Antonio Garrido - The Corpse Reader

Ming came forward. “Most worthy Councilor for Punishments, permit me to bow down in the face of your magnanimity,” he said, bending low, and Kan gestured for him to continue. “I am only a lowly professor and therefore hugely grateful that you thought of me in relation to this awful event. I hope that, with the assistance of all the spirits, I might cast a little light on this dark affair. I would also like to apologize in advance to those who might be offended if my assessment differs from those given so far. Should that be the case, I commend myself to your benevolence.”

Ming went over and looked at the corpse’s back before asking the matron to turn it back over. Seeing the wound around the sex, he couldn’t help but flinch, but he leaned close to the body and began examining this and the other wounds slowly and in turn. He then asked for a bamboo stalk with which to probe the wounds, and Kan gave his approval. After some final checks, Ming turned to the councilor.

“Wounds are always faithful witnesses. Sometimes they can help us establish the how, sometimes the when, and sometimes even the why. Having an understanding of corpses allows us to evaluate the depth of an incision, the intent behind a blow, or even the force of that blow. All of this is well and good, but if you want to solve a murder, the fundamental thing is to enter into the murderer’s mind.”

He paused briefly, and the room seemed to hum with the group’s anticipation.

“It may be mere speculation, but I see the removal of the pubic area as indicative of a depraved mind, a lustful impulse that unleashed a rare feat of violence. I couldn’t comment on whether these are the acts of any cult or sect, though the wound on the breast might suggest that. What I am absolutely convinced of is that the removal of the head and feet had nothing to do with any ritual—it was to make it difficult to identify the corpse. Someone’s face, obviously, is the easiest way to tell who they were, and their feet contain the secrets of lineage and office.”

“Would you mind elucidating?” said Kan.

“This woman was no peasant, let me assure you. The delicacy of her hands, her well-kept nails, and the vague hints of an expensive perfume all indicate nobility. The murderer tried to make us think otherwise by dressing her in a servant’s clothes.” Ming paced the room slowly. “I’m sure no one in this room needs me to tell them that, from a young age, the feet of upper-class girls are bound in order to prevent their growth and render them beautiful. What people might not know, though, is that with binding the big toe is often stretched back over the top of the foot, while the other toes are bent under the foot. This produces somewhat different, and painful, deformities in each woman. Though men never get to see them, the women’s servants do, in private. Therefore the motivation to remove a woman’s feet is to prevent her from being identified by a servant who knows her peculiar deformities only too well.”

“That is certainly very interesting,” said Kan. “What about the wound to the breast?”

“Well! The prefecture judge pointed to the indubitable cruelty evidenced there, and I’d agree that the wound looks very much like teeth wounds from a large animal. But we don’t know that the wound was necessarily inflicted immediately after the moment of death. Any dog passing down the alleyway where the corpse was dumped could have stopped and devoured that part of her, and at any point.”

Kan frowned and glanced at the hourglass standing on one side of the room.

“Very well,” he said. “Thank you, in the name of the emperor, for your efforts. We’ll call upon you if we have any further need of you. Now if you’ll please follow my assistant, he’ll show you out.” And with this he turned on his heel.

“Excellency! Please!” It was Ming. “You’ve skipped the Reader…I spoke about him to the prefecture magistrate, who agreed that he should accompany us here.”

“The Reader?” said Kan.

“The Corpse Reader,” said Ming, pointing to Cí. “The best student I’ve ever had.”

“Well, I wasn’t informed.” Kan shot a malevolent glance at his assistant. “And frankly, I wonder what he could possibly add that your expertise might have missed.”

“It might seem strange, sir, but he has the ability to see things where, for any other person, whoever it may be, there is only darkness.”

“Yes, I do find it strange.” He muttered something but then turned to Cí. “Fine, but get on with it. Anything to add?”

Indeed I do .

Cí stepped forward, picked up a knife, and, before anyone could stop him, plunged it into the corpse’s belly.

“I can add that what we have here is no woman,” he said, lifting out innards and holding them above the corpse. “This body belonged to a man.”

24

Further examination confirmed Cí’s assertion: the corpse had no female reproductive organs. Kan was astonished. Seating himself on a bench, he asked Cí to go on.

With a confident tone, Cí went on to assert that the wound to the lung had been the sole cause of death. Though its edges didn’t have the hard, pinkish patches produced when living flesh is cut—nor did the ankle and neck stumps, nor did the gash around the sex—Cí found definitive signs of collapse in the lung, which happened only when a living person’s lung was punctured.

He rejected the idea that an animal had been involved. The lung had clearly been removed with a great degree of brutality, as if someone had been trying to access the heart, but, he pointed out, there were no scratches or bite marks, nothing to indicate the involvement of any large animal. And though the ribs had been broken, they were clean breaks, as if made by some kind of tool. It seemed, in any case, as though the murderer had been looking for something inside the corpse. And it would appear that whatever it was had been found.

“Why? What might he have been looking for?” asked Kan.

“That I don’t know. Maybe an arrowhead broke off inside and the killer tried to remove it because, say, it was reinforced with some kind of precious metal or something else that would point to the culprit.”

“As for the amputations…”

“I believe they were a red herring. Professor Ming’s idea that the corpse belonged to a noblewoman, and that the feet had been removed to prevent her identification—though an excellent reflection—is, I think, what the murderer wanted us to believe. Add that to the smooth, feminine body, and the breasts above all—”

“Male genitalia, but also breasts? Should we be thinking about the victim as some kind of aberration of nature?”

“Not at all. The deceased was, in fact, none other than an Imperial eunuch.”

But Cí’s astuteness did not have the desired effect. From the way Kan clenched his fists and muttered under his breath, it seemed that he was kicking himself for not having drawn the same conclusion. Everyone knew that eunuchs often developed feminine features, especially those castrated before puberty. Kan glared at Cí as though he were responsible for the oversight, as if he had somehow caused Kan to misinterpret the evidence.

“That will be all,” he hissed.

On their way back to the academy, Ming asked Cí to explain his logic.

“I worked it out during your remarks, when you said it would have been easy to identify the woman by her deformed feet…”

“Yes?”

“Well, as you yourself pointed out, foot binding is only something the upper classes do. Kan would definitely have known that. So we have to assume he’d already interviewed all the noble families about a disappearance. Since he asked you to help, it must have been because those interviews bore no fruit.”