Free HS04 - Unholy Awakening by Michael Gregorio Page A

thighs, the material was badly scuffed, stained here and there with streaks of moss. There was also a jagged rent between her knees. As the body fell down the well-shaft, it had evidently scraped and bumped against the rough stone walls.
    Merson looked at me. ‘Where do you want me to start, sir?’
    I told him to cut through the centre of the lower hem of her gown and work his way up to the neck. ‘Be careful not to mark the body,’ I warned him, following the relentless progress of the cutters as the cloth fell loose between her legs. The snip with which he severed the heavy waistband of her gown, sounded obscenely loud in the silence. As Merson continued cutting through the blouse which covered her stomach and breasts, I told him again not to do any additional damage to the body. She had suffered enough with out being carelessly mutilated.
    He laid his scissors down on the table, and turned to me.
    ‘Throw back the coverings,’ I ordered.
    He hesitated, looked at me.
    ‘Surely you’ve done this sort of thing before?’ I said with growing impatience.
    He nodded grimly, laying his hands on the divided parts of the gown, and flicking them aside. His hands appeared very dark against the white flesh of the woman’s legs.
    ‘Remove the top, as well,’ I added.
    ‘I’ll need to slice through the sleeves,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, they’ll…’
    ‘Do it,’ I said.
    From wrist to shoulder he managed the lower blade of the scissors like a knife, using the dead weight of the woman’s arms to facilitate the operation. The sleeves fell away and slid to the floor like snakes. He set his hands just below her breasts and shifted the blouse and bodice, lifting them away like two perfect halves of a delicately hinged box.
    Angela Enke lay on the table, naked except for a ragged pair of culottes the colour of mud which covered her sex. Her breasts sagged heavily upon her ribs. Her skin was so pasty and pale, it might have been rubbed with powdered chalk. Blood had flowed out in a torrent from the punctures in the left side of her neck, pooling in the deep crook of her shoulder bone, where it had hardened as a sticky cake, spilling over and thinning out onto her left breast, before running away in a narrower stream beneath her left armpit.
    I had seen the wound at the bottom of the well, though not so clearly. I prayed silently that I would find some other injury which might explain her death, and put an end to the superstitious speculation which had spread like a raging fire through Krupeken, and which threatened now to engulf Lotingen, as well.
    I began with the face.
    The tip of her nose was ragged and bloody, broken perhaps. There were scratches and scrapes impressed on her temples and her forehead at different angles, as if she had been rubbed with a carpenter’s rasp. I moved down, pressing my thumb against a large black bruise on her upper right arm. Some drops of blood seeped out of it. The arms and hands were scarified at numerous points. There was, indeed, a great deal of superficial damage to the skin, but that was easily explained. She must have bounced from wall to wall as she fell, and the well was as deep as two houses placed one on top of the other. From the quantity of blood which had issued from the cuts and scratches, it was evident that she had still been alive when she hit the bottom of the shaft. Her heart was pumping, she was bleeding copiously.
    There was nothing fatal in those injuries.
    The most notable damage to the upper part of her body was a large livid red-and-blue contusion on her left breast. The nipple had been torn away, the blood had flowed profusely, rolling away down the side of her ribs and underneath her back. I bent closer, looking more carefully. There was no sign of intrusion, or puncture, such as one might expect from a knife, a pike, or some other lethal weapon. Again, I concluded that the flesh had been ripped away on some sharp point – a nail, perhaps – as she fell. That