Cemetery Lake (5 page)

The moment we step into it, her cellphone rings. She shakes

it open and starts talking. I pat down my pockets, then turn

them inside out. I mouth the word ‘keys’ to her and point back towards the morgue.

‘Make it quick,’ she says, lowering the phone so the person on the other end can’t hear.

I walk back into the morgue. I stare at the dead girl and I

wonder what she looked like before Death crammed her into

this coffin, taking everything away from her in one brutal insult.

Looking at this cheap imitation of her makes me feel ill.

Tracey is finishing up her phone call when I rejoin her in the corridor.

“They’ve found the one that sank again, and another one,’ she

says, slipping the phone into her jacket. ‘That’s four in total.’

‘Any IDs?’

“They’re close to ID-ing one of them.’

-How’d she come up to the surface? The freshest one?’

‘It was the cinderblock,’ she says. looks like the rope was

tied around it, but those cinderblocks can have sharp edges. The block landed against another block down there, and it damaged

the rope. It cut through it partly. Gas build-up in the body was enough to break it. Look, you really have to leave.’

‘I get the feeling I’m going to be hearing that a lot over the next few days.’

“Then do yourself a favour and drop this thing, she says,

before turning away and heading back into the morgue.

The elevator is chilly, as if it sucked in most of the cold air when the doors opened. Outside it’s only slightly warmer again. I think the sun could be melting the city into a pool of lava and I’d still feel this way after coming out of there.

On the way to my car I take the dead woman’s diamond ring

out of my pocket and begin to study it. There is an inscription on the inside, and I have to squint in the weak light of the car park to make it out. Rachel & David for ever. It reads like an adolescent inscription carved into a tree. The three stones are not diamonds, which could be why the ring was still by the woman’s hand and not sitting in some pawnshop gathering dust. They’re

glass, cloudy-looking glass that for some reason seems to make the poignancy of what happened to her that much more awful.

Somebody bought this for her; he couldn’t afford real diamonds, but she didn’t need real diamonds. Maybe they had a promise

that when things got better, when the money started flowing

from some plan he would one day hatch, he would buy for her

any stone she wanted. The ring didn’t come from her wedding

finger, it was from the other hand, but perhaps there were other promises too.

If Tracey spotted the ring, then pretty soon she’s going to

realise it’s gone. The question is what she’ll do about it. Call me?

Or call somebody else about me? I should never have put her in that position.

This time when I get back to my office I slip in behind my

computer and boot it up, studying the ring while I’m waiting.

If the ring had been expensive, or custom made, it might have

been easy to track down. I surf into a Missing Persons secured site accessible only to the police and social workers and a handful of private investigators. It only takes a few minutes to come up with a list of missing Rachels. I set the parameters of the search to go back two years, figuring she was dead after Henry Martins was buried.

I end up with two names, and one of them is from the same

week Henry Martins died. The description could easily match the Rachel I was looking at half an hour ago.

I print out Rachel Number One’s details. Nobody has seen

Rachel Tyler, the nineteen-year-old reported missing by her

parents, in two years. I don’t remember the case, and I guess

that’s because she was one of many girls believed to have run

away. The reality is people in this country go missing every single day. Sometimes they turn up: they’re broke and high and living in a single-room motel, having burned off all their cash in casinos betting on red instead of black. Sometimes they’re being pimped out, forced into prostitution to pay back money for gambling or drugs or as a form of self-abuse. Other times they’ve left their wife or husband for somebody with a bigger bank account or a bigger house or a younger body. Other times they don’t turn up at all.

The photograph of Rachel was taken at a moment of sourness,

either faked or real, and it sure beats seeing a happy and outgoing girl holding ice creams or diplomas or helping the sick and elderly.

She would be twenty-one now if somebody hadn’t killed her, then jammed her into a coffin.

I study the photograph. Her brown hair is darker than when

I saw it less than an hour ago; her blue eyes in the picture are bright and alive. I read through the file. The conclusion was that she ran away, that she fought with her parents or her boyfriend and couldn’t take it any more.

I look up the phonebook and find Rachel’s parents are still at the same address. I wonder if they’re still married and what kind of state they are in. I wonder how many nights they sit watching the door, waiting for her to stroll inside and tell them everything is going to be okay.

I slip the ring into a small plastic bag and drop it into my

pocket. Then I look again at the watch I took from the body

in the lake. I compare the time to my own. It’s out by only a

few minutes, but it could be the Tag that is accurate and my

one isn’t. Its owner must have died in the same six-month period we’re in now, between October and March, because the watch is

set for daylight saving time. The date is out by fourteen days.

I grab a pen and start doing the addition. Every month an

analogue watch goes to thirty-one days, regardless of what month it is, and the user has to adjust it manually in the other five months when there are fewer. I work out that those five months would

add up to seven days a year that the watch would be out by if it wasn’t adjusted. That means this watch hasn’t been touched in

two years. So. It is now nearing the end of February. The guy

who owned this watch was put in the ground sometime after the

beginning of December and before the end of February two years ago.

I pick up the file with Henry Martins’ details on it. He died on the ninth of January. Could be his.

I grab the phone. It takes half a minute for Detective Schroder to answer it.

‘Come on, Tate, you know I can’t answer any questions,’ he

says when he hears my voice. ‘This has nothing to do with you.

And soon it won’t have anything to do with me either. I’ve got too much on my plate to chase after this one too.’

‘You’re working the Carver case?’

‘Trying to. Unless I retire. Which I might.’

‘One question. The body that floated up without the legs. Is

that the oldest one?’

“I don’t know. Maybe. The ME said it’s hard to tell. Looks

like two of them went into the water fairly close to each other.

Why?’

‘Can you find out?’

“I can find out.’

‘And let me know?’

