Cemetery Lake (3 page)

snapping it from side to side like a sail. An officer gets it under control and secures it. ‘Okay, let me back up a bit here. First of all, the two bodies we’ve got. Only one of them is intact.’

‘That’s got to be one of two reasons, right?’ I ask.

‘Yeah. And it’s the good one. Nobody tortured these people

or cut them up — at least that’s my preliminary finding. The

worst one is simply coming apart from decomposition. He’s

missing everything below the pelvic girdle, and what is there is held together mostly by his clothes. Hard to tell how long he’s been in the water, but it seems obvious that when we find the rest of him we’re going to find more rope. Could be piles of bones

stuck in the mud down there. The thing is, Tate, going by the

woman we found, I’m pretty sure these people weren’t killed and dumped in the lake. They were already dead. Dead and buried,

I’d say. Don’t know what originally killed them, but we’ll get there. We’ll get some timeframes too.’

I look past Sheldon to the grave markers all around us.

There are a few things going through my mind. I’m thinking

that somewhere out there is an undertaker or mortuary assistant saving money by reselling the same coffins to different families.

Coffins are expensive. Use them once, dig them up, dump the

bodies in the water; rinse down the woodwork, spray some air

freshener in, and make it sparkle with a coat of furniture polish.

Then it goes back on the market. Brand new again. None of those signs saying ‘as new, only one owner, elderly lady, low mileage’.

One coffin could do dozens of people.

‘You know you could buy a car for the same amount as a

coffin?’ the medical examiner muses.

‘That’s not it,’ I realise.

‘What?’

‘This isn’t about reselling coffins,’ I say.

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘Why throw the bodies into the lake? Why not just throw

them back into the ground? Or switch the coffins with budget

ones?

‘Yeah … maybe. I guess.’

“I wonder how many more bodies are down there.’

He shrugs. ‘We’ll know soon enough.’

If there are more bodies in the lake, the divers will find them.

I’ll be gone by then. It’s unrealistic to think somebody will keep me informed — I’ll learn the numbers from the papers. One

thing I learned in the years before I left the police force is that life and death are all about numbers. People love statistics. Especially nasty ones.

‘How old do you think this cemetery is?’ I ask.

He shrugs. ‘What? How the hell would I know that? Sixty,

eighty years? I don’t know’

‘Well, the lake has always been here,’ I say, ‘which means this might not even be a crime scene. Except maybe one of criminal

negligence.’

‘You want to elaborate?’

‘It’s not like people were getting buried here and suddenly

this lake appeared, pushing some of the graves deep into the

water. It’s not a stretch to imagine some poor management and

attempts at utilising space means some of these graves are too close to the water. Maybe some of the coffins have rotted from water damage and the bodies have been pulled into the lake, or there’s an underground stream sucking some caskets along.’

‘Not in this case.’

‘You sure?’

‘The woman makes me sure. She’s been in the water only a

couple of days. No time for your rotting-coffin theory. There are signs of mortician tricks that suggest she had a funeral, which is why I’m confident these people were once buried. In fact, she’s the reason we’re all here. She’s the catalyst here — fat stores and gases brought her to the surface, and she brought the others up with her.’

‘She’d do that, even if she was embalmed?’

‘She wasn’t embalmed.’

“I thought that…’

‘I know what you thought. You thought that everybody has

to be embalmed, that it’s law. But it’s not. Embalming slows

the decomposition for a few days so the body can be displayed

— that’s all it’s for. It’s optional.’

‘Can you tell if anything else has been done to the bodies?’

‘Like what?’

“I don’t know. I mean, if this isn’t a result of nature and they were dug up, they had to be dug up for something, didn’t they?

Have they been used for anything? Experimented on? What

about jewellery? Are any of them wearing … ?’

‘The hands of the male are skeletal, so nothing there; but our Woman, she’s wearing rings and she’s got a necklace. You can rule out grave robbery.’

Grave robbery. I feel as though I’ve slipped back into a Sherlock Holmes novel. Holmes, of course, would find some logic in this.

Often he would solve a case only by remembering something he

read in some textbook ten years earlier, but in the end he’d get there, and he’d make it look easy. Looking around, I’m not sure if the evidence is here for anyone to deduce whether the person who did this was left or right handed, or worked as an apprentice shoemaker. Only Holmes would. He was one lucky bastard.

‘Any way we can ID them?’ I ask.

‘We?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘We’ll start with the woman. She should be simple. Then

work backwards.’

I glance past the examiner towards the tent that shelters the

dead and the wet. The wind chill seems to have dropped by

around five degrees, and picked up an extra twenty-five kilometres an hour. The sides of the tent are billowing out, as though ready to take off. The blanket around me no longer feels warm.

‘So how do … ?’

He raises his hand to stop me. ‘Look, Tate, your colleagues

know what they’re doing. Leave it to them.’

He’s right and wrong. Sure, they know what they’re doing,

but they’re no longer my colleagues. I think about the watch in my pocket, hoping it will have one of those ‘To Doug, love Beryl’

inscriptions on it. Then if s just a matter of finding a gravestone belonging to a Doug who was married to a Beryl. With luck,

that gravestone is here. With luck, these people were given

proper burials by proper priests under the proper conditions,

and not autopsied and dressed up by some homicidal maniac in

his basement.

A four-wheel-drive pulls up next to the tent. Two guys climb

out and walk around to the back of it. They each pull out a scuba tank, then reach further in for more gear.

‘Look, Tate, I’ve told you what I can. It doesn’t involve you, but if you think it does, then take it up with one of your old buddies. I have to get back to work.’

I watch Sheldon as he moves back to the tent. The helicopter

is still buzzing back and forth, the rotor blades sound like the beginnings of a deepening headache. I can imagine what the

journalists are saying, what they’re coming up with, and there is no doubt they’re thriving on it. Bad things happening to good

people make great news.

