Twenty-five
Sometimes it is that searchers spot
The kind of thing they ‘d rather not.
(Lessing, Nathan der Weise)
During “Jammie” Jarnold's twenty-two years’ service on the Sutton Courtenay site, he'd seen most things. Not everything. For example, he'd never caught a glimpse of that sack of notes the Metropolitan Police were certain had been deposited in one of the trucks on that long train which arrived in the early hours of each morning from Brentford, via a branchline from Didcot, with its thousands of tons of the capital's refuse. Four hundred and fifty thousand pounds, they'd said, in fivers and tenners. Yes, Jammie had kept his eyes wide open on that occasion; had occasionally climbed down from his cab to prod anything that seemed even minimally promising.
If, on balance, it was a steady old job, it was also a job that was unmemorable and predictably monotonous. For this reason, neither Jammie nor his colleagues in the team of BOMAC tractor operators had dismissed as so much negligible bumf the single Xeroxed sheet which had been handed out that Saturday morning, both to permanent on-site personnel and to every dump truck driver entering the site from the far quarters of Oxfordshire.
(Morse himself would have been pleased to write such a succinct note—though inserting, of course, an apostrophe in the humorous parenthesis.)
Just after the start of the shift, a colleague shouted across at Jammie, waving a copy of the memo.
“Better keep your eyes open!”
“What's the reward?”
“Night with Sophia Loren in the Savoy.”
“Bit young for me.”
“I still reckon you'll keep your eyes open.”
“Yeah! I reckon.”
“Like looking for a needle in an ‘aystack though.”
“Like finding a shadow in the blackout, as me ol’ mum used to say.”
“I like that, Jammie. Sort o’ poetic, like.”
Jarnold braked his tractor at 10:05 A.M. and jumped down from his cab on to the semileveled, semicom-pacted mound of recently deposited rubbish. It was not that the specific item he'd spotted was unusual in any way. In fact, any pair of shoes was a very common sight: thousands of pairs were ever to be observed on every part of the site, worn down, worn out, worn beyond any possible repair. But there were unusual aspects about this particular pair of shoes. For a start, they looked comparatively new and were clearly of good quality; then, they were the only objects sticking out of a large black bag; what's more, they seemed strangely reluctant to drop out of that large black bag, as if (perhaps?) they might be attached, permanently, to something inside that large black bag.
Jarnold shouted over to a colleague.
“Come over ‘ere a sec!”
But already he had half-torn one side of the plastic.
“Christ!”
He turned away to vomit full-throatedly over a piece of conveniently positioned carpeting.
Had he been dining with Miss Loren at the Savoy, this would have caused considerable consternation. Not here, though. Not at the landfill site at Sutton Courte-nay in Oxfordshire.