Below Suspicion

by John Dickson Carr

  Dr. Fell let out a gusty sigh of relief.

  "Nothing, I am glad to say. Absolutely nothing!"

  "But the poison. . .."

  "My dear sir!" said Dr. Fell, who was startled and bewildered. "Poison? This experiment had nothing to do with poison!" And he put the bottle, as well as his little lamp, on the bedside table.

  Patrick Butler closed his eyes, counted slowly to ten, and opened his eyes again.

  "Just a moment," he said in a voice of such authority that Dr. Fell blinked. "Let's get one thing straight. Sometimes these cryptic remarks

  of yours sound like mere hocus-pocus, and sometimes they sound feebleminded."

  Dr. Fell looked guilty.

  "But the man who solved that Vampire case, and the poisoning at Caswall Moat House," Butler went on, "is no fool. His remarks aren't mumbo-jumbo."

  "They aren't," Dr. Fell assured him. "They aren't, really."

  "In my opinion," said Butler with the same hammering tone, "you see some link between two pieces of evidence; the link would seem obvious if you pointed it out. But your mind darts off to some other aspect of the case. And you've quite sincerely forgotten what we're talking about when we ask questions about that link." Here Butler assumed his eighteenth-century manner. "Sir, will you accept a challenge here and now?"

  "Sir," intoned Dr. Fell, rearing up and adjusting his eyeglasses, "I shall be delighted."

  "Then prove my judgment is correct. What is the Murder Club? How does it work? What are the clues to it? And above all," Butler's wild curiosity reached frenzy, "under what cloak does it operate? Can you—or will you—tell us that now?"

  Dr. Fell, whose huge goblin shadow covered the door as Butler raised the pallid lamp, looked back at him with clear eyes and without absent-mindedness.

  "I can," repeated Dr. Fell, "and I will. You deserve to know the dead-liness of the enemy you are fighting."

  "And that is?"

  Through the dead and silent house, making Butler's ner'es jump, clove the strident ringing of a telephone-bell.

  "That 'phone," said Lucia abruptly, "has been cut off for weeks!"

  Dr. Fell shook his head.

  "By some fortunate accident or even design: no. That's how I have been able to keep in touch with Hadley. Will you excuse me for a moment?"

  Butler was in despair.

  ( H he tries to get away from me, ii I don't hear this story within the next iew minutes, I'll follow him as I mean to follow Luke Parsons.)

  Dr. Bierce, cap in one hand and medicine-case in the other, was contemplating the wooden bedstead with a strange expression Butler could not read; it reminded Butler of a face, perhaps out of history, which

  eluded him. Lucia, biting her hp in perplexity as though she wanted to know the truth and yet didn't want to know it, seemed about to speak. Then she sent a startled glance at the door.

  In the doorway stood Miss Agnes Cannon.

  "Well!" said Miss Cannon, with a sort of mild and fizzing hauteur. She continued with the same words Dr. Bierce had used: "Then you decided to come here after all."

  Colour tinged Lucia's cheeks.

  "I did," Lucia said, "but no thanks to you! Why didn't you give me Dr. Bierce's message?"

  Miss Cannon, wearing a trim buff-coloured coat and with a blue scarf over her head with a knot under the chin, continued to fizz like a human Bromo-Seltzer as she drew off her gloves. She glanced slowly round the room, and seemed emotionally moved.

  "Mildred Taylor!" she said. "In this room died one of the finest and noblest characters I have ever known." Then, abruptly, she answered Lucia's question. "You are a child, Lucia. You will not allow me to do my duty and take care of you. If anyone came here, I decided that it should be myself."

  "What on earth," cried Lucia, "do you think you can do here?"

  "I flatter myself," said Miss Cannon, flashing her pince-nez, "that I am a woman of the world. I know human nature and its ways." Her glance at Butler, though casual, was charged with significance. "You did not even inform me where you were going, or with whom."

  "Oh, Agnes, stop it!"

  Miss Cannon opened her handbag, threw her gloves inside, and closed the bag with a snap.

  "Nor did you know," her voice quivered, "nor did you know, when you rushed home to dress for dinner, that the police had searched the house this afternoon? No, you did not know it."

  For a second Lucia seemed to stop breathing. "Did they search my room?"

  "Among all the rest. Obviously."

