Below Suspicion (27 page)

"Respectability!" Dr. Fell's voice came back to him in contempt and scorn. "I tell you, my dear Butler, that all the gangsters in creation are no more dangerous than that," a snap of the fingers, "compared with pious respectability about to be unmasked as something else."

Butler eased forward the hammer of the Webley, replaced it in the holster, and shook his dressing gown into place.

Probably he wouldn't need it. Probably there wasn't a gun out there. But—someone must come to kill him.

Meantime. . . .

He had his dictating to complete. He was tolerant; if it had not been for the silent way of murder, he might not even have blamed the witch-cult. They sought some kind of distraction in this dismal existence. Once, when the individualist had been a national pride, England had stood alone in her glorj'; and her lightest breath shook the world. Now the man was subjugated by the mass, for which Butler's contempt found its outlet in (say) Agnes Cannon at its best and Gold-teeth at its worst.

Again he sat beside the dictaphone, swung round in a position so that he could still keep his eye on the front door. Seeing that the second wax cylinder was almost finished, he substituted a third and took up the speaking-tube.

"Final points for the conviction of the murderer," he said.

Then he lit a cigarette, and resumed with the same detached deadli-ness.

"Having considered the workings of the murderer's mind," he went on, "I now deal with the next, and perhaps the most important point in a psychological sense: Kitty Owen and the green knitting-bag.

"Richard Renshaw, as we know, had a great influence on women. It was his habit to take them up and discard them at a moment's notice, as was the case," Butler winced, "with his own wife.

"Kitty Owen is just eighteen years old, of Welsh extraction and suggestible temperament. But there is no evidence or even suggestion to connect Kitty with Renshaw. On the contrary, her remarks and attitudes suggest no more than a mild attraction, even fear. We have proof positive (see foregoing) that Kitty had a harmless schoolgirl adoration for someone else.

"Kitty, in fact, did substitute a poisoned bottle for a harmless one. My original thought was correct, but I had the whole episode the wrong way round and its meaning the wrong way round; just as so many things, in this affair, have been reversed like the cross of Satan.

"Thus the actual method—"

"Good evening" interposed a voice behind Butler's head.

While you might have counted ten he sat paralyzed, motionless, without turning his head. The almost noiseless whir of the wax cylinder became audible.

What held him was not fear. He could have little cause to fear the person who spoke. What struck him like a bludgeon was the knowledge of his own blunder; he seemed to have been making blunders ever since his last meeting with Gold-teeth.

For he had walked out of this house—and for several minutes left the front door wide open. Anyone at all could have strolled in and sat dovm in the easy-chair opposite him, while his otherwise-concentrated wits noticed nothing.

"Good evening," he said mechanically, and switched off the dictaphone.

Joyce Ellis, in an evening gown, walked round from the hearth and stood facing him.

"I told you," she said quietly and through clenched jaws, "that I wouldn't see you again until I could prove the identity of the murderer. Well, I've brought you my proof now."

"Have you, my dear?"

Joyce's evening gown was of velvet, flame-coloured and with puffed shoulders. It did not in any way change her, except that it enhanced

the beauty of the grave face, the grey eyes, the dark hair in a short bob. In front of her she gripped a bulky handbag.

"I didn't poison Mrs. Taylor!" Joyce said. "I can prove that now!"

Butler leaned back in his chair lazily.

"Sure and I know it, me dear," he said with a smile. " 'Twas an inevitable accident, acushla. And isn't it the foine chance that brings ye here?"

Again it was as though he had hit her in the face.

Subtly Joyce's face changed. Her eyes looked deeper, and there w^as a little twist of cunning to her mouth. Her sensual figure seemed to distend the flame-coloured evening gown.

"J am the head of the witch-cult," she said. '7 killed Dick Renshaw."

IN THAT library, now, there were forces more dangerous, more subtle, more explosive, than either Joyce Ellis or Patrick Butler had ever handled. For here were two different temperaments, subtly attracted, who might have been lover and mistress, or even husband and wife.

Joyce's voice, except for perhaps a far-off amusement, became the le\'el voice with which he was so familiar.

"Yes?" queried Joyce.

"I knew that too," answered Butler, touching the dictaphone.

"You knew it?" Faint contempt.

Butler jumped to his feet.

