Carte Blanche

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 J ACK D ENNISON stitched on his overalls, said, “That’s right, sir.” Then he snapped to one of the workers, “Right, sunshine, don’t keep Mr. Hydt waiting. He hasn’t got all day, has he?”
    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.”
    They’ll keep quiet.
    “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 endeavor.
    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 of a homeless person, dead from exposure to the elements, drink or drugs, hurled unceremoniously onto 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 odor 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 appeared longer because the flesh beneath them had shrunk.
    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 jail door mounted on legs