Murray nodded again.

  ‘And, for God’s sake, don’t go down the rabbit hole of blaming yourself,’ he added. ‘That’s not going to do you any favours.’

  ‘It’s not the first time something like this has happened,’ offered Okeke. ‘And it won’t be the last. During the cold winter months, you’re gonna get –’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Murray. ‘We had the advisory. I should have figured the bin was too heavy when I wheeled it over.’ He looked up at Boyd. ‘Will I need to come into the station? To give a statement?’

  Boyd nodded. ‘At some point, lad, yes. But certainly not today. We’ll be in touch when we’re ready.’ He turned to Okeke. ‘Do we know which wheelie –?’

  ‘Already on it,’ she replied, nodding at a green one that was smothered in Sully’s ‘hands off’ stickers and surrounded by three cones with crime-scene tape strung out between them. The number 22 was scrawled in white paint across it.

  ‘And, yes, Number Twenty-Two is next on my list,’ she added. She gave the young man’s shoulder a squeeze, then got up and headed over towards the terraced house in question.

  ‘I’m going to take the pool car back and get the log set up,’ he called out after her. ‘You going to grab a lift back with Sully?’

  She lifted a thumb in response before knocking on the front door.

  Boyd held out his paper cup to Murray. ‘Need some coffee?’ It was still surprisingly warm.

  Murray nodded, and Boyd handed it to him. ‘It’s all yours, mate.’

  4

  Boyd found Detective Superintendent Sutherland in the CID kitchenette.

  ‘Ah, there you are, sir.’

  Sutherland’s hand jerked away from the open tin of Quality Street and shot to the kettle.

  ‘How’s the diet going?’ Boyd asked.

  Sutherland nodded vigorously. ‘Splendid. Splendid. I maintained discipline over Christmas and haven’t put any weight on.’

  ‘Wish I could say the same,’ replied Boyd, tapping his muffin-top waistline.

  Sutherland stirred his coffee. ‘We haven’t really spoken much since the CID piss-up, Boyd. Did you have a nice Christmas?’

  ‘We had a quiet one,’ Boyd replied. He’d invited Charlotte and her dog, Mia, to join him, Emma and Ozzie on Christmas Day. He’d spent New Year’s Eve alone with Ozzie. Emma had had to work and Charlotte had been nursing a shitty cold. ‘You?’ he asked.

  ‘We had the grandkids over,’ said Sutherland, his round potato-head splitting with a wide grin. ‘I spent the whole of Boxing Day on the floor with them building a Lego Hogwarts.’

  Boyd felt a small prickle of envy. Noah would have been well into his Lego phase by now. If things had gone differently. He flipped the subject. ‘Have you heard about the –’

  ‘Body in a wheelie bin?’ Sutherland finished. ‘Yes. I was just coming to find you, to discuss allocations.’

  ‘Your office in five, sir?’ suggested Boyd. ‘I need to nip to the gents, then grab myself a coffee.’

  Boyd rapped his knuckles on the door and stepped into Sutherland’s goldfish bowl of an office. It had glass walls on three of the four sides; the only peace it offered was respite from the general hubbub and noise on the main floor.

  He walked over to the seat in front of Sutherland’s desk and sat down, clocking a Lego Dumbledore sitting beneath the monitor. He sipped his coffee. ‘It’s a bit of a messy one this one,’ he began.

  ‘So I heard,’ replied Sutherland. ‘He ended up in the compactor?’

  Boyd wasn’t entirely clear as to how everyone could be so certain the body was male. From the brief glimpse he’d caught, it wasn’t at all obvious that the mangled form was even human.

  ‘Yup,’ Boyd said. ‘The poor young man who tipped him in is pretty messed up by it. He’s going to need some counselling.’ He winced at the image sitting in his own head. ‘So am I for that matter.’

  Sutherland sighed. ‘It happens this time every year. It’s the cold, you see. An empty wheelie bin’s a more enticing prospect than sleeping out in the open on a damp piece of cardboard.’

  Boyd nodded along to the obvious.

