There was not
a sign of any nail-marked footprint under the corpse, although there
were many close around it. It was evident, therefore, that the
footprints of the deceased were made first and those of the nailed shoes
afterwards."
As Thorndyke paused the magistrate rubbed his nose thoughtfully, and
the inspector gazed at the witness with a puzzled frown.
"The singularity of this fact," my colleague resumed, "made me look at
the footprints yet more critically, and then I made another discovery.
There was a double track of the nailed shoes, leading apparently from
and back to the Shepherd's Path. But on examining these tracks more
closely, I was astonished to find that the man who had made them had
been walking backwards; that, in fact, he had walked backwards from the
body to the Shepherd's Path, had ascended it for a short distance, had
turned round, and returned, still walking backwards, to the face of the
cliff near the corpse, and there the tracks vanished altogether. On the
sand at this spot were some small, inconspicuous marks which might have
been made by the end of a rope, and there were also a few small
fragments which had fallen from the cliff above.
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