Cemetery Lake (2 page)

Authors: Paul Cleave

Tags: #Fiction, #Suspense, #Crime, #Mystery & Detective, #General

a lot of family and a lot of clients, but his occupation wasn’t an opportunity for him to line his pockets with other people’s money.

I looked into his life as much as I could in the small amount of time I could allot for his daughter’s ‘hunch’, but nothing stood out as odd.

Two years later, and Henry Martins’ coffin is behind me on

chains as the wind increases in strength. And Henry Martins’ wife is trying to avoid anybody with a badge now that her second

husband has died, his blue fingernails the first indication that he was poisoned. Henry’s daughter hasn’t spoken to me because I’m no longer in the same position I was two years ago. It’s easy to let my mind wander and think of things that might have been. I could have done more back then. I could have solved a murder,

if that’s what happened. Could have stopped another man from

dying. The jury is still out on whether Mrs Martins had bad luck or bad judgement when it came to men.

The rain gets heavier, creating a thousand tiny ripples on the surface of the water. The caretaker is backing away, keeping his eyes on the water. Slowly the elements seem to disappear; so do the voices, and the vibrations. All that is left are the three corpses floating ahead of me, each one a victim of something — a victim of age, foul play, bad luck or maybe a victim of a cemetery’s lack of real estate.

The three workers have all come over beside me. Their excited

bursts of started but stilted observations have ended. We’re

standing, the four of us, in front of the water; three people are in it: it’s like we’re all pairing up for a social but with one person left over. The occasion demands quiet, each of us unwilling to say anything to break the silence building between us. More dirt slides into and mixes with the water, turning it cloudy brown.

One of the bodies sinks back out of view and disappears. The

other two are drifting towards us, swimming without movement.

I’m not about to jump in and pull them out. I’d do it, no doubt there, if the bodies were flailing about. But they’re not. They’re dead, have been for maybe a long time. The situation may seem

urgent but in reality it isn’t. Both are face down, and both appear to be dressed, and not badly dressed either. They look as though they could be on their way to an event. A funeral or a wedding.

Except for the ropes. There are pieces of green rope attached to the bodies.

The digger driver keeps squinting at the two corpses, as if his eyes are tricking him. The truck driver is standing with his mouth wide open and his hands on his hips, while his assistant keeps glancing at his watch as if this whole thing might push him into overtime.

‘We need to haul them in,’ I say, even though both bodies are

nudging against the bank now.

I had planned on staying dry today. I had planned on seeing

one dead body. Now everything is up in the air.

‘Why? They’re not exactly going to go anywhere,’ the truck

driver says.

‘They might sink like the other one.’

‘What are we going to grab them with?’

‘Jesus, I don’t know. Something. A branch, maybe. Or your

hands.’

“I’m not using my hands,’ he says, and the other two nod

quickly in agreement.

‘Well, what about rope? You gotta have some of that, right?’

‘That one there,’ the truck driver says, looking at the corpse closest to us, ‘already has some rope.’

‘Looks rotten. You gotta have something newer in the truck,

right?’ I ask, and we all look over at the truck just as we hear it start.

The caretaker is sitting in the cab.

‘What the fuck?’ the driver asks. He starts to run over to it, but he isn’t quick enough. The caretaker gets it into gear and pulls away fast. The coffin isn’t secure; it slides across the edge and hits the ground but doesn’t break.

Tley, come back here, come back here!’ The guy keeps running

after the truck, but the distance quickly grows.

‘Where’s he going?’ the digger operator asks.

‘Anywhere but here is my guess.’ I pull my cellphone from my

pocket. ‘You got some rope in the digger?’

‘Yeah, hang on.’

I phone the police station and get transferred to a detective I used to know. I tell him the situation. He tells me to sober up.

Tells me of course there are going to be bodies out here in the cemetery. It takes a minute to persuade him the bodies are coming up from the depths of the lake. And another minute to convince him I’m not joking.

‘And bring some divers,’ I say, before hanging up.

The digger operator hands me the rope. The truck driver is

back; he’s swearing as his partner uses the cellphone to call their boss for someone to come and get them. I tie an arm-length

branch around the end of the rope and make my way down the

gently sloping bank, intending to throw the branch just past the nearest corpse to bring it closer, but it turns out the slippery grass beneath my feet has other ideas. One moment I’m on the bank.

The next I’m in the water.

My feet are submerged in mud, the water up to my knees.

Something grabs my ankle and I lever forwards, my arms slapping the surface next to the corpse before I start sinking. I pull my legs from the mud, but there is nothing to stand on. This lake is a goddamn death trap, and now I know why it’s full of corpses.

These people came to grieve for the dead and ended up joining

them. The water is ice cold, locking up my chest and stomach and

cramping my muscles. My eyes are open and the water is burning them. There is only darkness around me, compounded by the

silence, and I can sense hands of the dead reaching to pull me deeper, wanting me to join them, wanting fresh blood.

Then suddenly I’m racing back to the surface, my hand tight

around the rope that is pulling me up. I kick with my feet. Point my body upwards. And a second later I’m right next to a bloated woman in a long white dress. It looks like a wedding dress. I push away from her, and the three men help me onto the bank. I sit

down, gasping for air. Both my shoes are missing.

‘Goddamn, buddy, you okay?’

The question sounds like it is coming from the other side of

the lake, and I’m not sure which one of them asked it. Maybe all three of them in unison. I lean over my knees and start coughing.

I feel like I’m choking. I’m shivering, I’m angry, but mostly I feel embarrassed. But none of the men are laughing. They’re all leaning over me, looking concerned. With two floating corpses

nearby, it’s easy to understand why nothing here is a joke.

