The Body at the Tower

Seven





Somebody was staring at her. Mary could feel it, like a warm patch of sunlight on the back of her neck. But when she turned to see who it might be, there was no one: only a tall, thin man departing the site. She frowned after him. Judging from the way he moved, he was elderly or an invalid of some sort. Apart from that, little distinguished him from the dozens of be-suited, be-hatted gentlemen outside the Houses of Parliament.

And yet.

Still frowning, she watched him climb into a carriage. There was something familiar about that, too, although she couldn’t place it. The driver was just another ordinary-looking middle-aged man. But she’d seen him before. She was still trying to remember where and when as the carriage disappeared into the stream of traffic, leaving her staring after it.

“Seed a ghost or something?” piped a voice in her ear.

She started and turned to find Jenkins smirking at her. “Yeah, the ghost of the clock tower.”

He snorted. “Ghost won’t help you shift them bricks.”

She sighed. “Yeah. It’s heavy work.”

“Carrying bricks? It’s easy-peasy. How many bricks you carry at a time?”

“Three.”

“Three! Delicate little girl, ain’t you?”

“You couldn’t take more.” She glanced about but the brickies were nowhere in sight. Good. Another minute’s banter with Jenkins and with luck she could lead him back to the subject of the dead man, Wick.

“Watch me!” He leaned the hod at a forty-five-degree angle against the nearest wall and loaded it with care, distributing the bricks so the weight fell evenly. “You ready?” he called when the hod was prepared.

“Six bricks is awfully heavy,” she said.

“It’s nothing, with this method,” he said grandly. “Easy-peasy, like I said.”

“Suit yourself.”

Jenkins braced himself beneath the hod and, with an enormous effort, lifted its cradle over one shoulder. In theory, it might have worked. In practice, however, he was much too short and weak: the length of the hod’s stick, intended for an adult, made the six-brick load teeter precariously above his head. Immediately, it began to waver.

Mary reached out to steady the hod.

“I can do it!” Jenkins insisted, his face already scarlet with exertion.

“Let me help you!”

“Let me alone!” He swatted away her outstretched hands and, in that moment, lost his last bit of control over the hod. Mary just had time to jump clear as the six bricks smashed to the ground.

“What the devil is going on here!” The roar came from a third party, a livid man some fifty yards behind them.

She froze guiltily.

Jenkins scrambled clear of the mess and made to scamper off, but Keenan was moving fast and almost upon them. A moment later, he seized each of them by an ear.

Jenkins yelped.

Mary sucked in a sharp breath, but made no sound.

“Hold this brat,” snarled Keenan, shoving Jenkins towards another man. Mary hadn’t the leisure to notice whom. Then he turned his full attention to her, shaking her like a particularly wet and wrinkled piece of washing. Her head snapped back and forth on her shoulders and her eyes began to water. “Where the hell do you think you are? Little Lord Fauntleroy’s nursery school?” snarled Keenan. “This is a building site, you bleedin’ lazy little scoundrel!” He didn’t appear to expect a response, and didn’t stop shaking her long enough to permit any. “Of all the stupid, wasteful, mutton-headed things to do! Why is that Jenkins brat here to begin with?! Why ain’t you carrying the blasted hod?! What the hell you playing at, Quinn?!”

He might have kept shaking her until she fainted, but somewhere in that storm of fury and nausea, Mary dimly registered a placatory voice. “Aw, Keenan, he’s only a kid. Thrash him if you want, but don’t shake him to pieces.”

No change for a few dreadful seconds. Then there was a reluctant slowing of the shaking action. It finally stopped altogether, but Keenan kept a firm grip on Mary’s hair. Slowly, the world turned the right way up once more. The flashes of black and red in her vision subsided. She began to discern faces again, prominent among them Keenan’s enraged features, only a few inches from hers.

Instead of relief or remorse, Mary was gripped with a boiling sense of outrage. She wanted to attack Keenan, to kick and punch and bite him until he knew what she was feeling. But even in the first rush of fury, a distant common sense prevailed: Keenan could smash her to a pulp. He was a large, powerful man and she was a slight woman. There would be no contest.

