“At what time was it that you first saw the body?” asked the coroner.
“I heard it chime the half-hour past eight by St. Martin’s Church clock when I was about halfway between Stroan bridge and the place where we discovered the body.”
“Was there anything about the position in which the body lay, or anything else, in fact, to enable you to form an opinion as to the cause of death?”
“Nothing whatever, sir,” answered Hemming, who gave his evidence in the clear voice and confident manner of the old policeman, who feels that the court is his own theatre, where he is bound to get a hearing and deserve it.
“Was the body lying face downward, in such a position that the man may have been too drunk to rise, and have been suffocated in the grass and mud?”
“He was lying face downward, as I have said, sir. But his mouth was not close to the ground. I don’t think it is possible that he could have been suffocated. His clothes were quite loose about his neck also.”
“Then you formed no opinion as to the cause of death?”
“Well, sir, I had heard something; and it made me jump to a conclusion as I should not otherwise have done. With your permission, sir, I would rather not say at the present stage what that conclusion was. It was formed from nothing I saw about the body.”
There were whispers in the court. The people in the crowd looked at one another, and intimated that there wasn’t much worth knowing that the London chap didn’t know. They all felt kindly toward Hemming for speaking out so that they could hear him, an accomplishment in which the non-professional witness is so lamentably deficient.
This was the gist of Hemming’s evidence, the few further questions which he was asked producing unimportant answers. Each witness had to put up with a trivial question or two from the members of the jury, who all wished to make the evidence given bear more weight than the giver intended.