There was perfusion in her face.

There was blood moving under that skin.

Her lips were not right.

She had been dead, I was told, for two days, and a person who has been dead for two days does not have that.

And there was a thing on her left hand, just below the knuckle, that I could not stop looking at, and which turned out to be the piece of information that a layperson would have walked past and that I could not.

It was a small bruise with a dot in the centre of it.

An extravasation.

The mark a cannula leaves when a line has been running and the fluid has gone into the tissue instead of into the vein.

It is a specific thing and it looks a specific way and it takes hours to form.

Which means a line had been running in my daughter’s hand.

Which means somebody had been giving her something.

People do not put lines into the dead.

I put two fingers on the side of her neck and held them there for a full sixty seconds, counting, because that is what you do when you think you might be about to be wrong about something enormous.

Twenty-two.