“I shall have to send down to the station for that. It’s locked up in the office.”
He entered the house, and, having dispatched a messenger to the police station, came out and conducted us to the outbuilding where the corpse had been deposited. Thorndyke made a rapid examination of the wounds and the holes in the clothing, neither of which presented anything particularly suggestive. The weapon used had evidently been a thick-backed, single-edged knife similar to the one described, and the discolouration around the wounds indicated that the weapon had a definite shoulder like that of a Norwegian knife, and that it had been driven in with savage violence.
“Do you find anything that throws any light on the case?” the inspector asked, when the examination was concluded.
“That is impossible to say until we have seen the knife,” replied Thorndyke; “but while we are waiting for it, we may as well go and look at the scene of the tragedy. These are Pratt’s boots, I think?” He lifted a pair of stout laced boots from the table and turned them up to inspect the soles.
“Yes, those are his boots,” replied Fox, “and pretty easy they’d have been to track, if the case had been the other way about. Those Blakey’s protectors are as good as a trademark.”
“We’ll take them, at any rate,” said Thorndyke; and, the inspector having taken the boots from him, we went out and retraced our steps down the avenue.
The place where the murder had occurred was easily identified by a large dark stain on the gravel at one side of the drive, half-way between two trees—an ancient pollard hornbeam and an elm. Next to the elm was a pollard oak with a squat, warty bole about seven feet high, and three enormous limbs, of which one slanted half-way across the avenue; and between these two trees the ground was covered with the tracks of men and hounds superimposed upon the hoof-prints of a horse.
“Where was the knife found?” Thorndyke asked.
The inspector indicated a spot near the middle of the drive, almost opposite the hornbeam and Thorndyke, picking up a large stone, laid it on the spot. Then he surveyed the Scene thoughtfully, looking up and down the drive and at the trees that bordered it, and, finally, walked slowly to the space between the elm and the oak, scanning the ground as he went. “There is no dearth of footprints,” he remarked grimly, as he looked down at the trampled earth.
“No, but the question is, whose are they?” said the inspector.