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Authors: John Dickson Carr

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BOOK: Below Suspicion
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"Stop!" said Butler. "Don't try to think. Let me do the thinking. Now my second and last question, I repeat, is about the back door and the key to the back door."

"I remember all about that, anyway!"

"Ah? That's splendid, my dear! You told me, I think, that the last thing you did before going to your room that night was to lock the back door?"

"Yes!"

"There's no bolt on the back door, as we both know. Only the key. Now tell me: is this the key to the back door?"

Fumbling inside his overcoat, he reached into his side pocket and produced a key. It was an old key, middle-sized, with a touch of rust-stain, common to the back doors of mid-Victorian houses.

"Is this the key?" he repeated.

"Where on earth did you get—?" Joyce checked herself, swallowing. "That's the key," she replied. "I mean: it JooJcs like the key."

"Better and better" beamed her counsel, returning the key to his pocket. "You further stated"—something of the Old Bailey manner touched his voice—"that you unlocked the back door for Alice GrifEths next morning?"

"Yes! At eight o'clock."

"Exactly. Now I feel sure," said Butler urbanely, "you've forgotten something that will be of great help to you."

"Forgotten something?"

"Just as you said yourself: when people are very upset, they forget things and have to be reminded." Then he looked her straight in the

eyes. "I feel sure that, when you went out to unlock the door, the key wasn't in the lock at all."

"Wasn't in the lock?" Joyce echoed stupidly.

"No. I feel sure," his glance was meaning, "that you found the key lying on the floor of the passage just inside the door. And you had to pick it up, and fit it into the lock, before you could admit Alice."

For perhaps ten seconds there was an intense silence. Butler could hear his wrist-watch ticking in this tomb. So as not to embarrass her, he let his gaze wander incuriously over the white-washed walls, himself a figure of blandness and innocence, whistling between his teeth.

"But that isn't true/" Joyce blurted.

Patrick Butler, K.C., could not have been more startled if the roof had been shattered as the quiet was shattered.

"Not true?"

"No! The key was in the lock."

Again silence; and she flinched as Butler studied her. His astonishment was mingled with a rising wrath, which tinged his cheeks. What the devil, now, did this girl think she was playing at? She was intelligent; she must see the value to her defence if she said that key was not in the lock. Well, then, what the flaming hell? Unless. ...

Stop! He'd got it. And, as he thought he understood the reason, all Butler's wrath dissolved in a kind of intellectual admiration. It would be a little more awkward if Joyce Ellis still persisted in play-acting; but he understood. He even saluted her for it. She was a woman after his own heart.

"Mr. Butler! I—"

Butler rose to his feet, picking up hat and gloves.

"You understand, of course," he told her cheerfully, "that this is only a preliminary talk. I shall see you again in a day or two. By that time, I feel sure, you'll have remembered."

Panic was in her voice. "Mr. Butler, listen!"

"After all, you know you've been very lucky."

"Lucky! Oh. You mean in having you to defend me? Believe me, I know that! But—"

"Tut, now!" said Butler. If the matron had not been watching, he would have chucked her under the chin. "I told you before: you overrate me. No. I mean lucky in the course of events. Poor Mrs. Taylor died on the night of February 22nd. You were arrested ... when?"

"Just a week later. Why?"

"Well! Your case, as it happens, has been crowded into the present term at the Central Criminal Court; that'll be in a little over a fortnight. You'll have been suspected, arrested, tried—and acquitted—in just less than a month. Not bad, eh?" His personality enveloped and smothered her words like a feather-bed. "Good-bye, my dear! Keep your courage up!"

"Mr. Butler, please listen! It isn't that I mind telling lies. It's only that. . . ."

But Joyce saw, with a feeling of being trapped afresh, that the matron was already in the room. A blue-clad male warder, his footsteps echoing in the passage, appeared to escort the visitor out.

Five minutes later, when Joyce was weeping hysterically in her cell, Patrick Butler emerged from Holloway Prison a good deal pleased with himself. The sleek dark hmousine stood a little way off. Johnson, Butler's chauffeur, climbed out to open the door for him. And in the back seat, on a wire of nerves, was Old Charlie Denham.

"Well?" demanded the solicitor.

"All W'Cll, me bhoy. And I want a drink. Johnson, drive to the Garrick Club!"

