The Body at the Tower - By Y. S. Lee Page 0,53

very thing she’d done for years: keep her head down, often literally, and avoid the issue entirely.

For the thousandth time, she wondered what her father would have done. He’d been a brave man, a clever man, highly regarded in their little community. Mary had learned, just the previous year, that he’d perished trying to uncover the truth. Ironically, he was so lost she didn’t even know what about. But when she’d made that limited, all-transforming discovery, it had affirmed her resolve to work for the Agency.

To uncover truths.

To serve the truth.

To live a life worthy of her father’s approval.

The jade pendant he’d left for her – the only thing that had survived the fire at the Lascars’ refuge, and her sole memento of childhood – was curled safely in a drawer at the Academy. It was her most precious belonging. There still remained the problem of how to reconcile that pendant, a talisman of her Chinese heritage, with her equally powerful desire to bury entirely the question of her race. But she would have time enough to think of that once she was Mary, just Mary, again.

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