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gravel. Another of the missing. Maybe it was my father. The dates would fit. Maybe if I stared at him hard enough, he might give up his secrets. And maybe it was just another bundle of dry old bones.
    “I wonder if Dawson carried out the original construction,” I said.
    “They didn’t. I’m not sure who did, but your man Dagg out there has been tut-tutting over the state of the original job. Said it was real cowboy stuff.”
    “Shit, Rory Dagg. I’d better go and talk to him. Thanks for letting me see this, Dave.”
    “All right, Ed. Take it handy now.”
    I left Dave climbing down a ladder to join the team gathered around the body. Descending to the dead to shorten the odds from a million to one.
    Rory Dagg was outside sending a text to someone on his mobile phone. When he saw me, he picked up his silver laptop and a transparent plastic tubular case containing what looked like architect’s plans and began to move toward the main gates.
    “I’m sorry to have kept you, Mr. Dagg,” I said.
    “Walk with me, will you?” he said, his voice a quiet drawl, his manner easy and efficient. “I’ve another site to check in on, and all this has made me late. Donnelly didn’t give you any idea when they’d finish up, did he?”
    “He didn’t. But I can’t see it taking too long. Twenty years in a concrete block probably doesn’t leave too much work for forensics,” I said, affecting an insouciance toward the freshly exhumed corpse I certainly didn’t feel.
    We headed up the main street toward the old town hall, that is to say, McDonald’s. Dagg’s phone beeped, and he read an incoming text as he walked. He was in his mid-forties, had the wiry build of a swimmer and the high color of a drinker; he wore his graying curly hair short. He looked like a civil engineer, or a university lecturer; in fact, as he told me, he had been both, but had set up in project management when the building boom started because there was money to be made, “and I knew the job. My father was a foreman for Dawson’s years ago.”
    “Is he retired now?” I said.
    “He’s dead these ten years. Are you working with the police, Mr. Loy?”
    “In a manner of speaking. I’m investigating the disappearance of Peter Dawson, on behalf of his wife, Linda.”
    Dagg looked up from a text he was composing.
    “I didn’t know he’d disappeared. I saw him only the other day.”
    “Peter was supposed to meet his wife in the High Tide, just after he’d finished with you. You’re one of the last people we know to have seen him. What business did he have with you?”
    Dagg sent his text, put his mobile in his jacket pocket and shrugged.
    “The usual, I suppose. He came on-site and asked his questions about budget overruns and unforeseen expenses. Each of the site supervisors said his piece. Then he rolled off a bunch of bills to pay for nixers. Last week it was a sparks and a couple of chippies we had to call out when some genius kango-hammered through a fuseboard. The odd unofficial bonus, site security, because tools kept walking. That was it, I think.”
    “Was that the usual? I mean, it sounds a bit hands-on for a financial controller.”
    “Yeah. Well, truth be told, Peter Dawson isn’t really the financial controller. The real work is done by Hanly Boyle, they’ve been Dawson’s accountants since the beginning. Peter’s title is what you might call an honorific — you know, because he’s the boss’s son.”
    “That must be humiliating for him.”
    “I don’t think it was initially. Easy money, free house, his boat, a beautiful wife: we should all be so humiliated. But in the last few months, he’s seemed less and less satisfied.”
    “Was there anything out of the ordinary about him that day?”
    Dagg thrust his chin forward and grimaced in thought.
    “He was actually quite — not distracted, preoccupied. Energized. As if he was excited about something. And once we were done, he was off, you know, all business.”
    “How