Below Suspicion (23 page)

"What shadow?" Dr. Bierce looked up from his surgical knife.

"Just now! It moved behind one of the pillars there. It—it seemed larger than life."

It would not be true to say that a wing of panic brushed that group. Yet Satan, even if we consider him as an abstraction, can become oppressive in his presence.

"There's nobody here." Bierce spoke curtly. But he replaced the surgical knife, and closed his medicine-case with a snap. "Those candles are throwing our own shadows. As for the candles, I want to have them analyzed. There's some kind of accursed magical scent that's putting images in front of my eyes, and ... let's get out!" he cried thickly.

"I agree," grunted Dr. Fell.

"And I!" said Lucia, viath her hand at her throat. "Ready to go, Pat?"

" 'Magical,' " said Butler, staring into vacancy. Then he woke up, all his theatricalism flowering.

"No, my dear," he smiled. "You people go on up and stand by the outer door of the chapel upstairs. I shall join you in exactly three minutes."

"Pat, what's wrong? Why do you want to stay down here?"

"Because," answered Butler, "I know where the records are hidden."

To use the word "sensation" would be a very mild description of the effect.

"A while ago," continued Butler, filling his lungs but speaking in the same easy tone, "I proved how your husband was really murdered. When I challenged Dr. Fell, he replied with mumbo-jumbo or plain mystification. Very well. But now, with your kind permission, 7 will do the mystification for a change. I promise to put those records in

your hands in three minutes. Will you go upstairs and wait for me? Or shall we postpone it, like Dr. Fell's explanation, for tomorrow?"

And he leaned back against the black-and-red curtain of the wall, folding his arms.

"Look here, dash it all!" protested a genuinely puzzled Dr. Fell. "I only meant that...."

"Sir, will you go?"

"We'll go," replied Dr. Bierce, taking a firm hold of Lucia's arm when Lucia began to turn back. "Three minutes, you said?"

"Three minutes."

Arms still folded, leaning against the wall beside the apse, Butler watched them move away in the red gloom. Lucia was protesting. Now they were at the little ebony-railed staircase, almost invisible. Now he was alone.

To be alone here, Butler hoped, wouldn't start his own nerves twitching like a drug addict's. All he had to fear was imagination. When he had first thought of that confessional box as a magician's cabinet on the stage, the idea should not have dropped away in his mind until it was jabbed to wakefulness by Dr. Bierce's term 'magical.'

The tops of magicians' cabinets, he had heard, were always made to look so shallow that nothing could be hidden in that shallow space. At a casual glance, especially at carving, the eye was deceived.

Butler, as quick on his feet as a cat, raced over to the parody confessional box he had examined before. He sat inside one compartment, which would have been occupied by the goat-deity. He closed the door of the compartment, with its black design of open scroll-work. Fishing out his pocket-lighter and snapping it into flame, he stood up to examine the roof.

The roof, on this side at least, was only plywood painted black.

Butler's heart was beating heavily. He ran the fingers of his right hand round the edges of the plywood. . . .

The whole thin underside of the roof fell down on hinges. When he saw it fall, showering him with paper-bundles, documents, notebooks, he instinctively shied back and sat down as though under attack.

"Got it!" he said aloud, hardly realizing that he actually had got it.

Papers or bundles, of all sizes, thumped or fluttered round him to fall on the floor of the box. They lay there at his feet, no small pile, while he sat in the confessor's seat and looked at them. Presently he raised his head to the door—and remained motionless.

Through the black Satanic scroll-work, very close, he was looking straight into the face of Gold-teeth.

Gold-teeth, with even his dental fittings. The upper lip, swollen badly and crossed with half-dried cracks, showed the two gleams below.

For perhaps two seconds, while both he and Butler remained motionless, every detail of appearance and every detail of thought went through Butler's mind.

Gold-teeth couldn't have got in here! Oh, yes he could. Lucia's key, to the door of the upper chapel, was in her handbag. That handbag, left behind with her coat at the Love-Mask Club, could quickly have been identified as belonging to the woman who ran away from the club with Patrick Butler. If Gold-teeth knew anything whatever about this red chapel, . . .

He did.