"By God, I did!"

"You don't alarm me, Mr. Butler. May I sit do\\Ti?"

She dragged round the other leather chair, so that they both sat sideways with the chairs half turned towards each other, backs to the fire. A log crackled and popped. Joyce, her bare elbow on the arm of the chair, propped her chin on her hand. With that Mona Lisa smile under the dark hair, and the lines of the flame-coloured gown outlining her figure, Butler found his wrath returning again.

"When I first saw you at Holloway," he said, remembering vividly the little room with the red sky outside, "I summed you up in my mind as being sensually passionate as the devil. . . ."

Joyce smiled.

"Also," continued Butler, "as a ready and fluent liar, whose tears looked almost like real tears. But with such shivering a respectability, such an angelic power of acting, that you wouldn't acknowledge your guilt even to your counsel. In short, as guilty as hell.

"Didn't I tell you," he added, "that I am never wrong?

"But," he continued, looking straight into Joyce's strange grey eves,

"I ought to have noticed even more than I did. Remember, acushla? We were sitting on opposite sides of a httle bare table. You were absorbed, while I was talking about the death of Mrs. Taylor.

"And with your finger you drew a design on the table. You traced a vertical line, then a horizontal line across it near the lower end. The reversed cross, me dear. The foremost symbol of Satan. You did it before my own eyes. You did it again later on, when you were thinking I-don't-know-what."

"Yes. I was absorbed," agreed Joyce, her eyes half-closed and her cheeks burning.

Butler watched her. He did not mean to remind her that Dr. Fell had visited her in prison too, and noticed the same habit, and passed on the information. Indeed, he preferred Dr. Fell to be kept out of this, in his o\^Ti hour of triumph.

"I was absorbed," said Joyce, breathing hard, "in worship of my deity." Her pretty face became calm again. "Do you beUeve in God and the power of Good?"

"Yes. I do."

"Then you must believe," Joyce said simply, "in Satan and the power of Evil. They are inseparable. Didn't I tell you I was a clergyman's daughter?"

"Yes. You also kept telling me how dull and dreary your life had been."

"To worship one," whispered Joyce, "is tedium and drabness. To worship the other," she passed her hands down over her body, "is fire and delirium and light. He is the deity; in my mind he was even an inferior deity to—"

"To Richard Renshaw?" Butler cut in, "the man who looked like me?"

"Yes," said Joyce. She smiled a rather cruel smile.

Butler was feeling a trifle sick.

"Anyone in his five wits," he said, quoting Dr. Fell, "should have seen—by the situation at Mrs. Taylor's house—that you were a leading member of the witch-cult. You lived there for nearly two years, as you told me. Here was Mildred Taylor, a leering old female-satyr, mth few friends and a lonely existence. There were you, fretting at your own drab life. It was obvious that long ago she would have approached you with her whisperings about the delights of the 'old religion'—just as much later she approached Lucia Renshaw.

"That house, 'The Priory,' had an atmosphere of the pit; I noticed it myself on the two visits I made there. Its taint hung in corners and permeated the air. On my second visit there, when I met a poHceman, I noticed on the main hall table two silver candelabra: just like those at Renshaw's house, and probably with stains of black wax too. And, when you came into my house tonight, did you notice a box of books in the passage?"

"Yes. I couldn't stop to look at them."

"They're books on witchcraft," Butler snapped. "Many of them were scattered about openly in Mrs. Taylor's house for any inmate to read. Any literate inmate, that is; we may exclude the Griffiths couple and the cook. Dr. Bierce knew what was wrong there. Yet you, as you told me—you, for two years, saw nothing and believed Mrs. Taylor was a commonplace old lady whom you liked."

Joyce's eyes had hardened, in the guileless face of the parson's daughter. Her fingernails began to scratch on the leather arms of the chair.

"Shall I tell you what happened on the night of February 22nd, when Mrs. Taylor died?" asked Butler. "It's very simple."

He turned round and threw his cigarette into the fire.

"You never dreamed of killing Mrs. Taylor," he went on. "At least, not yet. That night you went out of the house to poison Dick Ren-shaw."

"Why?" The bitter monosyllable came at him like acid.

"Mainly," replied Butler, "because he'd thrown you over. As he's thrown over so many other women."

