The Nesting - C. J. Cooke Page 0,78

measurements of the cliff on his computer, but he can remember the important numbers off the top of his head.

“You’ll still need explosives to secure the lift,” Clive says.

“Explosives, explosives,” Tom says, tutting. “You’re just dying to blow things up, you are.”

Clive grins, folds his arms. “It would make a good PR video for the YouTube campaign.”

“If it’s bad for the environment, it’s bad for business, remember?”

“It would get the job done fast. Fast is what we need, Tom, not more delays . . .”

Tom doesn’t answer. Clive drains the glass. “Seriously, though. How are you going to do this lift business? Because it strikes me this is extra time and money . . .”

“I was wondering when you were going to bring up your two best friends,” Tom says. He turns, fixes Clive with a goading stare. “You know, I can’t actually recall the last time we had a conversation where you didn’t mention time and money.”

Clive simmers, bites back the urge to pound Tom’s thick skull. If Tom hadn’t been recently widowed he’d dump this job. Screw the company. Some things aren’t worth the hassle.

Instead, he says, “Since you brought it up—how are we doing for time and money, Tom? Are we on track? On budget?”

Tom clears his throat. “I thought that was your job.”

Clive smiles. “Ah, yes. If only I had the power to create time and money out of thin air. But unfortunately, I don’t, and since you keep messing with the plans and blowing our budget, I’m struggling to know where we stand. So—this lift. How’re you doing it? Because if we need to order a digger I kind of need to know.”

Tom mumbles his reply. “Hand drill.”

Clive clearly hasn’t heard him correctly. Tom can’t have said they’re going to install a lift using a hand drill.

“Come again?”

“He said he’d do it,” Tom mutters. “It’s not really a hand drill. It’s one of those new ones on a frame. But it’s manually operated.”

Clive reels for a moment. He wants to belly laugh, but he might wake the kids, and he’s had enough nights of shrieking babies for a lifetime. “Hold on. A hand drill? Who said he’d do what?”

“Dag,” Tom says. “Probably a week’s work. They’re really efficient, these drills.”

Clive claps his hands to his head and does a circle on the spot.

“What?” Tom says innocently, as though he hasn’t just suggested that they attempt a highly technical construction project via the kind of tool you might use to remove a few flagstones from a garden path.

“This is insane,” Clive says when he’s regained the faculty of speech. “We’re talking here about insurance policies being breached. We’re not covered for this kind of labor . . .”

“He’s volunteering,” Tom counters.

“You’re exploiting him.”

Tom lifts his eyes. “You can talk.”

“What?”

“About exploiting people.”

“What the hell are you . . .”

Tom is right up into his face, kind of hoping Clive will hit him. “You underpaid those workers. That’s why they walked off the site. Not because of some rumors about goblins and bumps in the night.”

Clive raises his eyebrows all the way into his hairline. “How bloody dare you?! I paid those workers the agreed rate—”

“You lied to them about what the build involved, Clive.”

“—the agreed rate that was what we could afford, Tom! I didn’t expect you to start drafting in helicopters and using manual labor instead of explosives.”

Tom falls silent. “You know why I won’t use explosives.”

“If you’d used explosives to deepen the foundations of the first house, right now you’d be sitting in your living room drinking a Scotch by the fire.”

He watches as Tom seethes. Good. He’s sick of tiptoeing around plain facts. What he’d love to say is that Tom is holding everyone hostage with these insane demands. The Norwegian surveyor was strict as a nun, but even he said explosives and digging were still playing by the rules, so long as they took certain precautions. Tearing up some trees was fine, too, so long as they were put to use.

He wonders if Tom’s refusal to budge on these simple, rule-abiding methods is some kind of subconscious suicide mission that he’s dragging everyone else into. For a moment he feels genuinely scared.

“Someone will get hurt, Tom,” he says in a resigned voice. “Mark my words. You’re going to kill someone if you keep going on like this.”

20

aurelia’s diary

I could barely move this morning. Tom threw me against the wall last night and I hurt my head and back pretty badly. Breastfeeding is

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