  "What were they looking for?"

  "They did not inform me. However, they had a search-warrant. I compelled Chief Inspector Soames to produce it."

  Lumbering footsteps sounded in the passage. When Dr. Fell entered sideways and loomed up over them, radiating energy like the heat of a

  furnace, Miss Cannon seemed to melt away into a dim corner. Dr. Fell's expression was grave as he peered at Butler.

  "Look here," he began abruptly, dropping his academic manner. "I'm afraid I've got bad news for you. That was Hadley. The police raid on a certain Love-Mask Club was a fiasco."

  "How do you mean?"

  "One of your enemies, the man you described as Em, had already gone after a doctor to set some compound fractures. The other, whom you described as Gold-teeth, got away before the squad-car arrived. Both are still at large."

  Butler laughed. Dr. Fell, holding firmly to his eyeglasses, sur'eyed Butler with refreshed interest and something of awe.

  "I myself," he declared, "am not now of a corporeal shape to wreck billiard-rooms and carry on in Soho night-clubs as you and Mrs. Ren-shaw seem to have done...."

  "Lucia!" cried Miss Cannon.

  "But Hadley," Dr. Fell waved her aside, "asks me to convey to you a very grave warning. Gold-teeth means to put you on a morgue-slab."

  "Somehow," Butler told him dryly, "you fail to curdle my blood. So the cloth-heads are still at large, eh?"

  Dr. Fell's face grew more red. "If you had heard Gold-teeth's record, as Hadley read it over the 'phone, you might be more careful. Have you got a firearms license?"

  "No."

  "Well, run along to Scotland Yard in the morning; Hadley will arrange it without trouble."

  Butler's eyebrows went up. "Do you honestly think," he inquired, "that any gentleman would trouble to use a revolver-bullet against that type? It should be either ignored or stepped on."

  "For God's sake, listen! The first time you met. Gold-teeth regarded you as a mug.. .."

  "I took the same opinion of him. A trifle lower, maybe."

  "But he doesn't think so now. He won't give you a chance; he'll get you behind your back, when you're not looking. My dear sir, what can you do?"

  "Before I met him," Butler retorted calmly, "I hadn't the slightest idea what my tactics would be. I haven't now. But there will be something."

  "Pat/' cried Lucia, "suppose they're after you tonight?"

  "Well, suppose they are? Don't be alarmed, my sweet," said Butler, and openly patted her cheek—to the pink consternation of Miss Cannon.

  "We are now, I hope," Butler continued, putting down the white-globed lamp on the bedside table and letting his raw curiosity boil up again, "going to hear something really relevant. Dr. Fell, do you propose to tell us about the Murder Club?"

  "Yes," answered Dr. Fell very gravely.

  In the midst of a silence, while the others instinctively moved back, he sat down on the edge of the heavy bed. His hand, held forward on the crook of the cane, supported its ferrule against the floor.

  "I admit," Butler burst out, with unaccustomed humihty, "that my wits aren't up to everything. I know this crowd have developed some entirely new kind of racket. . . ."

  "Nor said Dr. Fell in a voice like a pistol shot, and rapped the ferrule of his cane on the floor.

  "It isn't new?"

  Dr. Fell rolled up his big head, with its grey mop of hair, and scrutinized Butler with a twisted-up look in which the wisdom of an elderly man mingled with the spirit
of a young one. But he lowered his head again.

  "I have often told Superintendent Hadley," he went on, "that his best course would be to shut himself up for fifteen hours a day and read history. He has answered me, not without reason, that this would leave him no time for anything else. Yet there is no crime, not even a trend in crime, which does not recur again and again.

  "New?" thundered Dr. Fell. "This cloak-for-devilry, which you are pleased to call a racket, is as old as the Middle Ages."

  The dim white lamp, amid so many shadows, turned the room with its yellow-striped wallpaper to a dusky reality of the Victorian era. Time ceased to exist. Mrs. Taylor, if her ghost still leered under the dyed hair, might have been dead for nearly a century. But Dr. Fell was drawing them back to a time many centuries before this.

  "I am not digressing," he said, "if I refer to the peasant of the Middle Ages. Any schoolboy knows that his life was hard and intolerably dreary. Church and State, or so it seemed, combined to oppress him. Lords of both rode past on their fine horses, to halls full of meat and drink. He must somehow find a penny, or its measure in barter, to get

  drunk at the ale-house. He could be hanged for small offences, snatched off to foreign wars; live at best by scratching in the earth.

