“The inquiry, gentlemen,” the coroner commenced, “upon which we are now entering concerns itself with two questions. The first is that of identity: who was this person whose body we have just viewed? The second is: How, when, and by what means did he come by his death? We will take the identity first and begin with the circumstances under which the body was discovered.”
Here the cobbler stood up and raised an excessively dirty hand.
“I rise, Mr. Chairman,” said he, “to a point of order.” The other jurymen looked at him curiously and some of them, I regret to say, grinned. “You have referred, sir,” he continued, “to the body which we have just viewed. I wish to point out that we have not viewed a body; we have viewed a collection of bones.”
“We will refer to them as the remains, if you prefer it,” said the coroner.
“I do prefer it,” was the reply, and the objector sat down.
“Very well,” rejoined the coroner, and he proceeded to call the witnesses, of whom the first was a laborer who had discovered the bones in the watercress-bed.
“Do you happen to know how long it was since the watercress-beds had been cleaned out previously?” the coroner asked, when the witness had told the story of the discovery.
“They was cleaned out by Mr. Tapper’s orders just before he gave them up. That will be a little better than two years ago. In May it were. I helped to clean ’em. I worked on this very same place and there wasn’t no bones there then.”
The coroner glanced at the jury. “Any questions, gentlemen,” he asked.
The cobbler directed an intimidating scowl at the witness and demanded:
“Were you searching for bones when you came on these remains?”
“Me!” exclaimed the witness. “What should I be searching for bones for?”
“Don’t prevaricate,” said the cobbler sternly; “answer the question: Yes or no.”
“No, of course I wasn’t.”
The juryman shook his enormous head dubiously as though implying that he would let it pass this time but it mustn’t happen again; and the examination of the witnesses continued, without eliciting anything that was new to me or giving rise to any incident, until the sergeant had described the finding of the right arm in the Cuckoo Pits.
“Was this an accidental discovery?” the coroner asked.
“No. We had instructions from Scotland Yard to search any likely ponds in this neighborhood.”
The coroner discreetly forbore to press this matter any further, but my friend the cobbler was evidently on the qui vive, and I anticipated a brisk cross-examination for Mr. Badger when his turn came. The inspector was apparently of the same opinion, for I saw him cast a glance of the deepest malevolence at the too inquiring disciple of St. Crispin. In fact, his turn came next, and the cobbler’s hair stood up with unholy joy.
The finding of the lower half of the trunk in Staple’s Pond at Loughton was the inspector’s own achievement, but he was not boastful about it. The discovery, he remarked, followed naturally on the previous one in the Cuckoo Pits.
“Had you any private information that led you to search this particular neighborhood?” the cobbler asked.
“We had no private information whatever,” replied Badger.
“Now I put it to you,” pursued the juryman, shaking a forensic, and very dirty, forefinger at the inspector; “here are certain remains found at Sidcup; here are certain other remains found at St. Mary Cray, and certain others at Lee. All those places are in Kent. Now isn’t it very remarkable that you should come straight down to Epping Forest, which is in Essex, and search for those bones and find ’em?”
“We were making a systematic search of all likely places,” replied Badger.
“Exactly,” said the cobbler, with a ferocious grin, “that’s just my point. I say, isn’t it very funny that, after finding the remains in Kent some twenty miles from here, with the River Thames between, you should come here to look for the bones and go straight to Staple’s Pond, where they happen to be—and find ’em?”
“It would have been more funny,” Badger replied sourly, “if we’d gone straight to a place where they happened not to be—and found them.”
A gratified snigger arose from the other eleven good men and true, and the cobbler grinned savagely; but before he could think of a suitable rejoinder the coroner interposed.
“The question is not very material,” he said, “and we mustn’t embarrass the police by unnecessary inquiries.”
“It’s my belief,” said the cobbler, “that he knew they were there all the time.”
“The witness has stated that he had no private information,” said the coroner; and he proceeded to take the rest of the inspector’s evidence, watched closely by the critical juror.
The account of the finding of the remains having been given in full, the police surgeon was called and sworn; the jurymen straightened their backs with an air of expectancy, and I turned over a page of my notebook.
“You have examined the bones at present lying in the mortuary and forming the subject of this inquiry?” the coroner asked.
“I have.”
“Will you kindly tell us what you have observed?”
“I find that the bones are human bones, and are, in my opinion, all parts of the same person. They form a skeleton which is complete with the exception of the skull, the third finger of the left hand, the kneecaps, and the leg-bones—I mean the bones between the knees and the ankles.”
“Is there anything to account for the absence of the missing finger?”
“No. There is no deformity