‘There’s something else you need to know,’ the digger operator says. “I was trying to tell you before.’ He slips that last part into the conversation as if each word is its own sentence, and his face screws up slightly. He makes it sound like that whatever he has to say is going to be worse than what just happened, and I can think of only one thing that could possibly be.

‘Yeah?’

‘Marks. On top of the coffin.’

‘How did I know you were going to say that?’

Now it’s his turn to shrug. ‘Thin lines. Like cuts. They look

like shovel cuts,’ he says.

‘You think this coffin has been dug up before?’

“I’m not just thinking it, I’m saying it. There are definitely marks on the coffin that nobody here caused. Shit, I wonder if she’s empty.’

She. Like a plane or a boat, because the coffin in a way is a

vessel taking you somewhere.

We walk over to it. There’s a large crack running from the

chapter three

There is a natural progression to things. An evolution. First there is a fantasy. The fantasy belongs to some sadistic loser, a guy who eats and breathes and dreams with the sole desire to kill. Then comes the reality. A victim falls into his web, she is used, and the fantasy often doesn’t live up to the reality. So there are more victims. The desire escalates. It starts with one a year, becomes two or three a year, then it’s happening every other month. Or every month. Their bodies show up. The police are involved.

They bring doctors and pathologists and technicians who can

analyse fibres and blood samples and fingerprints. They create a profile to help catch the killer. Following them is the media. The media spin the killer’s fantasy into gold. Death is a moneymaking industry. The undertakers, the coffin salesmen, the crystal-ball and palm readers, then eventually the digger operators and the private investigators: we’re the next step in the progression, standing in the rain and watching as one travesty of justice reveals another.

I have shrugged out of my wet jacket and wet shirt, dried

off using a towel an ambulance driver gave me and pulled on a

fresh windbreaker. My shoes are still missing and my pants and underwear are soaking, but I’m safe from pneumonia. Nobody

is paying me any attention as I sit on the floor of the ambulance with my legs hanging out, looking over the scene of, at this stage, an indeterminable crime.

The graveyard has been cordoned off. The two police cars have

become twelve. The two station wagons have become six. There

are road blocks covering the main entrance, as though they are preparing to fight back an upsurging of angry corpses. There are two tarpaulins lying across the ground; on each one rests a well dressed but decomposing or decomposed body. A canvas tent

has been erected over them, protecting them from the elements.

Somebody has strung some yellow ‘do not cross’ tape around the tent. It keeps the corpses from going anywhere. There are men

and women wearing nylon suits studying the bodies. Others are

standing near the lake. They look like divers preparing for some deep-sea mission, only there are no divers here. Not yet, anyway.

There are open suitcases containing tools and evidence beneath the tent. The rain is still falling and the long grass ripples with the wind. The digger has been taken away, and the coffin has been

taken to the morgue.

I tighten my windbreaker, and reach around for a second

blanket. The inside of the ambulance is messy, as if it’s sped over dozens of bumps on the way: God knows how the paramedics ever

know where anything is. I wrap the blanket over my shoulders and let my teeth chatter as I watch the few detectives who have shown up. More will arrive soon. They always do. So far there hasn’t been much for them to do other than look at two bodies and a lot of gravestones. They can’t go canvassing the area because all the neighbours are dead. They have no one to question other than the caretaker, but the caretaker is off somewhere in a stolen truck.

The wind has picked up. Acorns are still falling, flicking off the tombstones and making small metallic dinging noises as they hit the roofs of the vehicles. All this extra traffic, yet no other bodies have risen up from the watery depths of whatever Hell is down

there. I glance over at the ambulance driver. He has nobody to save. He has nothing else to do than watch the show, bury his

hands in his pockets and keep me company. All of us are in that boat. He’s probably just hanging around until he gets the call that somebody is dead or dying, blood and limbs scattered across the highway of life that he’s cleaning up every day.

The buzzing of a media helicopter approaching from the

north sounds like a mosquito. I touch the outside of my trouser pocket and run my finger over the bulge of the wristwatch I stole from one of the corpses after we pulled it from the water.

One of the medical examiners, a man in his early fifties who

has been doing this for nearly half his life, comes out of the tent, looks around at the small crowd of people, spots me and then

heads over to a detective. They talk for a few minutes, all very casual — the relaxed conversation of two men who have delivered and received many conversations about death. By the time he

comes over he is sighing, as though being in the same graveyard with me is such tiring work. His hands are thrust deep into his pockets. There are small drops of rain on his glasses. I stand up but don’t move away from the ambulance. I have a pretty good

idea what the examiner is going to say. After all, I spent some time with those corpses. I saw how they were dressed.

‘Well?’ I ask, clenching my jaw to keep my teeth from

chattering.

‘You said there were three bodies?’

‘Yeah.’

‘We’ve got two.’

‘The other one sank again.’

‘Yep. Bodies will do that. Bodies do lots of strange things.’

‘What else?’

‘Schroder said to throw you some basic facts, but nothing

more. Just the same things he’ll be giving those vultures out there when he releases a statement in an hour.’ He points to the edge of the cemetery where the media are no doubt congregating behind

the police barriers.

‘Come on, Sheldon, you can give me more than just the

basics.’

‘Is that what you think?’

Suddenly I’m not so sure. One day everybody is your best

friend; the next you’re just a giant pain in the arse. ‘So, you’re going to make me guess?’

‘My guesses are supported by science.’

‘Well, science away.’

‘You saw the rope?’

I nod.

‘I’d say they all had rope attached at one point. But not so

much now.’