“Possibly,” said Thorndyke. He had already noticed the fragments scattered over a sleeper and the adjacent ballast, and now once more produced his “collecting-box,” from which he took another seed envelope. “Would you hand me a pair of forceps, Jervis,” he said; “and perhaps you wouldn’t mind taking a pair yourself and helping me to gather up these fragments.”
As I complied, the inspector looked up curiously.
“There isn’t any doubt that these spectacles belonged to the deceased, is there?” he asked. “He certainly wore spectacles, for I saw the mark on his nose.”
“Still, there is no harm in verifying the fact,” said Thorndyke, and he added to me in a lower tone, “Pick up every particle you can find, Jervis. It may be most important.”
“I don’t quite see how,” I said, groping amongst the shingle by the light of the lantern in search of the tiny splinters of glass.
“Don’t you?” returned Thorndyke. “Well, look at these fragments; some of them are a fair size, but many of these on the sleeper are mere grains. And consider their number. Obviously, the condition of the glass does not agree with the circumstances in which we find it. These are thick con cave spectacle-lenses broken into a great number of minute fragments. Now how were they broken? Not merely by falling, evidently: such a lens, when it is dropped, breaks into a small number of large pieces. Nor were they broken by the wheel passing over them, for they would then have been reduced to fine powder, and that powder would have been visible on the rail, which it is not. The spectacle frames, you may remember, presented the same incongruity: they were battered and damaged more than they would have been by falling, but not nearly so much as they would have been if the wheel had passed over them.”
“What do you suggest, then?” I asked.
“The appearances suggest that the spectacles had been trodden on. But, if the body was carried here the probability is that the spectacles were carried here too, and that they were then already broken; for it is more likely that they were trodden on during the struggle than that the murderer trod on them after bringing them here. Hence the importance of picking up every fragment.”
“But why?” I inquired, rather foolishly, I must admit.
“Because, if, when we have picked up every fragment that we can find, there still remains missing a larger portion of the lenses than we could reasonably expect, that would tend to support our hypothesis and we might find the missing remainder elsewhere. If, on the other hand, we find as much of the lenses as we could expect to find, we must conclude that they were broken on this spot.”