Free HS04 - Unholy Awakening by Michael Gregorio

Not one!’
    As Knutzen began to shuffle away, breaking into a half-trot, Merson and I were the only ones left outside the cemetery. I stood in front of the gravedigger, staring in silence into his eyes.
    ‘I need your expert help,’ I said. ‘You and I will examine the body together, and you will tell me what you think.’
    He closed his eyes, and nodded once.
    Lars Merson is heavily built, with a large, ruddy face, and dark, leathery skin that has been tanned by the sun. He had laid her out in the sexton’s office next door to the chapel. It was the coldest place in the cemetery, he said, the most secure. He kept the large key on a string around his neck. On my request, he took the key and opened the door of the long, low building which is just inside the cemetery gate. Made of rough-cut stone, it had been added to the chapel of rest at some time in the last couple of centuries. It looked new in comparison.
    We stepped inside together.
    ‘Lock the door,’ I said. ‘I don’t want any interruptions.’
    I glanced at the collection of tools which were hanging on the wall: shovels of various sizes, shapes and lengths; irons, pikes and chisels for prizing out and lifting tombstones; wedges, hammers, saws, and many other implements of unspecified use; a row of lanterns which were resting on the floor at the foot of the wall; old tombstones standing up against the wall.
    A long, narrow table occupied the centre of the room.
    Light rained down from the latticed skylight set in the roof. It played fitfully upon the table as clouds raced across the sky, throwing an ever-shifting chiaroscuro on the body of Angela Enke. The pattern of the window-leading covered her like a net; she might have been a large fish recently caught. Merson had pushed his pens and papers into a careless heap at the bottom end of the table, close to where the toe-cap of her right boot and the naked toes of her left foot pointed skywards. She lay on a sheet of canvas, her hands along her flanks, her head resting on what might have been a ragged curtain. The red velvet had been folded to make a pillow for her head. She could so easily have been a bereaved customer who had come to see the sexton, suddenly felt giddy, and asked him if she might be allowed to lie down for a moment to recover. Except that her skin was the colour of wet lime.
    ‘What do you intend to do, sir?’
    ‘I want you to cut that dress away. Do you have a suitable implement?’
    Merson turned to the wall, and came back with a large pair of tailor’s scissors.
    ‘I have these, sir. They should do the job,’ he said.
    ‘Let me see,’ I said.
    His hand was shaking as he passed them over. I hefted the scissors in my palm, examined the blades, wondering why the points had been turned. Helena had scissors at home, but they were nothing like these strange things. ‘Do they have some special use?’ I asked him, as I handed them back.
    ‘I use them to recover wedding-rings and suchlike before I close the coffin,’ he explained. ‘Mourners rarely have the nerve to take them off, and the finger-joints are the first thing to start swelling up and stiffening.’
    In other circumstances, I might have been disturbed by the clinical coldness with which he described what he did. Then again, I thought, this was his job. He spoke of the details as thoughtlessly as I might speak of putting a man in jail.
    I made a brief examination of her clothing.
    The victim was wearing a plain brown blouse of coarse, heavy weave, and a light-blue taffeta gown with ribbed darker bands. Though worn and dirty, the gown seemed too good for her. Had one of her better-off customers passed it on to the seam stress, having no further use for it? The blouse was tightly caught inside the waist of the gown, except over her right hip, where it had come loose. I noted fine stitching along the seams – the victim’s own work, I presumed – where the dress had been taken in to fit her figure. Over her breasts and