"Wait!" said Denham. He made so imperious a gesture that the chauffeur's hand dropped from the starter. Then Denham switched on the interior light, so that he could see his companion's face.

'Old Charlie' Denham was about thirty-two. He was a lean, strong-built young man whose sombre bowler hat, sombre overcoat, hard collar and colourless tie were as professionally correct as the man himself. But he had never been so sombre as he appeared tonight.

Under a moonlight glow from the roof of the limousine, which shut them into grey-cushioned luxur)' with the dark and cold outside, there were shadow-hollows under Denham's cheek-bones. He wore a thin dark line of moustache, under idealistic eyes and dark eyebrows.

"Well?" he demanded again. "What did you think of her?"

Butler considered this.

"Not my type," he answered amiably. "But very attractive, I admit. Exudes an aura of sex."

Muscles worked down Charles Denham's jaws. He looked at Butler as though his question had been answered by a bawdy joke.

"Pat," Denham said slowly. "I think you seriously believe that three-quarters of the women in this world are preoccupied with nothing but sex."

"Oh, I shouldn't say exactly that." The barrister's grin implied that he meant nine-tenths of them,

"I suppose it's because that's the only sort of woman who ever gravitates towards you."

"Well," said Butler, "she gravitated towards me. Very definitely."

"That's a lie! I don't believe it!"

"A-a-isy, me son!" exclaimed Butler, genuinely surprised. He studied the other man. "Smitten yourself, are you?"

"No. Not exactly. That is. . . ."

"Now the divil bum ye for an old rake!" suggested Butler amiably. His tone changed. "I knew you were old Mrs. Taylor's solicitor, Charlie. But I was wondering why you were so much concerned with the Ellis girl."

"Because she's innocent, that's why! You believe she's innocent, don't you?"

Butler hesitated before replying. These two had been friends for several years; but you could never tell about Old Charlie and his British ideals and his infernal conscience.

"Do you want an honest answer to that," he asked, "or do you want the usual fine pretence between solicitor and barrister?"

"I want an honest answer, of course!"

"She's as guilty as hell," smiled Butler. "But don't worry, Charlie. I prefer to have my clients guilty."

For a moment Denham did not comment. He lowered his head and looked at the tips of his well-polished shoes. A thin wind whistled round the car, making the chauffeur beyond the glass panel pull up the collar of his coat.

"What makes you think J—Miss Ellis is guilty?" Denham asked.

"Partly evidence, but mainly atmospheres. I can always tell by atmospheres."

"Can you? What if you happen to be wrong?"

"I am never wrong."

Denham had heard this remark before. Sometimes it maddened him almost to committing what his precise mind called assault and battery. He was losing his sense of judgment and had already lost his sense of humour; nevertheless he was goaded into giving battle.

"Sol" Denham said, and raised his head. "You prefer to have your clients guilty?"

"Naturally!" said Butler, raising his eyebrows. He chuckled, "Where's

the credit—or the fun—in defending somebody who's innocent?"

"Then you regard the whole thing as a game to beat the other fellow? Is that your conception of the law?"

"Well, what's your conception of the law?"

"Justice, for one thing! Honour. Ethics—"

Patrick Butler laughed outright.

"Listen, Charlie," he urged gently. "Do you know what you sound like? You sound like a nineteen-year-old who gets up at the Oxford Union and solemnly asks, 'Would you defend a man whom you knew to be guilty?' Answer: of course you would. In fact, it's your duty to do so. Every person, under the law, is entitled to a defence."

"To an honest defence, yes! Not to a faked one."

"Has it ever been suggested that J faked a defence?"

"No, thank God! Because even rumours might ruin you." Denham's voice was almost pleading. "You can't get away with that sort of thing in England, Pat. One of these days you're going to come a hell of a cropper."

"Let's wait until I do, shall we?"

"And there's more to it than ethics," pleaded Denham. "Suppose you win the acquittal of a cold-blooded murderer who's killed for greed or hate or no reason at all, and might do it again?"

"Were you referring to our client?" Butler asked politely.

Silence. Denham passed a hand across his forehead. His face looked white and dazed in the moonlight glow.

"Let me ask you just one question, Pat," he urged. "Do you think Joyce Ellis is a complete nitwit?"

"On the contrary. She's a very clever woman."

"Very well! Then if she had poisoned Mrs. Taylor, do you think she'd have been such a fool as to leave all that damning evidence against herself?"

"In a detective story, no. She wouldn't have."

