In Butler's imagination, voices echoed and re-echoed out of that dark house.
("What do you see?" "Nothing, I am glad to say. Absolutely nothing/" And: "Poison? This experiment had nothing to do with poison!")
Butler lighted a cigarette. His hand was unsteady, but he forced words:
"The water in Dick Renshaw's bottle had been there for a long time. When anybody considered this with certain odd features of your case, it began to appear more than odd. But how could the water in that bottle be stale, when Kitty had refilled it?
"For meself, sweetheart, I at first slightly misinterpreted the facts. I knew Kitty had made an exchange of bottles. I knew she used the knitting-bag as a cover. But I was staring eye to eye with truth, never seeing it.
"A telegram arrived on Monday, March 19th, to say Renshaw would be home that night. The room must be cleaned, the water-bottle refilled. But Kitty, implacably true to your instructions of weeks before, would not let the water be changed. And what did she do?"
"She has told me," observed Joyce coolly. "Kitty is loyal, though not alone to me. To him."
"Him?"
Again Joyce took out the inverted cross, and kissed it.
"W^iat Kitty did," snapped Butler, "was to take a filled water-bottle, clean water, from another bedroom. She put that in her knitting-bag. She picked up the poisoned bottle of stale water, and slipped it into her knitting-bag when she went into the bathroom. It was the clean water-bottle she emptied, rinsed, and refilled to put in the bag. It was the same old poisoned bottle she put back on the table.
"Didn't I tell you," Butler said sarcastically, "that we saw all evidence exactly the wrong way round?"
Joyce laughed.
"Dick Renshaw was in a temper when he got home," Butler said. "Furthermore, he was having a row with Lucia. He never noticed the staleness of the water he drank." Butler, smoking the cigarette in short fierce puffs, threw it into the fire.
"He thought Lucia had done it," Butler added. "And most people thought you were now below suspicion."
"Below suspicion?"
"You'd been cleared in court of Mrs. Taylor's death," Butler refrained from adding that Dr. Fell had steadfastly maintained Joyce's innocence here, which he had never called 'murder* but only 'death.' "So most people, when Renshaw was murdered, could rule you out as causing both deaths.
"But remember Kitty Owen! Whether Kitty guessed the water might have been poisoned before that, she was smacking well certain when Renshaw died. But she was loyal! Oh, yes! She'd already done you a service, when there was to have been a Black Mass in the Black Chapel the night before Renshaw died."
Joyce, gliding back into the chair with the bulky handbag beside her, grew rigid. "How do you know there was supposed to have been—"
Butler groaned.
"The black wax-stains were fresh. When would have been the obvious night for the Mass? You parody Christian ritual, don't you? The 18th was a Sunday!
"I don't know why Renshaw didn't get back to celebrate it; we may never know. Mrs. Taylor, his second in command, was dead. You, the third in succession, were in prison. There wasn't any priest to perform the ceremony, even though the black candles had to burn at the altar and the goat-god statuette displayed. Somebody had to go and tell the masked assembly there'd be no ceremony.
"Who would do it? Kitty, of course! She was very close to two out of three of the leaders. And those candelabra were personal treasures: Renshaw liked to have a pair at home, as Mrs. Taylor did, to gloat over them. Oh, Kitty was always ready to show her superiority over Lucia Renshaw!"
"You're wrong in saying I did it for the money," said Joyce. "I should only have used it—for his work."
And she touched the cross. Her unwavering, half-smiHng fixity of expression began to unnene him again. He stumbled away, past the dictaphone, and stood with his back to the dying fire.
"W'Tien you were acquitted on the 20th," he said, "what did you do after you left the coffee-room? Did you get in touch with Luke Parsons? Or with Gold-teeth? Or with both?"
"Gold-teeth? Oh, you mean poor George! I 'phoned them both, yes. But I was thinking about you."
"Possibly you were, at that time. But next morning, when you came to see me and I threw you out without ceremony—wasn't that when you began to hate me?"
"I may have been a bit annoyed. At the time."
"Wasn't that really the reason why you got Gold-teeth and Em to go for me with knuckle-dusters last night? Or try to?"
"Not . . . I'm Sony- about that! You did annoy me."
"Yesterday aftemoon," Butler used words like a whip, without the least apparent effect, "I visited Luke Parsons and bribed him to give me a little information (two hundred quid it cost) about where I might find Gold-teeth and Em. Didn't Parsons ring you up immediately afterwards and tell you he'd done it?"
"Yes."
Joyce was sitting back lazily, the gleam of the wall-lamps on her sleek black hair, her face one of serene gravity except for certain movements of the lips and eyes.
"Was that why he was killed?"
