Once Jeffries was a poor man. He worked for 18 shillings a week, and was in competition with seven other desperate men for a position as a junior clerk. By night he studied for a commercial certificate, his passport out of poverty. It was in the commercial college that he befriended Merridew, who was to die so young, and met the woman he loved, Evie Soames.

From the beginning we can guess what will happen. Jeffries' narration tells us how and why.

Recommended 4* ( )

SPOILER ALERT: Very ingenious title, which could refer to one of three (at least) things: (1) a judicial reconstruction of 'evidence" carefully contrived by the malefactor. (2) the gradual elaboration of motive based on the narrator's constructions (and misconstructions) of the "evidence" he witnesses at first, second or third hand, and (3) an indictment of the grinding social oppression characteristic of Victorian England, "evidence" of the ways that a rigid and pitiless system corrupts even the healthiest human impulses. ( )