Below Suspicion

by John Dickson Carr

"But mightn't your Inn disbar you? And now you've got a brawl in Soho; and what would happen if you did something awful to this man at the detective-agency, on top of all the rest of it?"

  Now this, of course, was quite true. Yet it had never even entered Butler's head to do anything else. He stared at her.

  "Don't you understand?" he demanded. "I'm doing this for you.'"

  "I know that, dear!" Lucia was crying. "I know! And I love it. Especially when you take chances and—" She swallowed hard. "But don't you understand that sooner or later—Mr. Hadley said so at lunch— you're going to get hurt?"

  "I didn't get hurt tonight, did I?"

  "No, dear. But you were awfully lucky!"

  Patrick Butler looked at her. He looked at her again. Sensing the change, Lucia glanced up. Very carefully and deliberately Butler removed his arms from round her. He edged across and sat in the opposite corner of the car, with all the arrogance of a Roman emperor.

  "It would appear," he observed offliandedly, to the glass panel in front of him, "that I am lucky."

  Lucia's voice was conscience-stricken. "Darling! Wait! I didn't mean. . . ."

  Butler waved his hand.

  "This evening/' he continued in his courtroom voice, "two gentlemen attempt to put me in hospital. By the merest luck, a whim of chance ha ha, both these gentlemen are themselves in great need of medical attention. You and I, in a night-club devoted to spivs and amateur prostitutes, are cut off by several more than two of them. Yet by blind luck we walk out as free as air."

  "Pat! Please listen to me!"

  Then Butler's tone changed.

  "Where the hell are we, anyway?" he demanded. "What are we doing here? Where are we supposed to be going?"

  Looking out the side windows and the back window, he became again conscious of a world outside.

  They were crossing Westminster Bridge towards the Surrey side. The avenue of tall lamps threw trembling reflections deep in the water, as though, someone had written, the ghosts of suicides were holding up torches to show where they had drowned. Through the rear window of the car, far behind, Butler could see the great clock-tower, with its illuminated face, towering grey-black above grey-black Parliament roof-ridges.

  The shock and clang of Big Ben, on the quarter-hour after nine, quivered in vibrations as well as sound. It roused Butler to an icy courtesy.

  "May I again ask, Lucia, where we are going?"

  Lucia, white-faced and shrinking back, regarded him with eyes of hurt and reproach. Then she tumed her face away.

  "To Balham," she muttered. "That is, if you still want to go."

  "Ah," said Butler. Even his eyebrow-raising was overdrawn. "By Balham, I presume, you mean Mrs. Taylor's house?"

  "No, I don't!"

  "Then will you be good enough to explain?"

  Even Lucia's movement, as she tumed her shoulder farther away, said, 'I hate you!' But she replied in a light, lofty tone.

  "You heard last night, I think, that I inherited three houses. One at Hampstead, Mrs. Taylor's at Balham, and the third is at Balham too. It's a little place. It—it's never been lived in, really."

  "And this," asked the astounded Butler, "is what you call an 'adventure'?"

  No reply.

  "At a time when I should be after Luke Parsons, and working in your interest, you want us to explore a potty little house that's never been lived in?"

  "You beast!" flamed Lucia, whipping round for a brief and tearful look at him. "You may find more than you think!"

  You may find more than you think.

  That sentence, from Lucia, was vaguely disquieting. Mist, almost invisible, hovered over the black Thames. Westminster Bridge was like a swept, lonely dance floor.

  Patrick Butler, already forgetting how furious he had been, now felt contrition and wished to apologize. But he was really in love with Lucia; his pride blared at him; and his usual fluent speech would have been thick in his mouth. So he folded his arms and stared straight ahead. Lucia also stared straight ahead. There they sat like a pair of dummies, while the car hummed through dismal Kensington and Brixton.

  Unspoken recriminations hovered in the air during that long drive. Butler, meditating dark thoughts of suicide, had his black world broken unexpectedly.

  "Look out, you iooU" yelled the muffled voice of the chauffeur.

  Brakes screeched faintly; the heavy car skidded and stopped dead; both its passengers were flung forward.

  On the left they could see the red-white-and-blue enamel of an Underground Station sign which said, 'Balham.' On the right towered what looked like the arch of an overhead railway bridge. In the middle hung a traffic-light, green. A lean figure in an Inverness cape and an old tweed cap, someone who carried a doctor's medicine-case, had been concentrating across the street against the green light.

