Free Louisa and the Missing Heiress by Anna Maclean

a fatal cranial injury whereof she dies before she drowns, then she is certainly not drowned, but has fallen dead into the water.”
    Roder paused and looked at Cobban. “I am, of course, suggesting unnatural death,” he said, in case his train of thought hadn’t been followed. The paid witnesses leaned forward, interested now.
    “Could the injuries have occurred after she fell into the water?” Cobban asked.
    “Forensics is a science that sometimes provides more questions than answers, but in this case I would say no,” Roder said, poking again at Dot’s throat to test for sponginess in the tissue. “There is no swelling of the sinuses that follows a death by cerebral hypostasis caused by drowning.”
    He moved from Dot’s head to her right side, where he lifted her hand and used a sharp little knife to scrape under the nail of her index finger. He then held a magnifying glass over the knife tip.
    “There is no sign of sand or wood or any other substance that the deceased, in her death throes, might have attempted to clutch,” Roder said. “In my great experience”—he endowed the usually monosyllabic great with three syllables, I remember noting—“accidental drownings always have some such refuse under the nails, left during a vain attempt at self-rescue; but many drowning suicides have similar refuse, as if, in the last moment, they have changed their minds and now wish to reverse the decision of self-destruction.”
    Roder put Dot’s hand back at her side. He pressed gently on her chest, then again peered into the open mouth.
    “No evidence of tracheal froth, produced when inhaled fluid mixes with the natural mucus of the passages.”
    “An indication she wasn’t breathing when she fell into the river,” Cobban said.
    “You have been studying my papers. Well done, Constable,” Roder said. “But the absence of tracheal froth could also indicate that putrefaction has already begun,” he corrected him. “Gas is forming in the abdomen.” Roder pressed at the base of Dottie’s rib cage. “Most telling, however, are the lungs. They are not expanded, in fact are firm and crepitating. In a victim of drowning, the lungs distend and acquire a spongelike consistency. The torso would be misshapen by now.”
    Roder paused and reached to a tray an assistant carried. He picked a large, shiny knife. I flinched instinctively and fought the urge to cover my eyes. Next to me, Sylvia gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth, covering it.
    “Time to open the cavity and examine the organs,” Roder announced.
    Another assistant pulled away the last sheet covering Dot’s hips and legs and she lay there, naked and completely vulnerable, exposed to friends and strangers alike. I had to keep from crying out in protest. How Dot would have hated this, Dot who would not even pull up her stockings before other women but always retreated to her chamber or the water closet to make any adjustment of clothing, now lying there as naked as a newborn for all to gaze upon. Just as well that none of the family were here . . . this was not the way to remember the young woman, greenly white, blue eyes staring dumbly at eternity, the rest of the body as exposed as any lamb ready for slaughter.
    How—why—had she been brought to this? What awful circumstances and passions had led her on this course?
    Two factors already argued against suicide. First, the coroner’s statement that most suicides preserved, somewhere in the destroyed body, the wish to undo, to live, and Dot’s corpse had no such evidence. Could her grief, that secret despair she had worn upon her return from the honeymoon, have been so deep as to thwart even the most instinctive instruction to live?
    I concentrated on the past and suddenly remembered how Abba had once described Dottie: A little simple, sometimes, but full of love, the kind of woman who will live a long life and never regret a moment of it. No. Dottie could not have overcome her own nature, which was to