Inspector Morse 13 The Remorseful Day

"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

his colleagues in the team ofBOMAC 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

dumper-truck driver entering the site from the far quarters of Oxfordshire.

MEMO FROM SITE MANAGER

Thames Valley Police have advised of the possibility of a human body,

probably bagged, being recently conveyed from the Red- bridge Centre in

Oxford.  Everyone is asked to be extra vigilant and to report anything

unusual (or usual, provided its a body).

(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 black-out, as me of' mum used to say."

"I like that, Jammie.  Sort o' poetic, like."

Jamold braked his tractor at 10.  05 a.  m.  and jumped down from his cab on

to the semi-levelled, semi-compacted 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

"3

 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