I had a sudden memory. Of a state funeral, an event demanding of a plush coffin. Of a Swiss Army knife, scratching a forever bond into the oak. Of hats held against chests and white gloves and gold buttons. I might have doubted my ability to recognise the bones inside, but I knew this coffin.

Michael and Erin had dug up Alan Holton’s partner: the policeman my father shot.

CHAPTER 25

I knew I had to open it. Pandora be damned.

Lids of coffins are damn heavy: the fancy ones are lead-lined to stop you seeping through the wood as you liquefy and, even without the weight, the joints get warped by moisture and the pressure of six feet of dirt. Rigor mortis of the inanimate. If Michael hadn’t previously forced it open, I wouldn’t have been able to do it on my own. To get it into the truck, he and Erin must have rigged some kind of pulley system out of the moving straps hanging from the walls.

Since I was on my own, I figured out I could shift the lid by standing on the hinge side, leaning over the coffin, hooking my fingers under the rim and pulling back with all my weight. It was quite an effort given the cold: inside the four metal walls, on the mountain, the storage van may as well have been an ice truck. My breath puffed in the freezing air with the effort, as the first few centimetres squeaked open, agonisingly slow until inertia overpowered the weight and the lid shot all the way up, nearly knocking me on my arse and flipping the coffin. Luckily, I didn’t have to tango with a set of bones: the coffin rocked slightly towards me but found balance. The truck groaned again, as if begging me to quit moving around so much.

I shone my phone light (battery: 31%) into the coffin.

The coffin wasn’t empty, which I’d half suspected, so seeing a body came as more of a relief than a shock, because at least it was what was supposed to be there.

Quick science lesson. Thirty-five years is enough, depending on the seal and the coffin’s material, to leave a semi-mummified corpse. It’s not quite enough time for all of the tissue to liquefy, and the bones don’t crumble to dust until nearer the century mark, so the result is a skeleton covered in flaky grey rags of tendon. I didn’t know the science at the time – I had to look it up afterwards to write about it – so I wasn’t sure what Michael hoped I would forensically or intuitively learn from seeing a half-decomposed body. I shook my head at the pointlessness of it all.