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.
chapter four