"The person who will betray you in the very smallest thing," said Joyce, looking full at him and pressing the reversed cross against her breast, "m\ betray you in anything." Then the grey eyes opened wide. "That's a law of faith."
"It was a woman's crime. Luke Parsons was old and frightened and not very strong. A man would have taken him by the neck, from the front or the back. A woman would have stunned him first, as he was stunned, and then applied the garter in the form of a tourniquet. Did you enjoy killing him?"
"Dearest darling," said Joyce, "it had to be done."
"Was he a member of your—faith?"
"Well! A private inquir)' agent—don't you see?—is so useful when you want information about people."
"And Gold-teeth?"
"George? Oh, George is a very special friend of mine." Joyce's teeth gleamed; her slow smile suggested much. Then her face darkened. "But I never once thought—" She stopped. "When he slipped off those gold shell-teeth he used for a disguise, he wasn't unattractive."
"Not very fastidious, are you?"
"Don't be jealous. I'm not jealous of poor silly Lucia. The most dreadful thing I ever had to do," said Joyce, who would have raged if her self-control had not been so great, "was to give George orders to set fire to the temple under that chapel!"
"Then why did you have to do it?"
"Lucia was going there with you, wasn't she? One of George's men found her handbag, with the key and a cardboard label attached, in that club. He told George, even if he didn't understand; George 'phoned me; and—
"George," and now Joyce w^s fighting so hard for self-control that the flame-coloured gown writhed, "didn't know you were at Balham. But he saw the light through the shutters, and wondered. Then he went on to get very dangerous papers and do . . . the rest of it. The burning. The awful thing.
"What else could I do? I knew Lucia already suspected something. In court, when Dr. Bierce was talking about 'The Priory' being what he called an unhealthy place, I saw her get up and make shushing gestures. But I couldn't guess how much she knew."
Butler hit her, only verbally, but hard.
"Lucia knew nothing," he said. "If it hadn't been for Dr. Fe— if it hadn't been for me, we might never even have found the secret trap to go downstairs."
For several seconds Joyce was quiet, very quiet.
"You're lying," she smiled at him.
"No."
"I should hate you." Joyce regarded him thoughtfully, but her eyes in their steady look were as fascinating to him as fire to a child. "I can't hate you. I never could. I feel just as I said I felt at that coffee-room. Only—more so. I knew it as soon as I saw you again."
Then Joyce's smile widened, with both the cruelty and the allure.
"Did you get much pleasure from Lucia," she asked softly, "when you kept thinking of me?"
"I didn't say I 'kept' thinking of you! It only just—"
Again her exp
ression made him pause.
"And I know you won't give me away/' Joyce said. "Because I've known, all along, you were one of us."
"WTiat the hell do you mean, one of us?"
"Oh, you think you're not! You like to pretend it shocks you. But look into your real character, and see if it's not true!"
Joyce rose from the chair. She walked slowly towards him as he stood with his back to the fireplace.
"You know in your heart," Joyce breathed, "that he really exists."
"Don't talk like an idiot! This 'Satan' of yours is an allegorical mi:h, intended to represent—"
"Then why do you fear him?" asked Joyce. "Why do your churches fear him? Why do they cr)- out with one voice, but in helplessness? WTiy, since the beginning of time, has he remained unconquered?"
Patrick Butler had ceased to think. The perfume of Joyce's hair and flesh, her nearness, the sense about her of diabolic possession— He felt now that all he wanted, in this world or the next, was Joyce Ellis. He hit out with one last speech.
"D'you think I'd be a rival to Gold-teeth?"
There was a faint little laugh.
"George?" she said. "Oh, George needn't trouble you. He's dead."
"Dead?"
Butler's hand fell from Joyce's shoulder, which was warmer than blood-heat.
"Dead?" he repeated. "How did he die?"
"Oh, darling, does it matter?"
"Probably not. All the same, how did he die?"
Joyce's voice, low-pitched and full of genuine contrition, was muffled as she lowered her head.
"Last night," she said, "I \as annoyed with you for getting those papers. I don't feel like that now! But I—I told George to paste those bits of paper on your windows this morning. He didn't seem to like it, but he did it."
"Well?"
"Well! You sent that insulting (it was insulting, darling!) telegram, and dared him to come here with a gun. I was still annoyed, so I told him.... But he wouldn't do it."
"What do you mean by that? Answer me!"
"Darling, it really is frightfully funny." Faint little laughter, mingled with bewilderment, floated up past Butler's shoulder. Joyce Ellis, who
could slip on any mask or assume any voice, glided into pure Commercial-Road Cockney. The voice of Gold-teeth himself might have been shrilling in the room.
