female detective had moved to where the headstone had been removed and solemnly laid down before the first pickaxe strike. She, too, was looking expectantly at the undertakers with the plan. Both dressed in black suits and white shirts, their grey ties fastidiously knotted around their wrinkly necks, each with an open umbrella in his hand.
“Yes?” the colonel snapped.
“’Er…am I still needed here?” asked the caretaker.
The colonel gave him an irritated look. “No. We’ll let you know when your men can fill in the grave. Perhaps in a week or so.”
With a nod of the head, the caretaker motioned to the four gravediggers. As they were leaving, he heard the deep voice ask: “So, how do you plan to get the coffin out?”
* * *
Warrant Officer Ella Neser watched the caretaker walk away with his team. He had a slight limp, as if his shoe was pinching his toes, the flask in his hand thumping against his leg, his neckless head pulled into the collar of his raincoat. With the back of her hand she wiped her wet forehead, felt her blouse cling coldly to her skin. She remembered the afternoon she had walked into the Wendy house: the pounding of her heart, her finger trembling as it paused under a particular entry in the grave register.
It had also been late afternoon, like now, when at last she’d discovered the final resting place of the mother of the serial killer she’d been hunting. But of course on that hot, dry and windy day she couldn’t have foreseen the fatal outcome of her visit to this particular grave.
Her hand slid down her wet blouse. Over the past few months she had acquired a habit. When in thought, her finger would absent-mindedly move to the right side of her waist, across the lower part of her stomach, finding the dim, pale scar where her appendix had been removed when she was twelve. It had never bothered her before, but recently her stomach had acquired fresh scars, not yet faded. It was not tenderness or itchiness that caused her fingers to fondle the injured skin. It was whenever she thought of him, of Abel Lotz, that her fingers instinctively searched out the scar. Like now.
The discovery of his mother’s grave had led to that fateful encounter in his kitchen. The events were fixed in her mind. She’d looked up, and their eyes had met, and in that moment something had passed between them like an electric current, a mutual recognition. An awareness that hunter and hunted had found each other.
She’d been paralysed, like a mouse mesmerised by the eyes of a snake.
She remembered his hand, as it had shot out to crack her skull against the old ceramic washbasin. Later, of course, she hadn’t seen or felt the blade of his scalpel on her stomach, had only known its result when she’d regained consciousness. The new scar was a deep purple welt, the tissue still in the process of healing. Sometimes it itched, but not as badly as it used to.
Ella recognised the impatience in Silas Sauls’s voice.
Mr Poppe Senior wheezed. “We’ll erect our new pulley system over the grave. As we do for an interment. Not to lower a casket in this case, but to hoist it up. Space technology was employed in the development of the pulley, made of titanium, especially imported from Mississippi…”
“Do it!” ordered Col. Sauls.
“We’ll support the floor of the coffin to prevent her from falling out. We don’t want to leave her behind in the grave, do we, Colonel?”
“What are you waiting for?”
Another wheezy coughing fit. With a large white handkerchief Mr Poppe Senior wiped the phlegm from his thin lips, his eyes on the departing gravediggers.
“Who’s going to help?”
“Someone will have to get inside the grave.” Mr Poppe Junior stooped to wipe the mud spatters from his black shoes and polish the patent leather with his white handkerchief. “Someone has to place the props and straps and support under the coffin.”
“Fred,” Col. Sauls barked, turning to a detective who had moved slightly apart and was lighting a cigarette.
Lieutenant Fred Lange stuck his thumb and forefinger into his mouth and whistled shrilly. The caretaker and his team stopped, turned around.
“Not finished!” Fred shouted. “Something else to do.”
From the hearse parked in a driveway between the graves, the Poppe father-and-son team produced a pulley system with wide straps, which they carefully erected over the grave.
Ella looked down at the gravestone, raindrops like quicksilver on the polished granite.
Dorcas Johanna Lotz (née Linde), 11.12.1930 – †11.08.2005. I am pure, without transgression; I am innocent and there is no guilt in me. – Job 33:9.
Without transgression? Ella thought. She’d given birth to Abel, a child whose spirit she’d kneaded and moulded like clay. She’d created a fucking monster. And that was no exaggeration. Ella knew from personal experience, and the evidence etched into her skin.
She was only dimly aware of the bustle inside the grave, of Mr Poppe’s orders to the two diggers. The undertakers had not been given a reason for digging up Dorcas Lotz’s coffin. Ella supposed they would like to know, but they didn’t ask. Having carefully inspected the warrant for the exhumation, Mr Poppe Senior had nodded and filed the document. It was only fitting that their undertaking business should do the exhumation, seeing that they had laid the deceased to rest. They would know best how to handle the coffin and its contents.
There was no need for the Messrs Poppe to know that it had taken almost two months for the warrant application to be approved and signed by the chief magistrate himself. Even with valid reasons and strong motivation, the magistrate had wanted to be sure that the police had indeed not been able to trace any of the deceased’s relatives. Even Interpol had been involved in trying to find the only known next of kin – Dorcas’s son, Abel. And not only to obtain his permission for his mother’s grave to be exhumed: he was also wanted on allegations of serial murder. Only when all these measures had proved unsuccessful had the magistrate finally put his ornate signature to the warrant.
Now, with great effort, the coffin was being raised from the grave.
“It’s heavy,” said Mr Poppe Senior, bent over the pulley.
“She was a big woman, if memory serves,” said Mr Poppe Junior.
Ella looked at the grave to the left of Dorcas’s. The inscription on that undisturbed headstone read:
Johanna (Hannie) Maria Linde (née Yssel), 24.05.1893 – †16.03.1981. And behold, a pale horse, and he who sat on it, his name was Death. Hades followed with him. – Revelations 6:8.
Mother and daughter, Ella now knew. The mystery had been solved. Abel’s mother and grandmother, who had transferred their delusions to the receptive mind of the boy and grimly reinforced them.
“How many years has it been?” grunted Mr Poppe Senior. “How can she still be so heavy? Only the skull and bones should remain, and what could they possibly weigh, a bundle of bones?”
“I had to embalm her, remember?” said Mr Poppe Junior, embalming expert of Poppe & Son Undertakers & Embalmers
