Marsland ran on without heeding, cursing savagely at the hunted man. Brett had fled away again at the sound of his voice, and Crewe could hear his gasping breath as he stumbled over the slippery rocks. The two figures appeared clearly against the sky-line for a moment as they raced towards the end of the headland. Then the foremost disappeared over the cliff with a scream. Brett, endeavouring to double in his tracks at the edge of the headland, had slipped and gone over.
Marsland was standing on the edge of the cliff, peering down into the sea mist which veiled the water below, when Crewe reached his side. Crewe drew him back.
“Come away if you don’t want to follow him,” he said. “We shall have to get the police out to look for his body, but perhaps the sea will carry it away.”
CHAPTER XXV
The search for the body began in the morning, at low tide. Inspector Murchison had come from Staveley to superintend, and from the landing place he and Sergeant Westaway directed the operations of the Ashlingsea fishermen who had been engaged to make the search.
Some of the townspeople who had walked up from the town to witness the proceedings thought that the body would be swept out to sea and never recovered, but the fishermen, with a deeper knowledge of a treacherous piece of sea from which they wrested their living, shook their heads. If the gentleman had fallen in near the deep water of the landing-place the undercurrent might have carried him out into the Channel, but there were too many reefs and sand-banks running out from the headland, and too many cross-currents, to let a body be carried out to sea.
They gave it as their opinion that the body would be found before high tide, either in one of the shallows near the big sand-bank, a quarter of a mile out, or in one of the pools between the reefs whose jagged, pointed edges showed above the surface of the sea nearer the headland.
The sea lay grey and still under an October sky of dull silver. The boats, as they came from Ashlingsea, put in at the landing-place to receive the instructions of the police officers standing there, and then started to search. There were two rowers in each boat, and standing at the stern was a man holding the rope to which the grappling irons were attached. Slowly and mechanically the boats were rowed out some distance to sea, and then rowed back again. The men in the stern watched the ropes in their hands for the first sign of tautness which would indicate that the grappling irons had hooked in to something. Frequently one of the irons caught on a piece of rock, and when this happened the boat had to be eased back until the irons could be released. The boats searching further out, near the sand-bank, used nets instead of grappling irons.
Crewe, who had driven over in his car from Staveley, after watching this scene for some time, turned back to the road in order to put up his car at Cliff Farm. Marsland had not accompanied him. The young man had motored over with his uncle, who, after hearing from his nephew a full account of the events of the previous night, had insisted on participating in the search for the missing man. Sir George Granville, on arriving at the headland, had scrambled down the cliff with some idea of assisting in the search, and at the present moment was standing on the landing-place with Inspector Murchison, gesticulating to the rowers, and pointing out likely spots which he thought had escaped their attention.