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Guard could ignore. I took a few photographs and then climbed up the bank nearest the water to see if I could find some personal traces among the trash: a utility bill or two would be enough to nail at least some of the people involved.
    I put on the surgical gloves I always carry and a set of shoe covers I’d packed because I figured the job might get dirty. I waved a scum of flies away and selected the driest-looking bag I could see, which was full of old magazines, and pulled it to one side and uncovered a bag of cast-off clothes, most of them children’s; mixed in were a few broken plastic toys and two empty vodka bottles. Beside that I could see the top of a bag of shoes.
    I reached down and tugged on the top shoe, thinking as I did, What’s the point of this? What are you going to find out from an old shoe? Maybe I was drawn to it because it was the same make I favored; I could tell from the sole, barely worn, the mark still clear:
Church’s English Shoes.
Not the same shoe; I wore black wing tips, this had a buckle, and it was burgundy, a Blenheim, I thought, no, a Beckett, the last thought before my hand tugged on the shoe and what was in the shoe, and what was in the shoe gave against my hand. I flinched and yelled out and snapped my hand back as if I’d just tugged on a live rat, and I tumbled down the banked side of the dump and let gravity take me to the shore of the reservoir. I could hear the water lapping gently, as if that could distract me from what I’d just disturbed: not a rat, a foot, visible from where I stood, a foot attached to a man’s corduroy-clad leg, protruding from the mound of garbage and then slowly collapsing, like a guttered-out candle subsiding into a ruined cake.
    All I could hear now was my blood pounding out a funeral rhythm in my brain, and through the beats a calm, measured voice that said: "Call the Guards. Wait until they get here. Explain what you were doing. Tell them everything. All will be well." What the voice said made sense, but I didn’t listen. It didn’t sound like me.
    The victim was a well—or at least, expensively—dressed man, unusually lean and wiry, about five foot three, with a weather-beaten face and blond hair, possibly dyed, aged anywhere from twenty-five to fifty. He wore a kind of gentleman-farmer costume: rust-colored corduroys, olive-green sleeveless pullover, small-check shirt, brown wool sport coat. He’d been here—or dead, at any rate—at least two days, but not much longer: rigor had departed the body, but there was no sign of the abdominal staining or distension associated with further putrefaction. And there was no sign so far that the rats or birds had got to him. He’d been strangled, possibly by a ligature
and
by hand: there was a clear furrow around his neck, but a mess of bruising also; his eyes had been closed and it looked as if his mouth had been cleaned: there were no bloodstains. If I had to guess, I’d’ve said he’d been murdered elsewhere and the body had been dumped here within the last few hours—or possibly the last few minutes, courtesy of my friend in the white Transit van. I found four further things of note. The first three were a tattoo, a shredded slip of paper that looked like a betting slip and a small leather pouch full of coins. The fourth thing gave me such a fright I found myself back at the water’s edge again, gasping for breath, the air cold in my pounding chest.
    I repositioned the body in as haphazard a manner as I could and covered his face with the bag of children’s clothes and walked back along the gleaming woodland track through the darkening trees, shivering now, my steps quickening, keen to see a trail of smoke from a chimney, to hear a human voice, to warm myself at the fires of the living. When I reached my car, the blood bay spotted me and came pounding up to the nearest point of the fence, champing at the wire, long tail swinging like a pendulum, seemingly as anxious as I was for animal