His bag too--left by him at Waterloo for a solid proof that he was not in London as he pretended. The bag was at the cloak-room all right when he came to fetch it, but perhaps in the meantime it had been to Scotland Yard and back again. Besides, Waterloo was a station he should never once have showed his nose in; the link between Waterloo and home was too close--his own line--the railway whose staff was replenished by people from his own part of the country. While he was feeling glad that the passengers were strangers, perhaps a porter was saying to a mate: "There goes the postmaster of Rodchurch. He and I were boys together. I should know him anywhere, though it's ten years since I last saw William Dale." He ought to have used Paddington Station--he could have got to Salisbury that way, and gone into the woods the way he came out of them.
Last of all, that child in the glade--a child strayed from one of the cottages, or the child of some woodcutter who had brought her with him, who was perhaps a very little way off, who listened to the tale of what the child had seen five minutes after she had seen it. Of course nothing much would be thought of the child's tale at first; but it would assume importance directly suspicion had been aroused; it would link up with other circumstances, it would suggest new ideas and further researches to the minds of detectives, it might be the clue that eventually hanged him.
It seemed to Dale as he went over things in this quivering, quaking manner that, from the little girl weaving flowers back to the two Jews selling slops, he had recruited an army of witnesses to denounce and destroy him.
Only in one respect had he not bungled. He got rid of the clothes and hat all right. Cut and torn into narrow stripes they had gone comfortably down the drains of the temperance hotel in Stamford Street. That was a night's wise labor. But the labor and thoughtful care had come too late, on top of all the previous folly.
And he said to himself, "It's prob'ly all up with me. This quiet is the usual trick of the p'lice to throw you off the scent. They're playin' wi' me. They let me sim to run free, because they know they can 'aarve me when they want me."
With such thoughts, he went down-stairs of a morning to talk jovially with Ridgett, to chaff Miss Yorke; and with the thoughts unchanged he came up-stairs to glower at Mavis across the breakfast-table.