Page 54 of Girl, Entangled

He lifted.

The lid came up with a sound that was mostly the suck of wood letting go of wet earth, and it came up further than Ella expected, on a hinge that had survived better than the rest of it, and it stood for a second at the top of its travel and then Park let it rest back against the side of the cut.

‘Here we go,’ Ripley said. ‘Masks on.’

Ella pulled out her mask and snapped it on. The man nearest the foot of the grave had been leaning in to look, and he straightened up and looked at the man beside him, and that man looked into the box and then looked at Park.

Park didn’t move at all.

He crouched there with one hand still on the open lid, and his head tilted down into the coffin, and he didn’t call a name and/or reach for his dental records like he said he would.

‘Uhh…’

‘What?’ Ella shouted. ‘What’s in there?’

Park didn’t answer.

Ella thought to hell with the bacteria, ran over to the open grave and dropped to a crouch at the head end opposite Park.

She looked into the casket.

At the stained quilting on the inside of the lid. At the dark orange satin lining.

She looked at the long, clean, empty bed of it, foot to head.

The coffin was empty.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

‘Imagine if the conspiracy crowd got a whiff of this,’ Ripley said.

Ella was standing at the back of the cemetery with her partner as the crew reversed their operation. Hibbert and his men were talking to the foreman somewhere.

An empty coffin. No body and no notebook.

‘That’s why none of them are detectives.’

‘Well, we are detectives, and we need to find out who stole a giant’s dead body.’

Ella pulled her mask off. The relief of clean air lasted about a second before the rest of it landed on her. ‘An empty grave isn’t nothing. It means this whole thing is about Greaves. We find whichever lunatic has his corpse in their basement, we find our killer.

‘Simple as that,’ Ripley said.

‘There’s still avenues we can look into. Wait here.’

Doctor Park had climbed out of the cut and was talking into his phone with his free hand pressed flat to the crown of his head. One of the crew had started coiling the lifting straps without being told. The groundsman, a stooped man named Aldous who’d let them through the gate at noon, stood a few feet off with his key ring still in his fist, looking into the hole as if he’d never seen an empty coffin before.

Ella went over to him.

‘The empty casket,’ she said. ‘Is there any camera on this place? Anything that covers the gate, the road, the sections at the back?’

‘Not really, ma’am. Sorry.’

‘None at all?’

‘We have one on my maintenance hut, but I don’t know where the feed goes. I’ve never had to check it.’

‘No coverage of the plots?’