The woman’s body lay face down in a small vigorous torrent, swollen by the rains that ran into the Tatuban estero. The stream was some way to the north of the city, between the Dagupan railroad and the Santa Cruz racecourse. Carriscant looked around him: they were barely a mile from Intramuros and yet all around them was bushy scrub and marshy fields under low pewtery clouds. It was a depressing scene, drear. Drear was the perfect word, he thought. Or drookit, a good Scottish word, except that had connotations of cold and here it was warm and steamy. The rain pattered steadily against his hat and yellow slicker. Bobby, beside him, held an umbrella above his head and not far off half a dozen native constables stood by stoically, soaked through.
“This track here leads to Tondo,” Bobby said, pointing, then swivelled round. “Go the other way and you get to the Chinese hospital.”
“Is she Chinese?”
“Mestiza, I think. We can’t identify her. Chances are she’s from Tondo.”
The woman was unshod and her clothes were mean and worn. Carriscant shrugged. “Tondo. It could take you months to find out who she was, if at all.”
“We got to try,” Bobby said tersely.
Carriscant frowned: Bobby was not in a good mood—understandable, perhaps, but he could not see why he had been summoned. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.
Bobby signalled to the constables to move the body from the streambed and turned away and offered Carriscant a cigar which, for once, he accepted. They dithered and fussed over the lighting process, Carriscant taking three damp matches and Bobby two. Carriscant exhaled smoke, looking out over the drab scene. The cigar was cheap, tasted dry, of straw, hot on the back of his throat, an odd contrast as everything he saw spelled ‘cool’: grey skies, muddy greens, rain, waterlogged ground. He felt he was breathing in tepid consomme. Under his shiny raincoat he felt completely damp, hot and damp.
Bobby blew on the end of his cigar and said, “I think it’s the same fellow.”
“What do you mean?”
“Same person killed her as killed Ward and Braun.”
Bobby led him over to the four-wheeled wagon where the woman was now laid out. She was young, not much more than twenty-five, Carriscant guessed, her face covered in smallpox scars. She looked thin and malnourished and the right side of her muslin blouse was torn. As Bobby lifted her arm Carriscant saw, through the rip, the rough puckered slit of a knife wound between her fourth and fifth ribs.
“Stabbed in the heart,” Bobby said. “And like the others found in or near water at the site of Filipino or American lines as they were on 4 February 1899.”
“Who was up here?” Carriscant said, surprised.
“First Montana.” Carriscant was sceptical. “If she’d been a dead American soldier, I’d grant you your supposition. But she’s a peasant, a sick peasant too, I’d wager, from a Tondo slum. And there’s no L-shaped wound.”
Bobby’s hand went into his pocket and drew something out. He showed it to Carriscant: it was a scalpel. Carriscant took it.
“We found it by the body, just on the bank there,” Bobby said.
It was a Merck and Frankl scalpel, heavy duty, with a strong two-inch-long bevelled blade, Carriscant saw.
“It’s what we call a straight, sharp-pointed bistoury. Not for precision work. It’s a common make,” Carriscant said, returning it.
“We figure the murderer was surprised. Otherwise I’m sure we’d have an L-shaped wound and a missing heart.”
“But why a woman? Why a slum dweller?”
“I don’t know.”
“We…” Carriscant paused, not knowing quite how to express this. “We have these scalpels in the San Jeronimo.”
“I know,” Bobby said. “And in the San Lazaro and the First Reserve hospital.” He carefully put the scalpel back in his pocket. “Could you tell if one of these was missing?”
“Possibly.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
Carriscant looked back at the corpse. The soaked clothes were plastered to the small thin body. He could see that the belly was markedly distended. The mouth was slightly open showing stained front teeth. His brain was working quickly, troubled and agitated.
“I think you’ll find,” he said to Bobby, “that this woman is pregnant. Four or five months.” He pointed to the swell of her belly.
“Really? God…” The information seemed to have disturbed Bobby unduly. “That’s awful.”
“I’ll confirm it at the hospital,” Carriscant said. He made his farewells.
On the ride back to Manila he found his mind returning again and again to the same troubling conclusion. The scalpel found by the woman’s body, he was sure, would be traced back to his operating theatre at the San Jeronimo. He could not explain where this conviction came from. But it came to him with the numinous clarity of a revelation. Someone had stolen it and that someone, or some people, had placed it by the body for the sole purpose of implicating him in the murders.