The Cornish Coast Murder (British Library Crime Classics) (6 page)

“A heel!” exclaimed Pendrill. “Which way do the tracks run?”

“Toward the village.”

All faces were turned toward the Doctor who, with the air of a man on the scent of something, was prying closely at the footprints. Suddenly he threw back his head and laughed without restraint.

“It's all right, Inspector. I don't think you need trouble with those.”

“Not trouble with them, sir?”

The Inspector seemed aghast at the Doctor's levity.

“No. It's Mrs. Mullion or I'm a Dutchman!”

“Mrs. Mullion?”

“The local midwife. She had to attend a case to-night in a cottage over at Towan Cove. I drove her there myself in the car. It was an urgent case—twins as a matter of fact. And getting out of the car, and I suppose not being used to that sort of conveyance, she wrenched her heel on the running-board. I'll swear that's her foot right enough.”

“It's certainly small for a man's,” acknowledged the Inspector. “She would have returned this way to-night?”

“Yes. Towan Cove is about half a mile along the cliff—about a mile and a half from the village. A good bit further by the road. The cliff-path offers a short cut between the two coves. I would have run the good woman back, only she wanted to stay on for a bit to make sure everything was as it should be with Mrs. Withers. That was my patient's name. I couldn't stay longer myself as I had a dinner appointment with the Vicar here.”

“What time did you leave the cottage?”

“About seven-fifteen, I imagine.”

“And Mrs. Mullion?”

“Well, I can't say exactly. She may have stayed an hour, perhaps an hour and a half. I shouldn't think longer. Everything was going along quite satisfactorily.”

“Suppose she stayed an hour,” went on the Inspector quickly. “That means she would have left the cottage about eight-fifteen. Allowing her fifteen minutes to walk the half-mile along the cliff—we mustn't forget her damaged heel—that means she would have passed this spot about eight-thirty. You see where I am getting to, sir?”

“That she
may
have been somewhere in this locality when the murder was committed.”

“Exactly. If she left at a later hour it is almost certain she must have passed within a few minutes of the fatal shot being fired. I think it might be advisable for us to get hold of Mrs. Mullion tomorrow, Grouch, and put a few questions to her.”

“But you don't mean ...” put in the Vicar, aghast.

“That she shot Tregarthan? Hardly. But she may be able to give us information which will help us to find out who did.”

“There's a third alternative, sir,” said Grouch respectfully. “Perhaps it's already occurred to you. Mrs. Mullion might have passed the house
after
the murder was committed.”

“Yes—I thought of that. It's possible. Still, there's no harm in putting her through a little third degree, as the newspapers have it.”

“Which gets us, you realise, Inspector, no further with the footprints.”

The Inspector, who was by then on his hands and knees, peering again at the footprints, seemed at a complete loss.

“You're right there, sir. It sets us back half a mile. Take a close look at the path, gentlemen—you too, Grouch. How many recent sets of prints do you see?”

After a moment Grouch said:

“Three, sir. Two of Miss Tregarthan's. One belonging to Bessie Mullion.”

“And over here?” asked the Inspector, moving a yard or so along the path.

“Still three.”

“And here and here and here?” demanded Bigswell, advancing in jerks along the track under the wall.

The result was the same. Three tracks! For a stretch of twenty yards, which the Inspector considered a feasible angle from which Tregarthan could have been shot, an exhaustive inspection brought no further footprints to light. The little group extended its activities to the hoof-pocked and half-muddied turf which bordered the cliff-path beyond the wall. They found nothing! Three tracks and three tracks only were visible and those on the path itself. Two belonging to Ruth Tregarthan. One to Mrs. Mullion.

“Well, I'll be b—busted!” exclaimed the Inspector, realising the Vicar's presence in the nick of time. “What are we to make of that? Miss Tregarthan? Mrs. Mullion? Surely a woman——?”

“It's impossible, Inspector,” remonstrated Pendrill. “Why, good heavens, I've known Ruth since she was a kid! She couldn't have done a thing like this. Her uncle? It's ridiculous! You might as well accuse my old friend the Vicar here, as accuse that girl!”

“And Mrs. Mullion?”

