of Green Way International Disposal and Recycling; the company name was printed over a delicate drawing of a verdant leaf. Hydt didn’t much care for the design, which struck him as mockingly trendy, but he’d been told that the image had scored well in focus groups and was good for public relations (‘Ah, the
He was a tall man – six foot three – and broad-shouldered, his columnar torso encased in a bespoke suit of black wool. His massive head was covered with thick, curly hair, black streaked with white, and he wore a matching beard. His yellowing fingernails extended well past his fingertips, but were carefully filed; they were long by design, not neglect.
Hydt’s pallor accentuated his dark nostrils and darker eyes, framed by a long face that appeared younger than his fifty-six years. He was a strong man still, having retained much of his youthful muscularity.
The van started through his company’s dishevelled grounds, more than a hundred acres of low buildings, rubbish tips, skips, hovering seagulls, smoke, dust…
And decay…
As they drove over the rough roads, Hydt’s attention momentarily slipped to a construction about half a mile away. A new building was nearing completion. It was identical to two that stood already in the grounds: five-storey boxes from which chimneys rose, the sky above them rippling from the rising heat. The buildings were known as destructors, a Victorian word that Severan Hydt loved. England was the first country in the world to make energy from municipal refuse. In the 1870s the first power plant to do so was built in Nottingham and soon hundreds were operating throughout the country, producing steam to generate electricity.
The destructor now nearing completion in the middle of his disposal and recycling operation was no different in theory from its gloomy Dickensian forebears, save that it used scrubbers and filters to clean the dangerous exhaust and was far more efficient, burning RDF – refuse-derived fuel – as it produced energy that was pumped (for profit, of course) into the London and Home County power grids.
Indeed, Green Way International, plc, was simply the latest in a long British tradition of innovation in refuse disposal and reclamation. Henry IV had decreed that rubbish should be collected and removed from the streets of towns and cities on threat of forfeit. Mudlarks had kept the banks of the Thames clean – for entrepreneurial profit, not government wages – and rag pickers had sold scraps of wool to mills for the production of cheap cloth called shoddy. In London, as early as the nineteenth century, women and girls had been employed to sift through incoming refuse and sort it according to future usefulness. The British Paper Company had been founded to manufacture recycled paper – in 1890.
Green Way was located nearly twenty miles east of London, well past the boxed sets of office buildings on the Isle of Dogs and the sea-mine of the O2, past the ramble of Canning Town and Silvertown, the Docklands. To reach it you turned south-east off the A13 and drove towards the Thames. Soon you were down to a narrow lane, unwelcoming, even forbidding, surrounded by nothing but brush and stalky plants, pale and translucent as a dying patient’s skin. The tarmac strip seemed a road to nowhere… until it crested a low rise and ahead you could see Green Way’s massive complex, forever muted through a haze.
In the middle of this wonderland of rubbish the van now stopped beside a battered skip, six feet high, twenty long. Two workers, somewhere in their forties, wearing tan Green Way overalls, stood uncomfortably beside it. They didn’t look any less uneasy now that the owner of the company himself, no less, was present.
‘Crikey,’ one whispered to the other.
Hydt knew they were also cowed by his black eyes, the tight mass of his beard and his towering frame.
And then there were those fingernails.
He asked, ‘In there?’
The workers remained speechless and the foreman, the name
The employee hurried to the side of the skip and, with some effort, pulled the large door open, assisted by a spring. Inside were the ubiquitous mounds of green bin liners and loose junk – bottles, magazines and newspapers – that people had been too lazy to separate for recycling.
And there was another item of discard inside: a human body.
A woman’s or teenage boy’s, to judge from the stature. There wasn’t much else to go on, since, clearly, death had occurred months ago. He bent down and probed with his long fingernails.
This enjoyable examination confirmed the corpse was a woman’s.
Staring at the loosening skin, the protruding bones, the insect and animal work on what was left of the flesh, Hydt felt his heart quicken. He said to the two workers, ‘You’ll keep this to yourselves.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Of course, sir.’
‘Wait over there.’
They trotted away. Hydt glanced at Dennison, who nodded that they’d behave themselves. Hydt didn’t doubt it. He ran Green Way more like a military base than a rubbish tip and recycling yard. Security was tight – mobile phones were banned, all outgoing communications monitored – and discipline harsh. But, in compensation, Severan Hydt paid his people very, very well. A lesson of history was that professional soldiers stuck around far longer than amateurs, provided you had the money. And that particular commodity was never in short supply at Green Way. Disposing of what people no longer wanted had always been, and would forever be, a profitable endeavour.
Alone now, Hydt crouched beside the body.
The discovery of human remains here happened with some frequency. Sometimes workers in the construction debris and reclamation division of Green Way would find Victorian bones or desiccated skeletons in building foundations. Or a corpse was that of a homeless person, dead from exposure to the elements, drink or drugs, hurled unceremoniously upon the bin liners. Sometimes it was a murder victim – in which case the killers were usually polite enough to bring the body here directly.
Hydt never reported the deaths. The presence of the police was the last thing he wanted.
Besides, why should he give up such a treasure?
He eased closer to the body, knees pressing against what was left of the woman’s jeans. The smell of decay – like bitter, wet cardboard – would be unpleasant to most people but discard had been Hydt’s lifelong profession and he was no more repulsed by it than a garage mechanic is troubled by the scent of grease or an abattoir worker the odour of blood and viscera.
Dennison, the foreman, however, stood back some distance from the perfume.
With one of his jaundiced fingernails, Hydt reached forward and stroked the top of the skull, from which most of the hair was missing, then the jaw, the finger bones, the first to be exposed. Her nails too were long, though not because they had grown after her death, which was a myth; they simply
He studied his new friend for a long moment, then reluctantly eased back. He looked at his watch. He pulled his iPhone from his pocket and took a dozen pictures of the corpse.
Then he glanced around him. He pointed to a deserted spot between two large mounds over landfills, like barrows holding phalanxes of fallen soldiers. ‘Tell the men to bury it there.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Dennison replied.
As he walked back to the people-carrier, he said, ‘Not too deep. And leave a marker. So I’ll be able to find it again.’
Half an hour later Hydt was in his office, scrolling through the pictures he’d taken of the corpse, lost in the images, sitting at the three-hundred-year-old gaol door mounted on legs that was his desk.
