Silvermeadow

by Barry Maitland

  Brock had a distinct feeling that he was being manoeuvred, though he couldn’t yet see the point. ‘Do you think that’s going to be called for?’ he asked dubiously. ‘An Area Major Investigation?’

  ‘We’re not sure yet. The status of the case is currently being reassessed. But it has some disturbing, not to say intriguing features, Brock. And I was wondering if we might possibly prevail upon you, with your considerable specialist expertise, to lend us an hour or two of your valuable time to give us your own assessment. It might just avoid a great deal of unnecessary difficulty further down the track.’

  Insurance, Brock thought, that’s what he’s after, in his pompous, roundabout way. Fireproof me with your considerable specialist expertise or I’ll get in your way and stuff up your case.

  Perhaps it was an uncharitable thought, and in any case, Brock had never been one to walk away from a murder with disturbing, not to say intriguing features.

  ‘DS Gurney has some homework to do,’ Brock said, ‘reactivating Criminal Intelligence records on North’s connections in this part of the country. While he’s doing that, I’d be glad to offer whatever assessment I can on your other case. Only I missed lunch. Any chance of a sandwich to eat on the way there?’

  Forbes beamed. ‘You shall have the best our canteen can offer.’

  He turned to Rickets, who looked doubtful. ‘I believe the workmen have cut off power to the kitchen, sir, but we’ll do our level best.’

  2

  Detective Sergeant Gavin Lowry opened the door of the patrol car for Brock as soon as it came to a halt outside Number Three Shed, introduced himself and led him through the tall metal doors into the cavernous interior. Brock had an impression of vast scale, a shadowy Piranesian dungeon lit from high above by a few blinding industrial lamps, whose baleful glare illuminated a cardboard hillside, an unstable-looking avalanche of compacted cardboard blocks with the texture of a giant’s breakfast cereal.

  ‘They found her down there, sir,’ Lowry said, pointing to one corner, around which the figures of scene of crime officers in white nylon overalls were crawling. ‘One of the men was loading the waste onto the back of that truck. The bale split open and she was inside.’

  ‘How long ago was that, Sergeant?’ Brock asked, watching the man reach into the inside pocket of his black suit. A sharp dresser, mid-thirties, gel in his hair, after-shave, a smoker. His accent was standard Estuarine, Essex Man, delivered with a cool reserve, anxious to impress, Brock guessed, without showing it. He pulled the wallet of Polaroid pictures from his pocket and offered them to Brock.

  ‘The foreman placed a triple niner at eight forty-three this morning, sir. Reported the discovery of a body.’ He looked at his watch and automatically straightened his cuff again. ‘I’ve been here over five hours.’ He recounted briefly what steps he’d taken: the disposition of the SOCO teams, photographer, medical examiner.

  ‘The body’s been removed?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Brock put on his reading glasses and studied the photographs, peering at the strangely distorted figure coiled tight, pale and naked, inside a clear plastic wrapping, disconcertingly like some pre-packaged meal, a chicken leg perhaps, all ready for the microwave.

  ‘What did the FME have to say?’

  ‘Naked human, probably female, probably young, possibly adolescent, five to seven stone, between four six and five six, shoulder-length fair hair. No indication of cause of death, or time.’

  ‘Couldn’t get much vaguer than that.’ Brock turned to get more light onto the square glossy images.

  ‘She’s inside a heavy-duty clear plastic bag, as you can see, sir, and the doc didn’t want to open it up here. He reckoned she’d been crushed in a machine.’

  ‘A machine?’

  ‘Yeah, a compactor. The guy who runs this place is over there. He’ll explain the technicalities.’

  ‘No identification, then?’

  ‘We could see a ring on one of her fingers. It matches the description of one worn by a missing person, Kerri Vlasich, age fourteen, disappeared Monday, sir.’

  They walked towards an incongruously dressed figure: bright yellow yachting jacket, white slacks and espadrilles, a navy peaked cap on his head.

  ‘This is Mr Cherry, sir. The manager of the plant,’ Lowry said.

  ‘FD, facilities director,’ Cherry corrected tersely. He looked impatient and tense.

