“There’s the Grampians,” he said. “Fifty-odd miles from north to south and twenty-five-odd miles from east to west. Here’s Dunkeld down here at the southern edge. There’s Hall’s Gap away up on the northern edge. Three miles from Hall’s Gap was where they found Detective Price. The girls were lost twenty-five miles south of the place where Price was murdered, and approximately in the middle of the mountains. Have you ever been in them?”

“No. Point out the road taken by the two girls.”

“Well, from Dunkeld down here, they took the road northward past Mount Abrupt, which you can see through the window. They left about nine in the morning, and at eight that night a truck-driver saw them camped beside the road where there’s a little creek. Twenty miles from Dunkeld. The next-”

“The truck-driver? Where had he come from?”

“From Baden Park Station-here.”

“Oh! Proceed.”

“The next morning the girls followed the road to Hall’s Gap for a further ten miles where there’s a bridge and a turn-off track to the Baden Park Hotel. There! See the creek?”

“Yes. That turn-off track appears to be secondary to the road to Hall’s Gap.”

“Yes, it is,” Groves agreed. “When they left the hotel here, the girls said they were going through to Hall’s Gap, but on reaching the turn-off at the bridge they must have changed their minds. There’s a signpost there saying that Baden Park Hotel is four miles away. They had a road map, and therefore they probably saw that they could take that turn-off track, stay at the hotel, go on to the guest-house at Lake George, and from there follow a track which would bring them again to the Hall’s Gap Road. I suppose you know all this, sir?”

“Never mind. You tell the story.”

“Well. The girls reached the Baden Park Hotel the day after they left Dunkeld. They stayed at the hotel for two days. The licensee telephoned to the guest-house at Lake George and arranged accommodation for them for one night. They left his hotel about ten and had to walk only three and a half miles to the guest-house.