‘No. Goodbye, Tate,’ he says, and hangs up.

I look at the watch. It’s been on the wrist of a dead guy for two years, but not necessarily in the water for two years. It depends on how long he was in the ground before he went in the drink.

Either way, it looks like two years is the outer perimeter of the timeline.

I check the Missing Persons reports, but immediately the list

of names coming up becomes too long, and there is no way to

narrow it down until I know whether the killer had a type. Could be all the girls are similar ages, or similar descriptions. Or it could be the other coffins don’t have girls in them at all, but men.

I grab my dry cellphone and the printout of Rachel Tyler, and

head back down to my car.

I’ve barely left the car park when I think better of my initial impulse. It’s the wrong time of the day to show up at somebody’s house to tell them their daughter is probably dead. Most people would think there never is a right time — but there is. It’s the sort of thing you want to do earlier on so they can call friends and family who can come over to console them. Anyway, it may be

Rachel’s ring but it doesn’t mean it’s her corpse.

I drive towards the edge of the city and park my car outside a florist that is open every week night until seven. I need to replace this darkness with some light, yet the first thing I think about is how flowers and death have been mixed together over time as

much as flowers and love.

‘Hi ya, Theo.’ An extremely pretty girl with an easy manner

smiles at me as I go in.

‘How’s it going, Michelle?’ I do my best to smile back.

We make the usual chitchat, then she asks me if I’m after the

usual. I tell her I am.

‘Your wife must really love flowers,’ Michelle tells me, and

I slowly nod.

Michelle picks out a bunch she thinks Bridget will like, wraps some cellophane around the stems, and hands them over. She

writes down the amount in a small book behind the counter. At

the end of the month, like every other month, she will send me a bill.

‘Say hi to Bridget for me,’ she says, and her smile is infectious.

Sometimes I think I could just watch this woman smile for ages.

I head back to my car and rest the flowers in the passenger

seat, careful not to crush them. I glance at my watch. Bridget won’t be in any hurry to see me, so I change my mind and decide maybe I can pay a visit to Rachel Tyler’s family after all. I do a U-turn and drive back in the opposite direction, taking with me a bunch of already dying flowers and a whole lot of bad news.

Averageville. That’s where the Tylers live. All the houses in the street are well kept, but there is nothing special, as if any one resident was too scared to make their house stand out above

another. No huge homes with giant windows, no expensive cars

parked outside, no Porsches or Beemers suggesting a world of big money and high debt. Doctors and lawyers and drug dealers live elsewhere. This is typical living in suburbia, where robberies are high but homicides are low. It’s a pleasant place to live. Sure as hell beats some of the alternatives.

I slow down and glance at the letterboxes, getting an idea early how much further I have to drive. This wasn’t my case when

the bodies floated up. It wasn’t my case when the caretaker took off. But it became my case the moment the coffin opened and

Rachel Tyler’s body made a suggestion that there are others out there who could still be alive if not for my mistake. I glance at the geranium cocktail next to me, and for a few seconds I think about my wife. I like to think that I know what she would want me to do, but I can’t be sure. It’s been a long time since she gave me any advice.

I step out into the light rain in front of a single-storey house that was mass-produced back at the start of the townhouse era.

Things are tidy, but a little run down. The garden has a few weeds; the lawn is a little long; the entire house looks a little tired.

The door is opened by a woman in her late forties, early

fifties. She looks like she has been on edge for the last two years, expecting news at any moment. She is like the house — tidy, neat, but tired.

‘Yes?’

‘Mrs Tyler?’

“Yes …’

I can tell she isn’t sure whether I’m here to sell her encyclopaedias or God, or whether I’m here to bolster or destroy her hopes for her missing daughter. Slowly I reach into my pocket and take out a business card. Her eyes widen and her mouth drops slightly as I hand it across, and when she reads it her mouth firms back up.

She doesn’t seem sure what to say. Doesn’t seem to know whether to be happy or scared that I’m on her doorstep.

‘My name is Theodore Tate,’ I say, ‘and I’m a private

investigator.’

‘That’s what the card says,’ she offers, without any sarcasm.

‘Can I have a few minutes of your time?’

‘Do you know where she is?’ she asks, already sure of the

reason for my visit.

‘This is about Rachel,’ I say, ‘but not directly. Please, if we can step inside, I can tell you more.’

She fights with the beginnings of a sentence; perhaps the

struggle is with the hundreds of questions trying to come out at once, a hundred different ways in which to ask if her daughter is still alive. I bet she’s rehearsed this moment time and time again, but the reality is crushing her, confusing her. She steps back and I move inside.

The hallway is warm and homey. There are dozens of

photographs of Rachel on the walls, ranging over the nineteen

years she spent in this world. There are pictures of her as a baby, her mother holding her tightly. The years have taken their toll on Mrs Tyler. There are shots of Rachel next to a tricycle, in a sandpit, going down a slide. There is a man in some of them,

holding Rachel’s hand, or swinging her at the park, or helping her blow out a cake with eight candles on it. Rachel gets older.

So do her parents. Fashions change and the three grow older, but the smiles are always there, keeping the parents young. One of these photos should have been with her Missing Persons report, but probably Mrs Tyler couldn’t part with any of them. I’m sure Rachel’s bedroom will be just as she left it, the same posters on the walls, her favourite stuffed toys waiting for her on her bed, maybe even a stockpile of Christmas and birthday presents from missed chances. It’ll be like a time capsule.

Patricia Tyler leads me through to the lounge.

‘Is your husband home?’ I ask, praying she isn’t going to tell me they are separated or, worse, that her husband has died from the pain of losing his daughter to a mystery, that he has spent the last six or eight or ten months in the ground.

‘He’s at work. He sometimes works late. Mostly, actually, these days. I should phone him, I guess. Should I?’