She lay sprawled, drenched in rain, her face turned to the ground. Her long dress and jacket of a silky ramie cloth, the hem and sleeves richly embroidered with floral patterns, marked her as a noble.
“Roll her over,” Inspector Han ordered. “We have yet to see her wound.”
I stepped over the corpse, crouched, and grabbed her shoulder. This was why the Capital Police Bureau kept female servants like me: I was an extension of the officers, my hands used by them to arrest female criminals and to examine female victims. An inconvenience for the police, and yet men were forbidden from touching women who were not directly related to them. It was the law, Confucius’s law.
As I flipped the corpse around, her voluminous skirt whispered and I almost jumped back when her long, soggy hair clung to my sleeve. Don’t yelp.
I closed my eyes, panic thrumming in my chest. Never had I touched a murdered corpse before, having worked at the police bureau for only a few months. I sucked in a deep breath and peeled the damp strands off me, then forced my gaze down again. Blood stained her white collar. A deep gash with puckered edges stretched across her pale throat. A cloudy film covered her eyes. And a bloody cavern was dug into her face, a staring hole like that of a skeleton where her nose once was.
“Stabbed in the neck,” Inspector Han said. He gestured to the tassel-like ornament tied to the victim’s skirt. “No one has stolen the norigae, and the jewel pin is still in her hair. This is no robbery. What is that under her left shoulder?”
I lifted the shoulder. A small, bloody knife with a silver handle …
I looked back at the norigae hanging from the victim. Upon closer examination, I noticed there was a silver paedo ornamentally knotted to the norigae, and it was missing a knife. My hands moved of their own accord, taking the murder weapon and slipping it into the turquoise stone-encrusted sheath.
“It belonged to her,” the inspector whispered, a frown in his voice. “Give that to the clerk.”
I did so, stunned that the victim’s own decorative knife had resulted in her death.
“Now, look for her identification tag.”
“Neh.” I patted the corpse, buried my hand into her skirt, and discovered a yellow tag of poplar wood. By law, everyone in the Joseon kingdom had to carry one. There were characters engraved onto the wood, likely indicating the bearer’s name, place of birth, status, and residence—but I couldn’t say for sure, for to me words were brushstrokes with no meaning. It was likely Hanja, classical Chinese writing, the official script of our kingdom, for what else could it be? Our native script, Hangul, seemed to have more circles and straight lines.
Placing the tag in the inspector’s outstretched hand, I looked up, wanting to see his reaction to whatever name was written. But my gaze only managed to reach his chin, for I knew not to hold the stare of my superior. I still didn’t even know the color of Inspector Han’s eyes.
“Lady O, daughter of the Cabinet Minister O, and only nineteen years old.”
A murmur rose among the officers. “Pity, gone at such a young age,” someone said. “I’ll wager her father’s enemy killed her. Members of the Southerner faction like him have one too many rivals…”
As they shared their low-voiced speculations, I dragged the corpse toward Officers Ky?n and Goh, who were holding a wooden stretcher, waiting for me. No one else but I, the damo girl, was permitted to move the female corpse.
I clenched my teeth against the ache in my chest. In the past few days, an unusually high number of corpses had been carted in, the bodies of servants and peasants. Officers had looked upon their deaths as casually as they would butchered meat. But it was different now. The blood of a noble shocked them.
Another tug, and the sickly-sweet odor of death drifted into my nostrils. A smell that shouldn’t have surprised me. I’d hunted rabbits and birds before with an arrow. I’d helped skin them too. But this, this odor seemed half mold, half animal. With one last heave, I pulled the woman onto the stretcher, and at once I shrank away from the horrible odor.
“Senior Officer Shim, take Ky?n, question the watchmen.” Inspector Han’s voice resounded through the beating of rain. “The rest of you will go to all the inns, then all the houses. This cannot have been without witnesses…” He