The Cornish Coast Murder (British Library Crime Classics) by John Bude Read Free Book Online Page A

the wrong track there.”
    “Well, it beats me,” concluded Inspector Bigswell as he cut off his torch. “I don't think we can do much more out here. It looks to me as if we're up against a first-class mystery.” He pulled his cape a little tighter round his neck. “Brr! It's getting chilly, gentlemen. A Cornish cliff at the end of March is hardly a comfortable place for a conference. How about returning to the house?”
    “If you care to come up to the Vicarage,” said the Reverend Dodd. “Perhaps a little refreshment ...”
    He tailed off vaguely. The Inspector accepted the invitation, and leaving Grouch and the chauffeur to keep watch on the house, the three men piled into the Doctor's saloon and drove off up the drive.
    The Vicar, sitting alone on the back seat, was silent. He was disturbed and puzzled by the results of the evening's investigations. Those three tracks! Very curious. Ruth. Mrs. Mullion. Yet more curious were the two inferences he had drawn from a further inspection of Ruth Tregarthan's footprints. That little round heel—obviously a high-heeled shoe. The storm and the torrential rain. Would a sensible, country-bred girl like Ruth leave her house in the midst of a storm in flimsy, high-heeled shoes? She had always worn brogues, good, stout, walking shoes, when the Vicar had seen her out and about in the locality. She normally wore brogues . Then why, when it was raining, did she suddenly elect to tramp along the cliff edge in what appeared to be house-shoes?—or at the most, town-shoes?
    And secondly—yes, indeed it was rather like setting out the points in a sermon—why was the track returning to the side-door different from the track leading from it? There was less heel in the first, more toe. Which meant? She was running. Why? To get in out of the rain? Hardly that, since she had apparently set off quite cheerfully in the middle of the storm. Besides, Ruth was used to the wet. She had not lived the major part of her life in Boscawen without learning to ignore the vagaries of the elements. She was a typical country girl. Yet she had run. The nature of the footprints had changed about mid-way along the garden wall. Yet Ruth had told Grouch that she did not know anything was amiss until she reached the sitting-room and found her uncle dead.
    And further—that question about the wet mackintosh. Again it was unlike Ruth to avoid the exercise of common sense. That question seemed to have disturbed her. She had hesitated, appeared uneasy, stammered. What did it mean exactly? Was Ruth trying to hide something from the police?
    Did she, despite her denial, know that her uncle had been shot before she entered the sitting-room? Say, for example, when she was on the cliff-path at the bottom of the garden?
    The Vicar suddenly felt a great depression weighing on him. He stared uneasily at the spectral landscape which stretched out on either side of the drive. Behind his gold-rimmed glasses his eyes, devoid of their customary twinkle, were narrowed to two thin slits of perplexity and trepidation.

CHAPTER IV
    STRANGE BEHAVIOUR OF RUTH TREGARTHAN
    I NSPECTOR B IGSWELL , despite the cosiness of the Vicar's study and the excellence of the refreshment provided, did not remain long at the Vicarage. Satisfied that he had obtained a good wad of local knowledge from Pendrill and the Reverend Dodd, he returned at once to Greylings. The Doctor, who after the excitements of the evening felt pretty exhausted, offered to drop the Inspector before returning along the road to Rock House. But Bigswell, who wanted a few moments to himself and found walking a stimulating brain tonic, politely refused the offer. So the two of them said “Good night” at the Vicarage gate and went their separate ways.
    As Bigswell saw it, little more could be done that night. There might be a weapon hidden somewhere in the vicinity of the house or at any rate a further clue or clues, but it was useless to make an exhaustive search until