“He didn’t die. I’m telling you. Dig up the coffin and you’ll probably find it’s empty!”

Snape looked at Boyle, then back at me. Slowly, he nodded. “All right, laddy,” he said. “Let’s play it your way. But if you’re wasting my time . . . it’s your funeral!”

*  *  *

I’ll tell you now. There’s one place you don’t want to be at five past twelve on a black November night—and that’s in a cemetery. The ground was so cold I could feel it all the way up to my knees, and every time I breathed the ice seemed to find its way into my skull. There were the four of us there—Snape, Boyle, Tim, and myself—and now we’d been joined by another half-dozen police officers and workmen, two of whom were operating a mechanical digger that whined and groaned as it clawed at the frozen earth. Tim was whining and groaning, too, as a matter of fact. I think he’d have preferred to have been in bed.

But maybe it wasn’t just the weather that was managing to chill me. The whole thing was like a scene out of Frankenstein. You know the one—where Igor the deformed Hungarian servant has to climb into the grave and steal a human brain. Glancing at Boyle, I saw a distinct physical resemblance. I had to remind myself that two days ago I had been enjoying vacation and that the following day I would be back at school, with all the fun of honors geography and French. In the meantime I had somehow stumbled into a horror film. I wondered what was going to turn up in the final reel.

The digger stabbed down. The earth shifted. Gradually the hole got deeper. There was a clunk—metal hitting wood—and two of the workmen climbed in to clear away the rest of the soil with spades. Snape moved forward.

I didn’t watch as the coffin was opened. You have to remember that I was only thirteen years old, and if someone had made a film out of what was going on here, I wouldn’t even have been allowed to see it.

“Boyle!” Snape muttered the single word and the other man lowered himself into the hole. There was a pause. Then . . .

“Sir!”

Boyle was holding something. He passed it up to Snape. It was dark blue, shaped a bit like a bell, only paper-thin. There was a silver disc squashed in the middle. It took me a few seconds to work out what it was. Then I realized. It was a police officer’s helmet. But one that had been flattened.

“Henderson!” Snape muttered.

There had been a police officer watching Smile’s apartment. He had disappeared a week before the accident. His name had been Henderson.

And now we knew what had happened to him.

*  *  *