“I’m not sure about that,” said Holmes, speaking to himself as much as to our companion. “There is something decidedly odd about these tracks. Please keep as much to the side of the path as you can.”

From that moment on, Holmes led the way, his keen eyes following the footprints in the soft earth beneath us, and occasionally stopping to examine some mark at the side of the path that had caught his eye. Presently we came to a steep incline, where the ground ahead of us rose up ten feet or more.

“Professor Palfreyman believes these tall ridges which run through the wood are evidence of pre-historic agricultural practices,” remarked Miss Calloway, “and have been here since long before the trees. He has often said he will investigate them more thoroughly when he has the time.”

We had been climbing this steep little hill as she had been speaking. Now we reached the top and stood a moment on the narrow ridge. Immediately below us, the ground dropped down once more to a narrow gully, perhaps six feet wide, then rose up again to another ridge, similar to the one on which we were standing. It was not the ground that seized our attention, however, but something else, which had just become visible to us. On the second ridge, or just beyond it, stood a large, spreading tree, and from a low, horizontal branch of this tree, silhouetted against the grey mist, hung a rope, looped in the form of a noose.

“What in heaven’s name is that thing?” cried Miss Calloway in alarm.

“It is a hangman’s noose,” said Holmes. “What devilry is this?” He dashed down the slope and up the other side of the gully, Miss Calloway and I following close behind him. Again, we paused at the top of the ridge, and with a thrill of horror I surveyed the scene before us. Immediately ahead of us now was a small, open glade, perhaps twenty feet in each direction, and hemmed in on all sides by the dense wood. Upon the damp, leaf-strewn turf of this glade, stretched out on their backs about a dozen feet apart, were the motionless figures of two men, their sightless eyes staring up at the clouds above.

Miss Calloway began to scream, but the scream died on her lips, and she collapsed and would have tumbled back into the gully had I not caught hold of her. Holmes sprang down into the glade and bent to examine the two figures on the ground. The first was an elderly man with grey hair and moustache.

“Dead,” said Holmes after a brief examination. “Head stove in at the back.”

Then he turned his attention to the other figure, a younger man.

“Also dead,” said Holmes. “Shot through the heart.”

Miss Calloway showed some signs of returning consciousness, and Holmes helped me get her off the ridge and into the glade, where I sat her on a large fallen log and put my arm round her, as much to physically support her as to comfort her.

“Who are these people?” Holmes asked her as she looked about her in bewilderment.

“That is Professor Palfreyman,” she replied, indicating the grey-haired man, “and the other is Tim – Mr Martin. Are they both dead?”

Holmes nodded. “We can do nothing for them now. Watson, please take Miss Calloway back to the house and give her something suitable to drink, and send that gardener for the police. You’d better write a note for him to take. Stress that the matter is of the utmost urgency. Don’t bother with any details; just state that two men have been found dead, and that they may need to call in someone from Scotland Yard.”

The hardest part of what Holmes had asked me to do was getting Miss Calloway back to the house. She was, understandably, in a state of extreme nervous collapse, and almost fainted twice more before we reached the kitchen door. In between times, she kept bursting into tears and weeping copiously, and I had to keep stopping to comfort her.

“The two people I have been closest to in the last year!” she cried in anguish, clinging on to me for support. “Both dead! Who could have done such a terrible thing?”

“Have no doubts,” I replied, “Mr Holmes will find out. He always does. Justice will prevail, Miss Calloway, and the guilty shall not escape!”

Once in the kitchen, I settled her in a chair, found some brandy in a cupboard and poured out a tot for her and one for myself. I am not ashamed to say that my nerves, too, seemed shot to pieces. It had been a tremendous shock to suddenly come upon those lifeless bodies lying in that peaceful woodland glade, and I could scarcely comprehend the matter any more than my distraught companion could. I found a piece of paper in the professor’s study, wrote a brief note, in which I mentioned Holmes’s name, and gave it to the gardener, then returned to the kitchen. The fire there had all but gone out, so I set about rekindling it with paper and sticks, so that I could boil a kettle. While I was doing this, and Miss Calloway sat watching me in a sort of numb silence, the cook, Mrs Wheeler, returned. I explained to her briefly what had happened and, after coping with her momentary hysterics, left Miss Calloway in her care and hurried down the garden again to see what Sherlock Holmes was doing.

When I surmounted the ridge immediately before the woodland glade, I saw that Holmes was down on his hands and knees at the far side of the clearing, inspecting something on the ground. For some time he moved about in this fashion, like a hound following a scent, then he eventually stood up and turned to me, a slight frown on his face. “I have made a broad sweep round the whole area,” said he, “to verify one or two points.” I told him that Mrs Wheeler had returned and was looking after his client, and he nodded his head. “I am glad you have come back, Watson. You can hold the fort here, if you wouldn’t mind, as I wish to look at something in the house. I shouldn’t be more than five minutes.”

It gave me a strange, eerie feeling, to be left alone in that silent, fog-shrouded glade, with two men lying dead on the grass at my feet. Why had these two – an old man and a young man – been killed in this strange, unforeseen way? What was the meaning of that sinister hangman’s noose that hung, like a symbol of death and retribution, over this terrible scene? Backwards and forwards I paced round the edge of the clearing, unable to rest, either mentally or physically. What, I wondered, did Sherlock Holmes make of it all? What could anyone make of it? Would this be the one occasion when even Holmes was lost for an answer, when the mystery was too dark even for his great analytical skills to unravel?

My friend was away a little longer than he had predicted, but when he returned the frown had gone from his face and he seemed almost relaxed. “I have found what I was looking for,” said he in answer to my query. “My case is complete.”

“What do you mean by ‘complete’?” I asked in amazement.

“Simply that I believe I now know all that there is to know about the matter.”

“What! You know who killed Professor Palfreyman?”

“Yes.”

“And Martin?”

“Yes.”

“And why they were killed in different ways?”

“Yes.”

“And the meaning of that hangman’s noose?”

“Yes.”

“What do we do next, then?”

“We sit on that log and smoke our pipes, Watson! We can do nothing further until the police arrive, and must hope that they send someone with more than just sawdust in his head! There is nothing I find so wearying and tiresome as having to explain everything ten times over before I am understood!”

“I will not ask you any more questions, then, until the police arrive,” I said.

“Good man!” cried my friend, filling his pipe with tobacco and putting a match to it. “That is considerate of you!” I lit my own pipe, and we sat smoking in silence for some time.

“It seems so unfair,” I said at length, “that Miss Calloway should be involved in this dreadful business when it is really nothing whatever to do with her.”