The search for the body began in the morning, at low tide. Inspector¹ Murchison had come from Staveley to superintend, and from the landing place he and Sergeant² Westaway directed the operations of the Ashlingsea fishermen who had been engaged to make the search.

 

Some of the townspeople who had walked up from the town to witness the proceedings³ thought that the body would be swept out to sea and never recovered, but the fishermen, with a deeper knowledge of a treacherous⁴ piece of sea from which they wrested⁵ their living, shook their heads. If the gentleman had fallen in near the deep water of the landing-place the undercurrent might have carried him out into the Channel, but there were too many reefs and sand-banks running out from the headland, and too many cross-currents, to let a body be carried out to sea.

 

They gave it as their opinion that the body would be found before high tide, either in one of the shallows near the big sand-bank, a quarter of a mile out, or in one of the pools between the reefs whose jagged, pointed⁶ edges showed above the surface of the sea nearer the headland.

 

The sea lay grey and still under an October sky of dull silver. The boats, as they came from Ashlingsea, put in at the landing-place to receive the instructions of the police officers standing⁷ there, and then started to search. There were two rowers in each boat, and standing at the stern was a man holding the rope to which the grappling irons were attached. Slowly and mechanically the boats were rowed out some distance to sea, and then rowed back again. The men in the stern watched the ropes in their hands for the first sign of tautness⁸ which would indicate that the grappling irons had hooked in to something. Frequently one of the irons caught on a piece of rock, and when this happened the boat had to be eased back until the irons could be released. The boats searching further out, near the sand-bank, used nets instead of grappling irons.

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