“Sunrise is due in about a quarter of an hour. You gauged it neatly in waking me up, inspector. Well, we’ve a good deal less than two hours in hand. It may keep us pretty busy, if we’re to dig up all the available data before the tracks are obliterated by the tide coming in.”
He reflected for a moment, and then turned to the fisherman.
“Would you mind going into Lynden Sands village for me? Thanks. I want some candles—anything up to a couple of dozen of them. And a plumber’s blowlamp, if you can lay your hands on one.”
The fisherman seemed taken aback by this unexpected demand.
“Candles, sir?” he inquired, gazing eastward to where the golden bar of the dawn hung on the horizon.
“Yes, candles—any kind you like, so long as you bring plenty. And the blowlamp, of course.”
“The ironmonger has one, sir.”
“Knock him up, then, and quote me for the price—Sir Clinton Driffield—if he makes any difficulty. Can you hurry?”
“I’ve got a bicycle here, sir.”
“Splendid! I know you won’t waste time, Mr. Wark.”
The fisherman hurried off in search of his cycle; and in a very short time they saw him mount and ride away in the direction of the village. The inspector was obviously almost as puzzled as Wark had been, but he apparently thought it best to restrain his curiosity about the candles and blowlamp.
“I think we’ll leave your second patrol to watch the road, inspector, while we go down on to the beach. I suppose that’s the rock you were speaking about?”
“Yes, sir. You can’t see the body from here. The rock’s shaped rather like a low chesterfield, with its back to this side, and the body’s lying on what would be the seat.”
Sir Clinton glanced towards the bar of gold in the east which marked the position of the sun below the horizon.
“I don’t want to go blundering on to the sands at random, inspector. What about a general survey first of all? If we climb this dune at the back of the road, we ought to get some rough notion of how to walk without muddling up the tracks. Come along!”
A few seconds took them to the top of the low mound. By this time the dawn-twilight had brightened, and it was possible to see clearly at a fair distance. Sir Clinton examined the beach for a short time without making any comment.
“That must be my own track, coming along the beach from the village, sir. The one nearest the water. I kept as close to the waves as I could, since the tide was falling and I knew I was sticking to ground that must have been covered when Billingford came along.”
“What about the fishermen?” Sir Clinton asked.
“I made them keep to the road, so as to leave no tracks.”
Sir Clinton approved with a gesture, and continued his inspection of the stretch of sand below.
“H’m!” he said at last. “If clues are what you want, inspector, there seem to be plenty of them about. I can make out four separate sets of footprints down there, excluding yours; and quite possibly there may be others that we can’t see from here. It’s lucky they aren’t all muddled up together. There’s just enough crossing to give us some notion of the order in which they were made—in three cases at least. You’d better make a sketch of them from here, now that there’s light enough to see clearly. A rough diagram’s all you’ll have time for.”
The inspector nodded in compliance, and set about his task. Sir Clinton’s eye turned to the road leading from the hotel.
“Here’s Mr. Wendover coming,” he announced. “We’ll wait till he arrives, since you’re busy, inspector.”
In a few moments Wendover clambered up the dune.
“Did you turn back to the hotel for anything?” he inquired, as he came up to them.
“No, squire. Why?”
“I noticed a second track of motor-wheels on the road at one point as I came along. It faded out as I got nearer here, so I thought you might have gone back for something or other.”
“That would have made three tracks, and not two; one out, one back, and a final one out again.”
“So it would,” Wendover admitted, evidently vexed at having made a mistake.
“We’ll have a look at that track later on,” Sir Clinton promised. “I took care not to put my own tracks on top of it as we came along.”
“Oh, you saw it, did you?” said Wendover disappointedly. “Confound you, Clinton, you seem to notice everything.”
“Easy enough to see the track of new nonskids on a wet road, especially as I didn’t see my own track while I was making it. We’ll have no trouble in disentangling them, even if they do cross here and there, for my tyres are plain ones, and a bit worn at that. I think I ought to mention that our patrols report no traffic on the road since they came on to it; and, as I remember that there was no rain in the early evening, that gives us some chance of guessing the time when that car made its tracks in the mud.”
“The rain came down about half-past eleven,” the inspector volunteered as he finished his sketch. “I heard it dashing on my window just after I’d gone to bed, and I went upstairs about twenty past eleven.”
Sir Clinton held out his hand for the inspector’s notebook, compared the diagram with the view before him, and passed the book to Wendover, who also made a comparison.
“Better initial it, squire,” the chief constable suggested. “We may need you to swear to its accuracy later on, since we’ll have no visible evidence left after this tide’s come in.”
Wendover obeyed, and then returned the notebook to the inspector as they began to descend from the dune towards the road. Halfway down, Sir Clinton halted.
“There’s another set of tracks which we couldn’t see from the place we were,” he said, pointing. “Behind that groyne running down towards the
