Both of them looked at Darren, and the yellow bag.
‘It’s a leg,’ said Darren again, holding the bag out.
The two men exchanged glances.
‘Left or right?’ shouted Potts, readjusting the mask after wiping spit off his lips with the back of his hand.
‘What?’ said Darren, but he knew what he’d heard.
‘Left or right?’ said Bourne, tapping a ballpoint on the clipboard. He didn’t have a mask, which marked him out as one of the bosses from the second floor. ‘We need to know. You need a receipt, but we can’t sign it in unless we know. So – left or right?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Darren. He lifted the bag and read the written label attached to the metal tag. It was in code and meaningless. There was a signature, a squiggle in blue. Darren shrugged.
‘Take it back,’ said Bourne. Darren’s shoulders sagged. He should be clocking off at nine.
‘You could look,’ said Potts, pouring tea from a flask into the plastic stopper cup. Darren didn’t want to walk back, and he could feel they were judging him. He disguised a deep breath, then flipped the bag onto a metal worktop. The seal was plastic, poppable. He broke it
He resealed the bag with his fist; a savage blow.
‘Right.’
Bourne was already laughing, Potts spat out his tea. They leant on each other, a little vignette of mirth. Darren thought, not for the first time, how cruel comedy could be.
‘Priceless,’ said Potts, leaving a smear under his eyes where tears had trickled out under the mask. ‘Left or right!’
The main lights flickered back on, neon blazing, and – unbelievably – the noise levels jumped. A pain, quite sharp, went through one of Darren’s eardrums. He grabbed the yellow bag, feeling tears well up in his eyes.
‘Sorry, kid,’ said Bourne, avoiding the youngster’s eyes, pocketing the ballpoint. ‘Here – come and have a look at this.’
Darren didn’t move. He didn’t trust Bourne. ‘No,’ Bourne laughed, loosening his tie. ‘Really. I have to check the furnace now we’re back on full power. Routine. Come on…’ He put an arm round Darren’s bony shoulders. They walked to the wall and climbed a metal stairway to the next level. As they climbed Darren felt the temperature rise so that sweat sprang out on his skin and a cool thread of salty water ran across his left temple. Here, on the second floor, the space was subdivided into corridors lined with control panels, the ceiling an open metal lattice
‘Ashes to ashes,’ said Bourne, running a hand down his stiff back and licking his lips. ‘Six hundred degrees. When we’ve done there’s nothing left but a thimbleful of white dust. She can take anything…’ He patted the metal wall affectionately. ‘Radioactive waste, chemical waste, plastics, metals. Go on, have a look.’
Darren stepped up and sank his face into the plastic mould.
He was looking into the heart of the furnace. It wasn’t fiery in there. It was like the sun; a searing yellow, with flares of aluminium white. And then, at the left-hand margin, a sudden intrusion of charred black, something extended, like a winter branch. Darren blinked, clearing his eyes. The vision edged across his field of view on the internal conveyor, and he saw it for what it was: a body, the head on the thin skeletal neck flexing, jerking, one of the arms thrashing with mechanical, inhuman spasms. A body in agony, combusting like newspaper tossed on an open fire.
Darren sprang back, angry, the tears welling again. ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘There’s someone in there…’ Vomit gushed through his hands as he tried to cover his mouth. Bourne stepped in, pressing his face into the mould, turning his head quickly, rapidly, left right, right left. He
Darren’s knees had buckled and he sank to the floor, then rolled over, lying on his back, looking up into the metal-mesh floor above. The noise level peaked and then died, like an aircraft engine after touchdown and throttle-back, so that what was left felt like silence. So he heard the footsteps, above them, on the metal floor. Not measured footsteps – he’d later tell the police officer who took his statement – not measured, but running, escaping footsteps. Briefly he saw those footsteps, through the wire, the base of a pair of fleeing shoes. But it was the sound that was wrong – the crack of iron on iron, of steel on steel. And the telling detaiclass="underline" the sparks – the little crackling electric sparks – as the shoes struck the mesh, creating a necklace of tiny lightning bolts.
Detective Inspector Peter Shaw was on the beach when his mobile rang – the ringtone a snatch from A Sea Symphony by Vaughan Williams. His beach. The death of an Indian summer’s day, the sun already long set, the sand cool now, where it had once burnt the pale arches of his feet. He sat on the lifeguard’s high chair, the RNLI flag flying over his head. Tracking his telescope from north to south along a falling wave he looked for the few late surfers prepared to stay out in the dusk, and found instead his wife, Lena, walking in the shallows with his daughter. Further out the swell spilt sets of waves in perfect sequence.
He’d been looking west, enjoying the last of the amber light. A broad face, wide open, matching the distant horizon, high cheekbones, almost Slavic, and short hair surfer-blond. His good eye was blue, as pale as falling tap water. The other blind, the pupil reduced to a pale circle like the moon edging its way into the sky above. He’d lost the sight in his right eye a year ago and he had only just begun to develop the skills which would allow him to judge distance. In the first months after the accident he’d tried to ignore his disability. Now he understood that it might give him skills he’d never had.
He twisted the top of a Thermos flask and let its lip sit on the edge of the cup before pouring out the cool juice
He watched as a family quit the beach, a straggled line from the mother, carrying beach bags, to a young child, reluctant to leave a ring of sandcastles. Soon, he thought, he’d be able to reclaim the beach for his own. The car park on the headland was nearly empty, a few barbecue fires flared along the waterline, but to the north the sands ran to a horizon as deserted as the Empty Quarter. He imagined a camel train threading its way into the night past Arab camp fires.
He shivered, zipping up a lightweight jacket, hugging himself.
He’d played with his father here as a child; between the lifeboat house and the old café. Detective Chief Inspector Jack Shaw, reduced to human scale by the tangled skein of a kite’s string or a child’s cricket bat. The beach had been their world, the only one they’d shared, the place they could both live life in the moment. Shaw remembered the day he’d traced the outline of an imaginary corpse on the sand, his first crime scene. Clues laid: a clamshell for the heart where the bullet had lodged, lolly sticks marking the shell cases, a cigarette butt between imaginary teeth. He’d been ten. His father had
Somewhere on the beach he heard the time pips from a radio, and he counted nine. Then his mobile had rung. He’d held it at arm’s length, as if that would help. But the text, from Tom Hadden’s CSI unit, was one he couldn’t ignore.
187 QVH
The code for suspicious death – 187 – and the scene of crime: the Queen Victoria hospital.
And now, twenty-three minutes later, he’d swapped his world for this world. He wore a T-shirt under a jacket, an RNLI motif on his chest, but that was the only link back to the beach. That and his suntan.
He stood in the incinerator room, watching the corpse emerge from the furnace doors, the conveyor belt set in reverse. Instead of a distant horizon, twenty miles away, he was surrounded by metal walls, greasy heat, and the stench of ash; ash that had had every ounce of life burnt out of it. His world, limitless on the beach, had been compacted, pressurized, to fit within this windowless box. The air had thickened, cooked, so that he felt sweat bristling on his face. A sparrow flew around, its wings clattering amongst the steel girders and pipes, prompting a snowfall of white dust.