“There’s not much of the strong, silent man about you, Clinton,” said Wendover glumly. “I never heard anyone to beat you for talking a lot and saying nothing while you’re doing it.”
“Père François not mentioned in the classics? Well, well. One can’t drag in everything, of course. But don’t let’s dwell on it. What about the business in hand? We must have a theory to work on, you know. How do you account for Mr. Paul Fordingbridge’s quaint behaviour, squire? That’s really of some importance.”
Wendover pondered for a time before taking up his friend’s implied challenge.
“Suppose that No. 3 had a chloroformed pad in his hand when he came up behind Fordingbridge,” he suggested at last, “and that he clapped it over Fordingbridge’s mouth from behind; and then, once he was unconscious, they both carried him down to a boat.”
“You can chloroform a sleeping man without any struggle,” the inspector commented acidly, “but you can’t chloroform a normal man without his making some sort of struggle. There’s no trace of a struggle here.”
Wendover had to admit the flaw.
“Well, then,” he amended, “I suppose one must assume that he voluntarily allowed himself to be lifted down to the boat.”
Armadale hardly troubled to conceal his sneer.
“And what earthly good would that be?” he demanded. “Here are his tracks stretching back for the best part of a mile over the sands. Lifting him for twenty yards or so at the end of that doesn’t seem much use. Besides, as I read the tracks, that’s an impossibility. No. 2’s tracks are mixed up with No. 3’s in the second part of the trail, and sometimes one was ahead and sometimes the other of them. Two men don’t waltz round like that when they’re carrying anyone, usually. It’s impossible, for their footmarks show they were both walking straight ahead all the time; and if they were carrying a man between them they’d have had to reverse somehow if the front man changed round to the rear. That’s no good, Mr. Wendover.”
“What do you propose then, inspector?” Wendover inquired, without troubling to repress a nettled tone in his voice.
“I propose to take casts of their footprints and hunt up shoes to match, if I can.”
“I shouldn’t trouble, inspector,” Sir Clinton interposed. “Look at the marks. They seem to me to be about the biggest size of shoe you could buy. The impressions are light; which seems to suggest a medium weight distributed over an abnormally large foot-area. In other words, these shoes were not fits at all; they were probably extra-sized ones padded to suit or else, possibly, put on above normal shoes. Compare the lengths of the steps, too. If these men had heights anything in proportion to the size of their shoes, they would be six-footers on any reasonable probability, whereas their pace is no longer than mine. There’s no certainty, of course; but I’m prepared to bet that you’ll get nothing by shoe-hunting. And by this time these shoes have been destroyed, or thrown away in some place where you’ll never find them. These fellows are smarter lads than you seem to think.”
Rather mollified by the inspector’s failure, Wendover tried to draw the chief constable.
“What do you make of it yourself, Clinton?”
Somewhat to the surprise of both his hearers, Sir Clinton extended the range of the subject under discussion.
“Motive is what interests me at present,” he confessed. “We’ve had the Peter Hay case, the Staveley affair, the shooting of Cargill, and this vanishing trick of Fordingbridge’s. There must have been some incentive at the back of each of them. Eliminate Cargill’s affair for the present, and the other three are all concerned with one or other of the Foxhills people. The odds against that happening by accident are a bit too heavy for probability, aren’t they?”
“Obviously,” Wendover admitted.
“Then it’s reasonable to look to the Foxhills affairs for motives, isn’t it?” Sir Clinton continued. “What’s the big thing in the Foxhills group about which they might come to loggerheads? It stares you in the face—that old man’s will. You’ve seen already that it’s led to friction. Paul Fordingbridge won’t recognise the claim of this nephew of his—we’ll call him the claimant for short. He sat tight with his power of attorney and refused to abdicate. That suggests a few bright thoughts to me; and probably you feel the same about it.”
He glanced at his watch, and with a gesture invited them to walk over the sands.
“By the way, though,” he suggested, just as they were moving off, “you might note on your diagram, inspector, the difference between the light and heavy tracks of No. 3’s feet. Make the trail of the deep footprints a bit darker.”1
The inspector did as he was requested.
“If you start with that assumption,” Wendover pointed out, as they began to move across the sands, “then it ought to lead you to the idea of two camps in the Fordingbridge lot.”
“Who’s in your camps?” Sir Clinton asked.
“The claimant, Staveley, and Miss Fordingbridge would be in the one, since Staveley was living at the cottage and Miss Fordingbridge identifies the claimant. The other camp would be Paul Fordingbridge, with Mr. and Mrs. Fleetwood.”
Sir Clinton nodded thoughtfully, and put a further question.
“On that basis, squire, can you find a motive for each of these affairs?”
“I think one might find some,” Wendover contended confidently. “In the first place, Peter Hay had known the claimant very well indeed in the old days. Therefore his evidence would be invaluable to either one side or the other; and whichever side he did not favour might think it worth while to silence him. It was someone well known to Peter Hay who murdered him, if I’m not mistaken. In any case, it was someone in our own class. That was implicit in the facts.”
“It’s not beyond possibility, squire. Continue the analysis.”
“Supposing Paul Fordingbridge were out of the way, who would oppose the claimant?” Wendover pursued.
“The Fleetwoods,” said the inspector. “They’re next in the succession. And Staveley was a witness
