Below Suspicion

by John Dickson Carr

  "Somebody's hovering tonight," said Butler, with his left hand on the knob of the front door.

  "Visitors already?"

  "Oh, nothing much. But, when you're outside, don't loiter. Go straight left, and then left again up St. James's Street. Get a taxi if you can find one."

  And he opened the door.

  "Sir," replied Dr. Fell, removing his shovel hat, "I say good-night to a man who, despite certain—harrumph—eccentricities, I admire very much."

  For a minute or two Patrick Butler stood in the open doorway, silhouetted against the dim light behind. Again the tingling ran through him, except to his head. Though he despised athletics, he was a good horseman and a first-class pistol-shot. How, except for a certain numbing distraction, he would have enjoyed a meeting with Gold-teeth then!

  The cold air fanned up through his dressing gown. He could smell mist without seeing it, except in a thin blur round the street-lamp. Again, as Dr. Fell's elephantine tread and the tap of his cane faded away, he glanced round the bleak, lost square called Stable Yard.

  The Museum, yes. One of the supports of an arch, yes! Just faintly edged out of shadow, someone was standing there and looking at him.

  Far away, a taxi hooted faintly.

  Butler's right hand did not move; never aim at anything you don't mean to shoot. The seconds ticked past. . . .

  Very deliberately, allowing ample time for something or someone to move, Butler stepped back inside and closed the door. After consideration, he turned the key in the lock.

  And why not, it occuned to him sardonically, a gun-battle in Cleveland Row? After all, and fairly recently, hadn't there been a running gun-fight in cars through the West End? Before the war, Londoners would have considered that episode so fantastic that it could have occurred only in an American film; and probably exaggerated even in America.

  Moving back from the front door, Butler himself stumbled slap over that box of books. It brought him back to the distraction, the head of the witch-cult, which kept him from thinking with sensible concentration about Gold-teeth.

  At the top of the open wooden box his eye caught a pamphlet, dust-grey with the age of three centuries, and a part of the title: ". . . Lewd and Unholie Designs of. . . ."

  "This has got to stop," Butler said aloud.

  In the dining-room, just across from the libran', the telephone began to ring.

  Since the departure of Johnson and Mrs. Pastemack long ago, the whole house had been so quiet that the ping of the small clock in the library could be heard an}'vhere. The clamour of a telephone-bell tore silence to bits.

  Butler hurried into the dining-room. Mrs. Pastemack had drawn the curtains there, and set out a cold dinner under the dim-gleaming cr}-stal chandelier. With a certain hesitation Butler picked up the 'phone.

  "Pat?" asked the calm voice of Charles Denham.

  Butler considered for a moment. Then his heartiest tone animated the mouthpiece.

  "Hul-lo, Charlie! What's up?"

  "I promised to come round and see you, Pat. But I was so swamped under with business that . . . how are you?"

  "Never more fit in my life, old boy! Why not?"

  Slight pause. "But there was an item in the press to say you'd been hurt in a fire! Yes, and in a church and in the middle of the night. Never knew you to be inside a church at all," commented Denham, whose orthodoxy was notorious and strict.

  "It was a private chapel on an old estate," said Butler. "We were skylarking, that's all. No harm done."

  "Then I needn't worn- about you?" The tone was chilly.

  "Not in that way, no. Thanks for ringing up. Good-bye."

  Butler replaced the 'phone, and sat for a moment deep in thought. WTien he roused himself, he was looking at the cold dinner on the table. That meal, which Mrs. Pastemack had queued for hours to assemble, w^as so meagre as to seem comic and even apologetic. Patrick Butler did not mind this. WTiat he did mind, to put the matter as cinlly as possible, was the recollection of a happy, oily voice speaking on the radio, assuring listeners that neer in their lives had they been healthier than on their present diet.

  Butler got up. The nndow-curtains were closed, but he peered out through a chink.

  There were now two men m Stable Yard, watching the house.

  Quickly but without hurr}- Butler set about his prepararions. First he closed and fastened all the shutters in the downstairs rooms. After tliat he locked the back door.

  The best household safeguards, a chatty burglar had once informed him, were ordinary old-fashioned shutters; you cannot open them witli-out too much noise. Patrick Butler did not want to keep oflf attack; he wanted to know exactly where it came from.

  His own footsteps, creaking on old wood, made the only noise as he went upstairs. Not even a wainscot creaked, as it usually did. Upstairs he closed and locked the shutters, ending with his own bedroom at tlie front.

  Though he wore pyjamas under his dressing gown, he decided he would not bother to get dressed. Contempt for Gold-teeth and Company (pleasure began again) would be shown better like this. Threading a leather belt through the slits in the revolver-holster, he buckled it round his waist and fitted the Webley into the holster. And yet. . . .

  "Clumsy under that dressing gown, though," he said aloud. "If I could-"

  Got it! And characteristically. Whipping the cord out of the dressing gown, he fastened the dressing-gown collar round his pyjama-neck and shoulders with inside safety pins. The dressing govm hung over him like a duellist's cloak, leaving his arms free inside.

  Still dissatisfied v^ath the back door, he sauntered downstairs. Against the locked door he set the back of a chair, and on it he piled such a top-heavy edifice of pots and pans and saucepans that the slightest movement of the door would have brought down banging pandemonium. Butler took an artistic pride in this, setting a kitchen-funnel on top like a hat.

