‘What?’
‘Left something in the office. Give me a sec.’ She walks out, leaving me alone with Rosalind. She is lying naked on the metal platform in the middle of the room. Aside from the angry marks around her neck and some slight bruising on her thighs, she is flawless. Her perfect breasts, larger than I had imagined, roll slightly to each side but still point skywards, fulfilling all manner of universal fantasies. Her veins are delicate webs underneath her skin. Her wrists and ankles are almost childlike. Her lashes are dark and fan prettily; little shadows spiking out beyond them. I had wondered what she looked like naked so many times. I never expected this to be the circumstance under which I would find out. I walk over and stand beside her. I look into her eyes and wonder what they saw in their final moments. I whisper things to her that I wouldn’t dare say to anyone breathing. Words tumble out and I’m left empty and drained from the sudden release of my secrets. The clock ticks loudly from the wall above my head.
‘Right, let’s do this.’ Anna barges back in, snapping on latex gloves.
I step away from Rosalind, my heart racing, skin on alert across my body. I clutch involuntarily at my gut and then quickly drop my hand.
Anna walks around and picks up Rosalind’s arm, shifting it away from the edge of the table.
‘Should we wait for the others?’ I ask.
‘I told them eleven forty-five. They’re late,’ Anna replies, pressing a button on her phone to record her analysis. ‘Deceased female. Rosalind Elizabeth Ryan. Twenty-eight years of age. Found Saturday, twelfth December at around seven-thirty am face down in Sonny Lake in Smithson, New South Wales. Suspected homicide. Trauma to the head and suspected strangulation.’ She looks at Rose’s waxy face. ‘No suspects at this time.’
Felix and Jonesy enter the room. I can feel the heat coming from Felix as he stands next to me. Anna flashes them a quick, businesslike smile.
‘And the guy who found her?’ asks Anna.
‘A local man on a morning jog,’ I say. ‘Connor Marsh. We’ve cleared him.’
‘Jeez. Just the thing to have you renewing your gym membership.’ Jonesy laughs at his own joke, widening his stance and leaning heavily against the wall.
Felix’s hand scrapes softly against mine. A tingle pulses somewhere between my chest and throat.
‘Right, I’m going in.’ Anna puts on her mask, adjusts her gloves and circles her shoulders as if she’s about to throw a punch.
‘What a beauty,’ says Jonesy helpfully. ‘A bloody waste killing a girl like that.’
Anna tackles Rosalind’s wounds first, prodding into the ugly redness that is like a blooming flower on her left temple.
I stare at her until my eyes blur, until she becomes a mass of indistinguishable pixels. I think about transferring money into my savings account, my court appearance for a rape case in the new year, stopping to get petrol later, what I’m going to get Dad for his birthday. Anything to stop the piercing sound of Rosalind Ryan’s body being sawn open. Whatever air was trapped in there is forced out as her chest plate is cracked open. That’s the part that always gets me. It makes no sense but it’s like my brain reasons, Well, no one could survive that, so they really must be dead.
‘What’s with the roses that were all over her?’ asks Anna.
‘We think she was given them at the end of the play. She wrote and directed it. Maybe she still had them with her afterwards?’
Anna nods and keeps prodding Rose. ‘Kind of creepy that she was covered in flowers. Sort of like a real burial.’
I nod. Felix and I have talked about the flowers already, figuring they must mean something. An apology, perhaps? An attempt at a proper send-off?
I look at Rose, trying to ignore all the clinical markings and death tools. It is bizarre how death grabs at a body: claws at it, owns it. I must have attended at least fifty post-mortems by now. Each one sticks in my mind for a different reason. The most violent. The weirdest. The most straightforward. The youngest. I still vividly recall watching the autopsy of a three-year-old who had been killed by her stepfather. I held her hand as she lay on the table. Anna and I both cried.
Anna is making comments as she works, detailing her findings and Rosalind’s general health. ‘Non-smoker, I think, but the liver is a bit of a mess. She had dinner before she was killed.’ She scrunches up her face while she works through the stomach and intestines. ‘Some kind of dessert too. Maybe strawberries. And definitely alcohol in the hours before she died, judging by the digestion.’
Anna moves to the next stage of the examination. More robotic now, she reports her findings like she is reading a textbook. Jonesy peppers the procedure with unnecessary conversation before grabbing me around the shoulders and saying, ‘Sorry, Woodstock, I keep forgetting she was your mate.’
I shrug him away. I’m so used to the autopsy table chitchat now that I barely notice it.
Anna continues, ‘She definitely struggled. Though it doesn’t look like too much. I’d say she was already on the ground trying to scramble away rather than fighting back. This is dirt, not skin.’ Anna is inspecting Rose’s fingernails, bagging the slivers that she has carefully clipped off. ‘Definitely some recent bruising on her thighs but nothing conclusive.’ Then Anna starts to examine her genitals, looking for signs of sexual assault.
I deliberately tune out and begin counting the rubbery scratches on the floor.
It isn’t until Anna says, ‘Mm, well, this is interesting,’ that I snap back to the present.
‘What is it?’
We all lean forward.
‘Seems your dead girl was pregnant.’
Chapter Eight
Sunday, 13 December, 3.43 pm
I call Scott to tell him I’ll be home late. Then I spend the afternoon poring over what I can access of Rosalind’s social media accounts, phone records, medical records and financials but because it’s a weekend, there’s a lot of information that I can’t get hold of yet. The field crew is at the school trawling over the grounds looking for any signs of a struggle or a murder scene, but so far they haven’t come up with anything. Charlie calls just after 4 pm to let us know that a small bag has been located down the back of the oval, deep in some tall grass, with Rosalind’s phone, purse and lip balm inside.
‘They’re all wet,’ Charlie tells me. ‘Must have gone into the lake with her to begin with and then I guess the killer ended up dumping them here.’
‘Did you search the stormwater drain?’ I ask him. ‘The one near where she was found?’
‘’Course.’ Charlie sounds like he’s eating an apple. I can picture his big ruddy face covered in freckles as he marvels over the unsavoury delights hidden on the grounds of my old high school. ‘Did that first thing. It was empty apart from water, dead animals and a shitload of graffiti.’
‘So nothing unusual then?’