Dead if You Don’t

17

Saturday 12 August

17.00–18.00

There wasn’t much anyone could teach Stephen Suckling about mechanical diggers, grabbers and Jaw Crushers. He was fifty-two, and he’d held an operator’s licence since he was twenty-seven. After ten years of back-breaking manual labour on building sites — much of it in shite weather — he figured out there had to be an easier way for someone with few academic qualifications to make a living.

Such as the guys on the sites driving the bulldozers and cranes, for a start. They were inside their cabs, cosy and dry, and, he subsequently discovered, took home a far fatter pay packet than most of the manual labourers. So he’d got himself some qualifications by attending night school.

Since then he’d driven pretty much every make and model of construction site vehicle that was out there. Then he spotted a job advert that really appealed — and was the successful applicant. For the past eight years he’d been contentedly employed at the four-acre Shoreham Harbour depot of the Recycled Aggregates Supplies division of Carter Contracting, driving a yellow caterpillar-track excavator and operating the fifty-ton Premiertrak R 400 Powerscreen Jaw Crusher. That monster machine reduced the piles of rubble brought in daily by the company’s endless chain of lorries into different grades. Some would provide footings for the construction industry, some for highways or footpaths, car parks or drains.

There wasn’t much, after this length of time, that anyone could tell him about crushing concrete, nor demolition rubble, nor asphalt — although asphalt was his least favourite stuff because on hot days, like today, it stuck in the grabber’s jaws, and had to be laboriously scraped away by hand. His hands, as he was the sole operator on this site.

That was one of the things he liked most about this job. His bosses, working out of a Portakabin at one end of the site, pretty much left him to it, and so long as he kept up with the constant deliveries, working away at the different piles, his hours were his own, and there was no asshole of a site foreman to shout at him.

The county was currently going through a building boom, which meant demand for aggregates was at a premium. For Stephen Suckling, this meant lots of overtime and nice, fat wage packet every Thursday.

He also had a very secret, very nice little earner on the side.

Right now, Suckling, with his muscular body and shaven head, dressed in a high-viz vest over a grubby singlet and jeans, was sitting in the cabin of his JCB, operating the levers to dig the bucket deep into the side of a pyramid of rubble. He raised it in the air, swung it round and emptied the load into the hopper of the Jaw Crusher, which made a grinding roar. Tiny pieces rode up the Crusher’s conveyor and tumbled to the ground, forming a new pyramid.

He could set the level of the Jaw Crusher into different gradings. Type 1 would be recycled rubble for the construction industry. Type 6F2 would be a smaller grading, mostly for drains or for the footings of a new road.

That was what this particular pile was for — the road in a new housing development near Horsham.

He had chosen to work on this Saturday for two reasons. Firstly, because his bosses had asked him, and it was all on overtime pay. Secondly, because no one was around. They were all at the Amex Stadium, watching the Albion’s first league game of the season, against Manchester City. He would have liked to have been there too, to support his home team, but the money was too good today. He wasn’t just getting overtime from his Carter Contracting bosses, he was getting a very big bung from a certain Mr Jorgji Dervishi — an Albanian paymaster who regularly gave him five grand in cash to not notice human body parts inside a particular pyramid of rubble. Limbs, torso and a head which he would crush beyond all recognition, and in a week or so would be safely buried beneath hundreds of tons of tarmac. Forever.

And tonight, after he had finished here, he was looking forward to going to a barbecue at some friends’ with his wife, Aileen — and most of all he was looking forward to a cold beer. He could murder one now.

As the rubble dropped off the end of the conveyor he saw what looked like a human hand. Almost instantly, it was covered by more finely ground rubble. Then he noticed, dispassionately, what might have been part of a human head. Some hair and an ear?

He swung the machine round, dug back into the pyramid and raised another bucket-load in the air.

Then there was a sound from the JCB he had never heard before. A chunk-chunk-chunk grinding sound. The whole cab vibrated, alarmingly.

Then silence.

A red warning light flashed on the dashboard.

Shit, fuck.

He peered out of the cab window, alarmed, at the bucket, which was halted high in the air.

Especially at the object hanging over the side.

Unmistakably, a severed human arm. It was wearing a shiny wristwatch.

Shaking, he turned the ignition off, then back on again, and pressed the starter button.

Nothing happened.

‘No, no, no!’

He tried again. Then again.

Nothing.

The arm dangled. Too high for him to reach.

In desperation, he climbed out of the cab and, monkey-style, tried to climb along the extended, articulated boom of the machine, holding on to the hydraulic cylinder that would raise the second boom, to which the bucket was attached. He reached the linkage, hauled himself over, then tried to slide down the next section, to the bucket.

He lost his grip.

Plunging, his head struck the side of the bucket six feet below, then he fell another fifteen feet to the hard ground, landing upright with a sickening crunch, a snapping sound and searing pain from his legs as he crashed face down.

He cried out in pain, desperately tried to move and screamed again in agony.

Then he lay rigid with panic.

Oh Jesus, no.

The lower bone of his right leg was sticking out through his jeans. His shattered left leg lay at an impossible angle, partly beneath his body.

He tried to raise himself with his arms, but the pain was too excruciating.

Above him, he heard the cry of gulls. And above him he also saw the bucket. The human arm. The wristwatch glinting in the afternoon sun.

Thoughts spun through his pain-addled mind. He tried to haul himself along the ground towards the JCB. Stared around the site, at the piles of grey and brown rubble. At two parked blue lorries’ signs — written in the red lettering of his employers. CARTER. A skip filled with junk wood, plaster and cartons that he had removed from some of the building-site rubble that had come in recently. At the green roof of a warehouse on the wharf across the water, on the far side of Shoreham Harbour.

It was dawning on him that going to that barbecue tonight was not going to happen. It was also dawning on him that this was the least of his problems. He crawled again, a few inches nearer the caterpillar tracks of the JCB, then stopped, crying out in pain.

What the hell to do?

He felt in his jeans pocket. The hard lump of his mobile phone was there. Thank God! He eased it out, every movement shooting further pain through his body, dialled 999 and asked for an ambulance.

In his blurred and confused mind he wondered, perhaps, if the paramedic crew might not look up and notice anything amiss.