  "His only solace lay in the churches, bedight and gleaming like a vision of heaven, golden with candles like the gold out of coffers. Yet, even then, terrors and portents lurked behind every hedge. God existed, but He was aloof and terrible. What did He do for the children of misery?"

  Dr. Fell paused, and made an inconsequential gesture.

  "Let it go!" he said. "It is only a brief vision, tinged with comedy if we consider the thing called progress. Let us look at the intolerable dreariness in the life of the average man today.

  "I hasten to say, since Miss Cannon is about to speak, that this is not a question of what Government is in power. It is the result of a world cataclysm. No Government outside Utopia could have brought a cure-all by this time. But look at your average man!

  "His scale has risen, no doubt! He does not starve, though he gets just enough food to keep his body going. Even if he has money, he cannot buy anything. There is nothing to buy. He stands in long queues for cigarettes, when he can get any. Even newspaper-advertisements jeer at him, carolling that So-and-So's Custard is noblest, but that he can't get any because so many people want it.

  "He is stifled in crowds, hammered to docility by queues, entangled in bureaucratic red-tape, snubbed by tradesmen with whom he must deal. His nerves, frayed by five years of war and air raids, are scraped raw by reaching for something which isn't there. Haven't you ever observed those long theatre-queues, blank-faced as sheep, waiting in the cold to lose themselves for a time in the sugar-candy nonsense of a motion picture?

  "And what is his state of mind then?

  "Well, let's look back to those withered—but all too familiar—figures in the Middle Ages. To many of them, in their dreary lives, the Lord of Lords was a cold enigma. But there was another God, just as authentic and far more exciting. He had power too. He could dispense rich gifts. He would reward the faithful against Church and State. And so they could. ..."

  Dr. Fell paused.

  "Could—what?" asked Lucia, who was gripping the footboard of the bed.

  "They could worship Satan," replied Dr. Fell. "Then, as well as now, in sheer lust for excitement."

  The silence seemed to stretch out unendurably, tautened by the uncanny look of four faces in that queer light.

  "Will you face the fact," said Dr. Fell, "that cycles return?"

  It was Miss Cannon who answered first.

  "Really, now!" she said in a high, thin voice. "If you ask us to treat seriously a whole lot of foolish nursery tales...."

  Dr. Fell closed his eyes.

  " 'No doubt you have read'—I quote Mr. Machen—'of the Witches' Sabbath, and have laughed at the tales which terrified our ancestors, the black cats and the broomsticks, and the doom pronounced against some old woman's cow. Since I have known the truth, I have often reflected that it is on the whole a happy thing such burlesque as this is believed.'"

  Dr. Fell opened his eyes. The corners of his bandit's moustache were drawn down. He spoke heavily.

  "Ma'am," he asked Miss Cannon, "do you know what the Black Mass really was?"

  "Well! I-"

  "No fiction writer has portrayed it with accuracy, except Huysmans in La-Bas. Only the Church has dared to speak out and tell the details; and I shall not be more prudish than the Church. The Black Mass, which was celebrated on the body of a naked woman for an altar, began with the ceremony of—"

  Two voices spoke out sharply, one after the other.

  "Really," said Miss Cannon, "one is or likes to be broad-minded. But good taste is always good taste."

  "The Anti-Christ!" exclaimed Dr. Bierce, like a man praying. "Let it bum and be destroyed!"

  And now, as Butler looked round, he realized of what Arthur Bierce reminded him. He should have seen it long before. Bierce, whatever his background, seemed less a physician curing bodies than a seventeenth-century Scottish Puritan curing souls. Even his appearance, the narrow bald skull dominating brooding brown eyes and a thin ascetic's face, stood out in the gloom like the colours of an old painting.

  Butler noted this vaguely, in a daze of revelation. He glanced at Lucia.

  "Witchcraft!" Lucia said, and shivered. "The worship of Satan! But —nowadays?"

  "Nowadays," assented Dr. Fell, "more than ever."

  "Why?"

