He admitted this. He said, "That's where a post-mortem would come in, if it was a human being. Of course, Holmes never did post-mortems himself, that not being his work; but I've got to make one now. It may or may not help me."
He made it, and it didn't help him. My own opinion is that he didn't much like it and hurried it a good deal. He said there was no actual sign of violence on the surface of the guinea-pig, and the organs all seemed perfectly healthy. But when I asked him what they would have looked like if they hadn't been healthy, he avoided answering, and went on that the pig's inside ought to have been sent up to Somerset House, for examination by Government officials, in a hermetically sealed bottle. Peters declared that the public has a right to demand this service for the stomachs of their old friends and relations if foul play is suspected; but not in the case of a domestic beast like a guinea-pig.
So the pig was buried, and not until then did Peters really seem to set to work. The actual horror of the death gradually wore off, and he told me that he should now seriously tackle the case.
There was a most unusual lack of clues, he said; and he pointed out that even Sherlock Holmes could do nothing much until clues began to turn up. Peters warned me against always taking it for granted that James had done it. In fact, he said it was very unlikely to have been James, just because it looked so likely.
I said, "That may be the way Sherlock Holmes talks; but it seems to me to be rather footle."
And he said, "No, Maydew; it isn't footle; it is based on a study of the law of probabilities. If you read accounts of crime, you will see that, as a rule, the person who is suspected is innocent; and the more he is suspected, the more innocent he is."
I said, "Anyway, James has changed. He's gone down four places in his class and lost his place in the second 'footer' eleven also. There's something on his mind."
"Yes," said Peters, "that's true. Everybody believes that he killed a valuable guinea-pig, and treats him accordingly. That is quite enough to send him down four places in the class; but if he had killed the guinea-pig he would have brazened it out and have been prepared for this, and taken very good care not to show what he felt."
"In fact, you don't think he killed the pig," I said.
And Peters said he didn't think James had; but he was keeping an open mind.