I hate cemeteries. I don’t have a fear of them; it’s not a phobia like someone who is too scared to fly but must fly anyhow. I just don’t like them. I can’t really say they represent all that is wrong with this world, because that wouldn’t be a fair comment. Not logically.

But I feel that way. I think it’s because they represent what happens to all the people in the world who have been wronged, and even then they only speak for the ones who are found. There are others out there in shallow graves, in creeks and crevasses and oceans, or held down by chains, who cannot be spoken for with gravestones, only by the memories their loved ones have of them. Of course, that isn’t a fair statement either. That would be like assuming all of the graves out here belong to victims of crime, and of course only a few do. Most belong to people too old to live, too young to have died, or simply too unlucky to keep living.

My cellphone rings every minute or so as I drive away and

I’m lucky the thing still works after going in the drink. Salt water would have been a different story. As soon as I get past the gates I hit the blockade, where police cars are parked on angles across the road to prevent other people coming to mourn the dead, or

prevent the dead from escaping and mingling with the mourning.

I weave my way through them into the media blockade. It’s the

circle of life out here. Vans and four-wheel-drives with news

channel logos stencilled across the side and aerial dishes mounted on top are parked at haphazard angles, the rain no deterrent for the camera crews and reporters trying to look pretty in the drizzle.

I manage to get past, pretending I can’t hear the same questions yelled at me from every interviewer.

After them comes the first wave of get-home traffic that creates a blockade in the city at this time of the day. My wet jacket and shirt are in the back seat along with the borrowed windbreaker.

I have the blanket draped over my seat so my clothes don’t soak into the upholstery. With the heater blasting on full, moisture forms on the windscreen that the air conditioner can’t keep up with. Every half minute I have to wipe away the condensation

with my palm. I turn on the radio. There’s a Talking Heads song on. It suggests I know where I’m going but I don’t know where

I’ve been. I turn the radio off. Talking Heads have got it wrong in my case.

The first call I answer is from Detective Inspector Landry,

asking me to head into the station to provide a formal statement.

He probably figures he can do the world a favour by keeping me squirrelled away for a few hours running over all the exact reasons that added up to my being in a cemetery with dead bodies that

can’t be accounted for. When I ask him if they’ve tracked down the caretaker, he tells me they’ll inform me when they do, and we both know it’s bullshit.

The next two calls are from reporters. I knew some of them

would recognise me as I was driving away. Reporters are quick

like that. I go further back than yesterday’s news, and these guys have long memories. I hang up on their questions before they can finish asking.

Then my mother calls me, telling me she saw me on TV

sitting in the back of an ambulance and wanting to know what

has happened to me. Clearly the police didn’t have the cemetery as well cordoned off as they thought. I tell my mother that I fell into the lake, that was all, and that I still have all my limbs. She tells me to be careful, that I shouldn’t go swimming with so many clothes, and that she and Dad are worried. Bridget, my wife, she points out, would be worried as well.

When I manage to hang up, the phone rings again and another reporter asks me whether I’m back on the city’s payroll. I decide to switch my phone off, which is a pretty good decision considering the alternative of rolling down my window and throwing it into the elements.

I put both hands on the wheel and start thinking about the

three bodies, wondering if there are more. I start spinning the possibilities around in my mind, but it isn’t long before I have to concentrate less on the corpses and more on trying not to

become one as the traffic becomes thick with SUVs blocking

intersections.

My office is in town, situated in a complex with a hundred other offices, most of them belonging to law and insurance firms, from whom I get most of my business. Following cheating husbands

for divorce settlements and photographing people scamming their insurance providers allows me to pay the rent, and occasionally I even get to eat. Now I’m digging up coffins and swimming with

corpses and the pay is the same. I park in my space behind the building and, still shoeless and saturated, make my way inside to the elevators and ride eight storeys closer to Heaven.

Because most of my clients are in the same building, and any

other business I attract comes through phone calls and word

of mouth, I come and go as I please, allowing my answering

machine to be my secretary. I have enough computer skills to

type up my own reports; I know how to file; and I know how to

make coffee. A maid comes in once a month and drags a vacuum

cleaner and a duster around, but the rest of the time I take care of the spic-and-spanning myself. Private eyes working out of

dumpster officers, armed with fedoras and cigarettes, live only in the minds of scriptwriters these days. My office has nice art, nice plants, nice carpet, nice everything. In fact it’s so nice it’s a struggle to afford it.

I unlock my office door and switch on the light. The air is

warm and has held the smell of this morning’s coffee, probably because half of it got spilled across my desk by accident. The smell kicks my energy level up a few notches. The room itself is not large, and my desk takes up a quarter of it, backing onto a view of Christchurch that sometimes inspires me and sometimes

depresses me. On the opposite side there’s a whiteboard standing up on an easel that I often use to sketch ideas on in an attempt to connect the dots. The carpets and walls are mixtures of fawns and greys that sound like they are named after types of coffee.

There are files stacked on my desk, a computer in the middle, and a bunch of memos I need to take care of.

I glance out at the city. It doesn’t make me feel nostalgic

enough to head back to ground level to see what I’m missing.

I start playing with my cellphone. I turn it back on. It starts ringing. I pop the battery out and sit both pieces under the lamp to dry out.

I move into a small bathroom en-suite and clean up. I have a spare outfit hanging on the back of the door, there for the day I fall into a lake or get shot in the chest. I get changed and ball the wet stuff into a bag.

I take out the watch from my pocket. It’s an expensive Tag Heuer, an analogue, and it’s still working. Batteries in these things normally last around five years, and they’re waterproof to two hundred metres. I look at the back: there is no inscription. But already a time frame is beginning to take place.