  As though by a simultaneous impulse, Butler and Lucia turned to each other.

  "I didn't mean it!" Butler said.

  "Neither did I!" said Lucia.

  There would have been more to this, no doubt, if the lean figure in the old cap had not strode towards the car to exchange words with the chauffeur. Butler picked up the speaking-tube.

  "Control yourself, Johnson," he warned the chauffeur. "This is a friend of ours." Then Butler opened the door and called: "Dr. Bierce!"

  The figure halted by one side-light. They saw the harassed dark-brown eyes of Dr. Arthur Bierce, with hollows of fatigue beneath them.

  "Get in, won't you?" Butler invited. The doctor complied, and the car pulled over to the kerb beside the Underground Station.

  Dr. Bierce lowered himself on one of the pull-out seats facing them. When he Temoved his cap, the freckled bald skull again loomed up. He sat there with his medicine-case in his lap, his lower lip drawn down, curt yet kindly, just now on an edge of nerves.

  "Then you decided to come here after all!" he said.

  "To come here—" Butler, astonished, broke off and turned to Lucia. "Did Dr. Bierce know about this?"

  "No!" said Lucia. "I didn't tell anybody! Did I, Ambrose?"

  Dr. Bierce grimaced.

  "You may have heard," he said to Butler, "that the late Mrs. Taylor called me 'Ambrose.' After Ambrose Bierce, that very fine writer." The doctor's bony fingers tightened round the handle of his medicine-case.

  "Bierce's stories," he added, "were grotesque and often horrible. But they were never morbid."

  "That is what I wanted to talk to you about," pounced Butler, very much counsel for the defence. "That's why I ventured to stop vou here."

  "Oh?"

  "We've met only twice. Doctor. Once in court, and once at Mrs. Ren-shaw's last night. But it did seem to me, in court, that you knew much more and were hinting much more—about Mrs. Taylor—than the rules of evidence allowed you to say."

  "Yes," Dr. Bierce agreed curtly.

  "At Mrs. Renshaw's, then, I asked you why you said that Mrs. Taylor's house 'The Priory,' was unhealthy. We were interrupted before you could answer."

  "Yes." The lean face grew more stern.

  "Now tell me. Shouldn't you say that Richard Renshaw was on very friendly terms with Mrs. Taylor? On far closer terms, for instance," he nodded towards Lucia, "than her own niece was?"

  "Naturally," agreed Dr. Bierce with the same curtness. "Evil always attracts evil."

  There was a brief silence.

  "You won't understand, Doctor, if I refer to a group which operates under some fantastic cloak/' Butler continued. Dr. Bierce looked at him quickly. "But I think," Butler said, "that Mrs. Taylor was high up in its councils, probably next to the head of it. I think the head of it was Dick Renshaw. And that somebody poisoned them both to assume control."

  "Good!" the doctor said tensely, and slapped his hand on the medical bag. "Then why don't you go along to 'The Priory,' now, and make sure?"

  Patrick Butler blinked. "To Mrs. Taylor's house?"

  "Naturally! Isn't that where you're bound for?"

  "No, no, no!" interposed Lucia. "We were g
oing to the other place, the... ."

  "There is somebody in the house tonight," said Dr. Bierce.

  The words were commonplace enough, yet they had the sinister ring of an understatement in a ghost story.

  "But that's impossible!" protested Lucia. "The servants left weeks ago. The electricity's been cut off. The house is all locked up."

  "All the same," said Dr. Bierce, "somebody is moving from room to room with a parafEn lamp. Wait! Don't think about burglars or murderers. I think I can tell you who it is. Dr. Gideon Fell."

  Lucia let out an involuntary cry. "Dr. Fell?"

  "Yes. He was certainly there last night, very late, rummaging the house for evidence of a certain kind. The policeman who found him there, and thought he was a burglar, told me so today. Didn't you get my message?"

  "What message?"

  "My dear madam," Dr. Bierce spoke somewhat testily, "you weren't in between lunch-time and six o'clock, I know that. But I left a message," Dr. Bierce snapped bony fingers beside his ear, to stimulate memory, "with a certain Miss Cannon."

  "Agnes never told me!"

  "Well! I thought you might be interested. Because I'm fairly sure he's there tonight."

  "Why are you sure?"

