Mystery at Lynden Sands (A Clinton Driffield Mystery) Page 8

The Beach Tragedy

  Wakened abruptly by the trilling of a bell beside his bed, Sir Clinton bitterly regretted the striving of the Lynden Sands Hotel towards up-to-dateness, as represented by a room telephone system. He leaned over and picked up the receiver.

  “Sir Clinton Driffield speaking.”

  “I’m Armadale, sir,” came the reply. “Can I see you? It’s important, sir, and I can’t very well talk about it over the ’phone.”

  Sir Clinton’s face betrayed a natural annoyance.

  “This is an ungodly hour to be ringing anyone up in his bed, inspector. It’s barely dawn. However, since you’re here, you may as well come up. My room’s No. 89.”

  He laid down the receiver, got out of bed, and put on his dressing-gown. As he moved across the room and mechanically began to brush his hair, a glance through the window showed him that the rain of the previous night had blown over and the sky was blue. The sun had not yet risen, and a pale full moon was low on the western horizon. A murmur of the incoming tide rose from the beaches; and the white crests of the waves showed faintly in the half-light.

  “Well, inspector, what is it?” Sir Clinton demanded testily. “You’d better be brief, be businesslike, and be gone, as they say. I want to get back to bed.”

  “There’s been another murder, sir.”

  Sir Clinton made no effort to conceal his surprise.

  “Another murder! In a place this size? They must be making a hobby of it.”

  The inspector observed with satisfaction that his superior had given up any thoughts of bed, for he was beginning to dress himself.

  “This is what happened, sir,” Armadale continued. “Shortly after midnight a man appeared at the house of the local constable—Sapcote, you remember—and hammered on the door till Sapcote came down. He began some confused yarn to the constable, but Sapcote very wisely put on his clothes and brought the fellow round to me. I’ve got a room in a house near by, where I’m staying till this Hay affair is cleared up.”

  Sir Clinton nodded, to show that he was paying attention, but went on swiftly with his dressing.

  “I examined the man,” Armadale continued. “His name’s James Billingford. He’s a visitor here—he’s rented old Flatt’s cottage, on the point between here and Lynden Sands village. It seems he sometimes suffers from sleeplessness; and last night he went out rather late, hoping that a walk would do him some good. He strolled along the beach in this direction, not paying very much attention to anything. Then he heard the sound of shooting farther along the beach.”

  “Does that mean one shot or several?” Sir Clinton demanded, turning from the mirror in front of which he was fastening his tie.

  “He was a bit doubtful there,” Armadale explained. “I pressed him on the point, and he finally said he thought he heard two. But he wasn’t certain. He seems to have been mooning along, not paying attention to anything, when he heard something. It wasn’t for some seconds that he identified the sound for what it was; and by that time he was quite muddled up as to what he had really heard. He doesn’t seem very bright,” the inspector added contemptuously.

  “Well, what happened after the Wild West broke loose on the beach?” Sir Clinton demanded, hunting for his shoes.

  “It appears,” pursued Armadale, “that he ran along the beach close to the water’s edge. His story is that he couldn’t see anything on the beach; but when he came level with that big rock they call Neptune’s Seat he saw a dead man lying on it.”

  “Sure he was dead?”

  “Billingford was quite sure about it. He says he was in the R.A.M.C. in the war and knows a dead ’un when he sees one.”

  “Well, what next?”

  “I didn’t question him much; just left him in charge of Sapcote till I came back. Then I hunted up a couple of fishermen from the village and went off myself along with them to Neptune’s Seat. I made them stick to the road; and when I got within a couple of hundred yards of the rock I left them and went down to the very edge of the water—below Billingford’s marks, as the tide was still falling—and kept along there. There was enough moonlight to save me from trampling over anyone’s footmarks and I took care to keep clear of anything of that sort.”

  Sir Clinton gave a nod of approval, but did not interrupt the story by any verbal comment.

