A Silent Witness (1914) is a detective novel by R. Austin Freeman. Excerpt from the book: "THE history upon which I am now embarking abounds in incidents so amazing that, as I look back on them, a something approaching to skepticism contends with my vivid recollections and makes me feel almost apologetic in laying them before the reader. Some of them indeed are so out of character with the workaday life in which they happened that they will appear almost incredible; but none is more fraught with mystery than the experience that befell me on a certain September night in the last year of my studentship and ushered in the rest of the astounding sequence. A sudden, childish curiosity impelled me to see what it really was before I went, and the next moment I was striding sharply up the sodden path. It was a foot! I reached the corner, I came upon the body of a man lying in the sharp turn of the path; and the limp, sprawling posture, with one leg doubled under, told its tale at a glance."