His legs were long, and he could run fast for a short distance. In a few minutes he had lost himself and his pursuer in the darkness, but he still ran blindly on, till his utmost efforts would drag him no further, when he threw himself at full length on one of the park seats and endeavoured to still his panting, laboured breath. If the policeman should come upon him now, he thought his only chance lay in being able to simulate profound slumber. Luckily the working powers of this plan were not put to the test. Minutes passed, and no one came near him. It was some time before he could convince himself that he had eluded all pursuit for the present. When he was at last sure of it the fact heartened him wonderfully. If he could so easily escape when caught in the actual perpetration of a violent attack, it would bother the authorities indeed to fasten on him as one of those concerned in a crime so well concealed as that in which he had only unwillingly assisted.
It was when he remembered that he was quite ignorant of the damage he had inflicted on Barbara that doubts assailed him again. It seemed to him that he must have killed her. But if not ... if not? Why then, even though she could hardly denounce him, she would not forget Madame Querterot. And Madame Querterot’s first line of defence would be to accuse him, as she herself had declared.
Curse the woman, how he hated her! From first to last everything was her doing; he wished, oh, how he wished that it was she he had killed. If he had thought of that sooner, he told himself savagely, all these troubles would have been saved. As things were he would probably be arrested that day.
He did not lose his head, however, and went back presently to Scholefield Avenue, where he cleared away the broken glass in the library and put everything in that room to rights, as he had already done upstairs. Then he conquered his repugnance and went out on to the balcony with his brush, and swept up a handful or so of earth, which they had not been able to remove with the spade.
He did not know how to get rid of the broken glass, as by now it was daylight and he did not dare go out to bury it in the garden; so he left it in the dustpan, and swept the grains of soil into an old newspaper, which he crumpled up and thrust into the back of the cupboard in the basement. Then he closed the shutters again, for he could not bear to be a moment in the room without the friendly screen that interposed between him and the flower stand. Finding, however, no more to do upstairs, he went down, and knocked out the pieces of the window pane in the library that still remained stuck in the frame; he thought that the empty space might well pass unobserved for a considerable time. In doing this he cut his hand, through the glove he was wearing in obedience to Madame Querterot’s reiterated commands, and some drops of blood fell on to the shining tin of the dustpan, but he wiped them off carefully and polished the pan with his sleeve as it had certainly never been polished since it left the shop and entered into domestic service.
At last his anxious mind could suggest nothing further, and he surveyed the results of his efforts with some complacency.
“I’m bothered,” said Bert to himself, “if the brainiest detective on this rotten earth could set his fingers on a clue now.”