Twenty-two

“Not for scrap, is she?” Stan Cox nodded toward the Jag parked in the no-parking area outside his office window in the Redbridge Waste Disposal Centre.

“Getting on a bit,” conceded Morse, “like all of us. You know, windscreen wipers packing up, gearbox starting to jam, no heat…”

“Sounds a bit like the missus!”

“Pardon?”

“Joke, sir.”

“Ah, yes.” Morse's smile was even weaker than the witticism as he looked round the cramped office, his eyes catching a girlie calendar in the corner, from which a provocatively bare-breasted bimbo, with short blonde hair, stared back at him.

“Nice, ain't she!”

Morse nodded. “Past her sell-by date, though. She's the May girl.”

“Remember the ol’ song, sir—'From May to September’?”

“You just like having her around.”

It was Cox's turn to nod: “Drives me mad, she does. Keeps me sane at the same time though, if you follows me meaning.”

Morse wasn't at all sure that he did, but he was conscious that he'd drunk too much beer that lunchtime; that he should never have driven himself out to Red-bridge; that what he'd earlier seen as a clear-cut outline had now grown blurred around the periphery. In the pub, with Lewis, he'd felt convinced he could see a cause, a sequence, a structure, to the crime.

Perhaps two crimes now.

It was the same old tantalizing challenge to puzzles that had faced him ever since he was a boy. It was the certain knowledge that something had happened in the past—happened in an ordered, logical, very specific way. And the challenge had been, and still was, to gather the disparate elements of the puzzle together and to try to reconstruct that “very specific way.”

Not too successfully now, though. For here, at Red-bridge, there seemed a great gulf fixed between the fanciful hypothesis he'd so recently formulated, and the humdrum reality of a rubbish dump.

Is that what Cox was trying to say?

“How d'you mean? Keeps you sane?”

“Well, it's not exactly your Botanical Gardens here, is it? Just all the filth and useless stuff people want shut of. So there's not much good to look at, ‘cept her, bless her heart! Pearl in a pigsty—that's what she is.”

“Why don't you write her a fan letter?”

“Think she'd read it?”

“No.”

“So what can we do for you, Chief?”

Morse told him, making most of it up as he went along.

And when he'd finished, Cox nodded. “No problem. We'd better just let the County Authorities know.”

“Already done,” lied Morse. And refusing a cup of coffee, he left the office and walked unaccompanied around the site, only a few hundred yards from the southern stretch of Oxford's Ring Road, thinking about the things he'd learned from Cox …

“Do you reckon,” he'd asked, “you could dispose of a body here, in one of your, er… ?”

“Only in one of the compactor bins—that'd be the best bet. You'll be able to see for yourself, though. The others are a bit too open, really.”

“Black bag, say? Put a body in it? Just chuck it in?”

“You'd need a big bag.”

“Well, let's say we've got a big bag.”

“Heavy things, bodies. Ten, twelve stone, say? You couldn't just… well, unless you had two people, I suppose.”

“Or cut the body in half, perhaps.”

“Mm. Still a bit awkward, wouldn't you think? Unless it were stiff, of course.”

“Yes…”

“ Was it stiff, this body of yours?”

“Er, no. No, I don't think it was.”

“Or unless it was a pretty small body. Was it small, this body of yours?”

“Er, no. No. I don't think it was.”

“Well, as I say …”

“How would you get rid of a body here?”

“Well, if it were a littl'un, like I said, I'd go for a compactor bin. They got ramps that go back and forrard reg'lar like, and everything soon gets pushed through into the back o’ the bin. Doubt anybody'd notice it really—not this end, anyway.”

“There's another end?”

“Sutton Courtenay, yes, out near Didcot. The bins get driven out there, to the landfill site. Somebody might notice summat there, I suppose.”

“Funny, isn't it? Dustmen always seem to notice some things, don't they?”

“You mean our Waste Disposal Operatives.”

“They refused to take my little bag of grass cuttings last week.”

“Ah, now you're talking business, sir.”

“Put a human head in the bottom of the bag though—”

“—and you'd probably get away with it? Right! But I shouldn't try your grass cuttings again, Inspector.”

As he walked around, Morse was impressed by the layout and the management of the large area designated there to the various categories of Oxford's disposable debris: car batteries; can bank; engine-oil cans; paper bank; clothing bank; tools; bottles (green, brown, white); bulky items; scrap metal; fridges and freezers; garden waste (green); garden waste (other)…

Only the vast “Bulky Items” bins seemed to offer any scope so far; and even there a body would have lain uncomfortably and conspicuously amid the jagged edges of broken tables, awkwardly angled cupboards, tilted mattresses.

Then Morse stood still for many minutes inspecting what he'd been waiting to see: the compactor bins—twelve of them in a row. Each bin (Morse attempted a non-too-scientific analysis) was a 12-ton, 6 feet × 20 feet, white-bodied metal container, a broad green stripe painted horizontally along its middle, with a grilled covering at the receiving end which customers could easily lift before depositing their car-booted detritus there; and where a ramp was ever moving forward and back, forward and back, and pushing the divers deposits from the bin's mouth through into some unseen, unsavory interior. On the side of each bin were “start/stop” and “red/green” buttons and switches which appeared to control the complex operation; and even as Morse watched, a site workman came alongside, somehow interpreting the evidence and (presumably?) deciding whether any particular bin was sufficiently stuffed to get lifted on to one of the great lorries lumbering around, and to get carted off to—where was it?—Sutton Courtenay.

Morse tackled the young ponytailed operative as he was tapping one of the bins, rather like a man tapping the upturned hull of some stricken submarine to see if there were any signs of life.

“How long's it take to fill one of these things?”

“Depends. Holidays and weekends? Pretty quick—only a day, sometimes. Usually though? Two, three days. Depends, like I said.”

“How many bins have gone today?”

“Two? No, three, I think.”

“You didn't, er, notice anything unusual about… about anything?”

“What sort o’ thing, mate?”

“Forget it, son! And, by the way, I wasn't aware I was one of your mates.”

“An’ I wasn't aware you was me fuckin’ father, neither!” spat the spotty-faced youth, as an outsmarted Morse walked unhappily away.

It had not been a particularly productive afternoon. Morse hadn't even had the nous to bring his little bag of grass cuttings along, to be tossed, with full official blessing, into the garden waste (green) depository.

Back in Cox's office Morse was (for him) comparatively generous with his gratitude for the help he'd been provided with. And before leaving, he took a last look at the month of May's lascivious self-offering to all who looked and longed and lusted after her. People like Stanley Cox; like Cox's fellow Waste Disposal Operatives; like Chief Inspector Morse, who stood in front of her again and thought she reminded him of another woman—a woman he'd met so very recently.

Reminded him of Debbie Richardson.