  “The body was there all right,” Armadale continued. “He’d been shot through the heart—probably with a small-calibre bullet, I should think. Dead as a doornail, anyhow. There was nothing to be done for him, so I left him as he was. My main idea was to avoid muddling up any footprints there might be on the sand.”

  Again Sir Clinton mutely showed his approval of the inspector’s methods. Armadale continued his narrative:

  “It was too dim a light to make sure of things just then, a bit cloudy. So the best thing seemed to be to put the men I had with me to patrol the road and warn anyone off the sands. Not that anyone was likely to be about at that hour of the morning. I didn’t think it worth while to knock you up, sir, until it got a bit brighter; but as soon as there seemed any chance of getting to work, I came up here. You understand, sir, the tide’s coming in; and it’ll wash out any tracks as it rises. It’s a case of now or never if you want to see them. That’s why I couldn’t delay any longer. We’ve got to make the best of the time we have between dawn and high tide.”

  Armadale paused, and looked at Sir Clinton doubtfully.

  “I understand, inspector.” The chief constable answered his unspoken query. “There’s no room for fooling at present. This is a case where we’re up against time. Come along!”

  As he stood aside to let the inspector leave the room in front of him, Sir Clinton was struck by a fresh idea.

  “Just knock up Mr. Wendover, inspector. He’s next door—No. 90. Tell him to dress and follow on after us. I’ll get my car out, and that will save us a minute or two in getting to the place.”

  Armadale hesitated most obviously before turning to obey.

  “Don’t you see, inspector? All these tracks will be washed out in an hour or two. We’ll be none the worse of having an extra witness to anything we find; and your fishermen pals would never understand what was important and what wasn’t. Mr. Wendover will make a useful witness if we ever need him. Hurry, now!”

  The inspector saw the point, and obediently went to wake up Wendover, whilst Sir Clinton made his way to the garage of the hotel.

  In a few minutes the inspector joined him.

  “I waked up Mr. Wendover, sir. I didn’t wait to explain the thing to him; but I told him enough to make him hurry with his dressing. He says he’ll follow in less than five minutes.”

  “Good! Get in.”

  Armadale jumped into the car, and, as he slammed the door, Sir Clinton let in the clutch.

  “That tide’s coming in fast,” he said anxiously. “The Blowhole up there is beginning to spout already.”

  Armadale followed the direction of the chief constable’s glance, and saw a cloud of white spray hurtling up into the air from the top of a headland beside the hotel.

  “What’s that?” he asked, as the menacing fountain choked and fell.

  “Sort of thing they call a souffleur on the French coast,” Sir Clinton answered, “Sea-cave gets filled with compressed air owing to the rise of the tide, and some water’s blown off through a landward vent. That’s what makes the intermittent jet.”

  About a mile from the hotel the inspector motioned to Sir Clinton to stop at a point where the road ran close to the beach, under some sand-dunes on the inland side. A man in a jersey hastened towards them as the car pulled up.

  “Nobody’s come along, I suppose?” the inspector demanded when the new-comer reached them. Then, turning to Sir Clinton, he added: “This is one of the men who were watching the place for me.”

  Sir Clinton looked up with a smile at the introduction.

  “Very good of you to give us your help, Mr.——?”

  “Wark’s my name, sir.”

 
“. . . Mr. Wark. By the way, you’re a fisherman, aren’t you? Then you’ll be able to tell me when high tide’s due this morning.”

  “About half-past seven by God’s time, sir.”

  Sir Clinton was puzzled for a moment, then he repressed a smile slightly different from his earlier one.

  “Half-past eight by summer time then?” he queried.

  He glanced at his wrist-watch, and then consulted a pocket diary.

  “Sunrise is due in about a quarter of an hour. You gauged it neatly in waking me up, inspector. Well, we’ve a good deal less than two hours in hand. It may keep us pretty busy, if we’re to dig up all the available data before the tracks are obliterated by the tide coming in.”

  He reflected for a moment, and then turned to the fisherman.

  “Would you mind going into Lynden Sands village for me? Thanks. I want some candles—anything up to a couple of dozen of them. And a plumber’s blow-lamp, if you can lay your hands on one.”

