The accused, Donald Maudsley, is an ordinary enough fellow as regards appearances. A little beard, rather beaky nose, fair hair tied back in a short pony tail. Of average height, or under. A melancholy man, but not unintelligent. An old Oriel man, in fact.

He has a way of telling his story in the third person, which I found rather irritating at first. It becomes evident that he suffers from dissociation of personality.

A transcript of his deposition runs as follows:

After gaining his degree, this little man, by name Donald Maudsley, went into Earth Sciences. He attended the Brazil Conference, after which he disappeared into the wilds of South America. This is the essence of his story.

This little man came to live on the edge of an undiscovered rain forest which swept right down to the South Pacific ocean. The sun shone, the winds blew, the rains came and went. Days and years passed. No one knew where this man was. He had no contact with the outside world. No boat ever visited the shore. No plane ever passed overhead. It proved a congenial place in which to undergo a crisis of identity.

The little man collected discarded sunsets. He swept them up every evening when they were spent, and kept them in a big golden cage in the depths of the forest.

Although he often sang to himself, generally a folk song about a hermit polar bear, he remained lonely. He rarely met with another living thing, apart from crabs on the beach. Occasionally a white bird, an albatross, flew by overhead. The sight merely increased his feeling of solitude. The solitude pierced his being and became a part of him.

Early one morning, he cut down a forest tree. From a section of the tree he fashioned a ventriloquist’s dummy. He called the dummy Ben. He imbued Ben with an illusion of life for the sake of company.

The man and the doll held long conversations together, sitting on the trunk of the felled tree. In the main, they discussed morality, and whether there was a necessity for it. The little man had a stern morality which had served to shape his life. While up at Oriel, he had met a handsome and intelligent young woman, the daughter of foreign royalty. He had been in love with her. But when she had done her best to persuade him to make love to her, he had refused and shunned her company.

Her response to rejection had been one of fury and vituperation.

He had then studied at Black Friars to take holy orders, but once more felt unable to carry his wishes through. In his despair, he felt it was morality which had driven him apart from all human company.

The dummy sometimes became passionate on the subject, believing morality to be merely a failure in relationships. For a wooden thing, the dummy was surprisingly eloquent. It ran about the beach, such was its strength of conviction. But these arguments led nowhere, like the beach.