The Groote Park Murder. Freeman Wills Crofts

clear, Vandam imagined, that the scattering of the earth over the floor was done to remove the traces of its having been swept. If so, it had been badly done and it had failed in its object. Was this, he wondered, due to lack of care, or to haste, or to working in the dark?

      He could not answer any of these questions, but the more he thought over them, the more likely he thought it that Smith had been engaged with another or others in some secret and perhaps sinister business.

      Inspector Vandam was mildly intrigued by the whole affair, but it did not seem of passing importance. He decided that after taking a general look round, he would return to headquarters and consult his Chief as to whether the matter should be further followed up. He therefore turned from the shed to its immediate surroundings.

      At the end of the shed, between the path and the boundary wall, the ground was covered with low heaps of leaf mould. The stuff had evidently lain there for a considerable time, for the surface had grown smooth, almost like soil. Across this smooth surface and close to the end of the shed passed two lines of footsteps, one coming and the other going.

      Vandam stood looking at the marks. They were vague and blurred and quite useless as prints, and yet there was something peculiar about them. At first he had assumed—without reason, as he now realised—that they were Smith’s tracks approaching and leaving the shed. But now he saw they had been made by different persons. Those receding were closer together and much deeper than the others, and he began to picture a tall, thin man arriving, and a short, stout one going away.

      And there he would probably have left it, had not Sergeant Clarke at that moment walked across the leaf-mould to look over the wall. Almost subconsciously Vandam noticed that his steps made comparatively little impression, about the same, indeed, as those of his hypothetic thin man. But Clarke was not thin. He was a big man, tall, broad and well developed.

      ‘I say, Clarke,’ Vandam looked up suddenly, ‘what do you weigh?’

      ‘Just turn the scale at sixteen stone,’ returned the other stolidly, no trace of surprise at the question showing on his wooden countenance.

      ‘I thought so,’ Vandam muttered, turning his eyes again on the footprints. Somewhat puzzled, he walked across the strip himself, and turned to see what marks he had made. Vandam was a small man, thin though wiry, and his weight, he knew, was just under twelve stone. The prints he had left were considerably lighter than Clarke’s.

      At first he wondered whether atmospheric conditions might not have rendered the leaf-mould softer on the previous night than it was now, but he immediately realised that no such change in the weather had taken place. No, there seemed to be no way of escaping the obvious suggestion. The man who had left the gardens had been carrying a heavy weight.

      And this, if true, would account for the outward-bound prints being closer together than the others, so that they might well have been made by the same man. What could Smith have been carrying?

      Vandam turned and looked over the wall. Below him was the railway cutting, and his eyes followed the curving line of rails until about fifty yards to the right it disappeared into the black mouth of the Dartie Avenue tunnel. From where he stood, it was just possible to see the place where the body had lain, and Clarke lost no time in pointing it out.

      Inspector Vandam nodded absently as he scrutinised the grassy slope below him. Yes, he was not mistaken; a weight had been dragged down the bank. The bent grasses showed a slightly different colour when looked at parallel to the surface. He crossed the wall.

      ‘Stay where you are a minute,’ he called to Clarke, as he stooped to examine the ground.

      Immediately along the base of the wall, between it and the top edge of the slope, was a flat strip about three feet wide. On it, just opposite the deep footmarks on the park side, the grass was beaten down as if a weight had lain on it, and from this the marks of descent to the rails were unmistakable.

      Vandam moved slowly down the slope, noting every indication that he could find. The object appeared to have been something under two feet in width, and at one point it seemed to him that a halt had been made, though of this he was not certain. At the bottom of the bank there were further traces. Vaguely-marked footsteps showed at the edge of the offset, and two faint tracks or scrapes were visible coming on to the offset and turning in the direction of the tunnel. These scrapes were each about an inch wide and ran parallel, a foot apart. They were lost to view almost at once when they passed from the soft ground at the edge of the offset on to the beaten track at its centre.

      Calling to Clarke to follow him down and to keep clear of the traces, Vandam scrutinised the ground to the tunnel, but without finding further marks. Then, having reached the scene of the tragedy, he listened to the other’s detailed description of what had been found.

      ‘Not much blood about,’ he commented, as he stood looking down at the traces which still remained.

      ‘That’s so,’ Clark admitted. ‘I noticed that. It would all be the way he was struck.’

      Vandam did not reply. A terrible possibility had suddenly flashed into his mind, and he stood silently considering how far the various points he had learned would fit in with it. At last he turned once more to his companion.

      ‘I take it that body is still at the station?’ he asked.

      ‘Yes, sir. I have done nothing yet about getting it shifted.’

      ‘I’d like to have a look at it.’

      Twenty minutes later the two men stood gazing down on all that was mortal of the late Albert Smith. But the Inspector did not delay there long.

      ‘Where are the clothes?’ he demanded.

      Clarke took him to the next room. Instantly the Inspector picked up the shoes, and turning them over, glanced at the backs of the heels. For a moment he stood staring, then laid them down again very deliberately.

      ‘Clarke,’ he said slowly, ‘it’s well that gardener found the notebook. This is neither accident nor suicide. Albert Smith has been murdered by a carefully thought out scheme. How did you come to miss that? You should have spotted it.’

      For once the sergeant’s face became expressive. Blank amazement amounting almost to awe was stamped on its every feature. He gasped, speechless.

      ‘Let it be a warning to you about taking things for granted,’ went on Vandam gravely. ‘Here, look at this.’

      Once more he picked up the shoes, pointing to the backs of the heels. They were marked with a number of slight scratches, running up at right angles to the tread.

      ‘You see, he’s been dragged down the bank with his legs trailing on the ground. The track of the body is quite clear on the slope, and I found where the two heels dropped on the offset and were dragged along towards the tunnel. He was carried over that leaf-mould and dropped on the bank over the wall. And do you know the reason there was so little blood on the railway?’

      Clarke recovered himself with an effort.

      ‘He was dead, sir?’ he suggested in somewhat shaky tones.

      ‘Of course, because he was dead. You might have thought of that, even if you saw nothing else. And there was another thing that you might have thought of, too, if you hadn’t been so darned sleepy; the way the body was torn up. How do you think that happened?’

      ‘I don’t quite follow, sir,’ the unhappy man stammered.

      ‘No, because you won’t use your brains. Think a minute. If the man had been struck when he was standing or walking he would have been thrown clear by the cowcatcher. But if the body was lying on the ground—laid across the rails in all probability—why, it could hardly have escaped the kind of damage it got. See what I mean?’

      Clarke murmured incoherently.

      ‘I don’t say it would always happen that way,’ the Inspector went on after a pause, ‘but the thing might have let you smell a rat. Yes, there’s no doubt the man was murdered. Murdered, I should think, in that shed, but of