"He must have fallen from the very top of the
Keep--from the parapet, in fact--and plunged through this mass of green
stuff above us. If he had hit that where it's so thick--there!--it might
have broken his fall, but, you see, he struck it at the very thinnest
part, and being a big and heavyish man, of course, he'd crash right
through it. Now of course, when we examined the Keep on Monday morning,
it never struck us that there might be something down here--if you go up
the turret stairs to the top and look down on this mass of green stuff
from the very top, you'll see that it looks undisturbed; there's scarcely
anything to show that he fell through it, from up there. But--he did!"
"Whose notion was it that he might be found here?" asked Copplestone.
"Chatfield's," replied the Squire. "Chatfield's. He and I were up at the
top there, and he suddenly suggested that Oliver might have fallen from
the parapet and be lying embedded in that mass of green stuff beneath. We
didn't know then--even Chatfield didn't know--that there was this empty
space beneath the green stuff. But when we came to go into it, we found
there was, so we had that archway cleared of all the stone and rubbish
and of course we found him."
"The body'll have to be removed, sir," whispered the police-sergeant.
"It'll have to be taken down to the inn, to wait the inquest.
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