  ‘Maybe everyone should start having padlocks on their bins, or PIN numbers,’ Sutherland muttered. ‘My bloody neighbour keeps dropping his bloody recycling surplus into mine. All through Christmas… wrapping paper, Amazon boxes, bottles of –’

  ‘Anyway…’ Boyd nudged the Detective Superintendent back onto the subject at hand. ‘You’re right. It’s more than likely a homeless person, or maybe…’

  ‘Another McKeague?’ Sutherland supplied.

  Boyd nodded. Not that it had ever been confirmed that Corrie McKeague had ended up that way. The poor young airman had never been recovered.

  ‘Well. We’re in agreement,’ Sutherland said. ‘You should hand this down to a DC, Boyd. I’m not wasting my only free DCI on it.’

  ‘Suits me,’ Boyd said.

  ‘You’ve got Knight’s case to prep for the CPS and –’

  ‘Yes, I’m well aware of that, sir. I’ve got Flack’s mountain of paperwork to shuffle through too.’ Boyd was wondering when Operation Rosper was going to deliver anything at all to merit the budget that had been splurged on it. ‘Is there any progress on that front, sir?’

  Sutherland actually harrumphed. ‘They’ve collared a few low-level dealers recently but nothing substantial yet. All that’s really been achieved so far is to push the drug dealing down the coast towards Bexhill.’

  ‘Right.’ Boyd filed that piece of information for later. From the way Flack had reported it, it was as though he’d just smashed some Colombian cartel.

  ‘Anyway, I shouldn’t really comment on his operation,’ Sutherland said.

  ‘No, of course.’

  ‘So, one DC, Boyd. Take your pick from the litter. I need you and Minter in-office until my bloody budget’s renewed.’

  ‘And after that?’ Boyd asked.

  ‘That all depends on Her Madge,’ Sutherland huffed. ‘She seems adamant that half my money’s going on Rosper until Hastings is a drug-free haven.’

  ‘Which will never happen.’

  ‘You tell her that.’ Sutherland rolled his eyes. Then, realising he’d maybe gone a little too far, he cleared his throat and needlessly adjusted his monitor. ‘But that’s my concern, not yours.’

  Boyd returned to his desk to see Okeke’s bag hanging on the back of her chair, but no sign of her. He picked out Warren and Minter standing either side of the photocopier, staring at it dull-eyed as it spat out printed sheets of paper.

  ‘Morning, gents.’

  ‘Morning, boss,’ Minter replied.

  ‘Do either of you know where Okeke is? I know she’s back.’

  ‘She’s having a fag outside,’ said Warren. He began to pat the side of his jacket for his own pack of cigarettes.

  ‘Whoa now, Warren – hold on,’ moaned Minter. ‘You’ve just had a fag break, haven’t you? Seriously! You total up the minutes in the day that you flipping smokers get to slope off work and...’

  Boyd left them to it, crossed the floor, pushed the double doors into the hallway and took the stairs down to the lobby. He found Okeke outside, sheltering from the drizzle beneath the entrance portico and puffing away.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Guv.’

  ‘You ever thought of taking up vaping?’ he asked.

  ‘What’s the point?’ she replied, taking another drag. ‘I’ve still got to stand outside to do it.’

  She had a fair point. ‘What’s the latest?’ he asked.

  Okeke tapped the cigarette ash away. ‘I had a chat with the sweet little old lady at Number Twenty-Two: Mrs Martin. She was understandably mortified that her green bin had contained a rough sleeper last night.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘And Sully’s had the rubbish-collection truck driven over to Vehicle Maintenance to have its contents emptied out.’

  Boyd had wondered what that vaguely cheesy smell was when he’d stepped outside. Vehicle Maintenance was at the rear of the station a short distance away from the main building, but evidently not quite far enough.

  ‘Lovely job,’ he said, wrinkling his nose at the unpleasant scent.

  Okeke grimaced in agreement.

  ‘You’re on your own with this one,’ said Boyd. ‘Sutherland wants to keep me office-bound. There are too few bodies on the main floor to keep it warm.’ In truth, with Flack’s man-power drain and seasonal sickness, the CID floor was beginning to look like a ghost town.

  ‘Oh, happy days,’ she sing-songed.

  ‘Oh, lucky you,’ he agreed. ‘You might want to start by checking Milward Road for CCTVs.’