  Now let 'em come!

  With a grim sense of pleasure, he stalked to the front door and opened it. He stood in the doorway, like a man taking the air of an evening, and looked out towards Stable Yard. Where before there had been two watchers, now there were three.

  The cold war, eh? But you needed only the superior patience of superior intelligence.

  Closing the door but leaving it unlocked, Butler strolled back into the library. With the library door left open, he could watch that front door from the other end by tlie fire.

  All evening they would gather and stare, like motionless cats, under the curious impression that his nerve would break. Was that the notion? In that case, he would show his detachment by sitting down-comfortably—and giving the dictaphone an account of the whole case

  against the real murderer. If only (Oh, God!) if only he didn't keep seeing a face without its mask.

  Besides, he couldn't possibly use a gun against. . . .

  (Stopitl)

  Butler, with a few pain-wTenches, swung round his own easy-chair by the fire so that he could keep an eye sideways on the front door through the open library door. The fire was burning brightly again. The little clock pinged the half-hour after six.

  "I haven't talked to you," he said to the dictaphone, "since I made some notes yesterday afternoon. Let's see."

  He pushed the pointer a little back, to catch the thread of what he had been saying before he switched off. Then he set the machine in motion, and reversed the mechanism so that the tube should speak instead of record.

  His own voice—a microcosm, from a court in Lilliput—popped out of the speaker.

  "Lucia Renshavv, from the first, showed a. fondness amounting to passion ioi—tor P. B." Here the speaking-tube paused, and gave a slight embarrassed throat-clearing. "Was this," it went on, "because P. B. bears a strong resemblance, in voice and general appearance, to L. R.'s Jate husband, Dick Renshaw? Has she unconsciously transferred her affection to a man who looks hke him?"

  Abruptly Butler switched off.

  With unsteady hands he took the wax cylinder from its spindle. He go
t up, turned round, and flung down the cylinder on the stone hearth. The smash made it sound harder than wax; its pieces flew spinning over the hearth and into the fire.

  Butler sat down again, putting on another wax record. His own silliness! His own stupidity!

  "I now dictate," he began in his richest voice, "a complete record of the facts in what we shall call the Witch-Cult Murders."

  Never once was he unconscious of that front door, of the Webley at his hip, of the box of cartridges on the other side of his chair. At the same time, in ordered logic and wath precise phrase, his voice flowed on. He finished one cylinder, put it in its container in the rack below, and replaced it.

  Still the fluent voice went on. How many motionless figures now-waited in Stable Yard or Cleveland Row? Would they tr' to rush an unlocked front door? But the voice, the brain, kept these matters in a separate compartment.

  ". . . thus we begin to understand," he was saying, "the workings of the murderer's mind. New paragraph.

  "Let us say that I, for instance, commit a murder. It bulks large in my mind; it touches everything. Unless I am a consummate actor, I cannot help in some instance betraying—by a slip of speech, a gesture, an expression—the sense of guilt which fills me, even though this may go unnoticed.

  "But let us suppose, again for instance, that someone quite sincerely thinks and believes that he or she has not committed a murder? That person will never think of the crime at all. Since there is no sense of guilt, there will be only an innocent turn of hand or eye or mouth to any questions put either by private investigators or by the police."

  Abruptly Butler stopped, his finger releasing the button.

  The thought which struck him, at once infuriating and ludicrous, made him plunge across the room until he remembered to hurry back and shut off the dictaphone.

  Those watchers outside: what if they weren't enemies at all, but police-officers on the alert? It wasn't likely that Hadley would have sent as many as three men; on the other hand, it would explain their silence.

  Butler stalked to the front door, opened it, and went out. He cared not a curse (if it even occurred to him) about going across Cleveland Row and into Stable Yard in dressing gown and pyjamas and slippers. Besides, it was a hidden nook with few or no passers-by.

  The mist had thickened; the street lamp was a spark. Butler felt hard asphalt under his slippers, and a sense of loneliness among dead houses, when he emerged into Stable Yard. There were four men watching now.

  Two of them were behind arches of the Museum. One stood at the far end of York House, just outlined against shadow. The fourth was half invisible against a line of iron railings whose gate led to a path down into the Mall.

  "Is anybody here a police-officer?" said Butler. His voice, here, seemed to have an echo. "If anybody is, speak up!"

  Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. There was the slight scrape of a foot.

  The right-hand side of Butler's dressing gown had been flung back. He held the Webley ready with hammer at full cock, weight of tfie gun balanced on second joint of second finger.

  "Last chance if this is a joke!"

  It wasn't a joke.

  At the same time Butler became conscious of two foolish things done in anger: they could get behind him, if there were more of them; and bad light made ver}' poor shooting.

  He heard the scrape of his own slippers as he began to back away. A small pebble rolled and bounced. Familiar London chimney pots enclosed a lost arena. Over there, in the Museum, they had once exhibited the original door of Newgate Prison and a reconstruction of the condemned cell.

  {These aren't police-officers. They're not even GoJd-teeth's thugs. They're members of the witch-cuJt, sweating in their respectability. But they think Vm the only one who knews. And they've got to kill me.)

  Butler reached his own front door. This time he locked it quickly. He also was sweating, but not from any usual kind of fear. In his imagination, at least, they were gathering and gathering outside: directing against this house a silent pressure of evil.

  "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?"

&nb
sp; 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.