She stood as still as she could manage, swallowing huge gulps of air and glowering at him through her tousled fringe. They stood there for several minutes, bricklayer and assistant, staring at each other, hating each other. Keenan panted with the effort of shaking her. With visible effort, he turned his gaze to the fallen bricks: three chipped, one broken in two. It was as well that Jenkins was so short; had the bricks fallen from a greater height, they might all have been wasted. As it was…

“We can use these chipped ones,” said Stubbs mildly, scooping them up with the two undamaged bricks. “Turn them the other way out.”

Keenan grunted, still staring at the mess. Finally, his gaze reverted to Mary. “You’re a lucky son of a bitch,” he muttered. “That’s only fourpence off your wages, for the broken one.”

She forced herself to nod.

“But I’m still going to teach you a lesson,” he continued, with grim satisfaction. “You’ll know better than to play about on a building site, when I’m done – and that includes you.” He wheeled about and stabbed a finger at Jenkins, who dangled limply from Smith’s fist. “Hold this one!” snapped Keenan, shoving Mary towards Reid.

She stumbled once, then was caught in a firm, dispassionate grip. Reid’s hands were heavy on her shoulders and she was suddenly grateful he’d caught her so well. Her breasts were tightly bound, of course, but the binding itself might be noticeable were he to grip her across the chest. Her pulse, already racing, sprinted even faster at the thought. Furious as she was, she now felt a fresh stab of something else: fear.

She knew better than to offer excuses – or worse, to plead. Instead, she stared defiantly at Keenan as he unbuckled his belt. She stood very still as he doubled it in his hand, weighing the thickness of the leather and the heft of the buckle.

“Now,” he said in a new, soft voice. “Who’s first?” He looked from Mary to Jenkins, an unpleasant smile stretching his mouth.

Silence. Mary didn’t look at Jenkins, didn’t look anywhere except at Keenan’s brutal, ruddy face. She hated him with everything in her and didn’t bother to disguise it. All her senses were heightened, in this moment: she heard the different layers of traffic, both on the river and in the streets just beyond the site walls; felt the dank heaviness of the air on her forehead and the coarse fabric of her shirt against her neck; tasted the bitterness of rage in her mouth; and amidst the sticky, complicated smells of the city, she smelled something new and sharp and warm. Something ammoniac…

Beside her, Jenkins whimpered very quietly and she suddenly understood what had happened. A glance confirmed it: his trousers had a darker patch that clung to his leg, and a small pool of urine was collecting beside his right foot.

Keenan hadn’t missed it, either. A sadistic sneer twisted his mouth and he stared at Jenkins, inspecting him carefully as he might a defective tool. “You dirty little scoundrel. Your mummy lets you do that at home, does she?”

Jenkins made a choked, rattling sound in his throat.

“What was that?”

Mary stared at Jenkins, willing him to buck up. The more fear he showed, and the less control he had over his body and his voice, the more Keenan would enjoy this and the more vicious energy he would put into it. But Jenkins was scared witless. He could no more control his bladder and his voice than Mary could the weather.

“No answer?” Keenan’s voice was still ominously soft.

Jenkins was shaking now, a shivering so violent that his teeth began to chatter.

“Disgusting,” said Keenan. “Give him here, Smith.”

In one swift motion, Keenan seized Jenkins and yanked his wet breeches to the ground. Any pity Mary might have felt for the boy was now consumed in her own burgeoning sense of panic. This was it. In a few minutes, she would be publicly, literally, exposed. A fine trembling began in her throat, then spread to her limbs. She fought it desperately but not well enough. Her lungs squeezed tight. She couldn’t get enough air.

“Easy,” murmured Reid under his breath, pressing firmly on her shoulders. “Easy, lad.”

He sounds as if he’s talking to a horse, she thought hysterically.

The belt really did whistle faintly as it sliced through the air; that wasn’t merely a cliché. As it struck Jenkins’s pale, skinny rump, it made a meaty, loud thwock that resounded clearly across the now-still site. All had downed tools; all were watching. Apart from the rhythm of the belt – shweeeee-THWOCK, shweeeee-THWOCK – the only sounds were Jenkins’s half-suppressed screams and Keenan’s grunts of exertion.

