I
The jury returned a verdict of “Accidental death.”
If there had been any traces of a struggle, I had not noticed them when I came to the edge of the pond. There may have been marks as if a foot had slipped. I was not thinking of evidence when I looked into the water.
There were marks enough when the police came to investigate, but they were the marks made by a twelve-stone man in hobnail boots, who had scrambled into, and out of, the pond. As the inspector said, it was not worth while wasting any time in looking for earlier traces of footsteps below those marks.
Nor were there any signs of violence on the body. It was in no way disfigured, save by the action of the water, in which it had lain for eighteen hours.
There was, indeed, only one point of any significance from the jury’s point of view, and that they put on one side, if they considered it at all; the body was pressed into the mud.
The Coroner asked a few questions about this fact.
Was the mud very soft? Yes, very soft, liquid on top.
How was the body lying? Face downwards.
What part of the body was deepest in the mud? The chest. The witness said he had hard work to get the upper part of the body released; the head was free, but the mud held the rest. “The mooad soocked like,” was the expressive phrase of the witness.
The Coroner passed on to other things. Had any one a spite against the child? and such futilities. Only once more did he revert to that solitary significant fact. “Would it be possible,” he asked of the abashed and self-conscious labourer, “would it be possible for the body to have worked its way down into the soft mud as you have described it to have been found?”
“We-el,” said the witness, “’twas in the stacky mooad, ’twas through the sarft stoof.”
“But this soft mud would suck any solid body down, would it not?” persisted the Coroner.
And the witness recalled the case of a duck that had been sucked into the same soft pond mud the summer before, and cited the instance. He forgot to add that on that occasion the mud had not been under water.
The Coroner accepted the instance. There can be no question that both he and the jury were anxious to accept the easier explanation.