A PAIR of muddy wellingtons, crate of fizzy orange, a plastic cola bottle filled with milky liquid. The crowd stared at every load as the police brought them out of the house and tipped them into a container.
This macabre house clearance in Rue de Phillipeville, outside Charleroi, yesterday evening would allow the cadaver dogs to start their work. The three dogs, trained to find human remains, had to be brought specially from Germany.
Now that the funerals are over, the digging has started. Belgium is bracing itself to deal with more bodies, more victims of the paedophile gang leader, Marc Dutroux.
In the early hours of yesterday morning, police tore down the inside of the house at Sars-la-Buissiere where the bodies of Julie LeJeune and Melissa Russo had been buried in the garden. A local radio station reported that police had found the bodies of An Marchal (19) and Eefje Lambreck (17), two girls abducted by Dutroux last year, along with four other bodies. The story sent the national media into a tailspin until it was flatly denied by police.
In the village this afternoon, a homage to Julie and Melissa is planned. Posters advertise an open-air festival which was supposed to start yesterday but this was not a village in the mood for a party.
According to Mr Daniel Ducro, the local police commissioner, they will go ahead with the festival. "The father of Melissa sent us a fax telling us that we must have the festival. There will be a party, but it will be a quiet one."
Mr Ducro is able to draw a plan of the back garden behind the long, house, where the bodies of the two girls were found, along with an associate of Dutroux, Bernard Weinstein. The girls were buried four metres 50 cms down, he says, and Weinstein was three metres 30 cm down. It was a normal house, he says, maybe a bit bohemian.
At another of Detroux's 11 houses, in Rue Des Hayettes, a lone gendarme says there was no further digging that day. On Thursday, the public prosecutor announced that a fifth man, who lived in the house, has been charged with criminal association.
Supt John Bennett, of Gloucester police, who headed the Fred West investigation, is reported to have returned to Britain last night. Since Wednesday, he has been educating his Belgian counterparts in the art of finding bodies.
As the contents of Dutroux's house continued to pile into a container, a mixture of oil, fizzy orange and water started to drip onto the road. A gendarme threw down a pile of rags to mop it up. The crowd stared at the rags and waited.