  The fisherman seemed taken aback by this unexpected demand.

  “Candles, sir?” he inquired, gazing eastward to where the golden bar of the dawn hung on the horizon.

  “Yes, candles—any kind you like, so long as you bring plenty. And the blow-lamp, of course.”

  “The ironmonger has one, sir.”

  “Knock him up, then, and quote me for the price—Sir Clinton Driffield—if he makes any difficulty. Can you hurry?”

  “I’ve got a bicycle here, sir.”

  “Splendid! I know you won’t waste time, Mr. Wark.”

  The fisherman hurried off in search of his cycle; and in a very short time they saw him mount and ride away in the direction of the village. The inspector was obviously almost as puzzled as Wark had been, but he apparently thought it best to restrain his curiosity about the candles and blow-lamp.

  “I think we’ll leave your second patrol to watch the road, inspector, while we go down on to the beach. I suppose that’s the rock you were speaking about?”

  “Yes, sir. You can’t see the body from here. The rock’s shaped rather like a low chesterfield, with its back to this side, and the body’s lying on what would be the seat.”

  Sir Clinton glanced towards the bar of gold in the east which marked the position of the sun below the horizon.

  “I don’t want to go blundering on to the sands at random, inspector. What about a general survey first of all? If we climb this dune at the back of the road, we ought to get some rough notion of how to walk without muddling up the tracks. Come along!”

  A few seconds took them to the top of the low mound. By this time the dawn-twilight had brightened, and it was possible to see clearly at a fair distance. Sir Clinton examined the beach for a short time without making any comment.

  “That must be my own track, coming along the beach from the village, sir. The one nearest the water. I kept as close to the waves as I could, since the tide was falling and I knew I was sticking to ground that must have been covered when Billingford came along.”

  “What about the fishermen?” Sir Clinton asked.

  “I made them keep to the road, so as to leave no tracks.”

  Sir Clinton approved with a gesture, and continued his inspection of the stretch of sand below.

  “H’m!” he said at last. “If clues are what you want, inspector, there seem to be plenty of them about. I can make out four separate sets of footprints down there, excluding yours; and quite possibly there may be others that we can’t see from here. It’s lucky they aren’t all muddled up together. There’s just enough crossing to give us some notion of the order in which they were made—in three cases at least. You’d better make a sketch of them from here, now that there’s light enough to see clearly. A rough diagram’s all you’ll have time for.”

  The inspector nodded in compliance, and set about his task. Sir Clinton’s eye turned to the road leading from the hotel.

  “Here’s Mr. Wendover coming,” he announced. “We’ll wait till he arrives, since you’re busy, inspector.”

  In a few moments Wendover clambered up the dune.

  “Did you turn back to the hotel for anything?” he inquired, as he came up to them.

  “No, squire. Why?”

  “I noticed a second track of motor-wheels on the road at one point as I came along. It faded out as I got nearer here, so I thought you might have gone back for something or other.”

  “That would have made three tracks, and not two; one out, one back, and a final one out again.”

  “So it would,” Wendover admitted, evidently vexed at having made a mistake.

  “We’ll have a look at that track later on,” Sir Clinton promised. “I took care not to put my own tracks on top of it as we came along.”

  “Oh, you saw it, did you?” said Wendover disappointedly. “Confound you, Clinton, you seem to notice everything.”

  “Easy enough to see the track of new non-skids on a wet road, especially as I didn’t see my own track while I was making it. We’ll have no trouble in disentangling them, even if they do cross here and there, for my tyres are plain ones, and a bit worn at that. I think I ought to mention that our patrols report no traffic on the road since they came on to it; and, as I remember that there was no rain in the early evening, that gives us some chance of guessing the time when that car made its tracks on the mud.”

  “The rain came down about half-past eleven,” the inspector volunteered as he finished his sketch. “I heard it dashing on my window just after I’d gone to bed, and I went upstairs about twenty past eleven.”

