I failed to identify the body.  How could I?  It had been a tall woman, probably five feet eight, and I thought the nails looked like those of Jennie Brice.  The thumb-nail of one was broken short off.  I told Mr. Graves about her speaking of a broken nail, but he shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.

There was a curious scar over the heart, and he was making a sketch of it.  It reached from the center of the chest for about six inches across the left breast, a narrow thin line that one could hardly see.  It was shaped like this: 

I felt sure that Jennie Brice had had no such scar, and Mr. Graves thought as I did.  Temple Hope, called to the inquest, said she had never heard of one, and Mr. Ladley himself, at the inquest, swore that his wife had had nothing of the sort.  I was watching him, and I did not think he was lying.  And yet—­the hand was very like Jennie Brice’s.  It was all bewildering.

Mr. Ladley’s testimoney at the inquest was disappointing.  He was cool and collected:  said he had no reason to believe that his wife was dead, and less reason to think she had been drowned; she had left him in a rage, and if she found out that by hiding she was putting him in an unpleasant position, she would probably hide indefinitely.

To the disappointment of everybody, the identity of the woman remained a mystery.  No one with such a scar was missing.  A small woman of my own age, a Mrs. Murray, whose daughter, a stenographer, had disappeared, attended the inquest.  But her daughter had had no such scar, and had worn her nails short, because of using the typewriter.  Alice Murray was the missing girl’s name.  Her mother sat beside me, and cried most of the time.

One thing was brought out at the inquest:  the body had been thrown into the river after death.  There was no water in the lungs.  The verdict was “death by the hands of some person or persons unknown.”

Mr. Holcombe was not satisfied.  In some way or other he had got permission to attend the autopsy, and had brought away a tracing of the scar.  All the way home in the street-car he stared at the drawing, holding first one eye shut and then the other.  But, like the coroner, he got nowhere.  He folded the paper and put it in his note-book.

“None the less, Mrs. Pitman,” he said, “that is the body of Jennie Brice; her husband killed her, probably by strangling her; he took the body out in the boat and dropped it into the swollen river above the Ninth Street bridge.”

“Why do you think he strangled her?”

“There was no mark on the body, and no poison was found.”

“Then if he strangled her, where did the blood come from?”

“I didn’t limit myself to strangulation,” he said irritably.  “He may have cut her throat.”

“Or brained her with my onyx clock,” I added with a sigh.  For I missed the clock more and more.

He went down in his pockets and brought up a key.  “I’d forgotten this,” he said.  “It shows you were right—­that the clock was there when the Ladleys took the room.  I found this in the yard this morning.”