I am now driven to attempt the task, which I had hoped to escape, of a
topographical description. To begin with what is of least importance
for the present. The village of Long Wilton lies in the valley of a
little stream, and two roads run Northwards from the village along the
opposite sides of the valley. The road along the Western side leads up
a steep hill to the church, built at some distance from the village
for the benefit of the former owners of the manor house. Just beyond
the church lies a house which was the manor house, but has now lost
its identity in improvements and extensions and become a new and not
very beautiful hotel. This hotel owes its origin to the South-Western
Counties Development Company, Limited, which discovered in its
neighbourhood promising golf links, whose promise may be fulfilled
when the extension of the railway is completed. I ought to but do not
thank the Company for a liberal contribution made for the reseating of
the church in the days of my predecessor. The hotel spoils the view
from Grenvile Combe, across the valley. Its upper windows command a
prospect of the whole of Peters’ grounds. This, however, does not
concern us yet.
The road on the other side of the valley leads to some outlying
hamlets which form part of the parish. On the right hand of it, as you
go Northwards, the ground rises steeply towards a wide tract of
moorland. About a quarter of a mile out of the village a grass lane
diverges from the road and leads in a North-Westerly direction.
Grenvile Combe is a little property of some ten acres lying between
the grass lane and the road, and bordered on the North by a fir
plantation which extends from the road to the lane. The cottage, or
lodge, which was then Trethewy’s, stands close to the Southern corner
of the grounds, where the grass lane turns off; and the gate of the
drive is close by. The stables, which Peters had not used of late,
stand on a detached piece of the property across the road. The house
itself is near the fir plantation. The back of it looks out upon a
steeply rising pasture field which lies along the grass lane. The
front looks (across the drive, a strip of lawn and the road) to the
stream and to the church and that ugly hotel on the little hill
beyond. Peters’ study was in the front of the house at the North-East
corner of the main block of the building, in other words, it was on
your left as you entered at the front door; and his bedroom was just
above it. A path leads from the drive under the North wall of the
house to the kitchen entrance, and on the left of this path, as one
goes towards the kitchen, stands an out-building in which is the pump.
A shrubbery of berberis and box and laurel, starting near the house,
just across the path, skirts round the blind end of the drive, and
straggling along under the low brick wall, which separates the drive
and front lawn from the fir plantation, ends at a fine old yew tree
which stands just by the road. All along the front of the house there
is a narrow “half area,” intended to give so much light and air, as
servants were once held to deserve, to the now disused dungeons where
the dinners of former owners had been cooked.
In that area right below the unlatched window we saw a ladder lying, a
short light ladder, but just long enough for an active man to have
reached the window by it. Now the snow had come with a North-East
wind, and any one who may have wrestled with my essay in topography
will readily understand that just here was a narrow tract where very
little snow had fallen and the frozen ground was mostly bare. There
was accordingly no clear indication that the ladder had ever actually
been reared towards the window, but it might have been. The path to
the kitchen door was clear enough too, and a man might have picked his
way just thereabouts and left not a footprint behind. Casting about
like a hound, the Superintendent had found some footprints near,
before his companions had begun seeking; footprints pointing both
ways. He immediately returned to the house and got some bundles of
chips for kindling, with which to mark the place of the footprints he
discovered. Callaghan had joined us, and he and I and the Sergeant
followed the Superintendent, keeping, as he bade us, carefully a
little behind him. In a moment it was plain that some man had climbed
the wall out of the fir plantation, not far from the yew tree, that he
had crept along the edge of the lawn, planting his feet most of the
way under the edge of the berberis shrub, but now and then, for no
obvious cause, but perhaps in guilty haste, deviating on to the lawn
where his tracks now showed in the snow. He had made his stealthy way,
not quite stealthy enough for him, round the end of the drive; no
doubt he had found the ladder somewhere up that side path, no doubt he
had opened the latch in the well-known way, entered through the
window, done the deed, slipped out and left his ladder where we found
it; and there were his footprints, returning by the way he came to the
same point in the wall.
