Are there any more bones in that bag?"
"No, sir," replied the labourer, wiping his hands with an air of
finality on the posterior aspect of his trousers; "that's the lot."
The surgeon looked thoughtfully at the bones as he gave a final touch
to their arrangement, and remarked:
"The inspector is right. All the bones of the neck are there. Very odd.
Don't you think so?"
"You mean--"
"I mean that this very eccentric murderer seems to have given himself
such an extraordinary amount of trouble for no reason that one can see.
There are these neck vertebrae, for instance. He must have carefully
separated the skull from the atlas instead of just cutting through the
neck. Then there is the way he divided the trunk; the twelfth ribs have
just come in with this lot, but the twelfth dorsal vertebra to which
they belong was attached to the lower half. Imagine the trouble he must
have taken to do that, and without cutting or hacking the bones about,
either. It is extraordinary. This is rather interesting, by the way.
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