It appeared to be a thumb, but at first glance, it was difficult to tell whether it had come from the left or right hand.
Fang Mingyan crouched down, took a handkerchief from inside his robe, and used it to pick up the finger, placing it by itself on the cloth.
“You said this finger wasn’t cut from a corpse? What does that mean?”
Jiang Yunxin explained, “It means this finger was cut from a living person’s hand, not from the hand of a corpse.”
Besides this finger, there were other fingers—and ears.
If all of them had been cut from living people, then this was not corpse theft. It was murder!
Fang Mingyan’s expression grew even more solemn. He placed everything on a single handkerchief, and everyone examined the remains together.
“What about the others?” Fang Mingyan asked. “Were they all cut from living people’s faces?”
Jiang Yunxin was somewhat nervous as she examined them one by one. Then she breathed a sigh of relief. “No. All the others were cut off after death. Only this finger was severed from a living person. Judging from it, the person was probably a man who did manual labor. The finger is thick, the skin is rough, and there’s a callus on the pad.”
Everyone let out a sigh of relief.
“Explain specifically how you can tell,” Fang Mingyan said.
If this had been one of the old coroners from the Judicial Review Office, Fang Mingyan would have trusted him completely; he would only have needed to ask for the result. His detailed questioning of Jiang Yunxin was partly because he was still somewhat uneasy, but it also contained an element of testing her.
Fang Mingyan had never imagined that the Judicial Review Office would recruit a female coroner. But he had always valued ability above all else. If Jiang Yunxin truly possessed the necessary skills, then there was no reason it could not be done.
Besides, a female coroner had advantages of her own.
In truth, coroners did not examine only the dead. They could also inspect injuries on living people.
A male coroner had to avoid impropriety when examining a woman. But if the coroner was a woman, the restrictions could be somewhat less stringent.
For example, a male coroner could not examine a female victim’s body—not her arms or legs, either.
With a female coroner, however, as long as she avoided certain private areas, examining a male victim’s arms, legs, chest, and back would not be a problem.
Jiang Yunxin said, “To distinguish an injury inflicted before death from one inflicted afterward, we mainly look for vital reactions. Vital reactions mean… the reactions of a living body. When exposed to the same external stimulus, a living person and a dead person will react completely differently.”
Jiang Yunxin had been in this era for some time now, and she understood very clearly that, when it came to her professional knowledge, the issue was not simply whether she knew something. Both what she knew and what she did not know had to appear natural. She could not casually use too many terms that others would be unable to understand.
She had to explain unfamiliar concepts with words everyone could comprehend.
Her explanation was simple and easy to understand, and everyone nodded.
Jiang Yunxin continued, “If a muscle is severed before death, it contracts noticeably, causing the skin along the wound edges to curl inward. As a result, the wound gapes widely.”
“If the injury occurs shortly after death, the skin around the wound will also gape. But because the contraction is not as pronounced, the wound will not open as widely.”
“If the injury occurs much later—especially after rigor mortis has set in—the wound will gape only slightly, and there will be no contraction along the edges.”
No one had expected Jiang Yunxin to explain it so smoothly. She sounded as though she truly knew what she was talking about.
Jiang Yunxin added, “When a person is injured before death, the wound is stimulated, and localized redness and swelling soon appear, along with fluid discharge. The longer the person survives after being injured, the more obvious these reactions become. But a corpse that was already dead when injured will not show them.”
Compared with the other remains, the reactions in this severed finger were obviously extremely pronounced.
It had been hacked off a living person’s hand. Jiang Yunxin could even imagine the injured person leaping about in agony.
Wearing the gloves she carried with her, Jiang Yunxin carefully examined the severed finger.
It was almost as if flowers would bloom from the wound.
Fang Mingyan asked Old Zhou, “Were you the only person in the Mortuary today?”
Obviously, he was asking about the living, not the dead.
“It was just me,” Old Zhou said. “I was the only one. Not another person came by all day.”
“Then did you hear anyone screaming in agony?”
“No, absolutely not.” Old Zhou answered at once, but after thinking about it, he added, “The wind was especially strong today, though. If someone was shouting outside at a distance, I can’t say for certain. We probably wouldn’t have heard it.”
The wind had been particularly strong that night. The grass had been blown nearly flat, and it was impossible for footprints to remain on the ground. Everyone searched carefully, but they found no bloodstains either.
Jiang Yunxin said, “We can determine that this finger was hacked from a living person, but we can’t establish the exact time. It must have happened sometime between one and two hours ago.”
If they had instruments, they could determine the time with considerable accuracy. But now, everything depended on experience, and Jiang Yunxin did not dare to state it too definitively.
If she claimed certainty and then failed to deliver, she would truly be exposed as a braggart.
And if Fang Mingyan became dissatisfied and sent her back to the academy, then if she was really sent home to marry, she would have no choice but to fight to the death—or flee and live as a fugitive.
Fortunately, Fang Mingyan did not question her further.
He then began asking Old Zhou about the households in the surrounding villages.
This was not a one-time theft. Nine times out of ten, the criminal lived nearby—perhaps in the closest village, Springwater Village.
Jiang Yunxin, however, continued examining the severed finger, turning it over and over in her hands.
Just as Fang Mingyan was preparing to take Old Zhou toward Springwater Village, Jiang Yunxin said, “My lord, I have a theory.”
“Go on.”
Jiang Yunxin placed the severed finger alongside her own and compared them from several angles.
“This is a left thumb. Look at the angle of the wound. It’s different from the others,” Jiang Yunxin said. “The other wounds were made while the corpses were lying flat, with force applied from above, so they all have the same slant. But this finger is different. Its wound is perfectly level.”
The angle of a wound depended not only on the other person’s posture, but also on the attacker’s. However, judging from the height of the corpses in the mortuary, the killer would inevitably have been standing higher up. Surely he had not been sitting on the ground while cutting off the fingers. What kind of bizarre posture would that have been? He would not have been able to exert any force, either.
“But this one is different. With this one, the killer and the hand attached to the severed finger were almost at the same height. That is the only way this level surface could have been formed.”
Fang Mingyan’s expression gave nothing away, but everyone else found what they were hearing rather strange.
How should they put it? The coroners of the Judicial Review Office had always been the most skilled, and there was no question of that. But they had never explained things so clearly before—so clearly that it sounded as though Jiang Yunxin were giving them a lesson.
“Give me the conclusion,” Fang Mingyan said.
Jiang Yunxin said, “The conclusion is that I think the corpse thief cut off his own finger.”
Everyone was stunned.
Xue Dongyang was quick to voice his thoughts. “Why would he cut off his own finger? Could it be that he has a daily assignment—for example, that he has to cut off three fingers every day? Today, he was discovered after cutting off only two, so he had no choice but to cut off one of his own to make up the number?”
Everyone was dumbfounded by Xue Dongyang’s hypothesis.
What kind of extraordinary guess was that?