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lines of blackened ooze, and was not so sure.
    We left and I followed Hector upstairs. A fire had ripped through half of the morgue on a summer’s night a year before and now the upper floor lay derelict: tortured iron railings and marked walls. Such is the state of Honduras’s morgues. As if death had seeped into the very structure of this place and left it rotten and mould-tainted.
    Later, he introduced me to his medical colleagues. They shifted in their blue shirts when I shook their hands – they were embarrassed to be asked questions about what they did. Their work was difficult, Hector explained, and I asked what sort of people were drawn to this type of task. He repeated the words of the funeral worker outside: there is not much other employment around. Death creates its own labour.
    I offered the coroner team something to eat, and we sat down together. Around the table were Sanchez, Garcia and Rodriguez, two doctors and a forensic photographer. I had bought fried chicken and, despite the sugar stench of death coming from just beyond the door,they ate their lunch. I did not; I had gone to the toilet to wash my hands and found neither soap nor towels.
    I asked about the smell. There was a smirk. ‘What smell?’ These men had been busy and were hungry. On the day before they had nine bodies brought in: six homicides. Outside lay two more bodies. I looked at the white chicken meat and fried strips of skin in their hands and focused on writing notes.
    ‘Look at this. This one has been shot in the head,’ said the forensic photographer, glancing at the laptop before him, his mouth full. I shifted across to his screen: it was one of the women who had been killed the day before. There was the child’s Spiderman bike. The doctors looked too but were unmoved. The only thing shocking, they told me, is working with children who’d been tortured. One of them let out a low whistle. ‘It’s really common.’
    They described how victims’ hands and feet were often tied together and the rope wrapped around the neck, then lashed to the feet. ‘So, when they tire from struggling, they let themselves go. Their feet drop, and they end up choking to death. The rope just tightens around their throat. If they are lucky, someone shoots them before it gets to this.’
    Luck, fate. These were the things they talked about – as if that’s all you could pin your hopes on. ‘Some people are shot twenty times and end up in hospital, still living,’ said Sanchez, a heavy-set man with eyes dark rimmed and deep. ‘Then there are people who are only shot just the once – a small wound – and they end up here.’
    ‘The beautiful thing about this job,’ said Garcia, wiping his fingers with a napkin to clean off the chicken grease, ‘is seeing up close what a bullet can really do to you.’ And then he picked up another chicken leg.

    That night I met Orlin Armando Castro – a local TV journalist with a fixed gaze and an impish laugh. He had a fizzing energy that meant he never stopped moving. Beside him was his cameraman, OsmanCastillo, a solid man in ripped jeans and a white shirt. Osman hardly spoke; Orlin was his voice.
    On Orlin’s belt was a police radio that buzzed from time to time, and in his hand, always, was a Blackberry phone. He constantly scanned both and replied to his messages with a focus that could have been mistaken for something else. He was constantly awaiting that call – to a murder scene, to another death. On hearing of one, he and Osman would jump into their scraped blue Hyundai Tucson, whose passenger door did not open from the outside, and drive fast to where a body was sure to be lying. There they did what they were paid to do: they filmed murder.
    I had arranged to meet Orlin because he was a local journalist here and I had been told – out of everyone – he was the first to get to San Pedro’s murder scenes. The one reporter the police would call whenever there was a shooting, his life was defined