He hailed the conclusion with a sigh of relief. He had come here prepared to intervene at the inquest and challenge the identity of the corpse if he had found any evidence of the perpetration of a crime. But he would have been profoundly reluctant to intervene. Now there was no need to intervene, since there was no reason to suppose that any crime had been committed. Possession of an Egyptian mummy does not imply any criminal act. Admittedly, these proceedings of Mr Pottermack’s were highly irregular. But that was a different matter. Allowance had to be made for special circumstances.

  Nevertheless, Thorndyke was not a little puzzled. Acting on his invariable principle, he had disregarded the apparent absence of motive and had steadily pursued the visible facts. But now the question of motive arose as a separate problem. What could be the purpose that lay behind this quaint and ingenious personation of a dead man? Some motive there must have been, and a powerful motive too. Its strength could be measured by the enormous amount of patient and laborious preparation that the result must have entailed, to say nothing of the risk. What could that motive have been? It did not, apparently, arise out of the original circumstances. There must be something else that had not yet come into view. Perhaps the evidence at the inquest might throw some light upon it.

  At any rate, no crime had been committed, and as to this dummy inquest, there was no harm in it. On the contrary, it was all to the good. For it would establish and put on record a fact which otherwise would have gone unascertained and unrecorded, but which ought, on public grounds, to be duly certified and recorded.

  As Thorndyke reached this comfortable conclusion, the sergeant announced the approach of the jury to view the body; whereupon he picked up his attaché-case, and, emerging from the mortuary, made his way to the courtroom and took possession of a chair which a constable was holding in reserve for him, close to that which was to be occupied by the coroner.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Exit Khama-Heru

  Having taken his seat – and wished that it had been a little farther from the coroner’s – Thorndyke glanced round the large courtroom, noting the unusual number of spectators and estimating from it the intense local interest in the inquiry. And as his eye roamed round, it presently alighted on Mr Pottermack, who had secured a seat in a favourable position near the front and was endeavouring, quite unsuccessfully, to appear unaware of Thorndyke’s arrival. So unsuccessful, indeed, were his efforts that inevitably their eyes met, and then there was nothing for it but to acknowledge as graciously as he could the lawyer’s friendly nod of recognition.

  Pottermack’s state of mind was one of agonized expectation. He struggled manfully enough to summon up some sort of confidence. He told himself that this fellow was only a lawyer, and that lawyers know nothing about bodies. Now, if he had been a doctor it might have been a different matter. But there was that accursed shoe. He had certainly looked at that as if he saw something unusual about it; and there was no reason why a lawyer shouldn’t know something about shoes. Yet what could he have seen in it? There was nothing to see. It was a genuine shoe, and the soles and heels were unquestionably correct in every detail. He, Pottermack, could hardly have distinguished them from the originals himself.

  So his feelings oscillated miserably between unreasonable hope and an all too reasonable alarm. He would have got up and gone out but that even his terrors urged him to stay at all costs and hear what this lawyer should say when his turn came to give evidence. And thus, though he longed to escape, he remained glued to his chair, waiting, waiting for the mine to blow up; and whenever his roving glance fell, as it constantly did from minute to minute, on the sphinx-like countenance of that inopportune lawyer, a cold chill ran down his spine.

  Thorndyke, catching from time to time that wandering, apprehensive glance, was fully alive to Mr Pottermack’s condition and felt a humane regret that it was impossible to reassure him and put an end to his sufferings. He realized how sinister a significance his unexpected arrival would seem to bear to the eyes of the self-conscious gamester, sitting there trembling for the success of his last venture. And the position was made even worse when the coroner, re-entering with the jury, stopped to confer with him before taking his seat.

  “You had a good look at the body, doctor?” he asked, stooping and speaking almost in a whisper. “I wonder if it would be fair for me to ask you a question?”

  “Let us hear the question,” Thorndyke replied cautiously.

  “Well, it is this: the medical witness that I am calling is the police surgeon’s locum tenens. I don’t know anything about him, but I suspect that he hasn’t had much experience. He tells me that he can find nothing definite to indicate the cause of death, but that there are no signs of violence. What do you say to that?”

  “It is exactly what I should have said myself if I had been in his place,” Thorndyke replied. “I saw nothing that gave any hint as to the cause of death. You will have to settle that question on evidence other than medical.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” said the coroner. “You have set my mind completely at rest. Now I will get on with the inquiry. It needn’t take very long.”

  He retired to his chair at the head of the long table, on one side of which sat the jury and on the other one or two reporters, and having seen that his writing materials were in order, prepared to begin. And Thorndyke, once more meeting Mr Pottermack’s eye, found it fixed on him with an expression of expectant horror.

  “The inquiry, gentlemen,” the coroner began, “which we are about to conduct concerns the most regrettable death of a fellow-townsman of yours, Mr James Lewson, who, as you probably know, disappeared rather mysteriously on the night of the 23rd of last July. Quite by chance, his dead body was discovered last Monday afternoon, and it will be our duty to inquire and determine how, when, and where he met with his death. I need not trouble you with a long preliminary statement, as the testimony of the witnesses will supply you with the facts and you will be entitled to put any questions that you may wish to amplify them. We had better begin with the discovery of the body and take events in their chronological order. Joseph Crick.”

