feeble light from the lantern faltered long before it reached the corners of the stone room, yet the little corpse was illuminated, shimmering with a glaucous gleam. It was a peculiar effect, caused by the extreme paleness of the body, but a fanciful person might have thought the light emanated from the small limbs themselves.
Aware of the unusual alertness that stirred in her, Rita approached. She judged the child to be about four years of age. Her skin was white. She was dressed in the simplest of shifts that left her arms and ankles bare, and the fabric, still damp, lay in ripples around her.
Rita automatically initiated the convent-hospital routine. She checked for breathing. She placed two fingers against the child’s neck to feel for a pulse. She peeled back the petal of an eyelid to examine the pupil. As she did all this, she heard in her mind the echo of the prayer that would have accompanied the examination in a chorus of calm, female voices: Our Father, which art in heaven … She heard it, but her lips did not move in time.
No breathing. No pulse. Full dilation of the pupils.
The uncommon vigilance was alive in her still. She stood over the little body and wondered what it was that had set her mind on edge. Perhaps it was nothing but the cold air.
You can read a dead body if you have seen enough of them, and Rita had seen it all. The when and the how and the why of it were all there if you knew how to look. She began an examination of the corpse so complete and so thorough that she entirely forgot about the cold. In the flickering light of the lantern, she peered and squinted at every inch of the child’s skin. She lifted arms and legs, felt the smooth movement of joints. She looked into ear and nostril. She explored the cavity of the mouth. She studied every finger- and toenail. At the end of it all, she stood back and frowned.
Something wasn’t right.
Head on one side, mouth twisted in perplexity, Rita went through everything she knew. She knew how the drowned wrinkle, swell and bloat. She knew how their skin, hair and nails loosen. None of this was present here, but that meant only that this child had not been in the water very long. Then there was the matter of mucus. Drowning leaves foam at the edges of the mouth and nostrils, but there was none on the face of this corpse. That too had its explanation. The girl was already dead when she went into the water. So far, so good. It was the rest that disturbed her. If the child had not drowned, what had happened to her? The skull was intact; the limbs unbeaten. There was no bruising to the neck. No bones were broken. There was no evidence of injury to the internal organs. Rita was aware how far human wickedness could go: she had checked the girl’s genitals and knew she had not been the victim of unnatural interference.
Was it possible that the child had died naturally? Yet there were no visible signs of illness. In fact, to judge from her weight, skin and hair, she had been exceptionally healthy.
All this was disconcerting enough, but there was more. Even supposing the child had died of natural causes and – for reasons impossible to imagine – been disposed of in the river, there should be injuries to the flesh made after death. Sand and grit abrade skin, stones graze, the detritus on the river’s bed will cut flesh. Water can break a man’s bones; a bridge will smash his skull. Wherever you looked at her, this child was unmarked, unbruised, ungrazed, uncut. The little body was immaculate. ‘Like a doll,’ Jonathan had told her when he described the girl falling into his arms, and she understood why he had thought so. Rita had run her fingertips over the soles of the girl’s feet, around the outer edge of her big toe, and they were so perfect you would think she had never put foot to earth. Her nails were as fine and as pearlized as those of a newborn. That death had made no mark on her was strange enough, but nor had life, and that, in Rita’s experience, was unique.
A body always tells a story – but this child’s corpse was a blank page.
Rita reached for the lantern on its hook. She trained its