The Body at the Tower Read Online Free PDF Page B

she’d already set herself apart. It was too late to change things.
    The man looked up. His good humour seemed at odds with his face, which bore the souvenirs of a fist-fight: one eye puffy and discoloured, lip split. “What’s that?”
    “Mr Harkness sent me to help out.”
    “Ah. You want Keenan – dark chap over there.” He pointed to a tall, thickset man a little way off. He was scowling, but even without the surly expression Mary would have recognized him as the man who’d snarled at her not half an hour before.
    She sighed inwardly. Of course the bad-tempered bricklayer would be the foreman. Still, perhaps that was relevant to Wick’s death, too. She approached him reluctantly, as he was clearly preoccupied.
    “You’re awful small,” he said in response to her explanation.
    “I’m stronger than I look.”
    “Aye? I hope so.” Something happened when he spoke which made words sound like threats, even when they were simple instructions. He wasn’t generous with them, either: he simply nodded at a pole lying on the ground. “You’re Reid’s hod-carrier today.” Then he strode away.
    Mary struggled to make sense of the contraption, a long stick topped by three wooden planks that together formed three sides of a box. Unfortunately, she had no idea what to do with it, or whom to ask for assistance. The cheerful young man, perhaps? But when she looked around, he’d disappeared with his trowel and mortar board.
    When Keenan came back to her a few minutes later, his face was flushed with temper. “Still mucking about? I told you to get moving.”
    “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to use this.”
    His face darkened some more. “Useless brat. Never seen a hod before?”
    “N-no, sir.”
    “Then what you doing working on a building site?”
    “I want to learn, sir.”
    Keenan cursed. “Not with me for a bloody nursemaid, you won’t. I got bleedin’ work to do.” He looked about for a moment, then bellowed, “Stubbs!”
    Another youngish man, with curly ginger hair and an astounding number of freckles, appeared. “Mr Keenan?”
    “Show this brat what’s what.”
    Once Keenan was at a safe distance, Stubbs looked at Mary. “What’s he want you to do?”
    “Be Reid’s hod-carrier.” Mary spoke the strange words tentatively. “This is the hod?” She hefted the pole and box.
    Stubbs laughed, a single brief snort. “Aye. You hold it like this.” In a single deft motion, he swung the stick over one shoulder so that the three planks were behind him. “You fill it with bricks – at your size, not many, maybe three or four – and carry it to your brickie. You said Reid, did you? He’s over that way, round the corner.”
    “That’s all?” It seemed absurdly straightforward.
    “You fetch whatever he tells you to. You can carry mortar and trowels in it, or anything else he needs.”
    He gave her the hod and she hefted it experimentally. Not bad, but… “Why not use a wheelbarrow?”
    “Sometimes you climb with the hod – up scaffolding, like.” He grinned at her expression. “Not today, though – I’m doing the tricky bits while we’re short-handed.”
    “Oh. You missing a hod-carrier?” Mary followed him towards a large pile of bricks.
    Stubbs frowned down at her. “You new?”
    She nodded. “Started this morning.”
    “Oh. Suppose you ain’t heard, then.” He paused and his round face turned sombre. “One of ours, a brickie, died last week. Until Keenan finds a new one, the other hod-carrier, Smith, is filling in. Not that he’s a proper brickie, or nothing. But he can lay a simple wall while Keenan and Reid do the rest.”
    Mary frowned. The explanation was almost as confusing as the situation. So bricklayers and hod-carriers worked in teams, and it sounded as though this was a disrupted team of five: three bricklayers, Wick, Keenan and Reid, supported by the hod-carriers Stubbs and Smith. With Wick’s death, it was up to Keenan to find a new bricklayer to join his