The Coroner looked down at his papers, his spectacled eyes wandering about them as if in search of something. Suddenly he looked up.
"There's this matter of the handkerchief, or portion of a handkerchief," he said. "Picked up, we are told, from the hearth in the Mayor's Parlour, where the rest of it had been burned. Did you hear Mrs. Marriner's evidence about that, Dr. Wellesley?"
"I did!"
"Is what she said, or suggested, correct? Is the handkerchief yours?"
"I have never seen the handkerchief, or, rather, the remains of it. I heard that some portion of a handkerchief, charred and blood-stained, was found on the hearth in the Mayor's Parlour, and that it had been handed over to Superintendent Hawthwaite, but I have not had it shown to me."
The Coroner glanced at Hawthwaite, who since the opening of the Court had sat near Meeking, occasionally exchanging whispered remarks.
"Let Dr. Wellesley see that fragment," he said.
All eyes were fixed on the witness as he took the piece of charred and faintly stained stuff in his hands and examined it. Everybody knew that the stain was from the blood of the murdered man; the same thought was in everybody's mind—was that stain now being critically inspected by the actual murderer?
Wellesley suddenly looked up; at the same time he handed back the fragment to the policeman who had passed it to him.
"To the best of my belief," he said, turning to the Coroner, "that is certainly part of a handkerchief of mine. The handkerchief is one of a dozen which I bought in Paris about a year ago."