There's the coat over
there on the bank, with the great slash in it."
"But wait a minute," said the detective, Prince, quietly. "In that
case there seems to be something of a mystery. A murderer might
somehow have managed to throw the statue down on him, as he seems to
have done. But I bet he couldn't easily have lifted it up again.
I've tried; and I'm sure it would want three men at least. Yet we
must suppose, on that theory, that the murderer first knocked him
down as he walked past, using the statue as a stone club, then
lifted it up again, took him out and deprived him of his coat, then
put him back again in the posture of death and neatly replaced the
statue. I tell you it's physically impossible. And how else could he
have unclothed a man covered with that stone monument? It's worse
than the conjurer's trick, when a man shuffles a coat off with his
wrists tied."
"Could he have thrown down the statue after he'd stripped the
corpse?" asked March.
"And why?" asked Prince, sharply. "If he'd killed his man and got
his papers, he'd be away like the wind. He wouldn't potter about in
a garden excavating the pedestals of statues. Besides--Hullo, who's
that up there?"
High on the ridge above them, drawn in dark thin lines against the
sky, was a figure looking so long and lean as to be almost spidery.
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