"He said that the injuries to the heart were such that death must have been instantaneous, or practically so."
"Did anything else come out?"
"Nothing, except the evidence against poor old David, I'm sorry to say."
"You haven't told me that yet," said Gimblet. "Go on from when the police arrived on the scene."
"As soon as it was daylight we started off again on our search. But right at the beginning of it, they came upon the footsteps."
"Ah, where were they?"
"The flower-bed outside the library window showed them plainly; the ground beyond that was mossy, and there were no other marks. We divided into two parties, one going west down the side of the loch, and the other north and east over the hills. Till ten o'clock or later we beat the country, searching behind every rock, and going through the woods and bracken in a close line. But we saw no sign of a stranger, and came back at last, dead beat, for food and a rest. When we got back we found that the policeman left in charge had been nosing about, and whiling away his time by collecting the boots of every one in the house and fitting them to the footprints on the flower-bed. As bad luck would have it, David's shooting-boots exactly fitted the marks."
"His shooting-boots?" said Gimblet. "He wouldn't be wearing shooting-boots after dinner."
"That's what he said himself, and there seems no imaginable reason why he should have worn them, unless—" Mark hesitated for a moment, and then went on in a tone perhaps rather too positive to carry complete conviction to a critical ear. "Of course not. He can't have put them on after dinner. The idea is ludicrous. He must have made those footmarks earlier in the day."
"Is that what he himself says?" asked the detective. He had finished eating, and was leaning back in his chair with that air of far-off contemplation which those best acquainted with him knew was habitually his expression when his attention and interest were more than usually roused.