"Gaa!" roared one, and jumped. "Take that blasted thing What's the game, Pierce?"
They had all looked away. I came down the steps, not too quickly. The light bad to be moved, but I could count on about a second's blindness after it. At the rear of the yard was a tolerably high wall, with double gates giving on an alley. I heard my own footsteps ringing on the pavement of that yard, with an almost goose-step regularity in my effort to keep them slow. I didn't dare look round now, for I had a feeling that eyes were on me.
A voice said, "That's not Pierce," — and I cut loose for it.
The rear gates were only two feet ahead now, and there was a padlock and chain hanging loose from them. Those gates were spiked at the top, so that it would want careful climbing to get over them. I jumped through, slammed the gates with a crash like a falling lift, closed the padlock, and pitched away the key. For the first time I glanced behind. There were no shouts from that yard: no shouts, and no fuss. They were coming for me as quietly as a cage of animals, black against the light, and one arm came through like a paw as the gates crashed. The rear door of the station was open now, and a voice was calling with deadly efficiency:
"Thompson, over the wall. Dennis, through the sidegate next door and up the alley. Stevens, up the street as far as you like and get him from the front. Pierce-"
This was something like a chase to rouse a man's wits. While I ran up the alley, the geography of the place became clearer. In coming into Liberia Avenue from Valley Road-, I had made a left-hand turning, and the police station was almost at the end of the former street. It was a right-angle. If I doubled back now, I could get into the alley running at the rear of Valley Road. If I stayed in the open, they could nail me easily. It became clear that my only sanctuary was the place where I had originally intended to go: "The Larches," an empty house. The attention of householders I was not afraid of; my uniform was the best kind of security against that; and the neighbourhood would shortly be buzzing with policemen.
I was pelting in the dark along a narrow, rocky alley with garden walls on either side. Each had its ash-bin outside, and the roof of its miniature greenhouse faint-gleaming by starlight over the wall. High up behind me a beam of light shot out, and I saw one of my pursuers poised on the wall over the police station gate before he jumped. Hitherto the night had been so quiet that I heard the thud when he landed in the alley: but now the dogs began. That devilish din of barking masked the noise when I overturned a few ash-bins in the path of the man behind me. I had stormed round the turning now, into the lane behind Valley Road, so that his light could not find me. From behind there was a crash as apparently he met one of the ash-bins, and the light vanished; I hoped to heaven he had broken it. But people were moving in Valley Road itself, out beyond the houses between, and even at that considerable distance a white beam pierced through the trees into my face.
They were closing in. Several windows in the neighbourhood were going up with a bang; I could discern the heads of early-retiring householders poked out like turtles. My only course now was to switch on my lantern.boldly, beat the brush with a halloo, and pretend to be a real policeman searching for myself-while hoping with some fervency that I could find the back gate of "The Larches." That was the snag. Every one of those cursed gates looked alike. I was panting hard when my lantern flickered over one fence, into a tidy garden with paths laid out in white pebbles, and caught a larch-tree as neatly as you catch a fish. It might be a coincidence, but I should have to risk it. I pulled open the gate, closed it behind me, and ran smack into bottles.
There seemed to be dozens of bottles. They were ranked up just inside the gate; my imagination magnified them into a forest even as my foot sent them rolling and clanking and bumping as though they were alive, with din enough to rouse everyone in Valley Road. To taut nerves they became monsters. I turned my lantern down while I seemed to slip and wade in empty bottles. They were not even honest beer-flagons, but they had contained a particularly villainous brand of German mineral-water — with a taste rather like Epsom salts-which I remembered by the blue-and-red label. So far, the houses on either side of "The Larches" had remained dark and quiet. But now, in the house to the right, an upstairs window was half raised. I saw a woman's head in curl-papers edged in the window as though she were listening at it, and heard a voice speaking shrilly to me.
I steadied myself, and tried to get my breath.
"Sorry to disturb you, madam," I said, with a heavy imitation of a Force manner, "but there's an escaped murderer loose. He's a homicidal maniac, and the neighbourhood ought to have been warned, but don't worry, we'll catch him."
The window went down with even greater celerity than I had hoped for, and the curtain swept over it. I stood alone among bottles, sweating blind and listening to my heart bump. It had become uncannily quiet again. The dogs' barking was dying away. Even the pursuit, though that was quiet enough, seemed to have taken another direction. I could not understand why — unless they had spotted me, and were silently closing in.
Nothing stirred except a faint wind in the trees. Suburbia (which some, I believe, are foolish enough to call dull) was dozing under clear starlight. I went quietly up the path, which was outlined along its borders with white pebbles, past geometrical flower-beds and a tall post supporting a radio aerial. The scullery of "The Larches" projected some dozen feet from the flat line of the house. Besides the scullery door, and the door to a coal-house, there was a third door facing out on the garden. To the right of this were two windows, closely shuttered. These were undoubtedly the windows of the mysterious back-parlour, through a chink in whose shutters Sergeant Davis had seen the lights flicker round "a thing like a flower-pot turned upside down."
Even while I was wondering how I should be able to get into the house without any of the Compleat Burglar's kit, I found myself approaching those windows. It seemed an ordinary suburban house, and yet I did not like it, It looked wrong.
I went up to the window nearer the door, and tried to peer through the slits in the shutter — without result. It was dead black inside. Even when I put my lantern to the slit, and tried to look in alongside it, there was only a blur. The window itself, however, did not appear to be closed. Next I tried the farther window. As I put the lantern to the chink, it made a faint rattling sound on the wood: and I could have sworn that there was a movement in the room. I could not identify it — it was something like a rustling — but it almost made me drop the lantern. This time the slit was a trifle larger, so that I could see something very dimly and darkly on the edge. It was something of rounded shape, like the back of a chair. And projecting over the top of it, at a queer unnatural angle, was something like a flower-pot turned upside down. It seemed to be of the same reddish colour, although I could not be certain in that blur, and it did not move. There was no reason in the world why such a sight should seem horrible to a prosaic-minded man in a suburban garden: I can only tell you that it did. As I stood back from the window, wiping my forehead, I heard the rustling movement again.
I tried the shutters. Both were tight-fastened. More as an automatic gesture than with any hope, I moved along and tried the knob of the door. But the door was unlocked.
Though I tried to ease it open gently, the thing creaked and cracked at every foot. Ahead was the main hall of the small house, with the front door facing me some thirty feet ahead. And that front door was now open. In the aperture, the key of the front door still in his hand, a man stood silhouetted against the faint glow of the street-lamps outside, looking at me.