He could feel not a whisper of breath.
Her face was dead white, the lips blueish. Her tongue, protruding slightly, looked swollen. Rolling her over on to her front, he pressed down with his hands and leaned his weight on her back, at the level of the lungs: he had seen a man saved that way once, seen how the pressure squeezed the water from the body, brought the victim back from the brink so that he coughed out the muck in his throat and drew a life-restoring breath …
But that man had been under water for a matter of minutes. And this girl, this poor girl, had, Josse was forced to recognise, been immersed for hours.
She was quite dead.
He sat back on his heels, staring down at her. He felt tears running down his face, and brushed them away.
Her hair, he noticed absently, had been reddish. Curly, springy. It would have been sad when the day came to clip it short for the donning of barbette and wimple. He hadn’t noticed it yesterday … No. Of course not. Yesterday she had been wearing the short black veil of the postulant.
He took off his tunic and draped it over her head and the upper part of her body. Then, bare-chested, he went to find Abbess Helewise to tell her that Elvera had drowned.
* * *
If the Abbess were surprised at being summoned by a half-naked man before Prime, she gave no sign. Very shortly after Josse had located one of the sisters on night duty in the hospital, and told her the brief details of his urgent mission, Helewise had appeared, gliding down the steps from the dormitory, perfectly dressed, bringing with her a faint scent of lavender.
She, Josse thought absently, was indeed the exception to the general rule. She was as sweet-smelling as an Aquitaine gentlewoman.
‘Good day, Sir Josse,’ she greeted him. ‘It was you who found her, Sister Beata tells me?’
‘Aye, lady.’
‘Drowned.’
‘Aye. Drowned.’
She was having the same dreadful thought; he could read it in her eyes. She glanced over her shoulder, but Sister Beata had gone back to the hospital. Drowned postulants, her attitude seemed to say, were not her business, not while she had the sick and the suffering in her charge.
‘Do you think she died at her own hand?’ Helewise asked quietly.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s possible.’
She was nodding slowly. ‘We both noticed her state of mind yesterday,’ she said, in the same quiet, controlled tone. But he noticed the agitated hands, the strong fingers pulling at each other. As if she realised, she folded her hands and hid them away inside her sleeves. ‘I should have stayed with her, comforted her,’ she went on. ‘If she took her own life, I am to blame.’
He wanted to shake her. Tell her that, ultimately, every man and woman on God’s earth is responsible for themselves. That, if a soul is intent on self-destruction, that is their choice.
He said simply, ‘If she took her own life, Abbess, it was because it had gone so terribly awry that she considered it no longer worth the living. And that, you must agree, is not something for which you must blame yourself.’
She didn’t answer for some time. Then, after a faint sigh, she said, ‘We had better arrange for her body to be brought up to the Abbey.’
‘Not just yet.’ He heard the urgency in his voice. ‘I only had the briefest look at her. Let us return together. There may be things we can learn.’
She gazed at him. She seemed hardly to hear, and he wondered if she were in shock. Then abruptly she gave herself a shake, and said, ‘Of course. Lead the way.’
* * *
She made a detour from the track to go to the lay brothers’ quarters, and he heard her telling one of them about this latest death. ‘Come along in a little while,’ she said, ‘and bring something on which to carry her.’
The lay brother glanced at Josse, made some remark, and disappeared inside the shelter, to emerge with a brown robe in his hands. He nodded towards Josse.
The Abbess, returning to him, handed him the robe. ‘With Brother Saul’s compliments,’ she said.
‘I am sorry to appear before you like this,’ Josse said belatedly, putting on the robe. ‘My tunic covers her face.’
The Abbess nodded.
Then, silently, they went on to Elvera.
* * *
It was Abbess Helewise who noticed the marks on Elvera’s throat, purely because, out of delicacy, Josse had left it to her to unfasten the neck of the robe and expose the soft, creamy flesh.
Josse had been inspecting the girl’s hands — the right, which had been in the water, was dead white and crinkled, but the left had been on dry land, and there was something about it he wanted to show the Abbess — when he suddenly noticed Helewise’s stillness.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘What is it?’
Helewise pointed.
Elvera had a long neck, slim, graceful. At the front, neatly, side by side, were two clear thumb marks. And descending down the soft skin behind each ear were two rows of finger marks.
As Josse watched, Helewise put her own hand over the marks. Whoever had done this had hands considerably larger than hers.
‘She was throttled,’ Josse said quietly. ‘I would think, by a man.’
Helewise was stroking the bruised neck, tenderly, as if trying to assuage the pain of the wounds. ‘Throttled,’ she repeated. Then, looking up, she met Josse’s eyes. ‘God help me, but I am so very glad. I was so afraid that she had killed herself,’ she said, speaking rapidly.
He understood. Knew, too, even from his brief experience of her, that, by and by, she would realise what she had just said.
He did not have to wait long. With a sort of gasp, she stopped her ministrations, put both hands to her face and said from behind them, ‘What have I said? Oh, dear God, I’m sorry!’
He watched her anguish, aching with sympathy. He did not know what to do; on balance, it seemed best to do nothing. Pretend he hadn’t noticed. He gave a brief rueful smile; that would be impossible.
After some moments, he said, ‘Abbess, I don’t want to intrude, but Brother Saul…’
She removed her hands from her face. She was ashen, and the anguish in her eyes made his heart ache for her. She said, very quietly, ‘Thank you for the reminder.’ With a visible effort, she pulled herself together. She bent over Elvera’s body, and, as if she were tucking the covers around a sleeping child, rearranged Josse’s tunic over the girl’s head. Then, standing up, she turned to look up the path towards the shrine. ‘Brother Saul is on his way,’ she said, in what sounded very like her normal tone.
Josse looked too. ‘Aye.’ Then, suddenly remembering the mass of footprints at the place where Gunnora had been found, obscuring any trace a fleeing killer might have left, he hurried along the track and spoke briefly to Saul. Then, very aware of both Saul’s and the Abbess’s eyes on him, he began to walk slowly along the path in the other direction.
The short grass on the path was dry, the earth hard-baked, and there was little chance he’d find anything. But then he saw a disturbance in the longer grass between the path and the pond; it looked as if someone’s foot had missed the path and slipped sideways into the softer gound at the edge of the water.
Hardly daring to hope, he knelt down and went forward on all fours.
Very gently, he parted the long grass. And saw, quite clearly, the marks of running feet. Whoever it was had taken three … four … five paces on the softer ground. Perhaps he had been looking back over his shoulder at what he had left behind him, and not noticed that he was no longer running on the path. But he had certainly been running, there was no doubt of that. The prints were of the front part of the foot, and the toes had dug deep into the soft ground as if he had been pushing himself as hard as he could.
Josse stared down at the footprints.