  ‘Already have, guv,’ she replied. ‘Obviously there are no municipal cameras; it’s just a residential street. But there were several private ones that overlook where Number Twenty-Two’s bins are lined up. I’m going to sift through the footage from those this morning.’ She pulled on her cigarette. ‘In fact, as soon as I’ve finished this.’

  ‘Good,’ Boyd said, turning to leave.

  ‘How’s things with you and Charlotte?’ Okeke asked. ‘She’s finding it tough, isn’t she? She’s definitely not the same party girl we all witnessed last summer.’

  Over the Christmas week, he and Charlotte had joined Okeke and her boyfriend, Jay, for a pint and a burger in the old town. Charlotte had been noticeably subdued. ‘That incident with her ex…’ Boyd began, ‘it’s hit her harder than I realised. She’s spending some time with her folks.’

  Okeke nodded. ‘I can understand that. Do you think she’ll be back?’

  Boyd nodded. ‘Of course she will. She’s got a house and a job here,’ he replied with more certainty than he felt. Facing imminent death had a habit of flipping the card table over, so to speak, scattering one’s plans and priorities.

  I hope so.

  Okeke finished her fag and crushed it underfoot. ‘By the way, Jay says Emma’s doing really well behind the bar.’

  His daughter had switched jobs from the Lansdowne to the nightclub where Jay worked on the doors. She’d started the week before Christmas and slogged through New Year’s Eve as well. Every time Boyd caught sight of her – usually the two or three hours that they overlapped in the early evening – she looked knackered. The hours were playing hell with her body clock, but so far she always seemed keen to get off to work. More so than she had when she’d been working at the hotel in the aftermath of Patrick-gate.

  ‘Jay said, if she keeps on doing as well as she is now, she’ll be bar manager in no time,’ Okeke said.

  ‘Bar manager. A girl’s got to dream, I guess,’ Boyd said, pleased nonetheless that Emma was doing well.

  ‘Don’t knock it,’ replied Okeke. ‘Bar manager today… maybe nightclub manager tomorrow?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Boyd said. He held the door open for her as they went back inside. ‘Come on then, you idle slacker – go and get some bloody work done.’

  5

  The rubbish-collection truck’s contents had been dumped on to a vinyl sheet inside the maintenance depot’s main workshop to shield it from the weather. It was a giant compressed turd of waste, ranging from festering cartons of unfinished takeaways to broken lampstands, soiled nappies and soggy cardboard packets of cat litter.

  And, of course, the various mangled pieces of the poor bastard who’d been tipped into the compactor earlier that morning.

  Sully finished his coffee and ginger Hobnob and tucked the packet of biscuits back into his lunchbox. ‘Okey-dokey then, Magnusson – ready to get started?’

  His deputy capped her bottle of elderflower-flavoured spring water and pulled on a fresh pair of nitrile gloves. ‘Great. So how are we doing this?’

  ‘I’ll start at one end and you can start at the other. We toss everything that isn’t part of a person there –’ Sully nodded, indicating a sheet of green tarp laid out on the floor – ‘and we’ll gather the rest in this body bag.’ He unrolled a second black plastic sheet onto the floor, next to the one containing the torso, and spread it out.

  ‘Right you are,’ she said cheerily, pulling her mask up and squatting down beside the mound of rubbish. ‘Let’s be ’avin’ you for starters, mister,’ she said as she reached across for a foot, still in a black leather shoe and ending with the frayed end of a mashed shin bone.

  Sully nodded approvingly, got down a few feet away from her and began tugging at a messy tangle of Tesco’s carrier bags.

  Okeke started with the private CCTV camera that had been located on the opposite side of the street to Number 22. The grainy black-and-white footage showed the property’s small front yard and gate, beyond which was Milward Road, the residents’ bins all lined up and ready for collection in the morning. On the far side of the road, she could see the two bins belonging to Mrs Martin parked just beyond her gate.

  The footage had come in one big file that was a series of disjointed timestamped clips as the security camera was triggered by a motion sensor. Okeke scrubbed through the video until the timestamps showed eight p.m. She reasoned that if the unfortunate victim had been looking to bed down for the night, or a drunk staggering home from the pub, it was likely to be later in the evening, rather than earlier.

