“It almost looks to me as if he had been scratched to pieces.”
“I fancy these wounds are too deep for scratches—in the ordinary sense. It looks as if several narrow blades had been used, set in some kind of frame, or a row of spikes. The flesh has been torn open in regular layers. This is interesting—very.” This was the kind of remark which I should have expected he would make; it came from him sotto voce. “He’s been dead some time, he’s quite cold. Very curious indeed.”
While he spoke he had been unfastening, with deft fingers, the dead man’s clothes, laying bare his neck and chest. Now he called to me, with an accent of suspicion.
“Look at that!”
I looked. I saw that the body was almost as much disfigured as the head and face; that it was covered with gaping wounds.
“I see; enough violence has been used to kill the poor fellow a dozen times over.”
“Is that all you see?” Hume spoke with more than a touch of impatience. “Don’t you see that some sharp-pointed instrument has been thrust right through the man’s body, from the back to the front, and from the front to the back, because he has been attacked from both back and front? If, then, a knife, or something of the kind, has been driven clean through him, as it has been, over and over again, how came it to miss his shirt, his coat, the whole of his clothes?”
“I don’t quite see what you mean.”
“Then, in that case, my dear Ferguson, I am afraid that you are even more dense than you usually are—which is unfortunate. If I were to stab you where you stand, the stabbing instrument would have to pass through your clothing, and, in doing so, would leave a mark of its passage. One would expect to find this man’s clothing cut to pieces; but you can see for yourself that, with the exception of bloodstains, there is not a mark upon them; they are intact, without rent or tear. Are we to infer that the attacking weapon did not pass through them? In that case, was the man naked when he was attacked, and were his clothes put on him after he was dead?”
“I see, now, what you mean.”