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 multi-coloured 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
levellers. They're looking forward at all the rubbish, see?
Your normal truck driver, he's not even looking backwards at it. '
'You wouldn't be able to pin-point 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.
109
'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 towards 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 Kidling- ton 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? '
ni
chapter 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 every- thing. 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 branch line 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 un
memorable and predictably monotonous. For this reason, neither Jammie nor
