Turning again to the question of access and excess by the roads, Blick remembered what Walkinshaw had said about the facilities which the district afforded for successfully hiding a motor-car while its owner or occupant paid a visit. Here the Ordnance Map on the wall gave him great help. The entire contour and configuration of the country was plainly shown. North and north-east of Markenmore village, behind Greycloister, Mr. John Harborough’s big house, The Warren, Mr. Fransemmery’s residence, and Woodland Cottage, Mrs. Braxfield’s domain, lay over downs, which, bleak and bare, in the main, were intersected by deep lanes, and honeycombed by disused chalk-pits, thickly grown over with vegetation and shrubbery; there were also plantations, coppices, and here and there deep woods. It would be an easy thing for any one to turn aside from a main road into these solitudes, leave a motor-car in the shadows of some old, unworked pit, or amongst the elms and beeches of a wood, while he came down into the village. Moreover, Blick noticed that on the Ordnance Map were marked several grass tracks across the downs; now, he had already seen enough of the downs about Markenmore Hollow to know that the turf up there was so wiry, resilient, and firm that you could drive an automobile across it, almost anywhere, with as great ease as on a macadamized road and without leaving any trace. Therefore a man might have turned off the main roads, crossed the downs to some point within a couple of miles of the village, left his car in some convenient old chalk-pit, and felt assured that no one would know how he came nor how he left. Up there, on those solitudes, there was not a house, not a cottage, not even an outlying farm, marked on the map.
So much for these matters—Blick now turned to a third. Grimsdale had said that when the three men left his house at a quarter-past three on Tuesday morning, he saw them walk up the road in the direction of Greycloister and Mitbourne; Blick directed his attention to this road. Immediately in front of the Sceptre, flanking on its front garden, in fact, was the main road of the village; at the corner of the garden it divided; one branch, to the right, turning off, direct, to Selcaster; the other, on the left, turning to Mitbourne, and, at about three hundred yards from the Sceptre, passing the entrance gates of Greycloister. Now according to Grimsdale, the three men took this road and disappeared along it. But Guy Markenmore, if the medical evidence was reliable, was shot dead, about four o’clock, at Markenmore Hollow, about a mile northward of this road. How had he come there? The Ordnance Map and its meticulously careful markings, showed that. Two hundred yards from the Sceptre Inn, on the Mitbourne road, there were two footpaths, one on either side of the way. One, on the south, or right-hand side, went across the meadows in the directions of Selcaster; the other, on the north, or left-hand side, turned up to the downs, between Greycloister and Woodland Cottage. Near Markenmore Hollow—in fact, at the very spot whereat Guy Markenmore’s dead body had been found by the ploughman, Hobbs, this path struck into another, which led direct to Mitbourne Station. And on seeing this, Blick came to a conclusion: When the three men came to these footpaths, they separated. One man either turned back to the village (unlikely, thought Blick) or took the right-hand footpath to Selcaster (very probable, Blick considered); the other two men, of whom Guy Markenmore was certainly one, took the left-hand path, and climbed the hill-side to Markenmore Hollow. There Guy Markenmore was suddenly murdered, and whichever man it was who was with him, whether the presumed American who had come to the Sceptre at nine o’clock on Monday night, or the man who had been given admittance at two o’clock on Tuesday morning, was the murderer.