“A steady, respectable, unimaginative country-woman. Good at her job. A motherly old soul, if I know the meaning of the phrase. As to her handling a revolver—my imagination boggles at the thought. She'd miss the house at fifteen feet, let alone a man standing in that window. What do you say, Dodd?”

“Eh?” The Reverend Dodd during the Doctor's argument had moved off a little way, making a further inspection of the footprints on his own account.

“Ruth! Mrs. Mullion! Ridiculous, eh?” reiterated Pendrill.

“Oh, dear me—yes, of course. Unthinkable, Inspector. You must be on the wrong track there.”

“Well, it beats me,” concluded Inspector Bigswell as he cut off his torch. “I don't think we can do much more out here. It looks to me as if we're up against a first-class mystery.” He pulled his cape a little tighter round his neck. “Brr! It's getting chilly, gentlemen. A Cornish cliff at the end of March is hardly a comfortable place for a conference. How about returning to the house?”

“If you care to come up to the Vicarage,” said the Reverend Dodd. “Perhaps a little refreshment ...”

He tailed off vaguely. The Inspector accepted the invitation, and leaving Grouch and the chauffeur to keep watch on the house, the three men piled into the Doctor's saloon and drove off up the drive.

The Vicar, sitting alone on the back seat, was silent. He was disturbed and puzzled by the results of the evening's investigations. Those three tracks! Very curious. Ruth. Mrs. Mullion. Yet more curious were the two inferences he had drawn from a further inspection of Ruth Tregarthan's footprints. That little round heel—obviously a high-heeled shoe. The storm and the torrential rain. Would a sensible, country-bred girl like Ruth leave her house in the midst of a storm in flimsy, high-heeled shoes? She had always worn brogues, good, stout, walking shoes, when the Vicar had seen her out and about in the locality.
She normally wore brogues
. Then why, when it was raining, did she suddenly elect to tramp along the cliff edge in what appeared to be house-shoes?—or at the most, town-shoes?

And secondly—yes, indeed it
was
rather like setting out the points in a sermon—why was the track returning to the side-door different from the track leading from it? There was less heel in the first, more toe. Which meant? She was running. Why? To get in out of the rain? Hardly that, since she had apparently set off quite cheerfully in the middle of the storm. Besides, Ruth was used to the wet. She had not lived the major part of her life in Boscawen without learning to ignore the vagaries of the elements. She was a typical country girl. Yet she had run. The nature of the footprints had changed about mid-way along the garden wall. Yet Ruth had told Grouch that she did not know anything was amiss until she reached the sitting-room and found her uncle dead.

And further—that question about the wet mackintosh. Again it was unlike Ruth to avoid the exercise of common sense. That question seemed to have disturbed her. She had hesitated, appeared uneasy, stammered. What did it mean exactly? Was Ruth trying to hide something from the police?

Did she, despite her denial, know that her uncle had been shot before she entered the sitting-room? Say, for example, when she was on the cliff-path at the bottom of the garden?

The Vicar suddenly felt a great depression weighing on him. He stared uneasily at the spectral landscape which stretched out on either side of the drive. Behind his gold-rimmed glasses his eyes, devoid of their customary twinkle, were narrowed to two thin slits of perplexity and trepidation.

CHAPTER IV

STRANGE BEHAVIOUR OF RUTH TREGARTHAN

I
NSPECTOR
B
IGSWELL
, despite the cosiness of the Vicar's study and the excellence of the refreshment provided, did not remain long at the Vicarage. Satisfied that he had obtained a good wad of local knowledge from Pendrill and the Reverend Dodd, he returned at once to Greylings. The Doctor, who after the excitements of the evening felt pretty exhausted, offered to drop the Inspector before returning along the road to Rock House. But Bigswell, who wanted a few moments to himself and found walking a stimulating brain tonic, politely refused the offer. So the two of them said “Good night” at the Vicarage gate and went their separate ways.

