 William Street Lodge talking
to the keeper. The concussion made him tingle all over. He ran between the trees
towards the Observatory. »As fast as my legs would carry me,« he repeated twice.
    Chief Inspector Heat, bending forward over the table in a gingerly and
horrified manner, let him run on. The hospital porter and another man turned
down the corners of the cloth, and stepped aside. The Chief Inspector's eyes
searched the gruesome detail of that heap of mixed things, which seemed to have
been collected in shambles and rag shops.
    »You used a shovel,« he remarked, observing a sprinkling of small gravel,
tiny brown bits of bark, and particles of splintered wood as fine as needles.
    »Had to in one place,« said the stolid constable. »I sent a keeper to fetch
a spade. When he heard me scraping the ground with it he leaned his forehead
against a tree, and was as sick as a dog.«
    The Chief Inspector, stooping guardedly over the table, fought down the
unpleasant sensation in his throat. The shattering violence of destruction which
had made of that body a heap of nameless fragments affected his feelings with a
sense of ruthless cruelty, though his reason told him the effect must have been
as swift as a flash of lightning. The man, whoever he was, had died
instantaneously; and yet it seemed impossible to believe that a human body could
have reached that state of disintegration without passing through the pangs of
inconceivable agony. No physiologist, and still less of a metaphysician, Chief
Inspector Heat rose by the force of sympathy, which is a form of fear, above the
vulgar conception of time. Instantaneous! He remembered all he had ever read in
popular publications of long and terrifying dreams dreamed in the instant of
waking; of the whole past life lived with frightful intensity by a drowning man
as his doomed head bobs up, streaming, for the last time. The inexplicable
mysteries of conscious existence beset Chief Inspector Heat till he evolved a
horrible notion that ages of atrocious pain and mental torture could be
contained between two successive winks of an eye. And meantime the Chief
Inspector went on peering at the table with a calm face and the slightly anxious
attention of an indigent customer bending over what may be called the
by-products of a butcher's shop with a view to an inexpensive Sunday dinner. All
the time his trained faculties of an excellent investigator, who scorns no
chance of information, followed the self-satisfied, disjointed loquacity of the
constable.
    »A fair-haired fellow,« the last
