"A man!"
"Yes, sir — so Holden says."
"Call Holden. I'd like to know all he's heard," I said. And presently, when the gardener emerged from the grape-house, I sought of him all the particulars he had gathered.
"I don't know very much, sir," was the man's reply. "I went into the inn for a glass of beer at eleven, as I always do, and I heard them talking about it. A young man was murdered last night up in Rannoch Wood. The gamekeeper thought at first there'd been a fight among poachers, but from the dead man's clothes they say he isn't a poacher at all, but a stranger in this district."
"The body was that of a man, then?" I asked, trying to conceal my utter bewilderment.
"Yes — about thirty, they say. The police have taken him to the mortuary at Dumfries, and the detectives are up there now looking at the spot, they say."
A man! And yet the body I found was that of a woman — that I could swear.
