Blue light from my phone paints the mausoleum walls like a badly tuned monitor. I’m crouched by a coffin, grave dust under my nails, and for a second I actually wonder aloud. "How the hell did my life come to this?"

Oh, right. Bloody Grok. The nice polite corporate euphemism for “your job was handed to something that doesn’t need a pension.” Got laid off, learned how to break things instead of build them, which somehow graduated from “freelance penetration testing” to “creative asset recovery” to yes stealing from graves because morals are for people who aren't avoiding their landlord. Lovely trajectory.

You know the one in the papers, the heiress. Home intrusion turned murder. Of course it made headlines. Big house, better security, worse taste in husbands. They said she only needs two pence to pay the ferryman; £50,000 worth of diamonds is... overkill? Overdeath. And you should see my overdraft. So I do a thing I promised myself I’d never do: I pick locks, hack pressure plates, and crawl into marble mausoleums at midnight. Classy.

I get to the coffin expecting sparkle and easy cash. Instead mirror-glass beads, paste diamonds, the sort of fake that would embarrass a late-night market stall. My whole low point right there, and it wasn’t even worth the moral bankruptcy. I scoop the fakery back into the velvet and, because I apparently still have standards, I start to put the junk back on her.

Then I touch her gloved hand and the world lurches. Not a memory, an image, more like a film projected behind my eyes. It wasn’t a random intruder. It was a face I half-recognise: the face that would be on the ten o’clock news days after, holding back tears and asking the public for help. It’s always, always, the spouse. I swear to god, it’s always the spouse. I don’t have the luxury of seeing everything cleanly; the edges are fuzzy, the how is jagged, but the intent? Clear as day. Bye-bye wife.

The vision drags something up from when I was eight. Gran’s funeral. Me slipping a tiny sprig of heather into her coffin because children think small rituals fix big things. When I touched her had I saw it. I saw it, I felt the crush in her chest, I saw the glass of water tip as she tried to swallow her heart back down. When I told my family, they smiled the polite, worried smiles adults give children who invent ghosts to survive grief. Only Aunt Doris didn’t smile. She said, “Pearl could see things others couldn’t too. Perhaps there’s a lot of you in her.” I filed it under “odd family anecdotes” and tried to forget. Aftershocks followed, little visions always something to trigger it. A favourite song, a smooth wooden bead, until they stopped, and she felt truly gone.

So here I am: grave robber, failed corporate drone, unintended medium. Upset doesn’t cover it. Furious is closer. Part of me is furious at having sunk that low; a louder part is furious that the truth is sitting in my hands and my phone battery is dwindling.

I pull my phone out, thumbs jittery. I know who to call to sort this shit out. I'm calling someone who can handle bodies, evidence, and bad timing without crying into their cereal. That’d be you.