Below Suspicion

by John Dickson Carr

  "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 m
uch at all about her, until—" Joyce stopped.

  Butler scarcely heard her.

  "I never realized," he snarled, "that every bit of evidence against her, every bit I thought or spoke to this dictaphone," he pointed, "applied equally well—or far more so!—to you.

  "Never mind! I repeat: we go back to you on the night of the 22nd. How did you get from Balham to Hampstead and back? By Underground, of course. You had a friend and informant at Renshaw's house, who tipped you off by 'phone to everything that happened here—"

  "Who?"

  "Kitty Owen. She certainly doesn't like Lucia; you should have seen the look she gave Lucia on one occasion I remember. But Kitty has a purely schoolgirl worship for you. It's abject; it likes to be abject; it'll do anything. Yet I swear Kitty knew nothing about your visit to Dick Renshaw's on the night of the 22nd. All she did was give you information.

  "My evidence? You'll hear it later.

  "You knew that everybody would be away from 'Abbot's House' that night except Lucia. Lucia didn't sleep in her husband's room, but in a room down the gallery. You knew that Dick Renshaw had gone away the day before on one of his trips to spot the lie of the land for witch-cult poisonings in distant cities. Above all, you believed (Lucia told several of us) that Renshaw would be back in a day or two.

  "You 'believed' that, I say. Not even Miss Cannon would trouble to clean the room, to change the water in the bottle, before he returned. So you crept into the house—how? Because the lock on the back door was a Grierson, just as at Mrs. Taylor's. And you dissolved a heavy dose of antimony in Renshaw's water-bottle, almost a month before he actuaJiy drank it.

  "And the picture changes. Everything becomes reversed, like that damned cross you're wearing now. In fact, you drew the reversed crosses in the window-sill dust at the same time you poisoned the bottle."

  Butler paused, and sat down.

  His rage was evaporating, his voice calm and sardonic. Joyce Ellis, as though not thinking of murder at all, was smiling at him in a meditative way.

  "It was quite all right that night, you know," she told him. "I got home by the last Underground train. I felt nice and sleepy. I locked the back door and left the key in it. I didn't even think of the antimony tin when I went to bed. But next morning, after I'd let Alice into the house. . . ."

  "You got a shock, perhaps?" he inquired politely.

  "A horrible shock!" said Joyce.

  She turned towards him that face of eager innocence, the lips half-parted and the grey eyes wide, which she had turned towards him at Holloway prison. It gave him a shock, because there seemed to be no parody in it.

  But inwardly, always inwardly, she was rejoicing, delighting, revelling in her ability to put on these masks. He wouldn't understand; it was a part of her religion.

  "You see," Joyce went on in her soft voice, "Alice Griffiths said at the trial that when she discovered Mrs. Taylor's body she'd run 'to the backstairs passage' and spoken downstairs to the cook. That's very near the door of my bedroom, of course. She shouted, 'For God's sake come up here; something awful's happened.' All of a sudden I remembered the tin of antimony I'd hidden in my room. It was gone. I knew what had happened. When the bell began to ring, I—"

  "You didn't know what to do, poor innocent?"

  "It was awfully clever of you," Joyce assured him, with triumph gleaming out, "to explain my saying 'Wliat's the matter? Is she dead?' to Alice. And to twist Alice and Emma so they wouldn't swear I never touched the tin that morning. I couldn't think of a story myself. But then—as soon as I met you—I knew you were going to get me acquitted."

  "And why was that, me dear?"

  Joyce's eyes glittered with admiration.

  "It was your confidence, your self-confidence. You treated me almost as—"

  "As Dick Renshaw would have done?"

  "Yes, that low swine!" Joyce touched the inverted cross to quiet herself. "But, of course," her mood changed again, "I couldn't tell you, any more than I could tell the police, where I'd really been on the night Mrs. Taylor died.

  "For what's the good of me, of my Master's teaching, if any man is eer sure I'm telling the truth? So I agreed to say just what you wanted me to say. It was a dreadful moment—did you notice, in court, how upset I got?—when Alice told about that banging door? I thought I hadn't killed Dick, of course, but then they might have connected him with me and our rites in the chapel. Tliat was sacred."

  "You know," Butler said, "I should like to read your thoughts."

  Joyce leaned forward with eyes which had a frank, unmistakable expression; it had nothing to do with murder.

  "I should like to read yours," she said.

  Tlie attraction of the woman was like a hypnotic or a drug. We shall be saved through the flesh, said the ritual of the Black Mass. Momentarily Butler fought his way out of that allurement.

  "I mean—" he stopped. "The police suspected you from the start. You were under arrest in just a week. During that time, they'd watch you if you made visits. Did you try any 'phone-calls?"

