Inspector Morse 13 The Remorseful Day

chapter twenty-four In many an Oxfordshire Ale-house the horseshoe is hung

upside- down, in the form that is of an Arch or an Omega.  This age- old

custom (I have been convincingly informed) is not to allow the Luck to run

out but to prevent the Devil building up a nest therein.

(D.  Small, A Most Complete Guide to the Hostelries of the Cotswolds) As he

stood amid the wilderness of waste, a High Vizjacket 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 107

 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

land-fill 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 Land-rover 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 dp 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 land- scape.

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 snow plough pushing forward the levelled rubbish towards 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 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.