“Quite useless. Her detention would have been notified in the press. Brett would have taken warning and disappeared. By the way, Gillett, I’ll be glad if you will refrain from referring to the doubt I formerly expressed about Brett’s guilt. And I must ask Westaway to do the same.”
“I thought you’d come around to my way of thinking,” said Gillett. “It was plain to me that it couldn’t be anyone but Brett. However, you can rest assured I won’t try to rub it in. We all make mistakes at this game, but some don’t care to acknowledge a mistake as candidly as you have done, Mr. Crewe.”
The cliffs rose to a height of three hundred feet at this part of the road, and a piece of headland jutted out a hundred yards or so into the sea—a narrow strip of crumbling sandstone rock, running almost to a point, with sea-worn sides, dropping perpendicularly to the deep water below. Just past the headland, on the Staveley side, the road ran along the edge of the cliffs for some distance, the side nearest to the sea being protected by a low fence, and flanked by “Danger” notices at each end. Crewe pointed out the danger post which had been knocked out of the perpendicular—it was the one nearest to the headland.
Detective Gillett examined it very closely, and when Marsland and the Sergeant joined them he asked Marsland if he could point out to him the exact spot where his horse had taken fright on the night of the storm.
“I think it was somewhere about here, Crewe? It was about here we saw the hoof marks, wasn’t it?”
Crewe measured the distance with a rule he had brought with him from the motor-car.
“A trifle more to this way—about here,” he said at length.
Gillett glanced over the edge of the cliff, and at the white water breaking over the jagged tooth-pointed rocks nearly three hundred feet below.
“By Jove, you can congratulate yourself that you happened to be on the right side of the road,” he said, addressing himself to Marsland. “If you’d gone over there, you wouldn’t have stood much chance.”
“It was purely good fortune, or my horse’s instinct,” laughed Marsland. “The road was so dark that I didn’t know where I was myself. I couldn’t see a hand’s turn in front of me.”