The inspector completed his diagram, and handed it to his companions in turn for verification.
“We may as well start with this track,” Sir Clinton suggested. “It’s a fairly short one, and seems isolated from all the others by the groyne.”
He stepped down on to the sand, taking care to keep well away from the footmarks; and his companions followed his track. They walked on a line parallel to the footprints, which ran close under the groyne. At first the marks were hardly defined; but suddenly they grew sharp.
“This is where he hit the sand wetted by the tide, obviously,” said Wendover. “But the trail looks a bit curious—not quite like a normal man’s walk.”
“Suppose he’d been crouching under the groyne as he went along,” Sir Clinton suggested. “Wouldn’t that account for it? Look!”
He moved on to a piece of untouched sand, bent almost double, and began to move cautiously along. Wendover and the inspector had to admit that his tracks were very like those of the trail beside the groyne.
“Somebody spying on the people on the rock?” Wendover hazarded. “If you can get hold of him, Clinton, he ought to be a useful witness.”
The inspector stooped over the footprints and scanned them closely.
“It’s a clear impression. A man’s shoe with a pointed toe, it seems to be,” he announced. “Of course, if he was creeping along behind the groyne we can’t get his ordinary length of step, so we haven’t any notion of his height.”
Sir Clinton had moved on to the end of the trail.
“He evidently crouched down here for quite a while,” he pointed out. “See the depth of these impressions and the number of times he must have shifted the position of his feet to ease his muscles. Then he turned back again and went back to the road, still crouching.”
He swung slowly round, looking about him. The beach was empty. Farther along it, towards the hotel, a group of bathing-boxes had been erected for the use of hotel visitors. Less than ten yards from the turning-point of the footprints, on the other side of the groyne, Neptune’s Seat jutted up from the surrounding sand. It was, as the inspector had said, like a huge stone settee standing with its back to the land; and on the flat part of it lay the body of a man. Sir Clinton bent down and scrutinised the surface of the sand around the turning-point of the track for some minutes, but he made no comment as he completed his survey. When he rose to his full height again, he saw on the road the figure of the fisherman, Wark; and he made a gesture forbidding the man to come down on the sand.
“Just go up and see if he’s got the candles and the blowlamp, inspector, please. We may as well finish off here if he has.”
Armadale soon returned with the articles.
“Good fellow, that,” Sir Clinton commented. “He hasn’t wasted time!”
He turned and gazed across at the advancing tide.
“We’ll have to hurry up. Time’s getting short. Another half-hour and the water will be up near that rock. We’ll need to take the seaward tracks first of all. Hold the blowlamp, will you, inspector, while I get a candle out.”
Wendover’s face showed that even yet he had not grasped the chief constable’s object. Sir Clinton extracted a candle and lit the blowlamp.
“Plaster of Paris gives a rotten result if you try to take casts of sand-impressions with it,” he explained. “The classics pass rather lightly over the point, but it is so. Therefore we turn to melted wax or tallow, and by dropping it on very carefully in a thin layer at first, we get something that will serve our purpose. Hence the candles and the blowlamp. See?”
He suited the action to the word, making casts of the right and left footprints in the sand from the sharpest impressions he could pick out.
“Now we’ll take Mr. Billingford’s track next,” he said, as he removed the two blocks of wax from their beds. “His footmarks will be the first to be swamped by the tide, so we must get on to them in a hurry.”
He led his companions back to the road and turned round the landward end of the groyne.
“This is where he landed on the road, evidently. Now step in my tracks and don’t wander off the line. We mustn’t cut up the ground.”
He moved along the trail, and soon reached the tidal mark, after which the footprints grew sharper. A little farther on, he reached a point where Billingford’s marks crossed an earlier track—the prints of a woman’s nail-studded shoes.
“Golfing-shoes, by the look of them,” he pointed out to his companions. “We can leave them alone just now.
