Colin Dexter - The Remorseful Day

He voiced his thoughts. “If a driver dumped a body... well, he wouldn’t really know much about it, would he?”

Colin Rice, the site manager, hesitated awhile before replying — not because he had the slightest doubt about the answer to this question, but because he felt reluctant immediately to disappoint his somewhat melancholic inquisitor.

“No.”

“How many of those compactor bins do you get from Redbridge every day?”

“Depends.”

“Today?”

“Four or five? I could check.”

“No. No need.”

Morse watched as the yellow-painted BOMAG tractors were once again setting about their dismal business, the metal teeth of their giant wheels compacting the recently deposited mounds; and then, with a fair-weather frontage reminiscent of a snowplow, pushing forward the leveled rubbish toward its burial ground.

For the moment Morse said nothing more, suddenly and strangely aware that, if he half-closed his eyes, the piles of refuse around him could almost appear like some wondrously woven multicolored quilt, black and white mostly, but interspersed with vivid little patches of blue and red and yellow.

It was Rice who spoke: “If anybody’d see anything it’d be those chaps on the levelers. They’re looking forward at all the rubbish, see? Your normal truck driver, he’s not even looking backward at it.”

“You wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the place where any lorry loads from Redbridge...?”

The site manager shook his head. “No chance.”

“If you had enough personnel though?”

“How many?”

“ Five or six?”

“Five or six hundred, you mean?”

Morse decided to quit the unequal struggle. He kicked a hole in one of the black plastic bags at his feet, and briefly surveyed the nauseating mixture of spaghetti and tomatoes that oozed therefrom, like the innards of a road-squashed rabbit.

“If you’d like to stay?” suggested Rice, without enthusiasm. “You never know. We had a load of brand-new cameras dumped here once.”

“I’ve never had a camera myself,” admitted Morse. “I just hope you appropriated one for yourself.”

Rice smiled, forgivingly. “You don’t really know much about the rules in a place like this, do you, sir?”

Morse lifted his eyes from the ground toward the giant cooling-towers of Didcot Power Station which stood sentinel on the immediate landscape, only a few hundred yards away.

“No, I don’t,” he said quietly.

As he drove back along the A34 into Oxford, Morse doubted he’d expressed adequate thanks to Greenways Waste Management. He was (he acknowledged the fact) never a man renowned for voicing much gratitude. He’d even dismissed, and that cursorily, Rice’s thoughtful offer of issuing a memo to everyone working either permanently or temporarily on the site, acquainting them with the situation.

But Morse felt unable to feel too self-critical, because he knew there was no “situation.” And he repeated to himself this recently corroborated conviction as he turned on the car radio, and listened again to the slow movement of Bruckner’s Seventh.

When later that same afternoon Lewis arrived back at Kidlington HQ, he felt more pleased, more excited, and (yes!) more confident in himself than he’d been for a long, long while. In almost all previous cases he’d usually reached first base only to find that Morse was already sprinting off to second base; and so on, and so on, all round the baseball pitch. So now he decided to do a little sprinting for himself.

First, he rang Redbridge — only to discover that Morse had already visited the site.

Second, he rang Sutton Courtenay — only to discover that Morse had already visited the site, and where he’d pronounced that any search of said site was quite certainly foredoomed to failure.

So Lewis had coolly countermanded these instructions.

It was as if he — Lewis — was taking charge of the case.

Well, he was, wasn’t he?

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, semicompacted 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 Courtenay in Oxfordshire.

Morse (for some reason) was in that Saturday morning when Lewis knocked on his office door just after ten.

“Spare a few minutes, sir?”