  The next clip showed a couple of young lads with jauntily tilted-back baseball caps striding past the gate; one of them stopped, lifted the lid on the green recycling bin and tossed in a can of something.

  She smiled. Good boy… And then chuckled at the thought that her own neighbour, Mrs Patton, would have been out in her dressing gown and waggling a rolling pin at them for daring to be so cheeky as to use her bin.

  The next clip was triggered by a cat. And the next. She sighed and wondered how many millions of hours of motion-sensitive security camera footage pointlessly documented cats twatting around every night of the week.

  The clips kept coming: more cats, a few cars passing or parking, the occasional person walking past. Milward Road, she knew, was a quiet one. It wasn’t a shortcut to anywhere and therefore wasn’t plagued by cars rat-running through and setting the cameras off. Which was, at least, something.

  She managed to slog through until the midnight timestamp before deciding to take a late lunch break and grab something from the pier café.

  She found Warren puffing away outside. ‘You all right there, Boy Wonder?’ she asked, elbowing him in the ribs.

  The nickname had stuck, as they’d all known it would. The CID owed a great debt of gratitude to the Ricky Harris case for coming up with that zinger.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Warren was done with lunch; he was holding an empty chip carton and now having his obligatory post-lunch smoke. ‘I heard you got your own case?’ he said.

  Okeke nodded. ‘Berk in a bin.’

  ‘Not a dumped body, then?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Could be. But I reckon it’s more likely that some unlucky drunken sod found an empty bin and climbed in for a kip.’

  Warren looked at her. ‘Do you know how hard it is to do that without toppling it over… when you’re drunk?’

  Okeke shook her head. ‘Please tell me that isn’t from personal experience.’

  ‘It is, actually. Not to sleep in one… I was…’ He shrugged and shucked out a laugh. ‘I was out with O’Neal. Pub-crawling.’

  ‘And what? Don’t say he dared you to climb in one?’

  Warren nodded. ‘Well… basically, yeah.’

  ‘You’re an idiot.’ She shook her head. ‘Haven’t I warned you about hanging around with the big bad boys?’

  ‘Oh, haha. Very funny.’ Warren scrunched up his chip carton and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘So having this case all to yourself… does that make you the SIO?’

  Okeke sighed. ‘The IO, more like.’

  He frowned.

  ‘Work it out, genius,’ she said, and headed off to get her lunch.

  An hour later, trawling through what felt like endless cat footage, Okeke finally struck gold. The CCTV timestamp had reached 3 a.m. and the triggering events for the last half-dozen clips had been urban foxes.

  The segment started with a man walking into shot, smoking a cigarette and looking at his phone. He didn’t seem drunk, and he didn’t have the appearance of some unfortunate rough sleeper at his wits end for somewhere warm to curl up. He was walking past the wheelie bins of Number 22 when a second figure suddenly lurched into view. She paused the clip immediately and noted the timestamp on her pad before doing anything else.

  The frozen image showed the second figure as a blur. Which meant he was running. Sprinting even. She took a deep breath and continued the playback.

  What happened next occurred in no more than a heartbeat, or at least that’s what it felt like to Okeke watching the scene play out. The man on his phone had heard nothing, no pounding of footsteps behind him – he must have been wearing headphones. The second figure appeared to hit him half a dozen times from behind and the man with the phone collapsed to his knees.

  The attacker caught him before he went all the way down, flipped open the lid of the wheelie bin, hefted him up and over the lip, and closed the lid.

  ‘Shit,’ Okeke gasped, eyes widening.

  The assailant seemed to hesitate for a moment, then lifted the lid, looked down into the bin and reached in.

  What’s he doing now? Checking he’s dead? Checking for a pulse? Fucking hell.

  Then he closed the lid again and calmly walked back out of shot, the way he’d come.

  ‘You all right, Okeke?’

  She looked up and saw Boyd had cleared the stack of forms he’d been working his way through and was staring pointedly at her. ‘Okeke? You look like you’ve just found a tenner.’

  She paused the video again. ‘That wheelie-bin case you handed me, guv...’

  ‘Yup?’

  ‘It’s a murder.’