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.’

“I don’t follow,’ I say.

‘You probably figured we’re not dealing with homicides,

right?’

‘The thought crossed my mind.’

‘At least not in any traditional sense,’ he says. ‘Probably not in any sense at all.’

‘You want to clarify that?’

‘Why? You think this is your case now?’

“I’m just curious. I’m allowed to be curious, aren’t I? I’m the one who found these poor bastards.’

‘That doesn’t make them yours.’

‘You think I want them?’

‘You know what I mean.’ He looks back at the tent covering

the corpses. The wind has got hold of one of the doors and is

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?’