Below Suspicion (21 page)

"Oh, ah?" said the law, who carried a bull's-eye lantern. "And who might you be, sir?"

"My name is Butler," smiled the other. "I'm here with Dr. Fell, who's in the front room. Er—I think I have a card with me."

He found the card and handed it across the table. The policeman accepted it stolidly, gave it a quick glance, and handed it back.

"Butler," said the law, as though he found the name familiar but sinister. "Do you know the back door's wide open, sir?"

"That must have been Dr. Fell! I'll see to it. I heard glass smash somewhere out here. . . ."

"That was the prowler, sir."

"Prowler?"

"He run into a big glass-vase thing on a pedestal inside the back door. Then he saw my light, and he cut and run for it. We've had instructions to look out for him."

"How do you mean, instructions?"

"Just instructions, sir. And I'd be a bit careful, too. His two front teeth was gold."

THAT'S the chapel, eh?" muttered Dr. Bierce. "But I keep telhng you," Lucia persisted, in a low voice, "I haven't got the key! I left it in my bag at that night-club."

"Never mind. My own key here," said Dr. Fell, fishing out a large iron key with a cardboard label attached, "I obtained one from the Town Hall. Like my other information about it."

Agnes Cannon and Patrick Butler said nothing.

They stood at the edge of the Common on its eastern side, almost at the southern end. The Common, by day a dull greenish-brown vast-ness, now by night was black and empty, edged by a few far-away street lamps or bare trees.

The chapel, middle eighteenth-century, would have caught attention without rousing curiosity. Narrow, small, built of dark-grey stone, it had a peaked roof like a church without a spire. No shred of glass remained in its pointed mullioned windows, from damage older than the blitz. One large window, boarded up inside with wood turned greyish-black, faced the watchers; the narrow side was towards the pavement beyond a high yew hedge.

On either side of the chapel, each perhaps a dozen feet from it, stood two very respectable suburban houses with front rooms dark to save fuel. The white mist was rising again. Whatever you touched was as cold as a toad.

Dr. Fell's voice, rolling ahead of them, became the only path through an opening in the hedge and round the side of the chapel to the left.

"About two hundred years ago," the voice was a rumbling whisper, "most of that side of the Common was the estate of a baronet named Fletcher. A covered passage connected the house with this chapel. Hence the door, here at this side—is anything wrong back there?"

"Nothing at all," replied Butler, at the end of the single-file line. "Lead on."

He had only brushed his back against another hedge. But he thought he felt Gold-teeth's hand on his neck.

Lucia, just ahead of him, was wearing Butler's coat; he had insisted she put it on. So intense was the sense of sympathy between them that Lucia, as though hearing his thought, turned round.

"Pat," she whispered, "what did happen back there? When the glass smashed and you went out to look?"

"I've told you a dozen times: nothing," he hed.

"Don't you trust me?"

"A policeman found the back door open, that's all. Dr. Fell later admitted he'd left it open, didn't he? The policeman fell over a glass vase on a pedestal. End of episode."

Ahead of them a key grated in a lock. The arched and pointed door opened in the side of the withered little chapel. All scrambled inside, even to the bulk of Dr. Fell, who now held Dr. Bierce's torch. As Dr. Fell locked the door behind them and put the key in his pocket, Miss Cannon spoke in a curious tone.

"Why, this is an ordinary chapel," she said as the light roved. "The pews are broken down and it's in a dreadful state, but it's nothing but an ordinary chapel!"

"True," agreed Dr. Fell. He added, as though irrelevantly: "Sir Thomas Fletcher, the original baronet, isn't in the Dictionary of National Biography, but his son Harry, who was mixed up with that curious devil-worshipping society known as the Monks of Medmenham, has an inch or two of print. Come with me."

Butler, so deep in his own thoughts, never remembered where Dr. Fell led them. It was growing late, Butler reflected. His vitality must be ebbing. Or Gold-teeth would not have been in his mind at all. Gold-teeth, face to face and in light, would be no problem at all. Here. . . .

