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.
My computer is a little slow, and seems to take a minute longer to boot up for each year older it gets. I begin hunting through old news stories online, using search engines to narrow down my browsing, looking for any mention of coffins being reused to make money; but if it’s happened in this country nobody has ever found out.
I run the caretaker’s name through the same search engines and find other people with the same name doing other things in other parts of the world, covering occupations and religions and culture and crime. I find a link that takes me through to a newspaper story about the caretaker’s father. He retired two years ago after forty years of graveyard service.
I use the Christchurch Library online newspaper database to
go through the obituaries, seeing who died last week and who
would fit the description of the woman from the water. I end up with four names, but can’t narrow it down any further because
the obituaries don’t give descriptions or locations for the funerals.
I wonder if Carl Schroder, the detective who told them they
could talk to me, has already figured out an ID, and decide he probably has. Simple when you have the resources. He’s probably circulating a photo of her body to morticians around the city; or, easier still, he’s got the priest from the Catholic church at the cemetery to take a look. If they’ve identified her, then they’ll be in the process of getting a court order to dig up the grave she was taken from. I look at my watch. It’s after five-thirty: everybody will be pushing into overtime but it will get done today.
I put my phone back together and drop it into my pocket. It’s
a ten-minute drive from my office to the hospital, but it takes me thirty in the thick traffic and constant stream of red lights. The hospital is a drab-looking building with no appeasing aesthetics and a design that would equally suit a prison. I park around the back, head to the side ‘Authorised Personnel Only! door, use the intercom and, a moment later, get buzzed inside. I’m starting
to feel pretty cold again, and the idea of seeing the coffin and then having it opened in front of me isn’t warming me back up.
The elevator seems to take for ever to arrive, making me wonder exactly where it’s rising from. When the doors finally open, I ride it down to the basement.
The morgue is full of white tile and cold hard light. It’s like an alien world down here. There are shapes beneath sheets and tools with sharp edges. The air feels colder than the lake. Cabinets are full of bottles and chemicals and silver instruments. Benches and gurneys and trays hold items designed to strip a body down to