Brendon made no reply to this speech.  He was vexed, yet knew that he had heard little more than the truth.

He examined the plateau and showed again where some round object had pressed the earth and where a man had sat beside it.  From this spot it was not possible to dispose of a body in the sea.  Beneath it extended a fall of a hundred feet to broken ground, which again gave by sloping shelves to the water.  Had a corpse been thrown over here, it must have challenged their sight beneath; and yet from this standpoint no sign of the vanished man or his burden appeared.  But the zigzag path to the cliff top revealed neither any evidence of a weight being dragged upward nor the impression of the iron-shod foot.  Fresh footprints there were, but they had been made by Brendon and Doria on the previous night.  Now the police 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.”