might have been an accumulation of raw material for a cannibal
feast. It required considerable firmness of mind not to recoil
before that sight. Chief Inspector Heat, an efficient officer of
his department, stood his ground, but for a whole minute he did not
advance. A local constable in uniform cast a sidelong glance, and
said, with stolid simplicity:
“He’s all there. Every bit of him. It was a job.”
He had been the first man on the spot after the explosion. He
mentioned the fact again. He had seen something like a heavy flash
of lightning in the fog. At that time he was standing at the door
of the King William Street Lodge talking to the keeper. The
concussion made him tingle all over. He ran between the trees
towards the Observatory. “As fast as my legs would carry me,” he
repeated twice.
Chief Inspector Heat, bending forward over the table in a gingerly
and horrified manner, let him run on. The hospital porter and
another man turned down the corners of the cloth, and stepped
aside. The Chief Inspector’s eyes searched the gruesome detail of
that heap of mixed things, which seemed to have been collected in
shambles and rag shops.
“You used a shovel,” he remarked, observing a sprinkling of small
gravel, tiny brown bits of bark, and particles of splintered wood
as fine as needles.
“Had to in one place,” said the stolid constable. “I sent a keeper
to fetch a spade. When he heard me scraping the ground with it he
leaned his forehead against a tree, and was as sick as a dog.”
The Chief Inspector, stooping guardedly over the table, fought down
the unpleasant sensation in his throat. The shattering violence of
destruction which had made of that body a heap of nameless
fragments affected his feelings with a sense of ruthless cruelty,
though his reason told him the effect must have been as swift as a
flash of lightning. The man, whoever he was, had died
instantaneously; and yet it seemed impossible to believe that a
human body could have reached that state of disintegration without
passing through the pangs of inconceivable agony. No physiologist,
and still less of a metaphysician, Chief Inspector Heat rose by the
force of sympathy, which is a form of fear, above the vulgar
conception of time. Instantaneous! He remembered all he had ever
read in popular publications of long and terrifying dreams dreamed
in the instant of waking; of the whole past life lived with
frightful intensity by a drowning man as his doomed head bobs up,
streaming, for the last time. The inexplicable mysteries of
conscious existence beset Chief Inspector Heat till he evolved a
horrible notion that ages of atrocious pain and mental torture
could be contained between two successive winks of an eye. And
meantime the Chief Inspector went on, peering at the table with a
calm face and the slightly anxious attention of an indigent
customer bending over what may be called the by-products of a
butcher’s shop with a view to an inexpensive Sunday dinner. All
the time his trained faculties of an excellent investigator, who
scorns no chance of information, followed the self-satisfied,
disjointed loquacity of the constable.
“A fair-haired fellow,” the last observed in a placid tone, and
paused. “The old woman who spoke to the sergeant noticed a fair-
haired fellow coming out of Maze Hill Station.” He paused. “And
he was a fair-haired fellow. She noticed two men coming out of the
station after the uptrain had gone on,” he continued slowly. “She
couldn’t tell if they were together. She took no particular notice
of the big one, but the other was a fair, slight chap, carrying a
tin varnish can in one hand.” The constable ceased.
“Know the woman?” muttered the Chief Inspector, with his eyes fixed
on the table, and a vague notion in his mind of an inquest to be
held presently upon a person likely to remain for ever unknown.
“Yes. She’s housekeeper to a retired publican, and attends the
chapel in Park Place sometimes,” the constable uttered weightily,
and paused, with another oblique glance at the table.
Then suddenly: “Well, here he is – all of him I could see. Fair.