Free The Cornish Coast Murder (British Library Crime Classics) by John Bude

the room I heard them start all over again. Then I heard Miss Ruth come out into the hall in a hurry, get into her outdoor things and go out by the side door.”
    This concluded, as far as the Inspector was concerned, the valuable part of Mrs. Cowper's evidence. What followed was mere gossip and hearsay, which the Inspector put an end to as soon as was tactfully possible. Cowper merely corroborated his wife's statement that Miss Ruth and her uncle were always “chewing their rag,” as he put it.
    Satisfied that he was at last getting somewhere in his investigations the Inspector ordered Grimmet and the burly Constable to make an exhaustive search in the grounds of the house and on the surrounding part of the common, in the hope that some further clue might come to light. Bigswell, himself, returned at once to the cliff-path and went over the ground which he had covered the night before. There was, as he saw at once, a new series of footprints which served to corroborate Ruth's story of the previous evening. These he dismissed for the time being as extraneous and concentrated his attentions on the earlier footprints made by Ruth before Tregarthan had been discovered dead. This time he was struck, as the Vicar had been struck, by those two curious and interesting facts—(1) That Ruth Tregarthan had walked to about midway along the cliff-path at the bottom of the garden, stopped, apparently, and, by the direction of the toes, stared into the uncurtained room, and then run at a high speed toward the side door. (2) That she was wearing at the time high-heeled shoes.
    But why had she run? She, on her own statement, did not realise that anything was wrong with her uncle. Taking up his position mid-way along the wall the Inspector saw at once, by reason of the wide window-frames and the position of a small arm-chair, that Tregarthan's recumbent body would have been invisible from the cliff-path. And yet the girl had apparently taken one look at the window and bolted helter-skelter to the side door. And more than that—rushed without removing her wet attire, straight into the sitting-room. Why?
    Inspector Bigswell hoisted himself up on to the low stone wall, filled his pipe, lit it fastidiously and began to evolve the first outlines of a theory, which would account for the manner in which Julius Tregarthan had been murdered.
    His theory was something like this:
    Ruth Tregarthan had quarrelled violently with her uncle over this love-affair between her and Ronald Hardy. For some reason (at present unapparent) Tregarthan had been dead against the match. Ruth had gone at once to Ronald, probably to let him know of this final fracas and to make plans for their future actions. She was in a violent temper. The continued opposition of her uncle to the man she loved had driven her, at this final stage, to desperation. Perhaps her uncle's consent to the marriage was, for some financial reason, essential. At any rate, Ruth, finding Ronald out, had returned along the cliff-path and seeing a light in the sitting-room, had snatched up a handful of gravel from the drive, returned to the cliff-path, thrown the gravel, and when her uncle drew aside the curtains she had shot him. Then, horrified by the results of her action, she had rushed, via the side door, into the sitting-room, to find, alas, that her uncle was already dead.
    This was the Inspector's theory. Set out, step by step, in his mind he realised, at once, that though it explained away a good many of the facts of the case, it still left a great deal unexplained. Why, for example, had he found no footprints linking up the cliff-path with the drive, where the girl had gone to get the handful of gravel? It was reasonably certain that she would have used the little track which led through the laurel bushes. Where had the girl got the revolver? At Cove Cottage? She would hardly have had a revolver ready in the pocket of her mackintosh, and according to Mrs. Cowper she would have had no time