Laurent Tardieu left me in my chemise and culotte while he checked the pockets of my skirt for anything that might help to identify me. He found nothing. He then inspected my clothing for laundry marks, initials sewn with cotton thread on lapels or inside collars or waistbands. He did find initials on my blouse, which he added to the log, but on their own, meant not a lot. As far as he knew, my clothing could have been second- or even third-hand. He took note of the condition of my belongings: everything inexpensive but well looked-after. A tightly sewn patch on the elbow of my cardigan, neat darn tracks on the heels of my stockings. He noted that I wore no wedding ring nor any other jewellery. No lace or ribbon adorned my underclothing. Though my hair had become tangled and undone under the water, he could see that it had recently been washed. From my hands he retrieved one brown leaf and a slippery tangle of river weed. Common, he knew, from the struggle of the drowned. The residue of bloody foam in my mouth told him that I had inhaled water into my lungs, which meant that, when I entered the water, I was still alive. The lack of trauma to my body told him that, most likely, the water had been my choice.

Yet, I eluded him. My corpse and what I wore revealed very little about who I might have been, other than the assumption that, at some point in my life, I must have had some claim on the future, otherwise why the careful darning? Why the effort to make an item of clothing last just that little bit longer? This, more than anything else in his work, was what touched Laurent Tardieu’s heart the deepest. Jackets worn down to the seams, elbows reinforced with leather. It was the ingenuity, the bringing out of thimble and thread that represented some will to survive, but then, in the case of suicide, the evidence before him on the slab that this woman or that man had, at last, given up.

Laurent Tardieu was a wonder at recognizing professional darning and leather patchwork, and sometimes traced the dead through the establishments that performed these services. He knew where certain silks, velvets and satins were sold, the signature styles of lace and needlework, of seams and cuffs and collars. He knew the craftsmanship of several cobblers in Paris, and had identified more than a few victims with the help of these artisans.

Meticulously, in tight, slanted handwriting, Laurent Tardieu added to his log every blouse, shawl, boot and bonnet. Every scar, tattoo, broken bone or missing digit. Wounds or blemishes on the body were attributed with their size, severity, location and possible cause.

He had observed that most river suicides were carried out by single women. Often on a Sunday. Often in the spring. It was the blooms and the stench of reproduction, he believed, that spurred a certain melancholy in unwed women of a particular age and social standing. These women were alone in the world, or at least alone in Paris, and proof of this was the fact that they usually went unclaimed, their corpses blackened and split like rotting plums after days of submersion. They would have known the river, these women. Perhaps they lived close by. They had spent time walking its bridges and embankments. They imagined what the cold water would have felt like, or what would have waited for them down in the dark. They imagined their own loose hair and skirts flowing with the current, down there with the weeds and the silt and the other unknowable things.