After seventy years the discovery of the guilty man would seem difficult. We find historians grappling with the cases of accused persons, and forming conclusions absolutely opposite, even when the evidence seems quite full and circumstantial in every point. Take the case of Anne Boleyn, for instance; or that of Mary Queen of Scots: two of the most illustrious and most unfortunate princesses. What agreement is there among historians concerning these ladies? Yet there are monumental masses of documents—contemporary, voluminous, official, private, epistolary, confidential, partisan—that exist to help them.
In this case there were no other documents except those in the Book of Cuttings. All that a private investigation could do was to read the evidence that had already been submitted to two Courts, and to arrive, if possible, at some conclusion.
This Leonard proceeded to do. He laid aside altogether the work on which he had been engaged, he placed the book before him, and he read the whole contents again, word for word, albeit with the same strange shrinking.
Then he made notes. The first referred to the man Dunning.
I. John Dunning.—The prisoner was rightly acquitted; he was most certainly innocent. The boy showed that he had not been in the wood more than two or three minutes. The deceased was a man six inches taller than Dunning, and strong in proportion. The latter could only have delivered the fatal blow if he had come upon his victim from behind, and while he was sitting. But the medical evidence proves that the blow must have been delivered from the front; and it was also proved that the grass was too wet from recent showers for the deceased to have been sitting down on it.
II. The Time of Death.—If the medical evidence is worth anything, the man when found had been lying dead for about two hours, as was proved by the rigor mortis. This absolutely convinces one of Dunning’s innocence, and it introduces the certainty of another hand. Whose?
There he paused and began to consider.
There must have been another person in the wood; this person must have rushed upon his victim suddenly and unexpectedly. To rush out of the wood armed with a heavy club torn from a tree was the act of a gorilla. If there had been an escaped gorilla anywhere about, the crime could have been fixed upon him. But gorillas in the year 1826 were not yet discovered.
Perhaps the assailant ran upon him from behind, noiselessly; perhaps Langley Holme heard him at the last moment, and turned so that the blow intended for the back of the head fell upon the fore part.
This was all very well in theory. But why? Who wanted to kill this young gentleman, and why? There was no robbery. The body lay for two hours and more in this unfrequented place; there was plenty of time for the murderer to take everything; the murderer had taken nothing.