  In response to this summons a massively built labourer rose and advanced sheepishly to the table. Having been sworn, he deposed that his name was Joseph Crick and that he was a labourer in the employ of Mr Barber, a local builder.

  “Well, Crick,” said the coroner, “now tell us how you came to discover this body.”

  The witness cast an embarrassed glance at the eager jurymen, and, having wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, began: “’Twere last Monday afternoon –”

  “That was the thirteenth of April,” the coroner interposed.

  “Maybe ’twere,” the witness agreed cautiously, “I dunno. But ’twere last Monday afternoon. Me and Jim Wurdle had been workin’ in the pit a-fillin’ the carts with gravel. We’d filled the last cart and seen her off, and then, as it were gettin’ on for knockin’-off time, we lights our pipes and goes for a stroll round the pit to have a look at the old shelter-place where they used to keep the carts in the winter. We’d got round to the gate and Jim Wurdle was a-lookin’ in when I happened to notice a tree that had fell down from the top of the face. And then I see something layin’ by the tree what had got a cap at one end and a pair of shoes at the other. Give me a regler start, it did. So I says to Jim Wurdle, I says, Jim, I says, that’s a funny-lookin’ thing over yonder long-side the tree, I says. Looks like someone a-layin’ down there, I says. So Jim Wurdle he looks at it and he says, ‘right you are, mate,’ he says, ‘so it do,’ he says. So we walked over to have a look at it and then we see as ’twere a dead man, or leastways a man’s skillinton. Give us a rare turn, it did, to see it a-layin’ there in its shabby old clothes with the beedles acrawlin’ about on it.”

  “And what did you do then?” asked the coroner.

  “We sung out to the other chaps t’other side of the pit and told them about it, and then we set off for the town as hard as we could go until we come to the police station, where we see Sergeant Tatnell and told him about it; and he sent us back to the pit to wait for him and show him where it were.”

  When the coroner had written down Crick’s statement he glanced at the jury and enquired: “Do you wish to ask the witness any questions, gentlemen?” And as nobody expressed any such wish, he dismissed Crick and called James Wurdle, who, in effect, repeated the evidence of the previous witness and was in his turn dismissed.

  The next witness was Inspector Barnaby of the local police force, a shrewd-looking man of about fifty, who gave his evidence in the concise, exact manner proper to a police officer.

  “On Monday last, the thirteenth of April, at five twenty-one p.m., it was reported to me by Sergeant Tatnell that the dead body of a man had been discovered in the gravel-pit in Potter’s Wood. I obtained an empty shell from the mortuary, and, having put it on a wheeled stretcher, proceeded with Sergeant Tatnell to the gravel-pit, where the previous witnesses showed us the place where the body was lying. We found the body lying at the foot of the gravel-face close to a tree that had fallen from the top. I examined it carefully before moving it. It was lying in a sprawling posture, not like that of a sleeping man but like that of a man who had fallen heavily. There were a few stones and some gravel on the body, but most of the gravel which had come down with the tree was underneath. The body was in an advanced stage of decay; so much so that it began to fall to pieces when we lifted it to put it into the shell. The head actually dropped off, and we had great trouble in preventing the legs from separating.”

  An audible shudder ran round the court at this description and the coroner murmured, “Horrible! horrible!” But the inspector proceeded in matter-of-fact tones:

  “We conveyed the remains to the mortuary, where I removed the clothing from the body and examined it with a view to ascertaining the identity of the deceased. The underclothing was marked clearly ‘JLewson,’ and in the breast pocket of the coat I found a letter-case with the initials ‘JL’ stamped on the cover. Inside it were a number of visiting-cards bearing the name ‘Mr James Lewson’ and the address ‘Perkins’ Bank, Borley, Bucks,’ and some letters addressed to James Lewson, Esquire, at that address. In one of the trousers pockets I found a key, which looked like a safe key, and as there seemed to be no doubt that the body was that of Mr Lewson, the late manager of the Borley branch of Perkins’ Bank, I cleaned the rust off the key and showed it to Mr Hunt, the present manager, who tried it in the lock of the safe and found that it entered and seemed to fit perfectly.”

  “Did it shoot the bolt of the lock?” one of the jurors asked.

  “No,” replied the inspector, “because, after Mr Lewson went away and took the key with him, the manager had the levers of the lock altered and a pair of new keys made. But the old duplicate key was there, and when we compared it with the key from the body, it was obvious that the two keys were identical in pattern.”

  “Did you take any other measures to identify the body?” the coroner asked.

  “Yes, sir. I checked the clothing carefully, garment by garment, by the description that we issued when Mr Lewson disappeared, and it corresponded to the description in every respect. Then I got the caretaker from the bank to look it over, and he identified the clothes and shoes as those worn by Mr Lewson on the night when he disappeared.”

