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.