“Yes. Life had been extinct sometime, and rigor mortis had commenced. There was, however, no external sign of foul play.”
“And the post-rnortem?”
The Court was silent in anxious anticipation of the doctor’s response.
“Assisted by Doctor Lynes I made a post-mortem, but found absolutely nothing to account for death. There was no mark of violence on either of the bodies, and no physical defect or slightest trace of disease. Nevertheless, the position of the bodies when found makes it evident that both persons died with great suddenness, and without being able to obtain assistance.”
“Was there nothing whatever to give any clue to the cause of death?” asked the Coroner, himself a medical man.
“Nothing,” responded the surgeon. “One thing, however, struck us as peculiar. On the inside of the right forearm of both the man and the woman were identical tattoo marks. The device, nearly an inch in diameter, represented a serpent with its tail in its mouth, the ancient emblem of eternity. The mark on the man had evidently been traced several years ago, but that on the woman is comparatively fresh, and could not have completely healed over more than a month ago. It is as though the mark on the man has been copied upon the woman.”
“And what do you think is the signification of this mark?” inquired the Coroner, looking up from the blue foolscap whereon he had been writing down the depositions.
“I’m utterly at a loss to know,” the doctor answered. “Yet it is very curious that upon one of these cards we found beneath the plates there is a circle drawn, while it also seemed that snakes were kept in the house as pets. To my mind all three circumstances have some connecting significance.”
The jury bent together and conversed in whispers. This theory of the doctor’s seemed to possess a good deal of truth, even though the mystery was increased rather than diminished.
Many more questions were put to the doctor, after which his colleague, Dr Lynes, was called, and corroborated the police surgeon’s evidence. He, too, was utterly unable to ascribe any fatal cause. The tattoo marks had puzzled him, but he suggested that the man and woman might be husband and wife, and that in a freak of caprice, to which women of some temperaments are subject, she had caused the device on her husband’s arm to be copied upon her own. Opinions were, however, divided as to whether the pair were husband and wife. For my own part I did not regard his theory as a sound one.