Bea shouldered through, her identification ready. They encountered an unshaven man ducking into the employees’ loo and stopped him with a word, “Police.” He didn’t snap to as Bea would have liked, but at least he appeared cooperative. She asked for Will Mendick. At his response of “Outside, I expect,” they found themselves heading in the direction from which they’d originally come: working their way along the side of the building, but within it this time, along a gloomy aisle, and beneath towering shelves of paper products, boxed-up tins of this and that, and huge cartons printed with enough brands of junk food to keep morbid obesity going for several generations.
On the south side of the building, a loading dock bore pallets of goods in the process of being removed from an enormous articulated lorry. Bea expected to find Will Mendick here, but the answer to another question pointed her over to a collection of wheelie bins at the far end of the dock. There, she saw a young man stowing discarded vegetables and other items into a black rubbish bag. This, apparently, was Will Mendick, committing the act of subversion for which Santo Kerne had created his T-shirt. He was fighting off the gulls to do it, though. Above and around him, they flapped their wings. They soared near him occasionally, apparently trying to frighten him off their patch, like extras in Hitchcock’s film.
Mendick looked at Bea’s identification carefully when she produced it. He was tall and ruddy, and he grew immediately ruddier when he saw the cops had come to call. Definitely the skin of a guilty man, Bea thought.
The young man glanced from Bea to Havers and back to Bea, and his expression suggested that neither woman fit his notions of what a cop should look like. “I’m on a break,” he told them, as if concerned that they were there to monitor his employment hours.
“That’s fine with us,” Bea informed him. “We can talk while you…do whatever it is you’re doing.”
“D’you know how much food is wasted in this country?” he asked her sharply.
“Rather a lot, I expect.”
“That’s an understatement. Try tonnes of it. Tonnes. A sell-by date passes and out it’s chucked. It’s a crime, it is.”
“Good of you, then, to put it to use.”
“I eat it.” He sounded defensive.
“I sorted that,” Bea told him.
“You have to, I wager,” Barbara Havers noted pleasantly. “Bit tough for it to make it all the way to the Sudan before it rots, moulds, hardens, or whatevers. Costs you next to nothing as well, so it has that in its favour, too.”
Mendick eyed her as if evaluating her level of disrespect. Her face showed nothing. He appeared to take the decision to ignore any judgement they might make about his activity. He said, “You want to talk to me. So talk to me.”
“You knew Santo Kerne. Well enough for him to design a T-shirt for you, from what we’ve learned.”
“If you know that, then you’ll also know that this is a small town and most people here knew Santo Kerne. I hope you’re talking to them as well.”
“We’ll get to the rest of his associates eventually,” Bea replied. “Just now it’s you we’re interested in. Tell us about Conrad Nelson. He’s operating from a wheelchair these days, the way I hear it.”
Mendick had a few spots on his face, near his mouth, and these turned the colour of raspberries. He went back to sorting through the supermarket’s discards. He chose some bruised apples and followed them with a collection of limp courgettes. He said, “I did my time for that.”
“Which we know,” Bea assured him. “But what we don’t know is how it happened and why.”
“It’s nothing to do with your investigation.”
“It’s assault with intent,” Bea told him. “It’s grave bodily injury. It’s a stretch inside at the pleasure of you-know-who. When someone’s got details like that in his background, Mr. Mendick, we like to know about them. Especially if he’s an associate?close or otherwise?of someone who ends up murdered.”
“Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Havers lit up another cigarette as if to emphasise her point.
“You’re destroying your lungs and everyone else’s,” Mendick told her. “That’s a disgusting habit.”
“While wheelie-bin diving is what?” Havers asked.
“Not letting something go to waste.”
“Damn. I wish I shared your nobility of character. Reckon you lost sight of it?that noble part of you?when you bashed that bloke in Plymouth, eh?”