Somewhere, under a window, a large trap was being raised in the floor. They were descending, one by one, a staircase just wide enough to accommodate Dr. Fell. Bierce, last in the line, closed the trap after them.

(Wake up, you fool!)

Different, all different! The staircase was carpeted in some soft, deep material. On the right, covering stone, were hangings of another soft, heavy material. In brief gleams of the light, carpet and hangings seemed

a deep red. On the left of the narrow stair, the banister was of some black lustrous wood resembling ebony.

But over all distortion-glimpses, which showed little, the room down here was full of a stale smell of incense—sweetish, and mixed with another fainter scent which Butler could not place until he remembered the Erlington case. It was the breath of marihuana.

At the foot of the short staircase, on what might have been a newel-post, stood a heavy bronze group or statuette—only a shadow-mass— which must have weighed forty or fifty pounds.

They had all reached the floor of the low, oblong room when there was a click like that of a switch. From the centre of the ceiling sprang up the light of a human eye.

An inverted glass bowl, large but dim-lighted, had been painted to represent that staring eye. It was whitish, though faintly blood-shot; its iris was red, its pupil black. Though it stared down, like an eye probing consciences, it did not illuminate the room except to trace the red and black of the hangings. Both ends of the red-carpeted room lay in shadow.

"Dr. Fell," Lucia was looking round in a kind of fascination, "that light is electricity, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes. Just as the walls behind these hangings are concrete."

"But who—?"

"This chapel, not a very good real-estate investment, was bought by Mrs. Taylor's grandfather. Mrs. Taylor inherited it from her father. Unto the third generation."

Bierce was looking behind him, at the bronze statue-group on the newel post of the ebony staircase. Patrick Butler followed his glance. The bronze represented a nymph in the arms of a satyr, after the realistic Italian school, every feature and muscle a-quiver with mimic life.

"Dr. Fell, you've been here before!" Miss Cannon almost screamed at him.

"Oh, yes. This morning."

"Then why do you drag us here now?"

"Because every inch of this room must be searched. Haven't I kept telling you that through all history the witch-cult is the cloak of the poisoner?"

"But I don't see—" began Lucia.

She removed Butler's coat from her shoulders, because it was now too

warm, and threw it to him. Dr. Fell, an immensity partly silhouetted against the staring gleam of the eye, pointed at Lucia with his cane.

"Let us suppose, for the sake of argument," he said, "that you are a member of the cult. You are either, at the beginning, a thrill-seeker or a half-believer. But you come here, and breathe this air. Braziers burn in comers, herbs mixed with—"

"Marihuana?" Butler asked quietly.

Dr. Fell nodded. "Whose first and most important effect, as our newspapers or fiction-writers seldom tell us, is not to make you run amok. It is to remove all of what are called ordinary inhibitions.

"Down there"—Dr. Fell pointed to darkness at the end of the room— "candles bum at the altar. You grovel before Lucifer. You do acts of less than human decency; you have reached the pit, and therefore are exalted to a kind of infernal ecstasy. What things are not possible to the Lord of Flame? Now look there."

Again he pointed. Midway down the line of each red-and-black curtained wall, on either side of the rows of black gold-embroidered cushions which served as pews, stood a broad cabinet whose carvings made it seem half open.

"Confessional boxes," said Dr. Fell.

"You mean they confess their. . . ," Lucia stopped.

"They creep in, masked, not to confess their sins. To confess their desires for sins. They speak to the head of the cult, Satan's representative, who can grant all.

"On the ordinary, or even extraordinary, sins we need not dwell. They are easily provided. But suppose a woman wishes her husband dead? Or a husband would be rid of his wife? Or an old dotard with money lingers on and refuses to die?

"We had two problems to face," Dr. Fell went on, "in the case of nine poisonings in six months. First, how could a cult hide in such secrecy? And Satanism gives all the answers. Its members are outwardly respectable because, to join at all, they must be at least faintly well-to-do. They wear masks, of course. But masks may slip, in a moment of frenzy—"

"Masks!" Butler interrupted with bitterness. "Masks again! Always masks!"

