“That must be my own track, coming along the beach from the village, sir. The one nearest the water. I kept as close to the waves as I could, since the tide was falling and I knew I was sticking to ground that must have been covered when Billingford came along.”
“What about the fishermen?” Sir Clinton asked.
“I made them keep to the road, so as to leave no tracks.”
Sir Clinton approved with a gesture, and continued his inspection of the stretch of sand below.
“H'm!” he said at last. “If clues are what you want, inspector, there seem to be plenty of them about. I can make out four separate sets of footprints down there, excluding yours; and quite possibly there may be others that we can't see from here. It's lucky they aren't all muddled up together. There's just enough crossing to give us some notion of the order in which they were made—in three cases at least. You'd better make a sketch of them from here, now that there's light enough to see clearly. A rough diagram's all you'll have time for.”
The inspector nodded in compliance, and set about his task. Sir Clinton's eye turned to the road leading from the hotel.
“Here's Mr. Wendover coming,” he announced. “We'll wait till he arrives, since you're busy, inspector.”
In a few moments Wendover clambered up the dune.
“Did you turn back to the hotel for anything?” he inquired, as he came up to them.
“No, squire. Why?”