ice ascended, making
careful examination of every turn in the way, and finally reached
the summit a little after noon. It was a dizzy height, beetling over
the sea beneath; but crags and buttresses broke out from the six
hundred feet of precipice and any object thrown over from the crest
of Hawk Beak Hill must have been arrested many times in its downward
progress.

Inspector Damarell stopped to rest and flung himself panting on the
close sward at the crown of the cliff.

"What do you think?" he asked Brendon; and the other having made a
careful examination of the ground around them and scanned the peaks
and ledges beneath, answered:

"He never came here--at any rate not until he had disposed of the
body. It's the broken ground under the plateau we must search. There
may be a way down that he knew. I guess he threw the body over, then
scrambled down himself and covered it deep with stones. It's surely
there--for the simple reason that it can't be anywhere else. We
should have found out if he'd brought it to the top. And in my
judgment, even if he wanted to do so, he would have lacked the
physical strength. He must have spent himself getting it to the
plateau, however strong he is, and then found that he could do no
more. The body, therefore, should be hidden in the rocks below the
plateau."

"We can leave it at that then, till we've had something to eat and
drink," answered the inspector, and proceeding to the nearest point
of the highroad, where a car already waited for them, they made a
meal. The constable who drove the car had no news, but Brendon
expected that information might await him at Dartmouth. He was
convinced that on this occasion the object of their search could not
long evade discovery.

They chained up the motor car, and the constable who had driven it
joined them when they descended to explore the broken ground beneath
the plateau.

"There's nothing more hateful to me than a murder without the body,"
declared Damarell, on the way down. "You don't even know if you're
on firm ground to start with, and every step you take must hang upon
a fact that you can't verify except by circumstantial evidence.
Every step may in reality be a false one--and the nearer you appear
to be to the truth, the farther you may be going away from it. A
pint of blood needn't of necessity mean a murder; but this chap,
Robert Redmayne, has a partiality for leaving red traces behind
him."

The others listened and then th