She and Banks walked past a Portakabin with dusty windows, two of them broken.
Concrete-mixers, a parked bulldozer, a dredging crane leaning over the canal like a still heron. Fishing a large bunch of keys from the pocket of his dark blazer, he unlocked the fresh-painted doors of the first warehouse.
"You'll see how far we've got and what's still to do. There's no good reason why we're not getting on with it."
It seemed no more cool in the shadow of the building. Perhaps it was the heat of the morning, but she felt a sudden and unexpected diffidence; the conspiratorial feverishness of her conversation with Aubrey had worn off, vanished like a headache. The shadow of the warehouse over the towpath and the canal was sharply black. Banks ushered her through the door.
A film set, she thought at first; then, merely a building site.
Scaffolding, the smell of fresh plaster, dusty bootprints across the floor, hardened concrete on a board, a crumpled crisp packet that scuttled like a crab in the breeze that had entered with them. Sunlight burned through dirty windows and made the dust in the air glow.
"See?" said Banks, almost bullying her into sympathy.
"Nothing behind the bloody facade! And no money to go on…" His voice faded before her continuing silence.
His imminent bankruptcy had been the goad her concern required.
"Are the other two like this?" He nodded fiercely.
"And this is to be what, offices?" She waved her hand.
That's it. Thousands of square feet of office space around a central atrium. See?
Keep the tall windows that way—" He gestured towards the beginnings of flooring and a gallery.
"One of the others is supposed to become apartments, the third more offices. The other two are even less forward than this one."
"How long have they been like this?"
"Stopped work a month ago completely. Paid off the last few blokes, my best, out of my own pocket, too. Haven't had a bloody penny out of the main contractors since then or for another six months before I had to down tools!"
His face was brick red with remembered arguments, recollected outrage and growing paranoia and anxiety.
"And they just keep saying the cheque's in the post, is that roughly it?"
"Exactly it. Euro-Construction with the other fat cats backing them because they don't have any cash-flow problems just smile like my mother-in-law does when you try to persuade her that white is white and black black against her better judgement-!" He could not avoid grinning at his own waving arms, deep frustration.
"Honest, Marian it's a right Fred Karno's army setup…" His eyes wandered the warehouse as intently as if he were studying a home that had burned down, then he snapped: "Come on, I can't stand looking at this any longer!"
The shadow was cooler outside, at least for the first moments. Gnats swirled like smoke above the still water of the canal. Empty paint tins, the occasional condom, sodden cardboard and the inevitable mattress littered the towpath or stuck up out of the stagnant water.
"I even asked that bloody Euro MP of ours toffee-nosed pillock! to make a few enquiries. I never heard from him again, and his secretary can never get hold of him."
"Ben Campbell, you mean?"
That's him. Not much good for anything, is he?"
"I don't think he'd like to hear you say that." She heard the bell ring of a collar dove, startled by their presence, as its wings lifted it up to the roof of the warehouse. They passed beneath a narrow road bridge over the canal. She smelt the heavy, unappetising scent of cooking on the breeze.
The nearest streets aren't they to be redeveloped or something?" She'd had letters and phone calls of protest, but had been able to do nothing other than make soothing noises. The city's councillors and planners had decided the old back-to-backs must go not in favour of tower blocks, which was at least something, but to be replaced by a prettified, faked village-style development.
"Oh, the cooking smells. Sure they are but no one's been moved out yet. The compulsory purchase orders have been served, the prices agreed… but that's the council, mean buggers. They haven't paid up yet because no one's ready to develop the place. I think they've pulled down two houses and a pub so far."
"Are you—?"
He shook his head.
"Egan Construction are down for that redevelopment."
"Indeed."
The other warehouses were on the opposite bank of the canal. A pair of new moorings had been excavated beside one of the buildings, there were even brass rails. A mattress floated where a cruiser should have been berthed, or a fashionably old-fashioned narrow boat. They turned a slow bend in the canal and she saw it stretching into the distance between other warehouses, beneath low bridges, amid the canyons of red-brick buildings, towards the canal basin.
"Are they working on the basin?" she asked. Banks' work was, after all, on the periphery, at the flippant edge of the whole project once it had moved its epic entre from the marina towards the regeneration of a quarter of the city. If money was in the least tight, then he'd be the first to suffer. She had, as yet, no sense of the scale of delay.
"Sort of one or two blokes dithering about. A lot of it was completed with local funding private and council before the whole thing expanded.
Not much lately, though," he added.
"Most of this section of the development has shut up shop."
She recalled the opening ceremony and the very public steering of a JCB by the PM digging out the first rubble rather than cutting the first turf two years before. The PM possessed a gravitational attraction towards the grandiose; a building site was a newly discovered country, virgin territory for his classless society. Some colleagues referred to his fatal attraction for such schemes, and the hope that Glenn Close might spring up from the bath and stab him to death. He had made one of his characteristically lame speeches regarding the redevelopment as the largest urban regeneration scheme in Europe, perhaps the world.
This part of it seemed to retain his fingerprints, she reflected sourly. Two weeks' enthusiasm followed by the remaining evidence of something in which interest had been lost. It was still a building site.
She deflected her thoughts from the familiar with a conscious effort. A figure dressed in a cap and uniform shirt and trousers was emerging from a small Portakabin sited on a stretch of weedy concrete. Beyond it, she could see the tired, cramped streets scheduled to disappear and hear the noise of thudding music and the screams of children. The man was in his late fifties, short, bow-legged, a mobile phone slung at his waist like a cowboy's gun.
"Oh, it's you, Mr. Banks," he offered, studying Marian with an intensity that belied his casual greeting.
"Hello, Stan." On the man's cap and shoulder badges, Marian saw the blazon Complete Security. The surprise of memory must have been evident in her face.
"Anything wrong, Mr. Banks?" He did not look at Banks as he spoke.
"Only the usual. I'm just showing—"
"I'm a relative!" Marian gushed.
"An MP in the family, Mr. Banks? You never said."
"I apologise," Marian offered quickly.
"We didn't want you to attach any importance to… You were saying, Ray funding?" She glanced at her watch.
"I need to be back for lunch, Ray. Sorry and all that. Could we—?"
Snotty bitch. It was as if he had spoken the words, so clear was the sentiment in his eyes. Nice one, Marian after your classic Piece of stupidity.
"Oh, yes take care, Stan."