use for a living man? You look in all the rooms. When you
look in a room, if he is there, you see him; if you do not see him, you
assume that he is not there. You don't look under the sofa or behind the
piano, you don't pull out large drawers or open cupboards. You just look
into the rooms. That is what these people seem to have done. And they
did not see Mr. Bellingham. But Mr. Bellingham's corpse might have been
stowed away out of sight in any one of the rooms that they looked into."

"That is a grim thought," said Jervis; "But it is perfectly true. There
is no evidence that the man was not lying dead in the house at the very
time of the search."

"But even so," said I, "there was the body to be disposed of somehow.
Now how could he possibly have got rid of the body without being
observed?"

"Ah!" said Thorndyke, "now we are touching on a point of crucial
importance. If anyone should ever write a treatise on the art of
murder--not an exhibition of literary fireworks like De Quincey's, but a
genuine working treatise--he might leave all other technical details to
take care of themselves if he could describe some really practicable
plan for disposing of the body. That is, and always has been, the great
stumbling-block to the murderer: to get rid of the body. The human
body," he continued, thoughtfully regarding his pipe, just as, in the
days of my pupilage, he was wont to regard the black-board chalk, "is a
very remarkable object. It presents a combination of properties that
makes it singularly difficult to conceal permanently. It is bulky and of
an awkward shape, it is heavy, it is completely incombustible, it is
chemically unstable, and its decomposition yields great volumes of
highly odorous gases, and it nevertheless contains identifiable
structures of the highest degree of permanence. It is extremely
difficult to preserve unchanged, and it is still more difficult
completely to destroy. The essential permanence of the human body is
well shown in the classical case of Eugene Aram; but a still more
striking instance is that of Seqenen-Ra the Third, one of the last kings
of the seventeenth Egyptian dynasty. Here, after a lapse of some four
thousand years, it has been possible to determine, not only the cause of
death and the manner of its occurrence, but the way in which the king
fell, the nature of the weapon with which the fatal wound was inflicted,
and even the position of the assailant. And the permanence of the b