  ‘Perhaps you could tell me what’s going on here, Mr Cherry?’ Brock asked.

  ‘I’ve already explained it half a dozen times.’

  ‘For my benefit, if you don’t mind.’

  Cherry pursed his lips with frustration, then spoke rapidly. ‘This is one of four WTE plants . . .’ He saw the look on Brock’s face and checked himself. ‘Waste-to-energy plant,’ he said. ‘Two thousand TPD rating, mixed WTE facility with front-end processing of mixed MSW . . .’

  He spoke hurriedly, as if preoccupied with some overwhelming inner problem, so that the incomprehensible acronyms spilled out of their own accord.

  ‘TPD? MSW?’ Brock interrupted mildly.

  ‘Tons per day,’ Mr Cherry replied automatically. ‘Municipal solid wastes.’

  A phone began sounding from an inside pocket of his jacket, and he snatched it out. It was the same bright yellow colour as his coat. ‘Christ! What now?’ He hunched away from the police and barked, ‘Yeah? No, no, no, don’t do that, sweetheart . . . Just be patient, yes? Please . . . Hang on . . .’

  He turned back to Brock. ‘How long, you reckon? Before you’ll be through with me?’

  ‘Hard to say, Mr Cherry.’

  ‘Shit.’ He turned away again, tucking the phone into his shoulder for privacy but making the gesture futile by raising his voice. ‘There’s some chicken and stuff in the galley, sweetheart . . . no, the kitchen . . . and a bottle of bubbly in the fridge . . . Did you? Oh, well, there’s more in the cupboard in the corner . . . Lie down, have a rest, eh? . . . How can you be seasick when you’re still tied up to the berth? . . . Take a walk outside, sweetheart. I’ll ring you back in half an hour.’

  He put the phone away, took a deep breath. ‘Right. Okay. What do you want to know?’

  ‘Has this happened before, Mr Cherry?’

  ‘What?’ He looked alarmed. ‘With . . .?’ His voice trailed off. ‘Oh, you mean the body?’

  ‘Yes, the body.’

  ‘No, never. They joke about it, the lads, but this is the first time it’s actually happened.’

  ‘Maybe if you explained to me in laymen’s terms what goes on here, at the plant. You dispose of refuse, do you?’

  ‘In a nutshell, yeah. It comes from all over Essex and east London. We do some front-end processing to the mixed waste for general recovery and recycling in the building near the front gates. The rest goes up the ramp for processing into RDF—refuse-derived fuel.’

  ‘Can we see?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He led them out of the shed and onto the roadway leading to a concrete ramp. A light drizzle was falling now and they turned up their collars, hunching against the wind that grew stronger the higher they climbed. Halfway up they were obliged to stop and stand hard against the parapet as a heavily laden truck came grinding past, headlights on. It gave a blast of its horn and continued on up to the head of the ramp. They followed, the view opening up across the surrounding industrial landscape, flat and bleak, the humped profiles of grey factory sheds interspersed with the odd scarlet crane and silver flue.

  The truck belonged to one of a number of designated contractors, Cherry explained, whose waste sources were known and whose loads did not require to go through the front-end screening process. They watched as the truck began reversing towards the delivery point, guided by the waving signals of an operative in waterproofs and a hard hat. The back of the truck began to tilt upwards, the load slid with a rumble into the steel maw, and within a minute the truck was disappearing down the exit ramp ahead.

  ‘Nobody actually inspects t
he load, see?’ Cherry said, having to shout now against the wind and the roar of the plant. ‘The contractors certify the organic content, and it goes straight in here for processing—shredding, grinding, spin-drying and then into the fuel silos. From there it’s pumped to the power plant’—he pointed to a pair of tall gleaming steel chimneys reaching upwards to the cloud base—‘and incinerated. We generate electricity for the grid, and sell the waste heat to a number of industrial plants around here, and to the district heating scheme that serves the Herbert Morrison estate.’ He gestured towards a row of grey concrete slabs almost invisible against the dark clouds.

  ‘You’re joking,’ Lowry said. ‘Straight up?’

  ‘Yes, sure. Why?’

  ‘We think that’s where the girl came from.’