  Sir Clinton held out his hand for the inspector’s note-book, compared the diagram with the view before him, and passed the book to Wendover, who also made a comparison.

  “Better initial it, squire,” the chief constable suggested. “We may need you to swear to its accuracy later on, since we’ll have no visible evidence left after this tide’s come in.”

  Wendover obeyed, and then returned the note-book to the inspector as they began to descend from the dune towards the road. Half way down, Sir Clinton halted.

  “There’s another set of tracks which we couldn’t see from the place we were,” he said, pointing. “Behind that groyne running down towards the rock. The groyne was in the line of sight up above, but we’ve moved to the left a bit and you can just see one or two footprints. Over yonder, inspector. You’d better fill them in when we get to the road and have a clear sight of them.”

  The inspector completed his diagram [see here], and handed it to his companions in turn for verification.

  “We may as well start with this track,” Sir Clinton suggested. “It’s a fairly short one, and seems isolated from all the others by the groyne.”

  He stepped down on to the sand, taking care to keep well away from the footmarks; and his companions followed his track. They walked on a line parallel to the footprints, which ran close under the groyne. At first the marks were hardly defined; but suddenly they grew sharp.

  “This is where he hit the sand wetted by the tide, obviously,” said Wendover. “But the trail looks a bit curious—not quite like a normal man’s walk.”

  “Suppose he’d been crouching under the groyne as he went along,” Sir Clinton suggested. “Wouldn’t that account for it? Look!”

  He moved on to a piece of untouched sand, bent almost double, and began to move cautiously along. Wendover and the inspector had to admit that his tracks were very like those of the trail beside the groyne.

  “Somebody spying on the people on the rock?” Wendover hazarded. “If you can get hold of him, Clinton, he ought to be a useful witness.”

  The inspector stooped over the footprints and scanned them closely.

  “It’s a clear enough impression. A man’s shoe with a pointed toe, it seems to be,” he announced. “Of course, if he was creeping along behind the groyne we can’t get his ordinary length of step, so we haven’t any notion of his height.”

  Sir Clinton had moved on to the end of the trail.

&nb
sp; “He evidently crouched down here for quite a while,” he pointed out. “See the depth of these impressions and the number of times he must have shifted the position of his feet to ease his muscles. Then he turned back again and went back to the road, still crouching.”

  He swung slowly round, looking about him. The beach was empty. Farther along it, towards the hotel, a group of bathing-boxes had been erected for the use of hotel visitors. Less than ten yards from the turning-point of the footprints, on the other side of the groyne, Neptune’s Seat jutted up from the surrounding sand. It was, as the inspector had said, like a huge stone settee standing with its back to the land; and on the flat part of it lay the body of a man. Sir Clinton bent down and scrutinised the surface of the sand around the turning-point of the track for some minutes, but he made no comment as he completed his survey. When he rose to his full height again, he saw on the road the figure of the fisherman, Wark; and he made a gesture forbidding the man to come down on to the sand.

  “Just go up and see if he’s got the candles and the blow-lamp, inspector, please. We may as well finish off here if he has.”

  Armadale soon returned with the articles.

  “Good fellow, that,” Sir Clinton commented. “He hasn’t wasted time!”

  He turned and gazed across at the advancing tide.

  “We’ll have to hurry up. Time’s getting short. Another half-hour and the water will be up near that rock. We’ll need to take the seaward tracks first of all. Hold the blow-lamp, will you, inspector, while I get a candle out.”

  Wendover’s face showed that even yet he had not grasped the chief constable’s object. Sir Clinton extracted a candle and lit the blow-lamp.

  “Plaster of Paris gives a rotten result if you try to take casts of sand-impressions with it,” he explained. “The classics pass rather lightly over the point, but it is so. Therefore we turn to melted wax or tallow, and by dropping it on very carefully in a thin layer at first, we get something that will serve our purpose. Hence the candles and the blow-lamp. See?”

  He suited the action to the word, making casts of the right and left footprints in the sand from the sharpest impressions he could pick out.