Free HS04 - Unholy Awakening by Michael Gregorio Page B

wound alone had not caused her death.
    I pointed at the rough culottes.
    They hung down low on one hip, partially exposing her belly and the first trace of pubic hair. There were stains of blood which had soaked into the heavy material. I touched one spot with my forefinger. The blood was damp; it left a mark on my skin. Was the fatal injury concealed beneath her underwear? Had she been stabbed in the belly with some sharp blade which had robbed her life away?
    My tongue was dry and pulled against my palate.
    ‘Cut them away, Merson.’
    He clicked his scissors together twice, then did as I had told him, cutting up one side-seam, then down the other, pulling the wool away, exposing the belly, womb and the dark bush of brown hair which covered her sexual organs.
    There was a cut running almost parallel with the line where her left leg joined the trunk. It was long, and it was wide. I pushed at her left knee and the cut gaped open wide. It had bled abundantly, though it was not so deep. I put it down to a sharp stone or a jagged bit of metal which had ripped her body as she brushed against it, falling.
    There was nothing else to go on.
    That wound in her neck had signalled the beginning of the end. Her death had not been rapid, but it had been inevitable. Perhaps the vocal cords had been damaged during the attack, preventing her from shouting or screaming. Certainly, no-one at the Prior’s House had heard her cry for help.
    I examined the other side of her neck, but there were no bruises, no signs of any rough attempt at strangling.
    I forced my fingers in between her teeth and prised open her mouth. As Schuettler had suspected, the tooth left in the bucket was a wisdom tooth, and it belonged to Angela Enke. There was a gaping black hole in the left side of her gum. It had bled copiously, staining her teeth and gums dark red.
    ‘It looks as if she’s been sucking blood,’ murmured Merson.
    ‘The blood is hers ,’ I said emphatically. ‘Whoever killed her pulled that tooth out, then he threw her down the well. The tooth was found in a bucket…’
    ‘Where’s the sense in that?’ he quietly asked himself.
    I felt the same perplexity. That tooth seemed to me to be the most obscene of all the indignities that Angela Enke had suffered. Her tongue was caught in a bulge in her gullet, as if she had begun to swallow it. I prised the organ out with my forefinger, pulling hard against the retracted muscles, pressing it flat upon her lower lip. It was grey like a boiled sausage, but there was no blistering or burning, no sign that she might have been poisoned.
    ‘Help me to turn her over.’
    Though rigor mortis had made the joints stiff, it was now beginning to pass off, which made the body difficult to manage. It gave with a series of sharp cracks as we held her up, rolling her onto her right hip, then placing her face down. The ruined clothes clung to her shoulders, back, buttocks and legs. They had been pressed flat by the dead weight of the corpse. It made external examination a matter of an instant. I noted some minor rips and ruptures – the jagged wall, I presumed again – but there was no evidence of wilful wounding. No external bleeding, anyway.
    As I peeled the clothes away from her skin, I saw something that I will not easily forget, a condition which is often found in a corpse which has been abandoned, or which has lain undiscovered for any length of time. The skin, especially of her buttocks, was no longer white. It was a mottled red, blue and black carpet, the colours startlingly bright. This was what the onset of decomposition did to a body which had not been shifted. The blood settled to its lowest gravitational point in the human vessel which contained it, and there it pooled, slowly losing its familiar red colour as necrosis set in. On the basis of what I knew of her movements, I calculated that Angela Enke had been dead for almost twenty hours, and possibly more. Since the previous evening, that is,