Coming to the loophole, he examined it carefully as though to discover the range of view from it. Then he made his way to the loophole commanding the second centre, which he inspected with equal interest.
“Now we’ll go outside and have another look at the track my dog picked up,” he announced, curtly.
Wendover followed him once more, and they emerged from the entrance near the river. Sir Clinton walked over to the tree to which the dog had led them; and then, using the scraps of paper scattered on the previous day as his guide, he crossed the grass. Once on the road, he stopped and turned to Wendover. He seemed to be still smarting under the annoyance of his blunder with the darts.
“That’s the murderer’s route, you see? He came out of the Maze obviously. Then he climbed that tree, I think you said. No doubt he was well out of danger there. No one would think of looking for him up amongst the leaves. And after that he came over here, got into his private aeroplane, and flew off—since the trail stops short.”
He glanced up and down the road.
“Just the one place where he could have done it, notice. This bit of the road is concealed from nearly every direction by these banks of rhododendrons round about.”
Wendover took no notice of the irony. He sympathised with Sir Clinton’s feelings; it required no great stretch of imagination to appreciate how a man would feel after making a mistake like that. They walked over to the car and took the road to the East Gate.
As he drove, Wendover began to fit together the new facts in the Whistlefield case. The more he recalled the state of Neville Shandon’s room, the more obvious it grew that the burglar had been searching for a document of some sort. This linked itself in his mind with the torn fragment of Neville’s notes which had been found in his hand after death. And Roger’s room had not been burgled.
“It looks like Hackleton at work,” he uttered, half-unconsciously.
Sir Clinton seemed to come out of a savage reverie at the words.