Butler, staring through the scroll-work, saw that Gold-teeth held his right hand a little away from his body. It gripped a small bundle of papers, some white and some grey or greenish, loosely fastened wdth a paper-clip.

Gold-teetli had been here before. Those papers he held were the only deadly or compromising documents in the files of the Murder Club. He had them now; but he wouldn't have them for long. These papers inside the box were rubbish.

" 'Ullo," said Gold-teeth through the black carvings.

"Hello," answered Butler—and instantly charged at the door.

He burst out of that confessional box like a mad bull, the flimsy door whacking back. Gold-teeth, still facing him, was backing away with a footwork which to anyone except Butler would have suggested the boxer.

Abruptly Butler stifled his rage, steadied his eyesight; he became bland and negligent, with a half-smile. They were both in an open space in front of the altar, with no black pillars or cushions against dark-red carpet. A little way to Butler's right, the black goat-face of Satan lay on the carpet and grinned up at the light of the eye.

"Hand 'em over," said Butler.

"Wot?"

"Those letters, or whatever they are."

Gold-teeth, still in soiled evening clothes except for collar or tie, seemed to have something else on his mind.

"You 'it me," he stated, and touched his swollen lip. His murderous eyes never moved.

"That's right. Care to be hit again?"

'Tou 'it me," said Gold-teeth. "You done it when I wasn't ready. But you done it hke a amateur." The upper hp hfted. "You never done much fighting. Did you, mister?"

Butler smiled. Gold-teeth was half a head shorter than he; Gold-teeth was lean, stringy, bony. Nobody told his adversary that Bob Fitzsim-mons, despite height, was in actual poundage something less than a middleweight.

"I said," repeated Gold-teeth, "you never done much fighting. Did you, mister?"

"I never bothered to learn."

" 'E never bothered to learn!" crowed Gold-teeth, with that mimicry which could drive a man mad. "Could you lick me?"

Butler merely looked at him and laughed.

For the first rime Gold-teeth showed a human expression, a really human expression.

"Gawd's truth!" he said, with the veins standing out on his forehead.

He stuffed the bundle of papers swiftly into his pocket. His right hand darted to his left sleeve, and whipped out a closed razor. But he gripped the end of the razor, and flung it far away from him into the gloom; it made hardly a sound when it fell.

"I ain't got no razor," said Gold-teeth. "I ain't got no moley. I'm a-going ter give you an 'iding—fair and square."

"You think you can do it?"

Gold-teeth tapped the papers in his pocket. "Come and get 'em," he said.

Butler walked slowly towards him. And at the same moment, in the far comer of the room on the wall behind Butler's back, there was a very soft explosion with a gush of blue-yellow flame. A streak of fire rippled up the side of the curtain, it's light flashing out through the dim chapel.

"That?" jeered Gold-teeth. "That's only some little alarm-clock things, set to go off in lots of places. Lost your nen-e, mister?"

That was when Butler sprang at him, leading with a right that would have been murderous if it had landed.

It did not land. Something else was happening.

For the next thirt)' seconds he was conscious not so much of any pain as of splintered confusion. His eyes didn't seem to work. Somewhere

ahead, as he kept his head down and flailed out, there seemed to be a number of horizontal pile drivers. One was always in his face, always in his face, whichever way he twitched his head or forced Gold-teeth backwards. The other pile drivers, at all angles, smote in and struck, smote in and struck. . . .

Suddenly, to his surprise, he found himself lying on his side on the carpet. Vaguely he smelt smoke and saw yellow light, which he associated with his own head.

"No," said a hateful voice, hard-breathing, "you never done—"

Then came the shock of humiliation.

It ran through him before the voice completed that sentence. Never in his life, not even in school days, had he been brought so low as this. He had been made a fool of, shown up as clumsy and unskilled and a braggart, by someone whom he despised like dirt. In his mind he saw all his friends, and they were roaring with laughter.

"—done much fighting. Have you, mister?"

Patrick Butler bounced to his feet, and by sheer luck landed a belly-punch that nearly ended the fight. But Gold-teeth's retreating, weaving, dodging, didn't last long. The pile drivers smashed in again. They jolted Butler's head, banged his jaw, stabbed his stomach against his backbone. If he could only grip his hands round Gold-teeth—!

But he couldn't. He was on the floor again.