"And so it will be," Dr. Fell retorted, "until we snatch the mask from the present head of the witch-cult."

"Your second problem?" asked Bierce, whose hatred and disgust surrounded him hke the odour of this muffled room.

"How was it," asked Dr. Fell, "that in nine cases the police could trace no poison to any person concerned in the matter?"

"I am professionally interested in that, thank you."

"Let us suppose, then, that you are an architect living, say, at Oxford. What matters, much, in this lean and embittered world? Why should you put up with your wife, when the joy of Satanism is in your vitals?"

"I have never," said Dr. Bierce, twisting up his mouth, "been able to afford the luxury of a wife. But grant it! What happens?"

Again Dr. Fell pointed towards the grotesque confessional box.

"You whisper your desire," he said. "And all is planned, prepared, blue-printed for you. On a certain day you will go to, let us say, a city such as Wolverhampton. You will be given the street, the address, and the name of a certain quite innocent chemist. There, with a carefully prepared story, you will buy the poison called aconitine.

"And you will get it, never fear! You sign the poison-register with the real name of a man living in that city. You return from your journey. Your wife, after some time, is poisoned. . , ."

"With aconitine?"

"No!" groaned Dr. Fell. He seemed a vast cloak flapping against the staring bloodshot eye-light. "That is the whole secret. She will be poisoned with arsenic."

"Arsenic?"

"All is prepared, you know. You return here and whisper again to Satan's deputy. For your aconitine, which you pass through the grill, you exchange the arsenic. Some other would-be-murderer, a little pleasant woman from London, has bought arsenic in Leeds. With so many others it is subtle, deft, sleight-of-hand exchange. No suspicious poison —that is, one which couldn't be used for simple domestic use as well, and which many do buy—is ever used. When your wife dies of arsenic in Oxford, who will search for you buying aconitine in Wolverhampton?"

There was a silence. Lucia's head was bowed, and she trembled.

"Of all the ingenious new devices—!" exploded Butler.

"New?" Dr. Fell repeated wearily. "My dear sir, it was used by John Eachard's Satanist-cult in 1746. Can you wonder if I show no surprise?"

Arthur Bierce looked round wildly.

"But what, in the name of the true God, are we looking for?"

"Records," said Dr. Fell, "Don't you see that with such a complex organization in the hands of one man . . . Richard Renshaw had three bank-accounts, with a total of six figures . . . there must be records enough for a filing-case? They must contain names, dates, places. But where are they?"

Bierce spoke dryly. "Renshaw had an office in the City, I daresay?"

"Yes."

"Possibly even with the title of 'agent'?"

"Quite right," grunted Dr. Fell. "But the police found nothing there. This afternoon," he looked pointedly at Lucia, "they searched his house: not for garters. For two nights"—here Dr. Fell extended grubby hands, palms upward—"I have been ransacking Mrs. Taylor's house without effect. There is only one conclusion. The records must be here."

There was an interruption. Miss Cannon, who had been looking in a vague way at the bronze nymph-and-satyr, suddenly ran up the carpeted steps and disappeared through the open trap.

"Let her go," growled Dr. Fell in a quiet voice. "She has seen enough."

"But I haven't?" asked Lucia.

With only a grunt for a reply. Dr. Fell lumbered round to survey the room again. Then he began to walk down what might be called the aisle of the red-and-black chapel.

With their eyes growing accustomed to the streaky illumination, the others followed him. The soft red carpet gave no more whisper of sound than the heavy velvet curtains. The low roof was supported by pillars and carved beams of that wood which resembled polished ebony. On either side of the aisle, the piles of black gold-embroidered cushions which served as pews were disarranged, as though agitated. But it was a very short distance to the altar, towards which Dr. Fell was lumbering now.

To Butler, going down the aisle with Lucia clinging to his arm, there occurred the grotesque fancy that he and Lucia were approaching for some kind of wedding ceremony. The idea amused and rather shocked him. Besides, bride and groom didn't go arm-in-arm down an aisle.

