Lake of Sorrows

Nora lifted the sheet and looked at the band still encircling the man’s wrist, its metal parts corroded green and black. She could just make out the word “Waterproof” on its peat-clogged face, a watchmaker’s assertion now disproved. The hands pointed to 9:55; faded red characters, TUE 20, showed through the window at three o’clock. Around his neck was the thin leather cord with its three knots, regularly spaced, about an inch apart. The Gardai would have trouble identifying the corpse, if this and the watch were all they had to go on. She considered his still outline, wondering who had waited in vain for him to arrive; who had held fear inside like a clenched fist, waiting for any news of him; who, perhaps, was waiting still.

The left arm that had stretched toward the top of the bog now extended above the man’s head, the partially skeletonized hand still bagged to preserve any forensic evidence. Dr. Friel would take scrapings from beneath the fingernails, to check for traces of skin or hair from another person—possible evidence of a struggle, if he hadn’t gone quietly to his death. But the acidic bog environment typically destroyed fragile nuclear DNA, so even if there was any tissue residue from a struggle, it probably wouldn’t provide concrete clues to a killer’s identity.

She circled the table to take a closer look at the man’s right hand through another polythene bag. This hand was much better preserved than the other, the palm and fingertips marvelously intact. Her primary impulse, on seeing this modern body, was to wonder whether she might be allowed to take a few small samples to analyze and compare to older specimens. But that would require the consent of the family, if the man’s identity was ever determined, and might require a delicate diplomatic approach. Maybe Dr. Friel would have some advice.

At the other end of the table, the sight of the dead man’s right foot was particularly arresting: brown skin stretched, tentlike, over a fan of bone and sinew. The flexed foot was delicately pointed as if caught in a dance step, from the toes, like five small dark stones in a row, to the wrinkled arch and rounded heel leading to the shapely ankle. Strange, Nora thought, that the glimpse of a bare foot should strike such an oddly intimate chord. But the feeling was not unfamiliar; she had experienced similar, fleeting flashes whenever she worked on a cadaver. Death allowed all kinds of intimacies never imagined in life. She wanted so much from this man, whose skin and bones and sinews had already begun to form answers to her questions. For as long as she could remember, the human body had been her subject, her instrument, her fascination. Most people misunderstood the pathologist’s motivation; it was not a preoccupation with death, but a profound curiosity about life. She had seen a Latin inscription in some mortuaries that captured the philosophy exactly: Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae. “This is the place where death delights to help the living.” There was a procedure to be followed, a routine that broke the experience of death away from emotion and grief, and pushed it instead into the realm of scientific observation. It relieved her mind, at least for a while, to believe the illusion that she was dealing only with flesh and bone, with the comforting clarity of science rather than the murky world of human relationships. But even scientific detachment didn’t last. Eventually every person on the autopsy table had to be recognized as someone who had lately had a life.