Cemetery Lake Read Online Free PDF Page B

the structure of this coffin has been altered with all that dirt pressing down on it for the last two years. I lean some weight onto the crowbar to help. It starts to groan, then creak; then it pops open. From inside, darkness escapes, along with it the smell of long-dead flesh that reaches through the pores on my mask and right up into my sinuses. I almost gag. Tracey lifts the lid the rest of the way open. I stand next to her and stare inside.
    It isn’t at all what either of us is expecting.

chapter five
    Christchurch is broken. What didn’t make sense five years ago
    makes sense now, not because our perspectives have changed but simply because that’s the way it is. All of us are locked into a belief of how this city should be, but it’s slipping away from us, nobody able to keep a firm grasp as Christchurch slowly spirals into full panic mode. Pick up a newspaper and the headlines are all about the Christchurch Carver, a serial killer who has been terrorising the city for the last few years. The police hate him, the media love him. He’s a one-man moneymaking industry who is stretching
    the resources of the police — and the best they can do, it seems, is run ad campaigns on TV in an attempt to enlist new recruits. But the numbers don’t add up. They can’t do, because the police can’t keep up with the Carver, let alone the rising crime pandemic.
    There are few solutions — but at least there are some, and
    that’s where people like me come into the picture. Some of the smaller jobs get contracted out — the smaller things where a
    police presence isn’t required — and in the beginning people
    complained. They no longer do.
    So yesterday when one of the law firms on the next floor up
    contacted me with the job, it seemed like easy money. Crime
    fighting has come a long way since Batman and Robin: now
    it’s all about the lawyers and, sometimes, even the law. And in this case nobody needed a cop to stand in the cold while a coffin got dug out of the ground. Cops were getting paid to get put
    to better uses. They were out there trying to stem the flow of violence, to push back the tides and fight the good fight. So I got paid to be there — a professional making sure the chain of evidence remained intact.
    But nobody is paying me to be here in the morgue with a dead
    girl in another person’s coffin.
    And the police resources are about to get stretched even
    further.
    I struggle to focus my thoughts. They cover a whole range
    of possibilities, as well as emotions. I feel sorrow and pain for whoever this woman is, and can’t see any reason other than a bad one for her to be in this coffin. I’m thinking about hoaxes and jokes, and hoping like crazy this is one of them; and as much as I like to think there could have been an elaborate set-up, I know it is much more than that. This is real. I shouldn’t be looking at a woman, she shouldn’t be dead, shouldn’t be in a coffin that isn’t hers — yet here she is, all laid out in front of me.
    Tracey crouches over the coffin. ‘This isn’t Henry Martins,’ she says, not to be funny, not to state the obvious, but matter of factly, in a way that doesn’t suggest the same disbelief I’m feeling, but that the cold part of her mind she must engage to do this job is now fully in control. Tracey’s emotions have been locked away.
    ‘She’s decomposed, but not badly. Decomp comes down to temperature, soil, depth of the coffin and how long she was exposed to the air before being put in here. No way to tell what age at this stage.’
    I’m hardly listening to her. My heart is racing hard as I look down at the body. There are areas where chunks of flesh have shrunken and dried, and other areas where it’s completely disappeared. What she has looks like a shell, so that if I was to poke her with my finger she would turn to dust. The few patches of
    skin remaining are almost transparent, doing nothing to hide the
    stormcloud-coloured bones that for the