Mr. Justice Crogie, summing up, began dead against the prisoner.
Reviewing the evidence, he pointed out that plausible hypotheses neatly
dove-tailed did not necessarily weaken one another, the fitting so well
together of the whole rather making for the truth of the parts. Besides,
the case for the prosecution was as far from being all hypothesis as the
case for the defense was from excluding hypothesis. The key, the letter,
the reluctance to produce the letter, the heated interview with
Constant, the misstatement about the prisoner's destination, the flight
to Liverpool, the false tale about searching for a "him," the
denunciations of Constant, all these were facts. On the other hand,
there were various lacunae and hypotheses in the case for the defense.
Even conceding the somewhat dubious alibi afforded by the prisoner's
presence at Euston at 5:25 a. m., there was no attempt to account for
his movements between that and 7:15 a. m. It was as possible that he
returned to Bow as that he lingered about Euston. There was nothing in
the medical evidence to make his guilt impossible. Nor was there
anything inherently impossible in Constant's yielding to the sudden
temptation of a beautiful girl, nor in a working-girl deeming herself
deserted, temporarily succumbing to the fascinations of a gentleman and
regretting it bitterly afterward. What had become of the girl was a
mystery. Hers might have been one of those nameless corpses which the
tide swirls up on slimy river banks. The jury must remember, too, that
the relation might not have actually passed into dishonor, it might have
been just grave enough to smite the girl's conscience, and to induce her
to behave as she had done. It was enough that her letter should have
excited the jealousy of the prisoner. There was one other point which he
would like to impress on the jury, and which the counsel for the
prosecution had not sufficiently insisted upon. This was that the
prisoner's guiltiness was the only plausible solution that had ever been
advanced of the Bow Mystery. The medical evidence agreed that Mr.
Constant did not die by his own hand. Someone must therefore have
murdered him. The number of people who could have had any possible
reason or opportunity to murder him was extremely small. The prisoner
had both reason and opportunity. By what logicians called the method of
exclusion, suspicion would attach to him on even slight evidence. The
actual evidence was strong and plausible, and now that Mr. Wimp's
ingenious theory had enabled them to understand how the door could have
been apparently locked and bolted from within, the last difficulty and
the last argument for suicide had been removed. The prisoner's guilt was
as clear as circumstantial evidence could make it. If they let him go
free, the Bow Mystery might henceforward be placed among the archives of
unavenged assassinations. Having thus well-nigh hung the prisoner, the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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