MONOLITH Read Online Free PDF

of thirty-five to have a drink with you at your age officially qualifies you as a dirty old man,’ she grinned.
    ‘Fuck off,’ Hadley grunted. ‘It never used to bother you.’
    Jess lowered her gaze for a moment then drummed on the mug with her nails before looking at Hadley again. He was gazing at a couple in their twenties who were seated at one of the other tables. Both of them had iPhones in their hands and were glancing at the screens as if they’d just discovered a cancer cure.
    ‘Dickheads,’ Hadley murmured, nodding towards the couple. ‘Probably checking their fucking Facebook pages.’ He shook his head. ‘What is it with people now?’
    ‘You have to keep up with all the social networks,’ Jess said, smiling. ‘Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and all that.’
    ‘Fucking Twitter,’ Hadley rasped. ‘A bunch of nobodies writing bollocks so a bigger bunch of nobodies can read it. The only tweet worth reading, ever, would be “I’ve just cured cancer.” That’s it. All the rest is bullshit.’ He looked again at the couple nearby and then merely sneered. ‘Just once I’d love to tell one of them, “look, nothing in your boring, meaningless little life is worth putting on there for the other boring meaningless twats to read. Your life is pointless, just get used to it. Nobody is interested in what you do from one minute to the next and if you think they are then you’re dumber than I thought you were.”’ He took a swig of his tea.
    Jess smiled thinly but the undisguised venom in Hadley’s voice was a little unsettling.
    ‘You still haven’t told me what you were doing around here in the first place,’ she reminded him, trying to change the subject.
    ‘I was out walking about as simple as that. I saw the emergency vehicles pull up so I hung around to see what was going on. It was a coincidence, pure and simple. Not everything’s planned you know.’ He drank more tea.
    ‘Why were you walking about at eleven at night?’
    ‘Because I’d been inside all fucking day and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I needed to get a breath of air. And I’d run out of milk.’ He smiled but there was no warmth in it.
    ‘Any work about?’
    ‘Little bits here and there but not enough and certainly nothing that pays well enough.’ He looked at her. ‘What about you? You look as if you’re doing alright.’
    She shrugged.
    ‘You know how it is,’ she told him.
    ‘I used to,’ he sighed then sucked in a deep breath. ‘So what was going on in there?’ he asked, nodding in the direction of the Crystal Tower.
    ‘Another bad accident by the look of it,’ she told him. ‘I saw them carrying at least one body out of a lift shaft. It must have been a workman because the place doesn’t open for a while, does it?’
    ‘The first week they started work on that place a guy was decapitated by a crane.’
    ‘Four were crushed when a wall collapsed.’
    ‘And didn’t somebody fall from the roof?’
    She nodded.
    ‘And now we think how many more tonight?’ Hadley went on.
    ‘At least two as far as I can tell. I would have had a better look around if some Russian security guard hadn’t thrown me out. He called me a whore.’ She smiled. ‘And in broken English.’ Jess sipped her tea.
    ‘Russian,’ Hadley told her. ‘He was probably one of Voronov’s personal bodyguards.’
    ‘Andrei Voronov, the guy who owns the building. He’s a bit of a recluse isn’t he?’
    ‘When you’ve got as much money as he has you don’t have to speak to people. You know he tried to buy Chelsea before Roman Abramovich did, don’t you?’
    ‘No, I didn’t. What went wrong?’
    ‘No one knows for sure. He just backed off. Lost interest. Fuck knows why. He’s so loaded he makes Abramovich look like a charity case. He could have bought Chelsea, Arsenal, Spurs and any other club he fucking fancied.’
    ‘It’s a pity he didn’t spend some more of his money on security for the tower then. He’s going to lose half