And besides that. . . .

In the faint sweet-stale haze of the room, which seemed to heighten senses rather than drug them, he detected another even more faint.

"Paraffin oil?" he muttered.

"What did you say?" Lucia asked quickly.

"I was only mumbling to myself, pet."

Probably he had imagined it. One touch of a match or a lighter in this warm, stuffy, be-curtained chapel would be more than a tribute to the lord of darkness and poison. Behind them, Bierce was also mumbling.

Dr. Fell had reached the apsidal sanctuary, or deep curved recess, within which on the footpace stood the altar like a couch covered with the softest vestment. On either side of it, a pedestal supported a candelabrum, each with seven branches, each with seven black candles. The whole back of the recess seemed to be covered by a large, shadowy tapestry.

Then Dr. Fell struck a match and slowly lighted the fourteen black candles. And real diabolism sprang out at them.

The soft, gathering light rippled through the recess and out into the black-and-red chapel. The great tapestry, seventeenth-century French or Italian, bore its lettering, Lucifer Tiiumphans. And Lucia Renshaw took one glance at its subject-matter, and hastily averted her eyes.

"Why did you have to bring us here?" cried Lucia, in almost the same tone as Miss Cannon had used. "If you wanted to search, you could have searched on your own!"

"Forgive me," said Dr. Fell gravely, "but do you notice the candelabra?"

"I don't care to look at them, thanks."

"They are imitation silver, much tarnished. I found them in a cupboard behind the hangings to the left of the apse."

"Well? What about them?"

"My dear lady," said Dr. Fell, "a gathering of worshippers, if not an actual Black Mass took place in this room not later than four nights ago. The candelabra used in that ceremony came from your house."

Lucia still stood with her back to the altar and the tapestry. But her shoulders lifted and settled with the expression of a woman almost at breaking-point. Patrick Butler touched her elbow for reassurance.

"Suppose you prove that?" he challenged Dr. Fell.

"Dash it all, look here! Today," argued Dr. Fell, "is Wednesday, the 21st. Yesterday was Tuesday, the 20th. The day before that was Monday, the 19th."

"I do not challenge the calendar, sir. I merely challenge you."

"Dick Renshaw," persisted Dr. Fell, "was poisoned on the night of

Monday, the 19th. Well, somebody and for some reason brought those candelabra back to the house. I have my own ideas regarding who that person was. But the candle-sockets weren't cleaned properly; you and I saw the traces of black wax last night, the 20th."

"But to call Lucia a murderer on the strength of—"

"Oh, a murderer!" scoffed Dr. Fell, waving a hand as though this were the merest peccadillo. "I don't think she is, if that helps you.

"But," added Dr. Fell, with ferocious emphasis, "you don't see the point. Somebody, between last night and this morning, slipped downstairs and cleaned those candle-sockets. But nobody will admit doing such an ordinary household job. Inference: someone at 'Abbot's House' is closely aflaliated with the witch-cult. Secondary inference: probably only one person is concerned."

Lucia, taking a deep breath, turned round to face Dr. Fell and the burning candles and the tapestry.

"There are only three of us," she pointed out. "Which one would you choose?"

"We-ell, now," intoned Dr. Fell, pulling at his underlip, "have you given any thought to your maid? Kitty Owen? Hey?"

"Kitty!" echoed Lucia, as though in dumb astonishment.

"Well, ma'am," the learned doctor said dryly. "Which one would be your own choice?"

"I don't think it's anybody," replied Lucia. "I think this whole affair is silly and revolting and—and terrifying!"

"At the same time," Dr. Fell wrinkled up his face, "'that damsel has a lean and hungry look. She is not, I should think, what in my generation we called green, I did not like certain little episodes I witnessed. And quite clearly she worships Somebody."

"I think it's silly and revolting and terrifying!" repeated Lucia. "Don't you agree, Pat?"

The candlelight made a golden nimbus round Lucia's hair as she turned round, appealing with her young-girl look.