"It's a queer business," admitted the inspector, frowning. "I wish I could begin to learn something of the capabilities of these people. There must have been three hundred about the platform and the stairs. And we can't dig up a clue to save ourselves."
"No theory yet?"
"What theory can there be? You see the material as well as I. A corpse, a knife, and an empty shrine. It's a clear get-away, without a witness."
"Quite so. But aren't you forgetting this witness?"
The doctor laid a finger on the image of the Buddha. There it sat behind the taper and the offerings and the veiling vapor of the incense. There it sat cross-legged in its niche, with the left hand lying palm upward in the lap and the right hanging over the knee—with the calm and passionless and inscrutable regard of the tradition—a life-size image, whose painted garments in gilt and old rose, whose set and peaceful features had been dimmed to a uniform human tint. A very ordinary image....
At least so it seemed to the bewildered inspector. Until he saw it sag a trifle. Until he saw it give flaccidly under the doctor's touch. And then he saw that the actual image had been displaced and jammed back into the niche for a support and that this—this was a substitute.
"Dead!" he breathed.
The doctor dropped the wrist he had been thumbing.
"Dead," he affirmed rather shakily. "And not only dead, but cold!... Inspector, I'm not a fanciful man, would you say? I'm not one to believe much in deviations from the normal—in aberrations from the positive, eh?—even under the Temple of the Slanted Beam. But I'd swear in any court—west of Suez, I mean—I'd take my solemn oath the fellow was dead when he climbed to that altar!... It's the plain evidence. It's as certain as anything I know, if I know anything.... Dead?... He was dead the first of the two! He was obliterated, wiped out, blasted out of existence, a full five minutes before he ever killed that white chap there on the floor!"