“I see. And shall we make this arrangement—this loan, as you say—via solicitors or would you be agreeable to signing something electronically?”
“E-mail’s fine,” Tom said stiffly. Even after all this time, his father’s approach to parenthood never failed to incur the most abject disappointment.
“All right,” his father said wearily. “I’ll send a contract through this evening. I presume your mother has your current e-mail?”
Tom nodded at the phone. He’d had the same e-mail address for a decade by then, not that his father knew that.
“Once I receive the signed counterpart I’ll have my accountant organize a transfer. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
And with that, he hung up. An hour later, the e-mail pinged into his in-box. His palms sweaty, Tom opened the contract. His father had decided upon a loan period of twenty-four months with an interest rate of ten point four percent. Ten point four percent. The point four cracked him up. This from a man who had millions in numerous bank accounts, who barely spent any time at all with his two sons while they were growing up. Nannies, boarding schools, forgotten birthdays . . . And Tom could have applied for a loan at half that rate with a repayment period of up to a decade. It took every ounce of self-control not to shoot back an e-mail telling his father to shove the money right up his arse.
But he had no alternative.
And now, even though his father has not reneged an inch on that tyrannical arrangement, not even when he learned that Aurelia had died, Tom is calling home once more.
“Dad,” he says, feeling nothing, feeling everything. “I need money. I’ll pay whatever interest rate you want.”
* * *
—
Clive is appeased and the workers are paid. The company is injected with forty thousand pounds, but it isn’t enough to stop half the construction team from walking off-site. The next Monday morning Clive stands at the edge of the cliff, looking over abandoned girders and sheets of glass, sucking on a cigarette. The stress has made him take up smoking again. He’s frustrated beyond words, but he can’t half blame the poor guys for leaving the job. These sheets of glass weigh five hundred pounds each. They’re massive—fifteen feet by twelve—and therefore not easily shifted. All six sheets were found two-hundred-odd feet below here, right at the bottom of the cliff in the tidal waters of the fjord. The guys had looked everywhere for these vanished glass walls. Clive has hefted them himself—not alone, obviously; it took six men to move them off the helicopter that delivered them—and has a keen knowledge of their weight. For them to wind up in the fjord is mysterious. For them to wind up in the fjord unbroken, completely undamaged, is downright supernatural. Add this supernatural mystery to the other weird things about the build—the storm, the moose, the voices the crew say they’ve heard, rumors about the site being haunted—and he has a mind to tell Derry they’re getting the next flight home.
But then, that would be defeatist. There’s yet a small voice in his head that says this build, this house, could turn everything around. Put the company on the map. Enable him to get what he wants. Finally.
* * *
—
Tom has consoled himself about the loss of so many workers by zipping himself into work clothes and absorbing several construction roles. There are still six men on-site, and two of them he knows pretty well. One of them is Dag. He has warmed to Dag considerably over the last while, not least because of how industrious and intelligent Dag has proven himself to be, but also because Aurelia urged Tom to take Dag on. Dag is a kind of link back to her, a remnant of a time that floods Tom with warmth. And so, when Tom claps eyes on him now, he feels something return to his limbs, an old energy that reconnects him to the world.
“How’s it going, mate?” Tom asks, planting a hand on Dag’s shoulder.
“Pretty g-g-good, mate,” Dag says with a grin, and he pulls off a glove and wipes sweat off his forehead. Tom notices that Dag’s T-shirt is soaked with sweat. It’s barely above freezing. Tom is wearing a thermal vest beneath his work clothes and gloves lined with sheepskin. He looks over the steel framework and grins. For the last three weeks Dag has been painstakingly drilling through the cliff face to insert the thirty-millimeter-wide, twenty-foot-long iron rods that will secure the