  "Because I saw the lamp. And he told the policeman," added Dr. Bierce, "that he would be doing an experiment to prove who really poisoned Mrs. Taylor."

  Butler sat up straight. Lucia, who had been bending forward with

  her golden head in the dingy hght from the Underground Station, suddenly crouched back.

  "The house isn't very far from here, is it?" Butler demanded.

  "No, no, no!" Dr. Bierce pointed. "Under the arch of tliat railway bridge; turn right up Bedford Hill Road. And—if I may go with you?"

  Butler gave quick instructions to the chauffeur. The car hummed into life.

  "Doctor," persisted Patrick Butler, "one thing I want to know very much. WTiat was Renshaw's business? I mean his official or outv^-ard business? Lucia here can only talk vaguely of 'factories.' "

  "Darling, that's all he ever told me!"

  "I don't know his official business," Dr. Bierce retorted dr)4y. "For all I do know, he may have an office in the City and the useful title of 'Agent.' " Here a sardonic smile, music-hall-Scottish in its dourness, pulled down Bierce's lips. "But I can tell you something about the gentleman, from remarks let drop by Mrs. Taylor. I can tell you how he started hfe."

  "WeU?"

  "He was an ordained clergyman," answered Dr. Bierce.

  ^T THE top of Bedford Hill Road, on the edge of the Common, the Victorian-Gothic battlements and sham tower of The Priory' loomed vaguely whitish against a black sky. Not a light showed anywhere.

  Though the house was exactly like the one at Hampstead, it had not the same "feel" as Lucia's home. Its grounds were larger, behind a low stone wall, but they were ill-kept. It repelled you; it had the chilly stare of someone, much too respectable, who cuts you dead in the street. The trees shielded its bow-windows rather than gracing them.

  The limousine had been parked a little way down the hill, lights extinguished. Butler, Lucia, and Dr. Bierce—in that order—moved softly up the stone-flagged path to the front.

  "A parson!" Butler kept muttering. "Look here!" Then he remembered the ivory crucifix on the wall of Renshaw's bedroom.

  "Where else but the Church," softly asked Dr. Bierce, "could he have used that voice of his? Except on the stage—or at the Bar."

  "I know I'm like him, curse it!"

  "S-h-h!"

  "Did you know about this, Lucia? About the past?"

  There was no reply. And Butler insisted. "Did you?"

  "No. I didn't know about it." Lucia pressed the white scarf round her neck. "But once or twice I thought it might be. Just little things. And you're not like him." She pressed Butler's arm. "You're not like him at all; you must know that."

  "Try the front door!" suggested the misleadingly harsh voice of Dr. Bierce.

  The front door, though in Mrs. Taylor's lifetime secured by lock and bolt and chain, was not now secured in any way. It opened, on dense

  blackness, when Butler turned the knob. But he knew what he would meet. A faint scent of damp stain and decay was mingled with the ineradicable tinge of the perfume worn by dead Mrs. Taylor.

  "Anybody got an electric torch?"

  Dr. Bierce was prompt. "I always carry one. Here!"

  Inside, as at Hampstead, was the same passage, with two rooms on each side of it, leading to a large rear hall. But, whereas at Hampstead the drawing room had been the first door on the right, here the entrance to the front bed-sitting-room was on the left.

  Butler was drawn there as compellingly as though hands pushed him. The others followed, Dr. Bierce closing the front door. The beam of Butler's electric torch touched the open doorway to Mrs. Taylor's room; then it moved to a little table near by.

  On the table stood an old-fashioned lamp, a white globe painted with flowers on a white china. Butler picked up the lamp and shook it.

  "There's oil inside," he said, as the splashing rose loudly in stillness. "But the lamp's stone cold. There's nobody here tonight!"

  "I tell you, I saw the light! Dr. Fell "

  "He couldn't be walking about in the dark, could he?"

  Handing the electric torch back to Bierce, Butler took the globe off the lamp, kindled the wick with a pocket-lighter, and replaced the globe. Its pale whitish light, with a tinge of the unearthly, drew round them the atmosphere of the 'sixties in the last century.

  As though to defy bogles, Butler strode through the doorway into Mrs. Taylor's bedroom. He did not turn round, or hold up the lamp, until he reached the middle of the room.

