"Then we'd better get down towards Norcaster ourselves," said Copplestone. "Call Spurge back—he'll find nothing in that cove. This job has been done from land. And we ought to be on the track of these people—they've had several hours start already."
By this time Zachary Spurge had been recalled, Vickers had brought the car round from High Nick, and the injured man was carefully lifted into it and driven away. But at High Nick itself they met another car, hurrying up from Norcaster, and bringing Sir Cresswell Oliver and three other men who bore the unmistakable stamp of the police force. In one of them Copplestone recognized the inspector from Scarhaven.
The two cars met and stopped alongside each other, and Sir Cresswell, with one sharp glance at the rough bandage which Vickers had fastened round Jim Spurge's head, rapped out a question.
"Gone!" replied Gilling, with equal brusqueness. "Came in a motor, during the night, soon after Zachary Spurge left Jim. They hit him pretty hard over his head and left him unconscious. Of course they've carried off the boxes. Car appears to have gone to Norcaster. Hadn't you better turn?"
Sir Cresswell pointed to the Scarhaven police inspector.
"Here's news from Scarhaven," he said, bending forward to the other car,
"The inspector's just brought it. The Squire—whoever he was—is dead.
They found his body this morning, lying at the foot of a cliff near the
Keep. Foul play?—that's what you don't know, eh, inspector?"
"Can't say at all, sir," answered the inspector. "He might have been thrown down, he might have fallen down—it's a bad place. Anyway, what the doctor said, just before I hurried in here to tell Mrs. Greyle, as the next relative that we know of, is that he'd been dead some days—the body, you see, was lying in a thicket at the foot of the cliff."
"Some days!" exclaimed Copplestone, with a look at Gilling. "Days?"
"Four or five days at least, sir," replied the inspector. "So the doctor thinks. The place is a cliff between the high road from Northborough and the house itself. There's a short cut across the park to the house from that road. It looks as if—"
"Ah!" interrupted Gilling. "It's clear how that happened, then. He took that short cut, when he came from Northborough that night! But—if he's dead, who's engineering all this? There's the fact, those chests of gold have been removed from that old tower since Zachary Spurge left his cousin in charge there early this morning. Everything looks as if they'd been carried to Norcaster. Therefore—"