“It is,” agreed the doctor.
“And now we come to the most suggestive thing of all. One of the supposed men had very much bigger feet than the other, from which you would expect a taller and possibly heavier man with a longer stride. But on measuring the footprints, what do we find? In all three cases—the big man, the little man and the woman—we have exactly the same length of stride. Not only that, but the footprints have sunk into the ground to precisely the same depth, indicating that all three people were of the same weight. Now, the other discrepancies might pass, but that is absolutely beyond the reach of coincidence.”
Dr. Faulkner considered this for a moment.
“You’ve proved your point,” he said at length. “I consider that absolutely convincing.”
“It struck even Sir Charles Pillington, who is none too bright,” said Parker. “I had the greatest difficulty in preventing him from blurting out the extraordinary agreement of the measurements to that Evening Views man.”
“You think, then, that Miss Whittaker had come provided with these shoes and produced the tracks herself.”
“Yes, returning each time through the bracken. Cleverly done. She had made no mistake about superimposing the footprints. It was all worked out to a nicety—each set over and under the two others, to produce the impression that three people had been there at the same time. Intensive study of the works of Mr. Austin Freeman, I should say.”
“And what next?”
“Well, I think we shall find that this Mrs. Forrest, who we think has been her accomplice all along, had brought her car down—the big car, that is—and was waiting there for her. Possibly she did the making of the footprints while Mary Whittaker was staging the assault. Anyhow, she probably arrived there after Mary Whittaker and Vera Findlater had left the Austin and departed to the hollow on the downs. When Mary Whittaker had finished her part of the job, they put the handkerchief and the magazine called The Black Mask into the Austin and drove off in Mrs. Forrest’s car. I’m having the movements of the car investigated, naturally. It’s a dark blue Renault fourseater, with Michelin balloon-tyres, and the number is X04247. We know that it returned to Mrs. Forrest’s garage on the Monday night with Mrs. Forrest in it.”
“But where is Miss Whittaker?”