He let that register, while her breast heaved and the fingers on the chair-arms became rigid.

"But, since that had happened, you knew you could get control of the witch-cult—faith, and it's profitable, me dear!—shortly after he was dead. Only Mrs. Taylor stood in the way."

Here Butler bent forward.

"You weren't at Mrs. Taylor's house at all," he said slowly, "between about half-past nine and half-past one on the night oi February 22nd. You went to Dick Renshaw's house, at Hampstead, to poison his water-bottie when you knew he was away tiom home. That's the secret; and it nearly hanged you for the wrong death."

He sat back again. Joyce remained motionless.

"Corroboration?" said Butler. "It's everywhere. William and Alice Griffiths, maid and coachman-gardener, swore thev heard the back door

banging about midnight, in a high wind. Then they said its latch must have caught—which was quite true—and it stopped banging. I hadn't prompted them. They were truthful witnesses.

"You, of course, couldn't leave by the front door. It has a bolt and a chain as well as a lock, as I observed; how could you get back in again? Very well, my dearest dear!"

(Every time he used an affectionate term, whether in Dublinese or ordinary speech, it had some kind of odd effect on her.)

"At half-past nine," he went on, "you got the antimony in the Nemo's tin from the stable, took it to your own room. You removed enough antimony to poison Renshaw, and put it in a paper bag or whatever you used. You hid the tin of antimony in your room. You left the house by the back door—taking the key with you, for a very good reason —but, heart of my heart, you forgot to lock that back door."

Butler allowed the pause to register.

"And now what happens," he asked, "on that wild and windy night? Let's not look at you, for a moment. Let's look at old Mrs. Taylor, fretting and fuming in bed because she hasn't got any Nemo's salts!"

Then Butler's tone became lightly satiric.

"Let's look at Mrs. Taylor, poor old soul, who has so mysteriously left you five hundred pounds in her will! Mrs. Taylor, who in a moment of anger calls you what they delicately term 'a bad name' which means 'streetwalker.' But let us do you justice, my sweetheart. You have no need to walk streets."

Joyce was smiling, a genuine smile, with flushed cheeks and bright eyes. Round her neck she wore a very thin silver chain whose ends were lost in the bodice of her flame-coloured gown. Slowly she drew up the chain, to which a very small ebony cross had been attached upside down. Joyce pressed the reversed cross to her lips.

"I worship," she explained in ecstasy.

The fire, crackling and popping, added colour to her flushed cheeks. Over Butler's nerves stole a creepy sense that the girl was, in the old sense of the term, demoniacally possessed. But he forced his thoughts back to fat Mrs. Taylor, with her dyed hair, who had taught Joyce dark worship like a witch reading from a grimoire.

"We got from Dr. Bierce," he said, and Joyce's eyes flashed down, "a piece of information which Dr. Fe— which I thought was the most important we had received last night. When Mrs. Taylor thought some-

body was hiding something from her, she would ransack the house to get it."

No reply.

"There she sat in her own bed," Butler resumed, "brooding and brooding about Nemo's salts. You yourself told me she was brooding on it at half-past seven, and you made no answer. It went on and on. No Nemo's! Incredible! In a house run like this one? Incredible! Somebody was hiding them! Who must be hiding the tin? Obviously, you were.

"She rang her bell—here I indulge fancy—and rang it. No answer. Presently she stormed down to your room. It didn't surprise her when you weren't there, you might well be at the black chapel near by. But she searched the room. And she found a tin labelled Nemo's salts, with the proper-looking crystalline powder inside.

"Well, we remember that your fingerprints and hers were on the tin," said Butler. "But only her fingerprints on the glass. She mixed the dose with water, in the adjoining bathroom. And in her own bed, amid whatever horrors, she died."

Butler did not look at Joyce, who had returned the reversed cross to the bosom of her gown. He sprang to his feet, with black anger and horror unconquerable.

"As for you, me dear," he said, "let's follow what you did on the same night of February 22nd, just a month ago." Then Butler paused, swallowing.

"Damn you!" he said, and Joyce looked strangely pleased. "Do you know Lucia Renshaw?"

Joyce's expression changed. "Not very well," she answered. "I thought, at the trial, she looked like a little innocent for all her size and make-up. Otherwise I didn't think much at all about her, until—" Joyce stopped.