Laurent Tardieu’s logbooks read like a saga but the real drama existed within him, within the stories he imagined beyond the physical clues.

There was the boy who had been dragged from the river the year before, and in his pocket were found a few bits of string and a rat’s tail. Laurent Tardieu composed a life for this boy that played out in a tiny attic flat, looked after by a single mother with raw, laundry-house knuckles. The boy, about seven years old, only wanted to be with the other children who, in summer, bathed off the Quai de la Rapée. Not knowing how to swim, he dipped into the water and lost his purchase, and no one noticed when the river drew him, lovingly, into her body.

Or what about the elderly man who, before drowning himself, dressed in layers of clothing? Shirts and collars, waistcoats and trousers, top boots over his woollen slippers. His torso, thighs and chest were pocked with the ghost scars of syphilitic papules, a decade healed. In his pockets: a silver snuff box, a leather pouch of tobacco, keys and spectacles. A foreigner, obvious from the cut of his clothes, who, Laurent Tardieu concluded, lived a few steps below the position he would have liked to have occupied in life. Probably widowed. Likely confused and stumbling through the tertiary stage of his venereal disease, demented or insane.

Though he found no signs of trauma on my body, Laurent Tardieu did discover a familiar bilateral bruising along the muscles of my neck and chest, further evidence of drowning, or rather, the thrash and struggle of the drowning victim to survive. He began to create my story. Suicide, naturally. I was the right gender, the right age. He inferred correctly that my missing boots had been placed deliberately on the bank. Apparently quite common.

He palpated my abdomen, and determined from the shiny, pale lines that branded my skin where it had stretched, and from the dark rawness of my nipples, that I was a new mother. I was employed, he decided, with work unsatisfying to me. I hadn’t really wanted to die, those bruises told him as much, and was probably downtrodden by the baby or a lack of love or too much of its unhealthy sort. With a cold sponge and a bowl of warm, soapy water, he washed the bloody foam from my chin and neck, inspected my fingernails.

Being the fresh specimen that my corpse was, Laurent Tardieu knew that any number of the anatomy labs in Paris would pay a good few francs for it, and he considered this option carefully, as his daughter was engaged to be married and the money would have helped a great deal. But there was something about me that intrigued him. He wanted to give me a chance to be found, and presumed that even after a few days in the viewing salon, and with enough care, my body would still be worth a small sum.