Part Seven: The Coffin Company
Disposing of a body presented a particular problem for people who understood, with some professional sophistication, how bodies were found.
They were found in rivers and in forests and in abandoned buildings and in the grounds of properties connected to the people who had something to lose. They were found when someone talked, when a detail didn’t match, when the absence of a person drew too much attention too specifically directed.
What was not typically searched was a grave.
Graves were, in the cultural and legal architecture of most societies, final. They were dug once and covered once and visited but not opened, not without specific legal process, not without cause. A body placed beneath another body in a sealed coffin, in a grave that was to be filled with earth within hours of the burial, was a body that had effectively ceased to exist.
It was a solution that required access to a coffin at a specific point in its journey and the ability to modify that coffin without detection. It also required a funeral.
Marta Wójcik’s death — officially an accident involving a poorly maintained staircase — provided the funeral.
A company called Spokój i Godność, registered three months earlier with falsified documents, received the order through an intermediary two days after Marta’s death. The order specified a sealed delivery of a premium coffin to the funeral home handling the Wójcik burial. Full payment in cash, delivered in advance. The coffin arrived at the funeral home the morning before the viewing, sealed and documented, with paperwork that passed the cursory examination of a busy office managing multiple arrangements.
The funeral home staff had not opened the sealed outer packaging. There was no reason to. The coffin was of the correct dimensions, the documentation was in order, the delivery had been coordinated through channels that appeared legitimate.
The modification to the coffin’s interior — the false base, the space beneath — had been made before delivery. The space was not large. It required that the inner dimensions of the coffin be reduced by approximately twenty centimeters in depth, which was achievable with the right carpentry. The weight of a second body in that space, combined with the weight of the coffin itself, had produced what the pallbearers encountered: something that could not be lifted by the ordinary assumption of what they were carrying.
This was the error. The error was weight.
The people who had planned this had accounted for many things. They had accounted for documentation and delivery and the sealed nature of premium coffins. They had not fully accounted for the physical reality of placing a second adult body in an enclosed space and asking eight men to carry it.