  "Because the world is in chaos. Because, after the late affair of Adolf Hitler, many persons believe that decent standards of behaviour cannot exist. Horrors no longer offend. As for religion, observe that politics have taken its place. We have seen little girls, fifteen years old, screaming-drunk in Leicester Square. Decent men are gleeful about trickery and deceit, because their lives compel them to be. This will all change, I grant you! Meanwhile, there is the witch-cult."

  "Widespread?" demanded Patrick Butler.

  "Not widespread, no. But profoundly evil and doubly dangerous. Because it contains the avid thrill-seekers and the potential murderers."

  "Murderers?" screamed Lucia.

  "Don't you understand?" Dr. Fell asked quietly. "The witch-cult has always been the cloak for the wholesale poisoner."

  YEARS ago, you know," continued Dr. Fell, apparently not conscious of any sense of tension in his listeners, "Inspector Elliot and I believed we had found a witch-cult in that Crooked Hinge affair. We hadn't; it existed only in one person's mind. But now, by thunder, the reality has come home with a vengeance! Er—shall I explain how I discovered it?"

  "Yes, yes, yes!" Lucia kept repeating in a low voice. She wheeled out one of the old horsehair chairs to face Dr. Fell, and sank into the chair. Miss Cannon, still flustered and evidently shocked, hovered near her.

  Dr. Fell blinked at Patrick Butler.

  "Last night, at Mrs. Renshaw's home," he said, "I told you about my belief in an organization which distributed poison. But I couldn't, for the life of me, think how it worked silently with every tongue mute.

  "Archons of Athens, what a scatterbrain!" added Dr. Fell, knocking the heel of his hand against his forehead. "I had forgotten history, which no criminologist should ever do. For, immediately afterwards, I saw on the drawing-room table a very large silver candelabrum with seven branches."

  For a moment nobody spoke.

  "But all you did," protested Butler, though he saw many dangers sweeping near, "was scrape some pieces of wax out of one holder. The wax had gone completely black with dust."

  "Oh, no!" said Dr. Fell. "Not dust! As I found immediately afterwards. Miss Cannon here is too good a housekeeper to let any dust settle. And the underside of a blob of wax, when you scrape it off, will not be black too. Did you ever in your life see black candles, of a size to fit those large socket-holders? You didn't; they aren't made except privately. They were black candles—"

  "For the Blac
k Mass," supplied Dr. Bierce, with savage quietness.

  "I might inform you," said Miss Cannon in a high voice, "that the candle-sockets were quite clean. I saw them this morning."

  "So I was informed by Hadley. He saw Mrs. Renshaw during lunch." Dr. Fell looked at Lucia. "In other words, Mrs. Renshaw, someone in your house cleaned out those sockets during the night. I repeat: in your house. Don't you find it coming closer to home?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about." Lucia spoke from a dry throat. "Really and truly I don't."

  "We-ell," mused Dr. Fell, resuming his narrative with an offhand gesture, "Just after the dazzling illumination brought by the candles, I was handed more information which, as you may have noticed, made me jump."

  "What information was that?" struck in Arthur Bierce, who stood over in shadow with his fists clenched. "I—er—I had left the house after meeting you. What information?"

  "On the sill of one window in Mr. Renshaw's bedroom," answered Dr. Fell, "somebody had drawn a few little designs in the dust. Miss Cannon kindly informed me that each design looked like 'an inverted "T," and with perhaps a little tail to it.' H'mf, yes."

  "Unfortunately," said Miss Cannon, "the marks in the dust are gone."

  "Fortunately," said Dr. Fell, "the police had photographed them when they first went over the room."

  Reaching into an inside coat pocket which must have contained enough old letters to stuff a shoe-box, Dr. Fell produced a crumpled glazed photograph. He held this before Lucia's. eyes, inviting her to look.

  "They're just as Agnes said!" protested Lucia. "The little tail is an extension, a slight extension of the vertical line."

  "Do you make anything of them? Hey?"

  "No!"

  "This is the correct way of viewing the photographs," said Dr. Fell. "But now look at them upside down!"

  He reversed the photographs, and Lucia cried out.

  "Why . . . tliey're crosses! I mean, they look like Christian crosses!"

  "Aha!" grunted Dr. Fell, and stuffed the photograph away in his pocket. "On a wall of that room, we remember, was an ivory crucifix. Someone looked at it, when the poison was poured, with derisive mockery. Some one drew in the dust, as comments, drew several times in