Francis Benton-Smith’s discovery below the sea cliffs turns a difficult search into a promising forensic lead: on a narrow shore beneath the chapel, he finds an egg-shaped stone caught in a remnant of surgical glove, with a reddish stain that appears to be blood. The object may be connected to Nathan Oliver’s killing, but it is recovered as a suspected weapon, not yet proven to be one. Its significance rests both on what it looks like and on the careful, limited claims the investigators can make about it.

Background and the Search

The search takes place against the developing forensic picture of Oliver’s death. Edith Glenister’s initial examination placed the time of death between 7:30 and 9:00 in the morning, probably nearer the earlier time. She identified finger-shaped bruises on the neck and concluded that Oliver had been strangled before his body was hanged. Her later autopsy report confirmed death by asphyxiation from manual strangulation and described a fracture of the thyroid cartilage and a bruise at the back of the neck, where his head had been forced against something hard. Those findings give the search for a possible blunt instrument a specific investigative context, but they do not by themselves identify any particular stone as the weapon.

Another strand of the inquiry concerned the climbing rope used in the staged hanging. Jago Tamlyn had been told to rewind it and return it to its hook after the stretcher was taken away; the lighthouse door was unlocked, so others could have reached the rope. Kate Miskin later secured it in an exhibit bag with Francis Benton-Smith adding his name, but laboratory examination found that someone had tried to wipe it along its length. The rope’s handling and cleaning complicate that line of evidence. The search beneath the cliffs is separate: it seeks a small, heavy stone that might retain a trace of blood.

Kate Miskin, Francis Benton-Smith, and Jago Tamlyn travel by buggy toward the chapel. Kate stops about twenty yards away to preserve the ground near the scene, then leads the group down through bushes and jutting rocks to a narrow lower ledge. They follow it until they are beneath the chapel and look down over an approximately eighty-foot drop. Below lies a cove without a beach, crowded with stones and boulders; the tide is coming in quickly. The place makes the search urgent as well as physically difficult: each advancing wave reduces the exposed ground available to examine.

The Descent and Search

Kate judges that either she or Francis Benton-Smith must abseil down, and asks Jago for help. Benton goes down. As Jago secures the slings around a boulder and Benton clips in, the familiar preparations bring back Benton’s memories of climbing, including the ritual silence in which he and his grandfather used to prepare. He has not experienced this kind of descent for more than a decade. At the edge, he leans backward into space; the rope holds, and the initial fear gives way to the renewed exhilaration of controlling his descent with his hands and the karabiner.

Once at the bottom, Benton releases himself, puts on search gloves, and assesses the strip of sea-smoothed rocks. He is looking for a stone heavy enough to serve as a weapon but small enough to be held in the hand, ideally with blood still on it. The rocks are piled in their thousands, many polished by the sea and similar in size and weight to what he seeks. Meanwhile, the incoming tide covers the outermost rocks and advances into the pools. Benton searches yard by careful yard, knowing that the visible ground is disappearing and that he will still have to climb back up. The scene’s brief exhilaration has become a race against the water and the dwindling chance of finding anything.

Discovery and Recovery

Near the cliff’s edge, Benton notices a pale scrap of litter on the otherwise untrodden shore. It is an egg-shaped stone, partly enclosed in what appears to be the remnant of a surgical glove. Most of the thin latex has torn away, but one finger and part of the palm remain. On the stone is a reddish stain that Benton believes can only be blood. The glove fragment and stain make the stone more than an object of the right size: they are visible traces that may connect it to an act of violence, though the discovery alone cannot establish whose blood it is or how the marks came to be there.

Benton puts the stone into an exhibit bag, closes it, and ties the package to the abseil rope. He calls up that he has found it, and Kate signals from above as the bag is hauled to the cliff top. The recovery is immediate and practical rather than a completed forensic conclusion: the package is brought out of the incoming tide and preserved for further examination. Jago then descends, and the group prepares to move around the outcrop toward the next climb. The rock remains a suspected murder weapon whose material traces need testing.

Evidentiary Significance

The find gives the investigation a concrete object to examine, but the details of its discovery matter as much as its apparent promise. The stone is found on a shore where seawater is actively washing over the rocks; the glove material is torn, and only a small portion remains. The reddish mark looks like blood to Benton, but the scene supplies no laboratory identification, no confirmed source for the stain, and no proof that the stone caused Oliver’s injuries. Its recovery in an exhibit bag preserves it for examination without resolving those questions in advance.

The episode also brings together the novel’s competing forms of evidence: medical findings that establish strangulation, a rope whose condition has been compromised by wiping, and a newly recovered object bearing possible traces of blood and a glove. None should be treated as interchangeable or conclusive on its own. The discovery matters because it opens a testable line of inquiry and because Benton, under pressure from the tide and the difficult terrain, finds the particular object the team was seeking. The success is real, but its meaning remains provisional until the evidence can be assessed.