town in
all England!"

"Did you take that as a seriously meant statement, Mr. Brent?"

"Oh, well--he laughed as he made it. I took it as a specimen of his
rather heightened way of putting things."

"Did he say anything that led you to think that he believed himself to
have bitter enemies in the town?"

"No," said Brent, "he did not."

"Neither then nor at any other time?"

"Neither then nor at any other time."

The Coroner asked no further questions, and Brent sat down again by
Tansley, and settled himself to consider whatever evidence might follow.
He tried to imagine himself a Coroner or juryman, and to estimate and
weigh the testimony of each succeeding witness in its relation to the
matter into which the court was inquiring. Some of it, he thought, was
relevant; some had little in it that carried affairs any further. Yet he
began to see that even the apparently irrelevant evidence was not
without its importance. They were links, these statements, these
answers; links that went to the making of a chain.

He was already familiar with most of the evidence: he knew what each
witness was likely to tell before one or other entered the box. Bunning
came next after himself; Bunning had nothing new to tell. Nor was there
anything new in the medical evidence given by Dr. Wellesley and Dr.
Barber--all the town knew how the Mayor had been murdered, and the
purely scientific explanations as to the cause of death were merely
details. More interest came when Hawthwaite produced the fragment of
handkerchief picked up on the hearth of the Mayor's Parlour, half-burnt;
and when he brought forward the rapier which had been discovered behind
the bookcase; still more when a man who kept an old curiosity shop in a
back street of the town proved that he had sold the rapier to
Wallingford only a few days before the murder. But interest died down
again while the Borough Surveyor produced elaborate plans and diagrams,
illustrating the various corridors, passages, entrances and exits of the
Moot Hall, with a view to showing the difficulty of access to the
Mayor's Parlour. It revived once more when the policeman who had been on
duty at the office in the basement stepped into the box and was
questioned as to the possibilities of entrance to the Moot Hall through
the door near which his desk was posted. For on pressure by the Coroner
he admitted that between six and eight o'clock on the fateful evening he
had twice been absent from the