Paul Cleave - Cemetery Lake

“Put these on,” she says, and hands me some gloves and a face mask. “The smell isn’t going to be pretty. But you better not tell anybody you were here for this.”

We shift a little closer to the coffin, and suddenly I don’t want to see what’s inside. This is a topsy-turvy world where corpses bubble up from lakes and coffins are full of empty answers. I pull on the latex gloves and slip the mask over my nose and mouth. If Henry Martins is inside, his fingernails may or may not be blue. If he isn’t inside and the coffin is empty, then Martins is one of the bodies on the bank of the lake, or deep within its belly.

Tracey sprays some lubricant into the hinges before shifting a small crowbar into place and pushing down.

The coffin lid sticks because of simple physics. They were designed to take people into the ground, not to bring them back out and, like Tracey pointed out, the structure of this coffin has been altered with all that dirt pressing down on it for the last two years. I lean some weight onto the crowbar to help. It starts to groan, then creak; then it pops open. From inside, darkness escapes-along with it the smell of long-dead flesh that reaches through the pores on my mask and right up into my sinuses. I almost gag. Tracey lifts the lid the rest of the way open. I stand next to her and stare inside.

It isn’t at all what either of us is expecting.

Christchurch is broken. What didn’t make sense five years ago makes sense now, not because our perspectives have changed, but simply because that’s the way it is. All of us are locked into a belief of how this city should be, but it’s slipping away from us, nobody able to keep a firm grasp as Christchurch slowly spirals into full panic mode. Pick up a newspaper and the headlines are all about the Christchurch Carver, a serial killer who has been terrorizing the city for the last few years. The police hate him, the media love him. He’s a one-man money-making industry who is stretching the resources of the police-and the best they can do, it seems, is run ad campaigns on TV in an attempt to enlist new recruits. But the numbers don’t add up. They can’t, because the police can’t keep up with the Carver, let alone the rising crime pandemic.

There are few solutions-but at least there are some, and that’s where people like me come into the picture. Some of the smaller jobs get contracted out-the smaller things where a police presence isn’t required-and in the beginning people complained. They no longer do.

So yesterday when one of the law firms on the next floor up contacted me with the job, it seemed like easy money. Crime fighting has come a long way since Batman and Robin: now it’s all about the lawyers and, sometimes, even the law. And in this case nobody needed a cop to stand in the cold while a coffin got dug out of the ground. Cops were getting paid to get put to better uses. They were out there trying to stem the flow of violence, to push back the tides and fight the good fight. So I got paid to be there-a professional making sure the chain of evidence remained intact.

But nobody is paying me to be here in the morgue with a dead girl in another person’s coffin.

And the police resources are about to get stretched even further.

I struggle to focus my thoughts. They cover a whole range of possibilities, as well as emotions. I feel sorrow and pain for whoever this woman is, and can’t see any reason other than a bad one for her to be in this coffin. I’m thinking about hoaxes and jokes, and hoping like crazy this is one of them; and as much as I like to think there could have been an elaborate setup, I know it is much more than that. This is real. I shouldn’t be looking at a woman, she shouldn’t be dead, shouldn’t be in a coffin that isn’t hers-yet here she is, all laid out in front of me.

Tracey leans over the coffin. “This isn’t Henry Martins,” she says, not to be funny, not to state the obvious, but matter-of-factly, in a way that doesn’t suggest the same disbelief I’m feeling, but that the cold part of her mind she must engage to do this job is now fully in control. Tracey’s emotions have been locked away.

“She’s decomposed, but not badly. Decomp comes down to temperature, soil, depth of the coffin, and how long she was exposed to the air before being put in here. No way to tell what age at this stage.”

I’m hardly listening to her. My heart is racing hard as I look down at the body. There are areas where chunks of flesh have shrunken and dried, and other areas where it’s completely disappeared. What she has looks like a shell, so that if I was to poke her with my finger she would turn to dust. The few patches of skin remaining are almost transparent, doing nothing to hide the storm cloud-colored bones that for the most part are exposed. Her face and eyes have gone, just dregs of dried-up skin and flesh and scalp hanging onto her skull. Her teeth look too large with nothing to hide them. Her hair is swept out fanlike beneath her body; it is long and dark brown and I imagine it was once well kept, that she liked to run her fingers through it, that it smelled of shampoos and conditioners, and it would brush against her lover’s face as they held each other as one day became another. Her fingers are only bone; one rests across her chest, the other by her side. Resting between her palm and her thigh is a small diamond ring that in the light of the morgue refuses to sparkle. I figure it came loose when her fingers rotted away, and got shaken free when she fell off the back of the stolen truck.

Her clothes don’t seem to line up right; her short dress is twisted and the buttons on her blouse are out of line, as if she dressed in a hurry or somebody else dressed her after she was dead. I dig my hand into my pocket and start playing with my car keys, wrapping them into my handkerchief over and over as my mind races.

Tracey looks up at me. “Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I can feel sweat starting to slide down the side of my body. It has to be near freezing in here and I’m sweating.

“There were other people in the water, Tracey,” I say, and the words are hard to form. “Maybe that means other girls, and if there are. . Jesus, I screwed up.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Two years ago. I should have dug Henry Martins up two years ago and we would have found this girl then. We would have known we were looking for a killer. We might have got him before he killed others.”

Tracey looks at me, but doesn’t know what to say. She can’t tell me the world doesn’t work that way, because we both know that it does. She doesn’t say anybody could have made that same mistake. She doesn’t try to tell me it isn’t my fault. All that happens is that her shoulders sag a little and she looks away, unable to maintain eye contact with me.

But then she says “We don’t know when the body was put in there, Theo. She might have only been there a year.”

“I hope you’re right,” I tell her.

“You need to leave now, Theo.”

“Come on, Tracey, there’s got-”

“I’m serious,” she says, looking up. “You wanted to know if Martins was inside-well, now you know. That was the deal. You can’t look at this woman and think it’s become your case. All you can do by being here now is compromise the investigation.”

“You don’t get it, do you?”

“What? That you could have made a difference two years ago? I know the case, and you’re right. It could well be that you messed up and other girls have paid for it, but we don’t know that yet, and won’t until we know who this girl is and when she was put into this coffin. That aside, how many others are out there because you have taken bad people off the streets?”