Chapter 90 - 56 Self-Harm_2
If it made no sense, she would stop trying to understand it. Ran Yan didn’t utter a superfluous word and went straight to the corpse placed at her feet.
The body was now on a wooden platform high enough that she only needed to bend over slightly to reach it. Tables and stands in the Tang Dynasty were rarely this high, and one could tell at a glance that it was specially made. Ran Yan silently cursed Inspector Liu: That damned old fox!
When she lifted the plain cloth, a terrifying female corpse was revealed. The body was still somewhat fresh, and as Inspector Liu had said, the face was a bloody mess with skin and flesh cut open. Judging by sight, there were at least eleven or twelve cuts, primarily on the cheeks and jaw, with only bloodstains on the forehead, but no wounds.
The face was swollen and purplish, and when Ran Yan lifted the corpse’s eyelids, she found as expected the subconjunctival hemorrhage in the eyes.
The way forensic doctors like Ran Yan thought about death was to consider homicide before suicide, external causes before internal ones, and injury before disease. Seeing a corpse as cruelly disfigured as Cui Mei’s, Ran Yan would certainly first examine it from the perspective of a homicide, with the external injuries being quite obvious.
However, after a series of examinations, based on the arrangement of the wounds and the direction of the cuts, Ran Yan reached a very puzzling conclusion—the marks on Cui Mei’s face seemed to have been self-inflicted!
The neck also had only one strangulation mark below the throat. The marks at the back of the neck branched out like the character for "eight" instead of intersecting, indicating signs of self-hanging rather than someone else strangling her and then staging it as a suicide.
To verify this result, Ran Yan quickly undressed the body until it was completely bare.