The implication remained that no one could be quite sure

From Murder in the First-Class Carriage: The First Victorian Railway Killing by Kate Colquhoun. Page 96.

The gold watch chains, the crumpled hat, the thoughtlessly discarded cardboard jewellery box, the injured ankle and Müller’s flight on the Victoria added up, according to the Daily News, to sturdy links in the chain of circumstantial evidence pointing to Müller’s guilt. That these ‘facts’ might also be coincidences, and that none of them provided direct proof of the actual crime, seemed unimportant. In the eyes of police and press, the accumulation of so much detail against the German simply cornered him.

Nowhere was the power of circumstantial evidence put more succinctly than by the barrister Robert Audley – hero of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s recent novel Lady Audley’s Secret – as he confronted his guilty aunt. It was, he told her, that wonderful fabric which is built of straws collected at every point of the compass … infinitessimal trifles [on which] may sometimes hang the whole secret of some wicked mystery … a scrap of paper; a shred of some torn garment; the button off a coat; a word dropped incautiously … A thousand circumstances so slight as to be forgotten by the criminal, but links of steel in the wonderful chain forged by the science of the detective officer. But there were also those who were uncomfortable with the fallibility of this kind of evidence. While the majority of newspaper readers were already swayed by the strength of the details so far known about Müller, others took note of small inconsistencies and alternative suspicions that allowed room for doubt. One or two reporters reminded their readers of the inquest’s finding that threats had been made against Thomas Briggs over his refusal to sanction a loan. Though they also wrote that the individual alluded to is a man in a respectable position, and his threat is believed to be simply one of those idle menaces in which disappointed people sometimes indulge without any intention to carry them into execution, the implication remained that no one could be quite sure.