As Bigswell saw it, little more could be done that night. There might be a weapon hidden somewhere in the vicinity of the house or at any rate a further clue or clues, but it was useless to make an exhaustive search until daylight. The murderer, whoever he was, must have had a fair amount of time in which to make himself scarce after the fatal shot had been fired. In all probability he had an exact knowledge of the surrounding country, and although the police in the district had been warned before the Inspector left Greystoke to keep an extra vigilance on all roads and to take note of any suspicious character, Bigswell did not hope for much in this direction. It was a lonely bit of coast, criss-crossed with tracks, well wooded a little way inland and sparsely inhabited. Besides, so far, he had no description to broadcast of the man or woman they were looking for. The Man with the Gaiters
might
have something to do with the crime, and enquiries would have to be made; on the other hand it might have been mere coincidence. Unfortunate, of course, if it brought the man under suspicion, but there was always the chance that he could explain his presence on the drive.

The footprints definitely puzzled him. He had hoped by an examination of the cliff-path to settle on some definite clue, some means of identification. Of course, either Mrs. Mullion or Ruth Tregarthan might have committed the crime. Neither of them were above suspicion. Both had been on the cliff-path at a late hour, apparently unobserved, and both had had the opportunity to shoot Tregarthan through the window. These were two further lines of enquiry which would have to be followed up.

Beyond this—what did he know? Tregarthan had been shot at by a person or persons outside the house and that one of the bullets fired, seemingly from an Army Service revolver, had entered his skull and killed him instantaneously. So far no evidence had come to light that he had any special enemies; neither was it possible, at the moment, to fix any definite motive for the crime. It was probable on the other hand, considering the nature of the crime, that it was a premeditated affair—a matter, without much doubt, of malice aforethought. The criminal must have known that Tregarthan was in that particular room at that particular time, for, with the curtains drawn, it was impossible to see in through the window. In some way (and Bigswell made a note of this point) the murderer had attracted Tregarthan's attention so that he moved to the french windows, drew back the curtains and looked out into the night, offering a clear target against the brilliant light of the room. This fact seemed to rule out the idea of a homicidal maniac. Of course, there was the chance that Tregarthan might have been watching the storm over the sea, but from what he had learnt from Pendrill and the Vicar he was inclined to rule out this supposition. Tregarthan was a man of rigid habit, precise, not particularly imaginative and with little appreciation of nature and natural phenomena. Bigswell felt that it would take more than a storm effect over the sea to move Tregarthan from an easy-chair, where he had, by evidence supplied, been reading the newspaper, and take him to the window. Yet something had lured him to the window. What?

By this time the Inspector had reached the circular patch of gravel in front of the severe, stone façade of Greylings. But instead of entering the house, he dodged right, through the dark clump of laurels, and followed the tiny path which led over a broken stile and thus down the north side of the garden wall. Reaching the wall he climbed over it and, switching on his torch, he made a minute inspection of the narrow cement strip which ran under the french windows. From this the grass dipped in a brief bank to the level of the lawn, forming a small terrace. The cement was still damp, and on its smooth surface, thrown into relief by the slanting rays of the torch, were numbers of tiny pieces of gravel!

The Inspector gave a muffled grunt of satisfaction, and with the industry of a pecking hen his fingers darted here and there, until he had a collection of these small pieces in his hand. He returned again by the north track to the drive. In his left hand he scooped up a sample of the surface, and moving to the light shed from the hall windows, he made a careful comparison of the two specimens of gravel. To his amazement, for he had not expected this result, the two specimens coincided!

The gravel which had been thrown against the window to attract Tregarthan's attention was identical with the gravel on the other side of the house!

This he felt was important.

Drumming lightly on the front door, he was let into the hall by Grouch and proceeded to the sitting-room, where Grimmet, the chauffeur, was lounging in an arm-chair reading the paper. On seeing the Inspector he sprang up and stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette. Bigswell poured the two little heaps of gravel side by side on a table.

“What d'you make of those, Grouch?”

Grouch quizzed them for a moment.

“Same gravel, sir—in both heaps.”

The Inspector explained how he had collected the right-hand pile under the window.

“Does it strike you as peculiar at all, Grouch? I mean that the two heaps should be the same. What's the general run of stone round these parts?”

“Crushed limestone—slate—granite. That's as far as my knowledge carries me, anyway.”

“Then the gravel for the drive was imported stuff, eh?”