Page:Fletcher - The Middle Temple Murder (Knopf, 1919).djvu/289

Rh "Lift the lid off!"

A man at the head of the coffin, a man at the foot suddenly and swiftly raised the lid: the men gathered round craned their necks with a quick movement.

Sawdust!

The coffin was packed to the brim with sawdust, tightly pressed down. The surface lay smooth, undisturbed, levelled as some hand had levelled it long years before. They were not in the presence of death, but of deceit.

Somebody laughed faintly. The sound of the laughter broke the spell. The chief official present looked round him with a smile.

"It is evident that there were good grounds for suspicion," he remarked. "Here is no dead body, gentlemen. See if anything lies beneath the sawdust," he added, turning to the workmen. "Turn it out!"

The workmen began to scoop out the sawdust with their hands; one of them, evidently desirous of making sure that no body was in the coffin, thrust down his fingers at various places along its length. He, too, laughed.

"The coffin's weighted with lead!" he remarked. "See!"

And tearing the sawdust aside, he showed those around him that at three intervals bars of lead had been tightly wedged into the coffin where the head, the middle, and the feet of a corpse would have rested.

"Done it cleverly," he remarked, looking round. "You see how these weights have been adjusted. When a body's laid out in a coffin, you know, all the weight's in the end where the head and trunk rest. Here you see