  “Excellent,” said the coroner. “Most thorough and most conclusive. I think, gentlemen, that we can fairly take it as an established fact that the body is that of Mr James Lewson. And now, Inspector, to return to the clothing; you have mentioned two articles found by you in the deceased’s pockets. What else did you find?”

  “Nothing, sir. With the exception of those two articles – which I handed to you – the pockets were all completely empty.”

  “And the letter-case?”

  “That contained nothing but letters, bills, cards, and a few stamps; nothing but what was in it when I gave it to you.”

  Here the coroner opened his attaché-case, and, taking from it the letter-wallet, the letters, cards, bills, and other contents, placed them, together with the key, on a wooden office tray which he pushed along the table for the jurymen’s inspection. While they were curiously poring over the tray, he continued his examination.

  “Then you found nothing of value on the person of the deceased?”

  “With the exception of the stamps, nothing whatsoever. The pockets were absolutely empty.”

  “Do you happen to know if the deceased, at the time of his disappearance, had any valuable property about him?”

  “Yes, sir. It is nearly certain that when he went away at about eight o’clock on the night of Wednesday, the twenty-third of last July, he had on his person one hundred pounds in five-pound Bank of England notes.”

  “When you say that it is nearly certain, what does that certainty amount to?”

  “It is based on the fact that after he had gone, banknotes to that amount were found to be missing from the bank.”

  “And is it known what became of those notes?”

  “Yes, sir. Their numbers were known and they have now all been recovered. As soon as they appeared in circulation they were traced; and in nearly every case traced to some person who was known to the police.”

  “Is it certain that these notes were taken by the deceased and not by some other person?”

  “Yes, practically certain. The deceased was in sole charge, and he had one key on his person and the other locked in the safe, where it was found when the lock was picked. But, if you will allow me, sir, I should like to say, in justice to the deceased, that he had, apparently, no intention of stealing these notes, as was thought at first. Certain facts came to light later which seemed to show that he had merely borrowed this money to meet a sudden urgent call and that he meant to replace it.”

  “I am sure everyone will be very glad to hear that,” said the coroner. “We need not go into the circumstances that you mention, as they do not seem relevant to this inquiry. But these notes raise an important point. If they were on his person when he went away and they were not on his body when it was found, and if, moreover, they are known to have been in circulation since his death, the question of robbery arises, and with it the further question of possible murder. Can you give us any help in considering those questions?”

  “I have formed certain opinions, sir, but, of course, it is a matter of guesswork.”

  “Never mind, Inspector. A coroner’s court is not bound by the strict rules of evidence; and, besides, yours is an expert opinion. Let us hear what view you take of the matter.”

  “Well, sir, my opinion is that the deceased met his death by accident the night that he went away. I think that he fell into the pit in the dark, dislodging a lot of gravel and pulling the small tree down with him. Both the body and the tree were on top of the heap of gravel, but yet there was a good deal of gravel and some stones on the body.”

  The coroner nodded and the witness proceeded:

  “Then I think that, about a month later, some tramp found the body and went through the pockets, and when he discovered the notes, he cleared off and said nothing about having seen the body.”

  “Have you any specific reasons for this very definite theory?”

  “Yes, sir. First, there is clear evidence that the pit has been frequented by one or more tramps. Quite close to where the body was discovered is an old cart-shelter, dug out of the gravel, and that shelter has been used from time to time by some tramp or tramps as a residence. I found in it a quantity of wood ashes and charcoal and large sooty deposits on the wall and roof, showing that many fires had been lit there. I also found an old billy, or boiling-can, a lot of rags and tramps’ raffle and a quantity of small bones – mostly rabbits’ and fowls’ bones. So tramps have certainly been there.

  “Then the state of the deceased’s pockets suggests a tramp’s robbery. It was not only the valuables that were taken. He had made a clean sweep of everything. Not a thing was left. Not even a pipe or a packet of cigarettes or even a match-box.”

  “And as to the time that you mentioned?”

  “I am judging by the notes. A sharp look-out was kept for them from the first. A very sharp look-out. But for fully a month after the disappearance not one of them came to light. And then, suddenly, they began to come in one after the other and even in batches, as if the whole lot had been thrown into circulation at once. But if it had been a case of robbery with violence, the robber would have got rid of the notes immediately, before the hue and cry started.”

  “So you consider that the possibility of robbery with murder may be ruled out?”

  “On the facts known to me, sir, I do – subject, of course, to the medical evidence.”

  “Exactly,” said the coroner. “But in any case you have given us most valuable assistance. Is there any point, gentlemen, that is not quite clear, or any question that you wish to put to the inspector? No questions? Very well. Thank you, Inspector.”

  The next witness called was the police surgeon’s deputy, a youngish Irishman of somewhat convivial aspect. Having been sworn, he deposed that his name was Desmond M’Alarney, that he was a Doctor of Medicine and at present acting as locum tenens for the police surgeon, who was absent on leave.

  “Well, doctor,” said the coroner, “I believe that you have made a careful examination of the body of the deceased. Is that so?”

  “I have made a most careful examination, sir,” was the reply, “though as to calling it a body, I would rather describe it as a skeleton.”