"Meaning what?"

"It's a good card," Butler conceded, "and of course I'll play it. But jurymen," he shook his head, "jurymen keep their detective-story minds and their courtroom minds locked in separate compartments. Now murderers, bless 'em—"

"Stop joking!"

"I'm not joking. Murderers, I repeat, are in a foolish state of mind and they do incrediblv idiotic things. Every newspaper reader knows

that. And any counsel who rehes on that nobody-would-have-done game is a goner before they've even sworn the jury. Not for me, Charlie!"

Denham's throat seemed dry. Before he spoke next, he reached out and switched off the roof-light.

"What about Joyce?" he asked out of the darkness. "Are you going to fake her defence?"

"My dear Charlie!" The other sounded shocked. "Have I ever faked a defence?"

"Oh, stop it!"

"Two of my chief witnesses," Butler said dryly, "will be witnesses for the prosecution. One of them, Dr. Bierce, will be telling the truth. The other, Mrs. Alice Griffiths, will be telling what she now believes to be the truth."

"I hope I can trust you. You sail so close to the wind that— My God, Pat, suppose something goes wrong?"

"Nothing will go wrong."

"No?"

"I will bet you the price of this car against the price of a dinner," Butler told him coolly, "that the jury bring in a verdict of 'not guilty' within twenty minutes." Then he leaned forward to tap the glass panel behind the driver. "Garrick Club, Johnson!"

THE jury had been out for thirty-five minutes. Courtroom Number One at the Central Criminal Court, otherwise the Old Bailey, wore an air of somnolence and looked more deserted than it actually was. The clock—up under the ledge of the small public gallery—indicated five minutes to four on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 20th.

One way or the other, it was all over now.

A running sting of sleet rapped across the flat glass roof over the white-painted dome of the courtroom. Below its whiteness the walls were panelled to some height in light-brown oak. Concealed lighting, under the edges of this panelling, threw a somewhat theatrical glow up over this sleepy, deadly room.

Sleet lashed again. Somebody coughed. Distantly there was the whish of a revolving door. Even sounds, in this room, seemed to come in slow motion. In the public gallery the spectators sat motionless, like dingy dummies; none would leave lest he lose his place. A verdict of Guilty, of course, would provide them the greatest lip-licking thrill as they watched the prisoner. A verdict of Not Guilty held less drama.

Below the public gallery, in the long tier of benches reserAcd for counsel, Patrick Butler also sat motionless towards the left-hand side of the front bench.

He was alone there. His grey-white wig, with its couple of precise curls at the sides, framed an expressionless face. His shoulders did not move under the black silk gown. He looked steadily at the wrist-watch on the desk-ledge in front of him.

Why didn't that jury come back? Why didn't that jury come hack?

He wasn't going to lose the case, of course. That would be unthinkable. Besides, he had wiped the floor with poor old Tuff\' Lowdnes— that is, Mr. Theodore Lowdnes, K.C., who had been instructed bv the Department of Public Prosecutions and led for the Crown. All the same. . . .

Why was he so concerned about the infernal case, anyway?

Patrick Butler glanced towards his left: towards the enormous dock, now empt}', whose waist-high ledge was enclosed with glass walls on every side except that facing the judge. Two matrons, who guarded Joyce Ellis there, had taken her below to the cells while awaiting the verdict.

Well, it was certain now she was in love with him. For some reason this infuriated him. He could not understand her strange attitude, her strange replies to his questions, during the past two weeks.

And Butler's mind moved back to yesterday moming at ten o'clock— the opening of the trial which had now concluded. Again he heard the whispers, the rustlings, as benches of barristers' wigs nodded towards each other like grotesque flowers. Again he saw the 'red' judge on the bench, in the tall chair just to the left under the gold-gleaming Sword of State.

And again the chant of an usher:

''li anyone can inform my Lords the King's Justices, or the King's Attorney-General, ere this inquest he taken between Our Sovereign Lord the King and the prisoner at the bar, of any treasons, murders, ielonies, or misdemeanours done or committed by the prisoner at the bar, let them come forth and they shall he heard; for the prisoner now stands at the bar upon her deliverance. And all persons who are bound by recognizance to prosecute or give evidence against the prisoner at the bar, let them come forth, prosecute, and give evidence, or they shall iorieit their recognizance. God save the King/"

BOOK: Below Suspicion
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