  ‘Blimey! She could have ended up heating her mum’s radiators and giving her a few minutes of Terry Wogan on the telly,’ Cherry said softly, and they all stared at the distant housing blocks, looking disturbingly like tombstones in the rain.

  The rain was falling with greater density and penetration now, and Cherry said, ‘Well, seen enough up here?’

  They jogged quickly back down the ramp, returning to the shelter of Number Three Shed where they shook their coats and stamped their feet. The two drivers were back in their machines again, scooping out cardboard bales to the instructions of the SOCO officers. A handler with a beagle had joined them, and the dog was eagerly investigating each new batch of material uncovered. He seemed to be the only one enjoying his work.

  ‘So where does this fit into the process?’ Brock asked Cherry.

  ‘It doesn’t,’ the man said wearily. ‘That’s the point. We’ve been having trouble with our emissions. A month ago we were forced to shut down one of the two incinerators while we installed new filters. It’s only just been fired up again. Meanwhile we couldn’t burn all the material coming in. The RDF silos filled up, and we had to start dumping half the loads in here, as a temporary storage. We’ve hardly begun to clear it. By rights, none of this stuff should be here. Number Three Shed is due for demolition, to make way for a third incinerator.’

  ‘All this should have gone straight up the ramp?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The manager’s phone rang again and he clamped the yellow instrument to his ear. ‘What’s that, sweetheart?’ he yelled. ‘Where? . . . You threw up where? . . . Oh, Jesus!’ He swung round, oblivious to those around him now, staring wildly up into the darkness beyond the floodlights, his mind seized by some vivid mental picture.

  Brock walked away, taking the Polaroid pictures from his pocket. The image in the photographs was so bizarre that he wished he’d seen it in situ for himself, the figure coiled inside the cube of compressed cardboard, like a foetus inside an egg. A private, secret foetus that by rights should never have been exposed, should have been delivered straight up the ramp to the shredders and grinders and then incinerated without anyone having a clue. Uncovered by a problem with emissions.

  The plant manager seemed preoccupied with an emissions problem of a different kind, Brock thought wryly, watching him thrust his phone back in his pocket.

  ‘Tell me about compactors,’ he said.

  ‘Plenty of them about. Factories, supermarkets, anywhere that generates a lot of dry waste. Common type has a two-cubic-yard capacity, four-to-one compression ratio’—he rattled off the technical mantra while his mental eye seemed mesmerised by the vision of his girlfriend vomiting—‘usually linked to a receiving container that’s emptied by a contractor.’

  Cherry paused, and stared up at the harsh lights. ‘Christ, we’ve had so many fucking disasters lately . . . Stroke of luck for you though, eh? You’ll be able to work out where it came from, no bother.’

  They spoke to the woman leading the SOCO team, who described their preliminary results from the bale of cardboard waste in which the body had been hidden. The manufacturers’ symbols printed on them were those of household names, makers of electrical goods, paper towels, breakfast cereals. Several of the compressed boxes had delivery codes written on them, and one had fragments of a delivery notice inside it, with the sender’s name and despatch number, and the destination: a store at Silvermeadow.

  When they returned to the patrol car, Lowry held the door open for Brock and said, ‘He’ll take you to Hornchurch Street, sir. Chief Superintendent Forbes is waiting for you in his conference room on the fourth floor. The driver’ll show you the way.’

  He was perfectly polite, Brock noted, like a young man looking after an elderly relative who needed direction. Brock rested his arm on the roof of the car and looked him over thoughtfully. ‘Where are you going, Sergeant?’

  Lowry checked his watch. ‘I’d better get over to the autopsy, sir. They said they’d make way for this one, and I’ll be needed to establish continuity of identification.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘Ah . . .’ Lowry’s voice became coaxing, the volume low, as if he didn’t want the driver to hear. ‘Chief Superintendent Forbes is expecting you back there, sir. Area Major Investigation Pool Management has been alerted. I believe there are important management issues to resolve.’

  ‘Bugger the important management issues, Sergeant. I want to see the body.’

  Lowry’s eyes flicked away briefly, a little smile forming on his lips. The elderly relative was becoming difficult. ‘You’ll get me into trouble, sir . . .’ he began, almost teasingly, then suddenly caught the cold look in Brock’s eye and stopped what he was about to say. He shrugged and reached for his phone. ‘I’ll let them know, sir.’