  He was now facing the dead woman's bed, with its scrolled and pointed wooden headboard a dull brown, its white bell-cord hanging. Its head was set against the inner wall of the passage. Its mattress had been stripped of bedclothing. But it was wicked; it was leering. He would not have been surprised to see fat Mrs. Taylor, with her painted face and her dyed hair, sitting in a pink nightgown and looking at him.

  Butler glanced round. The rays of the lamp, a disembodied pallor with small flower-shapes, dimly showed him the horsehair furniture mingled with a few easy-chairs, the clutter of marble-topped tables, the mantelpiece with its clock, the little bathroom built in the deep alcove between this room and the room behind it. The shutters were closed on the bow-window at the front. Nothing was changed since Butler last saw it.

  "Pat!" Lucia, who had followed him into the room on tiptoe, glanced quickly at the bed and away from it. "If Dr. Fell's been here, he's gone now. What are we doing in this house?"

  "God knows. Wondering if it's haunted, I suppose."

  Dr. Bierce, as a man of science, seemed to twitch his nose with skepticism.

  "Some kind of experiment—!" he began.

  "But what kind of experiment?" Butler swept the lamp round. "Everything's the same. Everything is "

  And yet it wasn't. Butler stopped abruptly.

  "Who," he demanded, "who put that water-bottle on the bedside table?"

  "Water-bottle?" echoed Lucia.

  "When Mrs. Taylor was poisoned, there were only two important things on that bedside table besides the electric lamp. One: a tin containing poison. Two: a glass with a spoon in it. There certainly wasn't a water-bottle. But look at it now!"

  On the bedside table, which was at the left of the bed as you faced it, stood a (dead) electric lamp with a fringed yellow shade. Beside it was a water-bottle—rather like the one in Dick Renshaw's bedroom—over whose top a glass had been inverted. The bottle was half full.

  "It's like...." Lucia's voice trailed away in a gulp. "Well, you know what it's like! But why should it be here?"

  "I don't know. Old Madame Taylor, so far as I ever heard, didn't own a water-bottle at all."

  Butler approached the bedside table. The pale light of his lamp turned his companions' faces into the pale masks of strangers, yet all were as absor
bed as though they feared the bottle might explode. Patrick Butler picked up the glass and inspected it. It was clean and polished. Putting down the glass, he picked up the bottle. He sniffed at its contents. Experimentally he lifted it towards his mouth....

  "For God's sake don't do that/" exclaimed a wheezy voice, so close at hand that Butler almost dropped the bottle.

  They had been too absorbed to hear even the elephantine approach or cane-tap of Dr. Gideon Fell. Dr. Fell, who was too big to go through the doorway by frontal approach, stood sideways there and held up a very small lamp with a cylindrical glass shade. The little flame shone on a distressed pink face, eyes peering over disarranged eyeglasses on the black ribbon.

  "Or, if you must meddle with it," wheezed Dr. Fell, with even deeper distress, "I beg of you not to drink the water. It's poisoned."

  Butler set down the bottle hastily.

  "Thanks, I won't. Excuse me, but is this your experiment to show who really poisoned Mrs. Taylor?"

  Dr. Fell frowned. He maneuvered sideways through the door, his shovel hat on his head and his cane hung over one arm beneath the back-flung cloak.

  "Mrs. Taylor?" he repeated. "No, no, no! My dear sir, you have got the facts backwards. My experiment, if I can dignify it by that name, is concerned with an important point in the poisoning of Richard Ren-shaw."

  "And—have you cleared it up?" asked Lucia.

  Dr. Fell gave her a vaguely benevolent look and bow, like an absent-minded Old King Cole, and nodded to Dr. Bierce. Peering down the mountainous slopes of himself, he managed with some difficulty to extract a large gold watch from among the ridges of his waistcoat. He blinked at it.

  "By thunder, it can be cleared up now!" he said, replacing the watch with agony. "That bottle has been on the table for well over twenty-four hours, which gives a good margin. Let us see, now!"

  "What is it?" cried Lucia.

  Dr. Fell picked up the bottle. Holding it near the pale globe-lam-p in Butler's hand, he advanced his own tiny yellow-flamed lamp so that the bottle was brightly lighted between them. The water was crystal-clear; the glass surfaces shone. Dr. Fell studied the bottle, tilting it back and forth.

  "Well?" prompted Butler, conscious of heat and excitement without knowing why. "What do you see?"