  "I rang Kitty. Poor, dear Kitty! Dick himself introduced her to the worship, but she Hked me. I asked Kitty if Mr. Renshaw had retumed. Kitty said no, but he'd be back before the end of the week surely. I told her the water must not, must not, be changed in that water-bottle."

  Butler was as tense as she.

  "I thought so!" he said. "You couldn't 'phone her, and you didn't dare see her, after you were arrested. But they did allow you newspapers. And not one word did you see—as you must have, if it had happened— about Renshaw's death. You believed the water had got poured out, just as it might have been."

  "Oh, yes. I was afraid he couldn't be dead. I knew it!"

  "In other words," said Butler, "you regarded yourself as innocent. The consciousness of guilt never touched your mind. You could rave inwardly about irony and filthy injustice: as you did aloud to me. But, by thunder! (As a friend of mine would say) nothing else clouded you. Someone could have written down your thoughts, up to and during the trial, and it would have been quite fair in the detective-story sense. Not after the trial—any afternoon paper would have told you Renshaw was dead."

  "Dead," breathed Joyce, "and deposed."

  "And after the trial," sneered Butler, "you still tried to make me believe you were innocent. In that coffee-room across from the Old Bailey, you even had the nere to tell me a story which gave you away: about a shutter banging instead of the back door. And I hurt you, I tore your vanity, when I told you that you were as guilty as hell."

  "What a queer phrase!" smiled Joyce. "But you attracted me most horribly. I wanted to stay near you. Didn't you ever find me attractive?"

  Butler, who was fighting shadows in his own mind, got up. He didn't want to say what he said; it blurted itself out.

  "I dreamed about you last night."

  Joyce also stood up. Tliey were so close they could almost have touched each other. Joyce moved closer.

  "Oh? What did you dream?"

  "I dreamed I v^'as kissing you, just as I kissed Lucia before that."

  "Only kissing?" murmured Joyce. "How tame your dreams must be."

  "And when I did have my arms round Lucia"—the impulse to reach out towards Joyce was almost irresistible—"just once, I thought of you."

  The pink lips curled. "Why was that?"

  "Because I knew," Butler snarled, "I knew in my heart, or whatever pretentious modem damned term you want to call it, that you were a murderer and I had to forget you. But I never knew until tonight—and I admit it was a shock—that you enjoyed wholesale poisoning for profit. Even though we got on the track of the witch-cult the very night you were acquitted,"

  "Oh?" Joyce said sharply.

  Any mention of the witch-cult, a holy thing which she had risked her life to keep secret, turned Joyce cold and wary. She backed away.

  "You said we," Joyce breathed. "Who got on the track of it?"

  "Faith, me dear, I was speaking editorially! Nobody knows but me-self."
<
br />   Joyce drew a quick breath, "You were saying?"

  "Well! I went out to Lucia's house at Hampstead, There were such things as black candle-wax and reversed crosses and mention of red garters. . . ."

  Through his mind, in the finger-snap time of pause, went everything Dr. Fell had told him late that afternoon,

  Dr, Fell, arriving at Lucia's house on Tuesday evening shortly after Butler, had already seen through the real meaning of the trial. "Sir, nobody considered the evidence!" And: "Both sides were looking up into trees for the roots and digging underground for the branches." Joyce Ellis was innocent of the death of Mrs. Taylor—because Joyce wasn't in the house. Where was she? She would have explained: unless her errand had been so deadly that she dared not explain and dared not risk explaining. What errand? Well, William Griffiths had testified that two large doses of antimony were gone from the tin.

  Hence that bumbling exclamation from Dr. Fell: "When I heard Mr. Renshaw had been murdered, I can't say I was surprised." And: "Surely it was at least reasonable that somebody would be murdered!"

  What knocked the learned doctor into a heap, what caused him to mutter and groan and make faces, was Lucia's testimony: that the water-bottle which killed Renshaw had been rinsed and refilled before Renshaw's death. Apparently Joyce couldn't have done it.

  Butler, out of his reverie in an instant, was speaking to Joyce.

  "But the idea that you couldn't have done the poisoning, because you were in prison," he said, "was knocked endways as soon as an investigator looked at tlie water-bottle on Renshaw's bedside table."

  "What about it?"

  "There was still about an inch of water left. And it was stale."

  "Stale?"

  "Yes. Full of those tiny beads that gather in water when it's been standing for days or even weeks. Could it have got stale in twenty-foui hours, since Kitty was supposed to have filled it? That didn't seem possible, with a glass inverted over the top to protect it. All the same, an experiment was tried at Mrs. Taylor's house.

  "A water-bottle, with glass over it, was left to stand for twenty-four hours. At the end of that time it was crystal-clear, vidthout a bead of any kind. It would clearly remain fresh for a long time."