I need to say what the inspection actually was, because it matters for what Wendell did.
Pier 12 had been through a structural remediation programme over two years. The contractor billed for the work in stages and certified each stage themselves, which is normal, and which is why you get assessed.
My team’s job was to go and look at what had actually been done to the piles below the waterline, unannounced, within a stated week, so that nobody could get a diver down there first and tidy up.
That window was that week. Everybody on their side knew it was that week. Nobody on their side knew it was that Thursday.
An interrupted or abandoned assessment does not just delay things. It goes in a file. It becomes a line about conditions on site, and a line about conditions on site is a thing a contractor’s solicitor can do a great deal with eighteen months later.
I was standing at the crates with Master Chief Kettleman and a civilian project manager called Imara Vega, three hours into it, when I heard something behind me that did not belong on a working pier.
Heels. Moving fast, on concrete.
You learn what a pier sounds like. Boots, forklifts, the crane, the hydraulics, somebody shouting a number across sixty feet of water.
Heels is wrong in the way a bird inside a building is wrong. Everybody hears it and everybody turns.
By the time I had turned round, four people had already stopped what they were doing, which is why there were twenty witnesses and not two.
She came straight at me across sixty feet of open deck, past a stack of equipment crates, past two contractors who both turned round.
She said, loud enough for all of them: you have got to be joking. You actually turned up here.
I put my clipboard down on an equipment crate. I remember doing it carefully.
I said: Arabelle. This is a controlled work area. You need to step back.
She said: don’t you Arabelle me.
And then she started on about a retirement event she was working that day.
She said: Wendell told me you’d try something like this. He said you couldn’t stand that I was doing the Halvorsen retirement today. He said you’d find a way to put yourself in the middle of it.
I have never heard the name Halvorsen in my life.