  Brock put out his hand. ‘Just get the number for me, Sergeant. I’ll speak to him.’

  He took the phone and walked away, out of earshot.

  She—it definitely was a she—was curiously resistant to their probing, as if unwilling to release her secrets. Her age for a start. Perhaps it was the effect of the prolonged wrapping in the heavy plastic, or simply the result of the brutal compression, but her crushed face appeared old, that of a wrinkled old woman, while some other parts of her body—a thigh, a breast—seemed undeniably juvenile. The juxtaposition was disturbing, and Brock found his eyes wandering backwards and forwards, trying to reconcile a span of sixty years in the one body. In the end the pathologist called for X-rays of the teeth, as the only sure guide, but made an informed guess based on the weight of her organs, especially the liver and the spleen, which of all the main organs experience the greatest growth during puberty, and which in both cases were close to the median weight for a fourteen-year-old of similar build.

  How and when she died were also problematic. There were no wounds incompatible with the effects of the compactor, into which, the pathologist was fairly certain, she had been put after rigor mortis was well established. But this was only a guess, he explained, for who had any real evidence of what the relentless hydraulic forces of the machine could do to the joints of a human body, whether stiff with rigor or not? He could only estimate, too, that she had been dead for around seven days, which matched reasonably well with Cherry’s conjecture that, from her position in the cardboard mountain, she had probably been delivered to Number Three Shed four or five days before. Maybe. As for identity, the teeth would again most likely provide the most reliable evidence, apart from the Mexican silver ring. It struck Brock as obscene that this little trinket, completely unscathed, should now seem to contain more of her personality than anything else on the stainless-steel table.

  When it was over, and they set off again for their meeting with Chief Superintendent Forbes, Brock thought he sensed a certain satisfaction in Lowry that he had kept the senior officer waiting for a couple of hours for so little additional information. But he felt happier. He had, in some way that he couldn’t quite define, made contact with the victim, seen what had to be seen. It was the true starting point, from which the axis of the investigation would extend.

  The jackhammering was at full volume when they returned to the divisional stat
ion at Hornchurch Street. Lowry showed Brock to the fourth-floor conference room and departed. Forbes rose to his feet, smiling, as Brock walked in. This was a much more comfortable meeting room, with high-backed chairs and a long polished timber-board table. The noise was muffled in here, and Forbes waved Brock to a seat. ‘So, how was the PM?’ he asked.

  ‘Not as informative as I’d have liked. A fourteen-year-old girl, most probably, but nothing much more solid than that. Sorry to have held you up.’

  Forbes waved a large hand dismissively. ‘Can’t stand autopsies. One was enough for me. Had she been interfered with?’

  ‘We’ll have to wait for the tests.’

  ‘Mmm. But nasty, you’d agree?’ He appeared keen to have Brock confirm this point.

  ‘Yes. Certainly that.’

  ‘A sticker, as my young colleagues would put it, eh?’

  Brock nodded. A sticker, certainly.

  ‘Mmm.’ He seemed reassured. ‘Wouldn’t like it said that we’d overreacted.’

  Perhaps that was what the insurance was for, protection against some sensitivity in the system to premature approaches to Area Major Investigation Pool Management.

  ‘And an interesting case?’

  Again Brock nodded. Interesting indeed.

  ‘No chance of further bodies out there?’

  ‘They haven’t found any so far, but they’re less than halfway through searching.’

  ‘Ah. So tell me, have you been able to give my proposal any further thought?’

  ‘What exactly did you have in mind, sir? There’s no suggestion that North is connected to this other case.’

  ‘No, no. But it has occurred to me since we last spoke that we might be able to come to some arrangement that would suit both our purposes. You want to spend time at Silvermeadow in the hope of tracking North, but don’t want it to be apparent, and we need top-calibre people there to support our investigations into the murder of this girl. Now suppose I, or rather AMIP, were to make a request to the Yard for high-level assistance with this murder, and you and your team were nominated. That would give you a legitimate reason to be at Silvermeadow, and of course would be a bonus for us.’