Halfway along Baggot Street, Gina takes Norton’s business card out of her bag and looks at it.
After another few minutes, she finds the address.
It’s a modern office building, an International Style glass box, but at only six storeys a little odd-looking – like a skyscraper in miniature, something squeezed down in scale to fit into its more elegant, Georgian surroundings. Put up sometime in the late seventies, she guesses, or early eighties, the building is quite ugly, and already appears dilapidated, streaked on the outside, as if it’s been dipped in some sort of corrosive chemical.
Gina goes into the lobby and glances around. Straight ahead, there is an unoccupied marble reception desk. Hanging above it there is a huge frameless painting – thick yellow stripes against a grainy bluish background. Next to this there is a directory, which Gina consults. She sees that Winterland Properties is on the third floor.
She takes the elevator up, and Norton’s secretary shows her into his office. Gina is surprised by the decor. Like the fittings and corporate artwork in the lobby, it has quite a dated feel to it. Norton’s desk is a huge mahogany affair, and in front of it there are two red leather sofas with a glass coffee table between them. The table is scattered with magazines. On the wall facing the desk, there is a mahogany cabinet with a large TV set in the middle of it.
‘Gina… Gina.’
Norton comes out from behind his desk and extends his hand. He’s wearing a grey suit with a powder-blue shirt and a slightly darker blue tie. Gina steps forward.
‘Hi, Mr Norton.’
‘Paddy. Jesus. Call me Paddy.’
They shake hands.
‘OK… Paddy, thanks.’
‘How are you?’
‘I’m all right. You know.’ The face Gina makes here – half pained, half resigned – is meant to express a keen desire to move on. But before she can say anything more, Norton claps his hands together.
‘Gina,’ he says, ‘I was going to propose something to you this morning. I was going to ask if you’d like to come and have a look at Richmond Plaza, let me give you a tour, show you the view from the top.’
Gina stares at him for a moment in surprise, as though he has just spoken to her in Chinese.
‘In Noel’s honour sort of thing.’ He pauses. ‘I mean, we both know how dedicated he was to the project, right?’
Gina certainly wasn’t expecting this, but after a pause she nods her head and says, ‘Yes, yes, I’d really like that.’
‘Good,’ Norton says, ‘good.’
There is a coat draped on one of the leather sofas. He reaches over and picks it up. He puts it on and holds a hand out, indicating the door. ‘OK then,’ he says, ‘let’s go.’
In the mid-morning traffic, it takes them about twenty minutes to get to Richmond Dock. Norton’s car is spacious and very comfortable, but with its sickly beige leather upholstery and pine air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror, Gina ends up feeling a little queasy and doesn’t say much. Norton, in any case, talks non-stop and goes into a level of technical detail about the project that she quickly finds incomprehensible.
At the site, Norton parks on the street, and they get out of the car. There is a wide paved concourse in front of Richmond Plaza, and as they walk across it, Gina leans backwards and looks up. Most of the building has external cladding in place and looks finished. The very top levels, though, seem more exposed, and dissolve into a blur. At the base of the building there is an arched glass entranceway, with space on either side for what will probably be large retail units.
Leading the way, Norton goes left across the concourse towards a sectioned-off area. Here, behind the wooden hoarding, it looks like a proper building site, with mud and cables and diggers and Portakabin huts. There is a gigantic tower crane on its concrete base. There are construction workers everywhere. Norton and Gina make their way to a row of prefab structures, one of which is an office. Norton signs in and introduces Gina to the project manager, a thin, earnest man in his late forties. They don hard hats and safety jackets, and the project manager then takes up where Norton left off – rolling out specs and statistics.
They go back across the concourse and enter the building proper. It takes Gina a moment to realise, as she looks up and around her, that what they are standing in here is a colossal atrium. It must extend to at least ten levels above them. Through the scaffolding and hanging power cables she can see that it’s going to have galleried floors on three sides, with Plexiglas elevators, probably, on the fourth. On one of the sides, reaching up diagonally to the next level, there is an escalator frame, not quite locked into place, that looks like a huge dinosaur skeleton in a natural-history museum.
They cross the atrium, passing a bank of six more elevators over to the right, and walk along a dimly lit corridor, eventually coming out at a large service elevator next to a loading dock. When they get into the elevator car, the project manager hits an unmarked switch. The car lurches slightly, starts moving and then picks up speed.
A few moments later, the door opens and they step out. ‘Level 48’ is painted on a partition directly in front of them. To the left there are five or six construction workers standing around and next to them on the floor are some loose sections of what look like air-conditioning ducts.
The project manager leads the way, taking Gina and Norton around the partition. Except for the core section and a grid of supporting steel columns, Level 48 is an open space. Its left and right sides have wall units and glazing frames already fitted, but the far end, with only a few interlocking steel girders and protective barriers, looks very exposed.
‘It’s not safe to go up on the roof,’ Norton says, ‘but I think you’ll get the picture from here.’
The project manager is about to say something when his mobile goes off. He answers it, listens, nods. After a moment, he gestures at Norton, pointing downwards. He turns to Gina, shakes his head apologetically and then scuttles back towards the elevator, the phone still at his ear.
‘Impressed?’ Norton says.
‘Yes. Yes. It’s… amazing.’
‘Of course, a project of this sort is all about teamwork and collaboration, that goes without saying – but don’t be in any doubt, Gina, your brother made his contribution here, and you should be proud of him.’
As Gina turns to look at Norton, her eyes well up. ‘I am,’ she says in a whisper.
Norton puts a hand out to her, but Gina moves away. She quickly regains her composure, takes a paper tissue from her pocket and blows her nose. ‘Sorry.’
‘Jesus,’ Norton says. ‘For what?’
‘Oh, you know. I suppose. I don’t know. Look, er…’ She hesitates, dabbing her nose with the tissue.
‘Yes?’
‘We were… talking on Thursday evening -’
‘Yes.’ Norton straightens up. ‘Yes indeed we were.’
‘So I just wanted to ask you -’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, the thing is, you see, I’m finding it hard to accept that the two deaths… well, that they were entirely unconnected.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. I mean, you know what kind of activity my nephew was involved in, right?’
Norton nods.
‘Well, I can’t help feeling that his killing may in some way have led to, or caused, my brother’s death.’
‘Oh. Oh. I see.’ Norton appears to relax a bit. ‘But what are you basing this on? I mean, Noel’s death was an accident, surely?’
‘Yes, but… I don’t know. What I wanted to ask you was – and maybe this is totally out of order, please tell me if it is – but… could there be any links between the building trade and gangland crime… I don’t know, with unions, or suppliers, or…’