Sir Charles Barry, was said to be unwell, made ill by the strain of working on the Palace. Now, with blame being redirected towards the site engineer, Harkness certainly had cause to look and feel unwell. A building twenty-five years behind schedule; a budget swollen to several times its original estimate; a dead bricklayer; and a safety review that might implicate him as the man responsible for these problems. Taken together, Harkness’s difficulties made the Eye on London’s fanciful “curse of the clock tower” seem almost rational.

Mary was among the last of the labourers to depart Palace Yard at the dinner hour. She’d been working steadily with James, making notes, taking measurements, generally being a good little errand boy. Now, as she trailed the narrow file of men through the entrance gate, her attention was snagged by a distinct change in Reid’s posture. This morning, he’d been tense and reluctant. When Keenan hadn’t appeared, he’d turned watchful and wary. Now, though, he was alert and purposeful, moving with an athlete’s deliberate grace towards the site entrance. And from the expression on his face, he wasn’t thinking about his dinner.

He was so preoccupied that he left without cleaning his hands. Reid’s careful hand-washing was the subject of some chivvying from others, and was something about which he was particular. Each day, before dinner and before going home, he splashed his hands and forearms liberally with water from the rain barrel and dried them carefully on a threadbare towel hanging from a rusty nail. But today he glanced neither at the rain barrel nor at the two hod-carriers with whom he normally ate.

Mary followed him to a busy coffee-shop across Parliament Square from which wafted an intense aroma of hot pastry. Inside, twenty-five or thirty men were wedged into a space intended for half that number. They seemed content with their lot nevertheless, tucking into enormous platefuls of food: pie and peas, pie and potatoes, pie and pie… Her stomach rumbled fiercely.

She slowed her pace just outside the shop. Its open windows vibrated with boisterous conversation and sharp barks of laughter, these deeper sounds ornamented with the bright clatter of forks. Among this relaxed bunch, Reid’s single-minded intent was only too evident as he picked his way through the crush of bodies, promptly disappearing from view.

Mary prepared to wait. She crossed the street and bought her dinner from the outdoor stall that looked nearest to clean: a hot potato, still in its jacket. There was nowhere to sit, of course, but she didn’t mind. She quite liked to lean against lampposts, lounge on walls – manners severely discouraged in young ladies, but essential to street urchins. The dinner hour was at its peak, now, with working men and women dining according to their budgets. Those with the most money went to coffee-shops like the one Reid had gone into, where one could sit down to a hot cooked meal. Public houses appealed to those who preferred to drink their sustenance, downing a few pints of ale with, perhaps, covert bites of a smuggled-in slab of bread-and-butter. There were also the bakeshops, which sold pies and other savouries to be eaten elsewhere – “elsewhere” meaning the street. Cheapest of all were the street vendors, like Mary’s potato-woman, with her tumbledown stall and hoarse cry of “’Ot-pitaaaaaaytoes, nice ‘n’ ’ot!”. One could buy slabby boiled puddings, elderly scraps rolled up in pastry, or even fried things – chunks of anonymous fish, for example – according to appetite and budget.

There were those who couldn’t afford the street stalls, of course. If they waited until day’s end, a generous coffee-shop-owner might offer them a handful of scraps – trimmings, kitchen sweepings, anything that couldn’t be resold another day. Or they could take matters into their own hands and, as a friend of Mary’s vagabond days put it, “make their own prices”. It wasn’t difficult to pinch food, especially with an associate. Confectioners were easy, since they put out yesterday’s goods on tables to entice passing trade. And loose fruit was as good as windfall. But hot wares were trickiest, since they were kept covered, and Mary never outgrew her yearning for cooked meals. Even a badly roasted potato, burnt outside and grainy at the core, was better for being warm.

She finished her potato, which was not burnt, and contemplated a second course. But the dinner hour was passing fast and the coffee-shop across the road emptying of customers. They strolled to the door, those men, sleepy and replete, and stepped onto the pavement with an air of awaking from a pleasant dream. It was time to take another look.

The first man Mary recognized was Octavius Jones, sprawled easily at a corner table in a high-backed chair, an open notebook before him. This must be his favoured coffee-shop, the hive of gossip he’d mentioned in the Eye. Sitting across from Jones, with his back to the window, was Reid. She stopped and permitted herself a good, long look. Reid leaned towards Jones, as though forward momentum might help his concentration. His narrative was clearly of import; the man was practically vibrating in his chair. In contrast, Jones’s posture was casual. He had a pencil in hand but wrote nothing, asking only an occasional brief question. Neither man looked at the other; both were entirely focused on the story flowing between them.

Mary would have given much to know what that was. While it would likely appear in tomorrow’s Eye, that might be too late. It was already Friday; Wick was buried; and the inquest was waiting only for James’s report before returning a verdict. Without more concrete information, the Agency would be unable to challenge that decision, if necessary. However, for the moment she had seen all she could.

As she began to slip away, something in her movement, slight as it was, caught Jones’s eye. He glanced up, eyes widening, body going completely still for a fraction of a second. Then his gaze sharpened in recognition and he grinned at her through the glass, not the least bit put out to catch her spying. Indeed, he raised his thick glazed mug to her in a mocking toast. Reid, already twitching with anxiety, spun round instantly. His eyes were wild, suspicious – and, when they lighted on Mary, incredulous.

She stood, dumbstruck. The best thing she could do was to move on and assume that Reid saw only a nosy little boy. But she couldn’t shake the notion that in his eyes, in that look of startled recognition, he’d seen something else. Someone else. Not Mrs Fordham, necessarily; it needn’t be that specific. But Reid had seemed to look at her anew just then, and she was worried what that might mean.