Here we paused for a moment. Not a word was said as to the inferences
that we all drew from those few footprints, but the Superintendent
sharply asked the Sergeant, “Why was that trail not found and followed
to an end this morning?” Poor Sergeant Speke looked for an instant
like a detected criminal, but he pulled himself together and made
sturdy answer: “I think, sir, it was not there this morning”. “Think!”
said the Superintendent, and in a very few minutes from the discovery
of the first footprint, he and all of us were over the wall and in the
fir plantation. And there we paused again, for the fir boughs also had
kept out the snow, and the carpet of fir needles showed no distinct
traces of feet. Eventually—it seemed a long time but it was a short
time—we found where the fugitive had emerged from the fir plantation
over some iron hurdles into Peters’ field and along a little sort of
gulley that there ran from the plantation half-way along the field.
“Not the best place to break cover, but their wits are not always
about them,” said the Superintendent, and he pointed to a wedge-shaped
snowless tract which, caused by some extra shelter from the wind,
extended from the wall, tapering towards a clump of gorse bushes. Then
he sped on the trail, making the rest of us spread out to make sure
that there were no other tracks across the field. Southwards, right
along the field, the trail led till he, and we rejoining him,
scrambled out of the field, where our quarry must have scrambled, into
the green lane about two hundred yards from Trethewy’s cottage. Thus
far, but no farther; along the now well-trodden snow of the lane it
was idle to look for the print of any particular foot. “I am thinking
of the hours of lost daylight,” said the Superintendent, now
depressed. “Was this a likely way for a man making for the moors,
Rector?” “You need not look that far,” said Callaghan; “those
footprints were the man Trethewy’s. Down at the cottage yonder,” he
added for the Superintendent’s benefit. “They are the track of
hobnailed boots, sir,” said the Superintendent, “that’s all that they
are.” “Do you see that pattern?” said Callaghan; and there was
something odd about the pattern of the nails in the last footprint
just beneath our eyes. “You never saw it in any footprint before, but
I did, and it is the pattern I saw in Trethewy’s footmark not a
fortnight ago when last there was snow.” He was strung up again now,
and he had strangely quick eyes when he was strung up. “That is the
man’s footprint,” he said, “and there are the man’s boots.” Some way
along the ditch, under brambles and among old kettles and sardine tins
and worn-out boots (for plentiful rubbish had been dumped just here),
lay quite a good pair of boots, old boots truly, but not boots that I
should have thrown away, whatever a poorer man might do. The
Superintendent had them instantly. “Odd they are so full of snow,”
said Callaghan; “he did not lace them or they were much too big for
him. But what possessed him to throw them away, anyhow?” “Oh,” said
the Superintendent, “they mostly have plenty of half-clever ideas. It
takes a stupid one to escape me, sir,” he interposed to me with a sort
of chuckle, for he had lost no more time in appropriating the
discovery than he had done in picking up the boots. “The clever idea
this time,” he added, “was just this—the lane is trampled enough now,
but in the morning, when fewer feet had been along it, you might have
picked out the print of a particular boot by careful looking. But a
fellow in his socks could shuffle along among the few footmarks and
make no trace that you could swear to; only he would not go far like
that by daylight when the people he passed would notice his feet. Of
course it was madness not to hide the boots better, but I expect he
had taken a good deal of liquor to screw himself up to his work. Is
that Mr. Trethewy’s house, sir?” for we were by this time close to it.
I had been keen enough, as any man would have been, from the moment we
saw the ladder till now, but I hope it will be easily understood why I
did not accompany the hunters to Trethewy’s cottage. I went back to
the house to find Vane-Cartwright, who had stayed there, as it seemed,
reading gloomily and intently all the afternoon, and to arrange for
the prompt removal of him and Callaghan from that now cheerless house
to the Rectory. The housekeeper, oddly enough, was quite ready to
stay, and she kept the housemaid with her.
Callaghan, who soon came back, said that Trethewy had come to the door
of his house when they knocked. “Mr. Trethewy,” said the
Superintendent, “do you know these boots?” He answered composedly
enough, “They look like my boots, but I do not know where you found
them”. Here Mrs. Trethewy came forward and said in a very unconvincing
tone (so Callaghan insisted), “Why, that is the pair I have looked for
high and low these three days. Do not you remember, Reuben, how angry
you were they were lost?”
We left the house for the Rectory soon (my man was to come with a
barrow for the luggage), but before we left, one further piece of
evidence had accidentally come to my knowledge. I learnt from
something which the housekeeper was saying to the maid that the ladder
was one which was always kept in the pump-house, that the pump-house
was always kept locked, and that Trethewy kept the key.