Though there still could be something else hidden in there, I figured. Michael surely would have moved anything truly valuable, though I remembered him trying to show me something, patting himself down and swearing as he couldn’t find it. Then again, if it was something small enough to fit in his pocket, why hide it in a large coffin in the first place? And why would Michael bring the whole coffin up here if he’d taken what he needed from it already?

I needed to take a closer look. My torchlight (battery: 31%) fell first on the remnants of a human foot, which, in isolation, looked like a small bird: long thin bones that almost formed a cage. I scanned up the legs, waxy in decomposition, trying to remember enough biology from high school to let me know if anything was amiss. It was messier than any model skeleton I’d seen, the rib cage partly crumbled so it looked like there were extra ribs. There was not a shred of clothing left except for a few gold buttons on the tattered-sail remnants of chest strung over the ribs and a belt buckle cradled amid the hollow of the pelvis.

I must admit, even though I was looking at a dead man, a man my father had shot in the neck, I felt nothing. No stirring of guilt, no disgust. It was like looking at the body on the mountain: purely academic. And now, with Michael having told me this corpse belonged to someone crooked, someone who’d tried to kill my father, I felt even less. The body in the coffin was meaningless to me. I’d tried so hard to shield myself with blind ignorance, I didn’t know a single thing about the long dead policeman. I’m not even sure I knew his name.

That said, last time I checked, he hadn’t had two heads.

I’d seen inside this coffin before, at the open-casket funeral, and it had definitely been single occupancy. I wondered not only who else was in this coffin, but how they’d gotten in there.

The second skull was smaller, though it had the same amount of decomposition. A tight, leathery skin stretched over its scalp. The head was tilted down, jaw facing the formerly white silk cushion, so I could see a jagged hole in the back of the skull, cracks feeding around to the ears. Shot or hit, I wasn’t sure, but surely enough damage to have killed whoever this was. Now I was looking closely, I noticed fine, thin bones – a spine – that turned in to the larger skeleton. The ribs had interlocked as the flesh had worn away, which explained the ribs I’d thought were decomposing – they actually belonged to the second corpse.