(Comic-spectacle Butler. Licked by a spiv. Funniest thing in years. Rememhei how he lorded it?)

Patrick Butler was on his feet again, though staggering. From those mental images he felt almost physically sick. He started to lash out at Gold-teeth; then, bleary-eyed and bewildered, he instinctively stopped.

Gold-teeth, too, had lost his head and forgotten where he was. Now he stared round stupidly.

With a whoom of expanding gases, the great altar-tapestry belled out like a sail as flame soared up over it. It dragged thinly, crumpled, and swept down across the altar, knocking over the candelabra and breathing fire-sparks above the carpet.

Three sides of the room were afire. On the right-hand wall, where it started, burning welts of tapestry sagged on blackened concrete; but it had gushed out across two roof-beams, preceded by a crackling of varnish. Black smoke held to the top of the room, wriggling its way; but a fine brownish haze crawled stifling into nostrils and mouth.

Butler and Gold-teeth looked at each other.

"What's the matter with you?" Butler yelled as well as he could. "Put up your hands!"

" 'R you crackers?"

Butler walloped out with a right-hander (always the right hand!) which Gold-teeth dodged because he was already running for the stairs. Butler, diving, caught him by one ankle and brought him to the floor with a crash.

Fire-puffs from the fallen candles bloomed along the carpet. A whole row of undisturbed cushions, stretching halfway across the chapel near the back, gathered into one gust of fire. Gold-teeth, kicking out maniacally, flapped like a landed fish and again screamed, "Crackers!"

Then his shoe-laces broke. Gold-teeth, freed and with one white sock of his evening clothes, raced towards the stairs. But the line of burning cushions lay across his most direct way. He was a prudent man; he darted to the right to circle them.

Butler, not a prudent man, raced straight for the cushions; staggered, and cleared them from a standing jump which landed him overbalanced to fall rolling on his side at the foot of the stairs.

Whether or not he had the strength now, he did it. He lifted the bronze statue of nymph-and-satyr, hoisting it with both hands above his head. He was three steps up, and had whirled round, when Gold-teeth reached the foot of the stairs.

Again they looked at each other. Both were coughing; words came in short spurts. Both were blinded and stung with smoke-tears. Gold-teeth lifted his lip.

"Wot's the game?"

"Don't move."

"Why not?"

"This bronze comes down on your skull. I can't miss."

"Come off it, mister! You won't stay there!"

"Why not?"

Gold-teeth grew frantic v^dth reasonableness. " 'Cos we'd both burn to death! That's why!"

"Then we bum."

Gold-teeth's smoke-grimed face changed a little.

Behind him the crackle of the fire had thickened into a faint roar as roof-beams grew as bright as Christmas logs, and a gush of flame ran up the hangings of the fourth wall: intolerably vivid except where the fast-

blackening smoke strangled it. And the coughing, murderous dialogue went on.

''Wotcher want.^"

"Those letters."

"You ain't sane!"

"Stay there then."

Gold-teeth's streaming eyes strained upwards,

"There's a roof-beam all a-burning—" His scream became choked. But he pointed above Butler's head, and kept on pointing until breath returned. "She's a-shaking loose! She'll fall bang on your head!"

"I know that. Letters?"

Hitherto Butler had been scarcely conscious of the intense heat, as he had been unconscious of injuries in the fight. Now the heat fanned him, enveloped him, slipped a fiery mask on his face. The black smoke, now pressing down, swirled closer. With a sudden crash the eye-light in the roof exploded.

"Letters?" said Butler. He could scarcely see or breathe.

Gold-teeth made a dart for the stairs, but jerked back again as he saw Butler's arms tighten to throw.

"Godamighty!" coughed Gold-teeth, shivering in an agony of reasonableness. Suddenly he pointed above. "She's a-going! She's—"

In the ceiling, with a long movement, something slithered and ripped. And the burning roof-beam fell.

It crashed down some five inches in front of Butler's face, aureoled with sparks. It hit the stair-banister without smashing the rail, because its other end landed first. Then it spun over in a flaming wheel—straight for Gold-teeth's face until its upward impetus swept it over his head to thud in a geyser of fire beyond.

And it broke Gold-teeth's nerve as a stick is snapped. He dragged out the paper-clipped bundle from his pocket.