A Murder in Time(63)

As Rebecca began setting up her art supplies, Kendra glanced around. Visiting morgues and viewing autopsies were all part of the job, but there was something really creepy about this room, with the cold seeping up from the stone floor, the dead animal carcasses hanging by hooks against the far wall, and the flickering light from the lanterns, staving off the perpetual gloom. The smell—dust and decay—seemed to have grown stronger.

She saw that Rebecca was also affected, but that might have had less to do with the atmosphere than it did with the corpse. For a long moment, Rebecca stared down at the dead girl, her expression solemn. Kendra thought she saw her shiver, but when she reached for the paper and pastels, her movements were brisk and sure.

Kendra didn’t know what to expect, whether she’d get an accurate likeness of the victim or not. It wasn’t as though Rebecca was a professional artist. Art was merely considered an appropriate activity for ladies of the era. At least she wouldn’t get a woman with three noses, as modernism wouldn’t take the art world by storm for several more decades. But Kendra was impressed with the woman’s absolute focus, her face pulled into lines of concentration as she worked, her tongue caught between her teeth. For the next ten minutes, the only sound in the room was the whispery movement of pastels against sketch paper.

“What color are her eyes?” Rebecca asked, without stopping, without looking up.

“Brown.”

She nodded, choosing a different pastel. Her fingers were smudged with color by the time she put the crayon down, and flipped her drawing tablet around to show them.

Kendra studied the portrait with an appreciation she hadn’t expected to feel. Not only had Rebecca captured the girl’s likeness, but she’d infused it with a liveliness that was obviously now absent. Maybe it was creative license, but Rebecca had added just the faintest smile to the Cupid’s bow mouth, a healthy tint of pink in the cheeks, a coquettish gleam in the eyes.

“You’re good. You’re very good.”

“Better than a death mask,” Aldridge added, and then looked over at Kendra. “You were right to insist upon this, Miss Donovan.”

“Do you really believe this will help?” Rebecca asked.

Kendra thought of what was said yesterday, that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of brothels in London—assuming the vic was even from a London brothel. She shrugged. “It can’t hurt.”

Gently Aldridge pulled the blanket up to cover Jane Doe’s face.

“What will happen to her now, Duke?” Rebecca asked.

“We shall have to bury her soon. We can’t keep her here forever.”

“A day or two at the most,” Alec agreed.

The Duke picked up Rebecca’s art supplies, and gestured toward the door. “Shall we?”

“You can go,” Kendra said. “I have one more thing I need to do.”

She was already turning to Rebecca so she didn’t see the humor that flashed in the Duke’s eyes. It wasn’t every day, Aldridge reflected, that he was dismissed by a servant.

“Could I borrow a pastel stick and some of your sketch paper?” she asked Rebecca.

Even though the other woman’s eyebrows rose questioningly, she handed over the requested supplies. “What are you planning, Miss Donovan?”

“I need to view the body again. Make a record of the wounds inflicted. I should have done it before the autopsy, but . . .” She’d still been reeling over the fact that she was in the nineteenth century. “I’ll need some assistance turning over the body.”

“I will stay with Miss Donovan,” Alec volunteered.

The Duke hesitated, looking as though he would’ve preferred to stay as well. But then he took Rebecca’s sketches and box of pastels and ushered her from the room. The woman shot them a departing look that was impossible to interpret before the door closed behind her.

Ignoring Alec’s presence, Kendra concentrated on drawing two crude outlines of the female form, front and back.

“Perhaps Rebecca ought to have stayed. Your artistic skill leaves much to be desired,” Alec observed, seeing the results of her handiwork.

She made a face. “Likeness isn’t important here. Location is—location of the injuries.” She put down the paper and pastel stick, and pulled off the blanket.

Dalton had done the standard Y-incision, sewing up the ragged edges of flesh after he’d finished. The girl looked like a torn ragdoll that some tailor had attempted to repair, with gruesome results. Her skin had become more mottled, tinged greenish-red. They were right; the cool temperature in the icehouse wouldn’t delay the body from breaking down much longer.

Methodically, Kendra moved down the body with her visual examination, starting at the top. “No bruises, cuts on the face, other than petechiae around the eyes,” she murmured. Was that significant? She retrieved the paper and pastel stick, drew a line through the neck area. “Manual strangulation. Several times. Ultimate cause of death. Bite mark on left breast.” She made a corresponding mark on the drawing, scribbling notes in the margins. “Knife wounds begin beneath the breasts. Looks like shallow slashes on upper torso. Deeper, thicker cuts in the middle of torso following the path of the Y-incision to the pubis. Still—deliberate cuts. No stabbing. Nothing frenzied.”

Alec suspected Kendra wasn’t even aware that she was talking out loud. He watched her with a kind of appalled fascination as she marked up the crude drawing she’d made, carefully depicting each wound, and meticulously writing notes in the margins. In a strange way, her behavior, the intense look of concentration on her face, reminded him of the Duke when he was caught up in one of his experiments.