Paupers' graves are meant for the forgotten. But what happens when the people buried there were never forgotten at all? In Cape Town, an undertaker's alleged fraud has exposed a failure of the systems meant to protect the dead -- and devastated those left behind.

In a windblown, arid cemetery outside Kuils River lies a grave - although it can barely be identified as such. There is no headstone and no base. Uneven patches of straw are strewn upon sand. The only indication that a person is buried here is a small white concrete block, on which someone has painted the grave plot number and the words "Tersia Belinda Murray".

This rudimentary grave marker is one of five in a row.

"There's something with these five graves," says the cemetery worker who showed us the row, gesturing at them.

He isn't sure what is going on with them. He just knows that there's a sort of mystery about them. At one stage, City of Cape Town officials arrived and hurriedly plonked down the markers; previously, there were none. Some people have been coming to look at these graves and take photographs, he says; one even laid flowers.

That surprises him, for a very good reason.

"These are paupers' graves," he says.

Paupers, in the City of Cape Town's crisp and clinical language, are defined as "unclaimed and/or unidentified deceased". These are every city's forgotten people; those who fell through the cracks of society and ended...