The Remorseful Day

Chapter twenty-four

As he stood amid the wilderness of waste, a High Viz jacket over his summer shirt and a red safety helmet on his head, Chief Inspector Morse realized that he had miscalculated rather badly. But he’d had to check it up.

It had always been the same with him. Whenever as a young boy reading under his bedside lamp he’d come across an unfamiliar word, he’d known with certainty that he could never look forward to sleep until he’d traced the newcomer’s credentials and etymology in Chambers’ Dictionary, the book that stood alongside The Family Doctor (1910), A Pictorial History of the First World War, and The Life of Captain Cook, on the single short shelf that comprised his parents’ library.

His father (sadly, almost tragically) had been a clandestine gambler. And Morse was fully aware that this time he himself had put his money on a rank outsider: the possibility that someone had murdered Harry Repp; had disposed of his body in the Redbridge Waste Disposal Centre; had disposed of this hypothetical body in a particular part of that Centre — specifically in one of the compactor bins perhaps: further, that the said and equally hypothetical bin had been, was being, or was about to be, driven out in a hypothetical black bag to Sutton Courtenay. And, above all, that somebody might have observed such a hypothetical deposit. Ridiculous! William Hill or Ladbrokes would probably have offered odds of 1,000,000-1 against any such eventuality.

On impulse Morse had driven down the A34, thence along the A4130, to the landfill site on the outskirts of Sutton Courtenay. Where, after a series of telephone calls from the temporary (permanent) Portakabins, the management had finally acknowledged the bona fides of their dubious visitor.

It was in a Landrover that (finally) Morse had been driven out to the tipping area, where virtually continuous convoys of lorries from the whole of Oxfordshire were raising the telescopic legs of container-cargoes to some 45 degrees as they began to tip their loads, moving forward in disjunctive jerks as they ensured the contents were fully discharged, and leaving behind a distinctive trail of their own particular type of rubbish. As a rather dispirited Morse watched these operations, he imagined that perhaps when viewed from some hovering helicopter each truck would seem like an artist’s brush, with the trail of the gradually extending rubbish like a stroke of variegated paint being smeared across the canvas of the landscape. But Morse accepted the more prosaic truth of the situation immediately: the truck drivers themselves would very seldom, if ever, have occasion to notice, let alone to examine, the contents of the loads they were emptying.

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?