like that of some horrible malady. As March moved he started
violently and faced round.

"My God!" he cried, "have you seen what's outside?"

"Outside?" repeated the other, glancing over his shoulder at the
garden.

"Oh, go and look for yourself," cried Herries in a sort of fury.
"Hewitt's murdered and his papers stolen, that's all."

He turned his back again and sat down with a thud; his square
shoulders were shaking. Harold March darted out of the doorway into
the back garden with its steep slope of statues.

The first thing he saw was Doctor Prince, the detective, peering
through his spectacles at something on the ground; the second was
the thing he was peering at. Even after the sensational news he had
heard inside, the sight was something of a sensation.

The monstrous stone image of Britannia was lying prone and face
downward on the garden path; and there stuck out at random from
underneath it, like the legs of a smashed fly, an arm clad in a
white shirt sleeve and a leg clad in a khaki trouser, and hair of
the unmistakable sandy gray that belonged to Horne Fisher's
unfortunate uncle. There were pools of blood and the limbs were
quite stiff in death.

"Couldn't this have been an accident?" said March, finding words at
last.

"Look for yourself, I say," repeated the harsh voice of Herries, who
had followed him with restless movements out of the door. "The
papers are gone, I tell you. The fellow tore the coat off the corpse
and cut the papers out of the inner pocket. 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