Barry Maitland: Silvermeadow

He put the phone away, took a deep breath. ‘Right. Okay. What do you want to know?’

‘Has this happened before, Mr Cherry?’

‘What?’ He looked alarmed. ‘With…?’ His voice trailed off. ‘Oh, you mean the body?’

‘Yes, the body.’

‘No, never. They joke about it, the lads, but this is the first time it’s actually happened.’

‘Maybe if you explained to me in laymen’s terms what goes on here, at the plant. You dispose of refuse, do you?’

‘In a nutshell, yeah. It comes from all over Essex and east London. We do some front-end processing to the mixed waste for general recovery and recycling in the building near the front gates. The rest goes up the ramp for processing into RDF-refuse-derived fuel.’

‘Can we see?’

‘Sure.’

He led them out of the shed and onto the roadway leading to a concrete ramp. A light drizzle was falling now and they turned up their collars, hunching against the wind that grew stronger the higher they climbed. Halfway up they were obliged to stop and stand hard against the parapet as a heavily laden truck came grinding past, headlights on. It gave a blast of its horn and continued on up to the head of the ramp. They followed, the view opening up across the surrounding industrial landscape, flat and bleak, the humped profiles of grey factory sheds interspersed with the odd scarlet crane and silver flue.

The truck belonged to one of a number of designated contractors, Cherry explained, whose waste sources were known and whose loads did not require to go through the front-end screening process. They watched as the truck began reversing towards the delivery point, guided by the waving signals of an operative in waterproofs and a hard hat. The back of the truck began to tilt upwards, the load slid with a rumble into the steel maw, and within a minute the truck was disappearing down the exit ramp ahead.

‘Nobody actually inspects the load, see?’ Cherry said, having to shout now against the wind and the roar of the plant. ‘The contractors certify the organic content, and it goes straight in here for processing-shredding, grinding, spin-drying and then into the fuel silos. From there it’s pumped to the power plant’-he pointed to a pair of tall gleaming steel chimneys reaching upwards to the cloud base-‘and incinerated. We generate electricity for the grid, and sell the waste heat to a number of industrial plants around here, and to the district heating scheme that serves the Herbert Morrison estate.’ He gestured towards a row of grey concrete slabs almost invisible against the dark clouds.

‘You’re joking,’ Lowry said. ‘Straight up?’

‘Yes, sure. Why?’

‘We think that’s where the girl came from.’

‘Blimey! She could have ended up heating her mum’s radiators and giving her a few minutes of Terry Wogan on the telly,’ Cherry said softly, and they all stared at the distant housing blocks, looking disturbingly like tombstones in the rain.

The rain was falling with greater density and penetration now, and Cherry said, ‘Well, seen enough up here?’

They jogged quickly back down the ramp, returning to the shelter of Number Three Shed where they shook their coats and stamped their feet. The two drivers were back in their machines again, scooping out cardboard bales to the instructions of the SOCO officers. A handler with a beagle had joined them, and the dog was eagerly investigating each new batch of material uncovered. He seemed to be the only one enjoying his work.

‘So where does this fit into the process?’ Brock asked Cherry.

‘It doesn’t,’ the man said wearily. ‘That’s the point. We’ve been having trouble with our emissions. A month ago we were forced to shut down one of the two incinerators while we installed new filters. It’s only just been fired up again. Meanwhile we couldn’t burn all the material coming in. The RDF silos filled up, and we had to start dumping half the loads in here, as a temporary storage. We’ve hardly begun to clear it. By rights, none of this stuff should be here. Number Three Shed is due for demolition, to make way for a third incinerator.’

‘All this should have gone straight up the ramp?’

‘That’s right.’

The manager’s phone rang again and he clamped the yellow instrument to his ear. ‘What’s that, sweetheart?’ he yelled. ‘Where?. .. You threw up where?… Oh, Jesus!’ He swung round, oblivious to those around him now, staring wildly up into the darkness beyond the floodlights, his mind seized by some vivid mental picture.

Brock walked away, taking the Polaroid pictures from his pocket. The image in the photographs was so bizarre that he wished he’d seen it in situ for himself, the figure coiled inside the cube of compressed cardboard, like a foetus inside an egg. A private, secret foetus that by rights should never have been exposed, should have been delivered straight up the ramp to the shredders and grinders and then incinerated without anyone having a clue. Uncovered by a problem with emissions.

The plant manager seemed preoccupied with an emissions problem of a different kind, Brock thought wryly, watching him thrust his phone back in his pocket.

‘Tell me about compactors,’ he said.

‘Plenty of them about. Factories, supermarkets, anywhere that generates a lot of dry waste. Common type has a two-cubic-yard capacity, four-to-one compression ratio’-he rattled off the technical mantra while his mental eye seemed mesmerised by the vision of his girlfriend vomiting-‘usually linked to a receiving container that’s emptied by a contractor.’

Cherry paused, and stared up at the harsh lights. ‘Christ, we’ve had so many fucking disasters lately… Stroke of luck for you though, eh? You’ll be able to work out where it came from, no bother.’

They spoke to the woman leading the SOCO team, who described their preliminary results from the bale of cardboard waste in which the body had been hidden. The manufacturers’ symbols printed on them were those of household names, makers of electrical goods, paper towels, breakfast cereals. Several of the compressed boxes had delivery codes written on them, and one had fragments of a delivery notice inside it, with the sender’s name and despatch number, and the destination: a store at Silvermeadow.

When they returned to the patrol car, Lowry held the door open for Brock and said, ‘He’ll take you to Hornchurch Street, sir. Chief Superintendent Forbes is waiting for you in his conference room on the fourth floor. The driver’ll show you the way.’

He was perfectly polite, Brock noted, like a young man looking after an elderly relative who needed direction. Brock rested his arm on the roof of the car and looked him over thoughtfully. ‘Where are you going, Sergeant?’

Lowry checked his watch. ‘I’d better get over to the autopsy, sir. They said they’d make way for this one, and I’ll be needed to establish continuity of identification.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘Ah…’ Lowry’s voice became coaxing, the volume low, as if he didn’t want the driver to hear. ‘Chief Superintendent Forbes is expecting you back there, sir. Area Major Investigation Pool Management has been alerted. I believe there are important management issues to resolve.’

‘Bugger the important management issues, Sergeant. I want to see the body.’

Lowry’s eyes flicked away briefly, a little smile forming on his lips. The elderly relative was becoming difficult. ‘You’ll get me into trouble, sir…’ he began, almost teasingly, then suddenly caught the cold look in Brock’s eye and stopped what he was about to say. He shrugged and reached for his phone. ‘I’ll let them know, sir.’

Brock put out his hand. ‘Just get the number for me, Sergeant. I’ll speak to him.’