" 'E told me I fought fair. He said 'e wouldn't make no charges against me, and 'e kept 'is word, 'E's a real gent, Butler is, and I won't do 'im dirt ii you kill me for it."
Silence.
Butler swallowed hard, and then spoke.
"What happened?" he asked.
Joyce shrugged her shoulders.
"Well, naturally—he died."
Something in the quiver of Butler's shoulders, the tensity that went through him, made Joyce look up. It stabbed through the dreamy haze of Joyce's senses. She backed very slowly away towards her chair, her eyes blank with astonishment. It was several seconds before Butler spoke.
"You swinel" he said.
His tone was not loud. Yet Joyce's bewilderment only increased.
"Darling, what's wrong?"
"I don't know where Gold-teeth is," said Butler. "But I'd like to shake hands with him. I'd like to get drunk with him. That jeering sandy-haired welterweight was a real sportsman. That means the finest breed in the world. And you had him killed!"
"Darling, I never thought—"
"No. You never thought."
Patrick Butler saw no irony in the fact that Gold-teeth, the one man he had hated most, was now the one man for whom he felt the most sympathy. Butler's voice was thick and there was a sting behind his eyes. He reached across and threw the whole dictaphone to the floor with a crash.
"And now, my handsome witch-woman," he roared, "I shall proceed to tell you something. You think I'm the only person who knows the evidence against you? Well, I'm not."
"What did you say?"
"Dr. Fell knows it. Superintendent Hadley knows it. The whole Goddamned police-force know it. I haven't got your papers; the police have 'em. And do you know what will happen tomorrow morning?"
Joyce whipped out of the chair, snatching up her handbag. Her face was not now pleasant to see.
"Kitty Owen," roared Butler, "will be taken to Scotland Yard for questioning. There's nothing in those papers to convict you. But Kitty Owen can convict you with direct evidence.
"She's loyal; I grant that. She worships; I grant that too. But she's voung, my handsome witch-woman; she's young. She'll break like that," he snapped his fingers, "under eighteen hours' questioning. And do you know what'll happen to you then? You'll hang at Holloway—where you came from."
Joyce, who was fumbling frantically at her handbag, had backed away and was facing him from about a distance of ten feet. He saw the edge of the low-calibre automatic.
"It might interest you to know," remarked Butler, throwing back the right side of his dressing gown, "that I've been covering you with this Webley for some rime."
Joyce screamed at him—what words he could not afterwards remember. He looked at her for a moment. Then, drawing a deep breath of self-contempt, he tossed the Webley so that it landed in the seat of the leather chair.
"Ah, the back of me hand to ye!" snapped the Irishman. "I can't shoot a woman."
The automatic was in Joyce's hand now, ten feet away.
"So you knew I was a murderer!" she screamed at him.
Patrick Butler, his back to the mantelpiece, drew himself to his full height.
"Didn't I tell you?" he asked politely. "I am never wrong."
And he made her a bow, in the full mocking style of the eighteenth century, as she shot him twice through the chest.
Being a letter from Gideon Fell, Ph.D., L.L.D., F.R.H.S., to Pahick Butler, K.C.
13 Round-pond Place, Hampstead, N.W. 3, 22nd June, 1947
My dear Butler,
And so, it seems, you are in trouble again. Not only, as I gather from your letter, with some legal dignitar}' whom you appear to have accused of cheating at poker, but in a case wherein you are convinced of your client's innocence. You are never wrong- I know it; and—yes, I will help. As for your comment about Joyce Ellis: now that the trial is over, I venture to answer it. No, the girl is not insane. She has her religion; there was recently in Germany, and now being expressed in Russia, worship just as fantastic. I think the jury knew she was not insane. But the verdict of 'guilty, but insane' strikes me as being the more merciful as well as the more sensible.
I believe I wrote to congratulate you on your engagement to Mrs. Lucia Renshaw. She is a charming lady, and I congratulate you again. I only trust that your (forgive me) somewhat unconventional temperament will get you both as far as the altar.
Never forget gallantry, my dear fellow! After all, if you had not bowed gracefully to Joyce Ellis when she fired at you, those bullets would have struck your heart instead of just below the collarbone. That you will live for a while to enliven this dull world is the hope of
Yours sincerely,
Gideon Fell
Photo by Caruso Studio
JOHN DICKSON CARR
author of Beloiv Suspicion
Mr. Carr, who has returned to America after seventeen years in England, is living in Westchester with his wife and three children, his huge library and his collection of swords.
Below Suspicion is the first John Dickson Carr detective novel to follow his recent biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Pages
Back Cover
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Below Suspicion Page 23
