"Nothing."
"There's a peculiarity about those marks, Groener. The little finger of the hand that made them is abnormally, extraordinarily long. Experts say that in a hundred thousand hands you will not find one with so long a little finger, perhaps not one in a million. It happens that you have such a hand and such a little finger. Strange, is it not?"
"Call it strange, if you like," shrugged the prisoner.
"Well, isn't it strange? Just think, if all the men in Paris should try to fit their fingers in those finger marks, there would be only two or three who could reach the extraordinary span of that little finger."
"Nonsense! There might be fifty, there might be five hundred."
"Even so, only one of those fifty or five hundred would be positively identified as the man who choked the photographer and that one is yourself. There is the point; we have against you the evidence of Godin who saw you that night and remembers you, and the evidence of your own hand."
So clearly was the charge made that, for the first time, the prisoner dropped his scoffing manner and listened seriously.
"Admit, for the sake of argument, that I was on the balcony," he said. "Mind, I don't admit it, but suppose I was? What of it?"
"Nothing much," replied the judge grimly; "it would simply establish a strong probability that you killed Martinez."
"How so?"