Just after the job was finished: Turner had moved his lorry off, Brook called across to one of his mates who had just come off the afternoon shift.
“Hi, there, Tom! Didn’t you say you’d walked over the moor past them two farmhouses below the ridge, there?” Tom Martin was a fellow in his thirties who moved with an easy swing; he was dark-haired and dark-skinned, with unexpectedly blue eyes which seemed to shine in his soil-grimed face. The black moorland soil made most of the gangers look like chimney sweeps when they came off the shift, and Tom Martin looked filthy enough to be taken for a down and out.
“Sure I walked over there and down to the village in the valley to that pub you blokes talked about. I brought you back some fags and a drink, you should know.”
“I do and all. I won’t forget that, mate. I was broke, but I’ll pay you back one day, never forget a good turn. Well, Turner, the lorry driver, says the cops have been out to that farmhouse that isn’t lived in, and they’ve found a stiff there, and a farmer bloke got laid out while the busies were on the job.”
“Cripes, what a yarn,” said Martin, and Brook went on: “See here, mate. Seeing there’s been trouble over there, as you might say, p’r’aps it’d be better not to know anything about them farmhouses. I’ll bet you any money the cops’ll come up here to badger us poor ruddy gangers. Now see here, if you want a mate to say where you was and where you wasn’t any time they get awkward about—well, count me in. One good turn deserves another.”
“O.K., mate, that goes by me, too. Always stick by a pal. Cheeri-bye. I’ll clock in for a cuppa. See you later.”
Chapter Six
“I DON’T LIKE it, Stone, and that’s a fact,” said John Wharton. Wharton was the manager for the contractors, Barrow & Teesdale, who were taking the pipe line over Bowland to connect the reservoirs they had built there with the water supply of the great industrial city of Leverstone. Wharton was a very able man; he had been in charge of similar projects, in conditions even more remote and inaccessible than Bowland, in the Highlands, in the Welsh mountains and the Northumbrian hills, and he had been heard to say that there was no problem connected with labour gangs in difficult terrain that he hadn’t had to face at one time or another.
Stone had come to his boss to report the van driver’s story, for Stone, also, was an experienced man, and he knew that crimes which occurred in the vicinity of labour gangs such as theirs were apt to have awkward repercussions.
“We have trouble enough keeping the chaps on the job up here without having a police inquiry to unsettle them,” went on Wharton, “and that’s what it’ll be, you mark my words. You remember it was the same in Wales. There were two crimes of violence within ten miles of us when we were working on the Trenant dam and the police made a beeline for our headquarters.”
“You can’t blame the police,” said Stone. “We get a few proper toughs in these gangs. If we were too choosey over the chaps we enroll, the gangs would be below strength and ourselves behind with our contract, and it’s a tough job working out in these wilds.”
“You’re telling me,” replied Wharton. “Folks say, look at the mechanical aids you have these days, the bulldozers and all the rest. Old Monty gave the answer to that one when he said the army needed men and would always need men no matter how mechanical the unit, for every machine needs a man to tend it.”
“Aye, that’s sense, that is,” replied Stone, “and if we have the police fossicking around here, the first chaps to walk out on us will be the skilled mechanics: they can get softer jobs than this and they know it.”
“That applies to every ganger we’ve got, Bill,” rejoined Wharton. “When I first managed a labour camp, way back in the thirties, the men had some inducement to stay on the job, because the alternatives were unemployment and an empty belly. When there are a million and more unemployed in the country, it’s a wonderful incentive to hold on to a job when you’ve got one, because you know you’ll likely not get another. It’s different today: any unskilled able-bodied man can take his choice of jobs, there are more jobs than men; our chaps know it, there’s work on building sites, work on road foundations, work on this, that and the other, and although we pay them well and feed them well, they’d rather have jobs where they can get to a pub in the evening and sleep with their wives at night.”
Stone chuckled. “Too true, boss. We’ve done pretty well up here; we’ve kept the nucleus of our gangs, the old toughs who’ve been with the company for years and who realise that there’s a lot to be said for a job which provides decent living conditions on the spot, decent food, and a tidy pay packet saved up with a bonus when the job’s finished to time.”
“That’s it,” said Wharton, “but once we get the police up here, some of the chaps will pack up on us.
“It happened at Trenant, it’ll happen here.” He paused for a moment and then went on: “It might be a good idea if I had a word with Lawley: he knows more about the chaps than any of us.”
Lawley was the head overseer, a man who had been with the company before the war, and had rejoined the contractors when he was demobilised
