The road on the other side of the valley leads to some outlying hamlets which form part of the parish. On the right hand of it, as you go Northwards, the ground rises steeply towards a wide tract of moorland. About a quarter of a mile out of the village a grass lane diverges from the road and leads in a Northwesterly direction. Grenvile Combe is a little property of some ten acres lying between the grass lane and the road, and bordered on the North by a fir plantation which extends from the road to the lane. The cottage, or lodge, which was then Trethewy’s, stands close to the Southern corner of the grounds, where the grass lane turns off; and the gate of the drive is close by. The stables, which Peters had not used of late, stand on a detached piece of the property across the road. The house itself is near the fir plantation. The back of it looks out upon a steeply rising pasture field which lies along the grass lane. The front looks (across the drive, a strip of lawn and the road) to the stream and to the church and that ugly hotel on the little hill beyond. Peters’ study was in the front of the house at the Northeast corner of the main block of the building, in other words, it was on your left as you entered at the front door; and his bedroom was just above it. A path leads from the drive under the North wall of the house to the kitchen entrance, and on the left of this path, as one goes towards the kitchen, stands an outbuilding in which is the pump. A shrubbery of berberis and box and laurel, starting near the house, just across the path, skirts round the blind end of the drive, and straggling along under the low brick wall, which separates the drive and front lawn from the fir plantation, ends at a fine old yew tree which stands just by the road. All along the front of the house there is a narrow “half area,” intended to give so much light and air, as servants were once held to deserve, to the now disused dungeons where the dinners of former owners had been cooked.
In that area right below the unlatched window we saw a ladder lying, a short light ladder, but just long enough for an active man to have reached the window by it. Now the snow had come with a Northeast wind, and anyone who may have wrestled with my essay in topography will readily understand that just here was a narrow tract where very little snow had fallen and the frozen ground was mostly bare. There was accordingly no clear indication that the ladder had ever actually been reared towards the window, but it might have been. The path to the kitchen door was clear enough too, and a man might have picked his way just thereabouts and left not a footprint behind. Casting about like a hound, the Superintendent had found some footprints near, before his companions had begun seeking; footprints pointing both ways. He immediately returned to the house and got some bundles of chips for kindling, with which to mark the place of the footprints he discovered. Callaghan had joined us, and he and I and the Sergeant followed the Superintendent, keeping, as he bade us, carefully a little behind him. In a moment it was plain that some man had climbed the wall out of the fir plantation, not far from the yew tree, that he had crept along the edge of the lawn, planting his feet most of the way under the edge of the berberis shrub, but now and then, for no obvious cause, but perhaps in guilty haste, deviating on to the lawn where his tracks now showed in the snow. He had made his stealthy way, not quite stealthy enough for him, round the end of the drive; no doubt he had found the ladder somewhere up that side path, no doubt he had opened the latch in the well-known way, entered through the window, done the deed, slipped out and left his ladder where we found it; and there were his footprints, returning by the way he came to the same point in the wall.
Here we paused for a moment. Not a word was said as to the inferences that we all drew from those few footprints, but the Superintendent sharply asked the Sergeant, “Why was that trail not found and followed to an end this morning?” Poor Sergeant Speke looked for an instant like a detected criminal, but he pulled himself together and made sturdy answer: “I think, sir, it was not there this morning.” “Think!” said the Superintendent, and in a very few minutes from the discovery of the first footprint, he and all of us were over the wall and in the fir plantation. And there we paused again, for the fir boughs also had kept out the snow, and the carpet of fir needles showed no distinct traces of feet. Eventually—it seemed a long time but it was a short time—we found