Two strokes.

Three.

With the fourth, a bright seam of blood welled up. Mary forced herself to keep looking, to take in the details: perfect stillness all around, men practically holding their breaths rather than disrupt Keenan’s show. Nobody moved to step in; no one opened a mouth to object. They were enjoying themselves, the hateful pigs.

Five.

Small rivulets of blood dripped down the boy’s legs, onto his breeches, staining the dusty ground.

Six.

Jenkins stopped shrieking and began merely to cry, a keening, childish sound that sliced through Mary’s contained panic. What would a brutal beating do to such a fragile, undergrown boy? Would Keenan stop before he caused permanent damage, or did he not care?

Seven.

Was there nothing she could do? Nothing at all?

Eight.

She tasted blood. Why? Must have bitten her lower lip.

“Keenan.” The voice came from just above her head.

Schweeeee-THWOCK.

Schweeeee-THWOCK.

“Keenan!” More forceful, now. “Enough, man.”

A pause in the rhythm. “Shut it, Reid.”

A resumption. Eleven?

Sweat trickled into her eyes, its sting a welcome distraction from her trembling limbs, her panic-squeezed lungs. The pain of the lashing didn’t matter; all she wanted was for her unmasking to be over and done with.

And then a cry, shrill but authoritative: “What the blazes do you think you’re doing?”

What does it look like? Fortunately, the hysterical giggle in her throat didn’t climb high enough to be heard.

Keenan swung the belt one last time but rather half-heartedly, as though acknowledging that the game was over.

“Why are you all standing about? Back to work, all of you! Except you, Keenan – what is the meaning of this!” Mr Harkness was standing before them. Slowly, the other trades melted back towards their tasks.

Keenan looked mutinous. He stared at Harkness for a long minute, his chest rising and falling rapidly. “Why, Mr Harkness, sir,” he finally said, his voice velvety and dangerous, “how kind of you to take an interest in a matter of site discipline.”

Bright patches of red appeared on Harkness’s cheeks, and on the top of his bald head. “I said, what is the meaning of this?!” His voice was shrill, the twitch going double-time.

Another silence. The only sound now was of Jenkins’s sobbing. Eventually, Keenan said, “The lad’s got to be punished.”

“What for?”

“Playing the fool. Damaging materials.”

Harkness took a deep breath and turned to Mary. “Is this true?”

From the corner of her eye, she saw Keenan’s face twist with rage. “Yes, sir.”

Harkness looked surprised. “You wilfully damaged Keenan’s property?”

“Not on purpose, sir. But between us, Jenkins and I broke a brick.”

“A brick!” Harkness turned back to Keenan. “You would thrash a pair of children within an inch of their lives for one damaged brick?”

“I thrashed them for playing the fool. They’ve no business messing about with tools. The damage could have been much worse.”

Harkness’s face turned very pale. Through clenched teeth he said, “Unless you wish your entire gang dismissed, you’ll remember who’s in charge of this building site, Keenan. Quinn will no longer assist any of you. You’ll work short-handed until you find another bricklayer, and I expect to see progress as usual.”

Keenan flushed a shade darker but didn’t reply.

“Do you hear and understand?” roared Harkness.

“Yes. Sir.” He spat the words as though they tasted bitter. “And I’ll remember this. Sir.”

If Harkness was troubled by the threat, he gave no sign of it. “Come then, children.” He beckoned to Mary and Jenkins, and she suddenly realized she’d been holding her breath. Although the other workmen made a show of returning to their tasks, they stared openly as the three of them marched past: Harkness in the lead, Jenkins hobbling as best he could, Mary bringing up the rear.

She could feel Keenan’s gaze on their backs. It was nothing like warm sunlight, more like an icy drill through her skull. Her thoughts were all confusion, her legs rubbery beneath her. She was still trembling, although this time it was with relief. But even as she followed Harkness and Jenkins, she began to wonder about the significance of Harkness’s rescue. He hadn’t intervened in time to save Jenkins from a savage beating. But in saving her from a similar lashing, Harkness had safeguarded her identity, and thus the entire assignment. She had to ask whether he knew the truth, or any part of it. And if so, what he expected in return.