“Peace, peace; I’m convinced. Since you seem omniscient, at least in so far as dynamic oceanography is concerned, suppose you tell us, Lefty,” murmured Ellery, “how much of this beach must have been uncovered at one o’clock or so this morning.”
For the first time Judge Macklin and Inspector Moley grasped the end Ellery had in view. The Judge whipped his long legs into a twist and gazed intently at the creeping water.
Lefty pursed his lips and studied the Cove; then his lips moved silently, as if he were computing something. “Well, sir,” he said at last, “you have to take a lot of things into consideration. But, figurin’ it as close as I can, takin’ into account the fact that at this time o’ year at high tide there’s about two feet of beach left uncovered, I’d say that at one this mornin’ there must have been at least eighteen, maybe nineteen feet of beach out of water. I told ye she goes out fast in here. At half-past one maybe more’n thirty. This Cove plays hell with the chart.”
Ellery clapped the man’s shoulder resoundingly. “Excellent! That’s all, Lefty, and many thanks. You’ve cleared up a pretty point.”
“Glad to’ve been of help, sir. Anything else, Chief?”
Moley shook his head absently and the detective went away. “So what?” demanded Moley after a while.
Ellery rose and went down the terrace steps leading to the beach. But he did not set foot upon the sand. “By the way, Inspector, I’m correct in assuming that there are only two ways of getting to this terrace: by way of the main path up there, and by way of this Cove?”
“Sure! Easy enough to see.”
“I like corroboration. Now then—”
“Much as I dislike argument,” murmured Judge Macklin, “may I point out that there are cliffs on each side of the terrace, my boy?”
“But they’re forty feet or more high here,” retorted Ellery. “Are you contending that some one may have jumped forty feet from the top of one of these cliffs onto the terrace or beach, which is even farther below?”
“Not quite. But there are such things as ropes, and to let oneself down—”
“Nothing to tie a rope to up there,” snapped Inspector Moley. “No trees or boulders on either side for at least two hundred yards.”
“But how,” protested the Judge mildly, “about an accomplice to hold the rope?”
“Oh, come,” said Ellery with impatience. “It’s you who are being the sophist now, dear Solon. Of course I’d thought of such a patent possibility. But why on earth should any one take that devious route in reaching the terrace when there are the path and the stairs? It isn’t guarded, you know; and at night the shadows of the cliffs would make it quite dark.”
“There’s the noise. That’s gravel on that path.”
“True, but a man would make just as much noise scraping and bumping down forty feet of striated rock if he were lowered on a rope. And it would be a much more suspicious noise to the intended victim than the mere sounds of footsteps on gravel.”
“Not if they were this Captain Kidd’s footsteps,” chuckled the Judge.
“My dear boy, I’ve no doubt you’re perfectly right. I’m merely clarifying an issue which it seems to me requires clarification. You yourself are always preaching that everything must be taken into account.”
Ellery grunted, appeased. “Very well, then. There are two avenues of approach to the terrace: the path above, and the Cove below. Now we know that John Marco was alive on this terrace at one o’clock this morning. We know that from his own testimony — he set the time down at the heading of the letter he began to write to this man Penfield. Incidentally, there can’t be any doubt about the fact that he did write it at one o’clock this morning; he set the date down, too.”
“That’s right,” nodded Moley.
“Now, even assuming his watch was wrong, the error could not have exceeded at the utmost a half-hour, and the probabilities are all against it’s having been as much as that, if anything at all. The coroner set down the time of death, which was virtually instantaneous, as between one and one-thirty. So far, then, we check all along the line.” He paused to gaze over the placid little beach.
“But what of it?” growled the Inspector.
“He’s obviously trying to establish the time the murderer came,” murmured the Judge. “Go on, Ellery.”
“Now if Marco was down here, alive, at one o’clock or so this morning, at what time did his murderer come?” asked Ellery, nodding his approval at the old gentleman. “That’s a vital question, naturally. Well, we can make genuine progress toward answering it. For we have Marco’s own word for the fact that it was he who came first.”
“Whoa!” said Moley. “Not so fast. How do you figure that?”
“Why, man, he said so — in practically so many words — in his letter!”
“You’ll have to show me,” said Moley stubbornly.
Ellery sighed. “Didn’t he write that he had a ‘few minutes alone’? Obviously he wouldn’t have written that had some one been with him. In fact, he stated that he was waiting for somebody. The only argument that would invalidate that would be to establish the falsity of the letter. But you maintain there’s no question whatever about the authenticity of the handwriting as Marco’s, and I’m quite eager to accept your word for it. Because it helps my argument. If Marco was alone and alive at one o’clock, then his murderer had not yet come.” He paused as the Inspector stared. Through the rift in the cliffs the nose of a large rowboat was pushing into sight. It was full of men and peculiar-looking apparatus which trailed over the sides of the boat to disappear in the blue depths of the water. They were dragging the sea-bottom about the cliffs of Spanish Cape, looking for John Marco’s clothing.
“Now our tidal expert,” continued Ellery, without taking his eyes from the boat, “tells us that at one o’clock this morning something like eighteen feet of beach were above water. But I’ve just shown that at one o’clock this morning Marco was still alive.”
“So what?” said the Inspector after a while.
“Well, you saw that beach this morning, Inspector!” exclaimed Ellery, flinging his arm forward. “Even at the time Judge Macklin and I came here, a couple of hours ago, there were from twenty-five to thirty feet of beach exposed. You didn’t see any impressions in the sand, did you?”
“Can’t say I remember any.”
“There weren’t. Then there weren’t any impressions in the sand last night between one and one-thirty, either! The tide had kept steadily ebbing, receding farther and farther from the terrace. The water, then, had no chance after one o’clock to wash away any footprints which might have been imbedded in that eighteen-foot stretch of sand extending seaward from the foot of the steps down there. Nor did it rain last night; and what wind there was could scarcely have smoothed away any footprints in this sheltered place, protected as it is by forty-foot walls of sheer rock.”
“Go on, son, go on,” said the Judge quickly.
“Now, observe. Had Marco’s murderer come to the terrace by way of the beach down there, he couldn’t have avoided leaving prints of some kind in the sand, since I’ve just shown that he must have arrived after one o’clock — at a time when more than eighteen feet of beach were uncovered. But there are no prints in the sand. Therefore the murderer of Marco didn’t come to the terrace by way of the beach!”
There was a large silence, broken only by the shouts of the draggers in the boat and the lap of wavelets on the beach.
“So that’s what you were driving at.” Inspector Moley nodded gloomily. “That’s straight arguing, Mr. Queen, but hell! I could have told you the same thing myself without all that folderol. It stood to reason that—”