Below Suspicion (25 page)

Butler's wits were whirling. Amid all the other excitements, he had almost forgotten those documents which nearly got him killed.

"What was in the papers?" he demanded.

"Enough," said Dr. Fell, "to smash the witch-cult and at least deeply incriminate its present leader."

"Consequently you think—?"

Dr. Fell puffed out his cheeks, with a flurry of the bandit's moustache, and rolled more uneasily in the leather chair.

"The head of the cult, and perhaps others too," he pointed out, "will be frantic. Who, presumably, got and read those papers? You did! Gold-teeth, when he rushed out of the chapel, never saw the rest of us. If he conveyed information to a higher-up, it was about you. You are the marked man."

For a moment Dr. Fell paused to draw a cigar case out of his baggy side-pocket, take out a cigar, and pierce it with a match-stick.

"Respectability!" he suddenly thundered, with distaste. "I tell you, my dear Butler, that all the gangsters in creation are no more dangerous than that," he snapped his fingers, "when compared with pious respectability about to be unmasked as something else. Seek first for the respectable! And you'll have the answer to the whole problem!"

Butler, tenderly weighing the Webley .38 in his hand, smiled a little.

"And yet," he said, "this goat-mask of the witch-cult seems chiefly good only at managing poison-murders in other cities."

Dr. Fell, in the act of lighting the cigar, gave him a sideways glance of consternation.

"Didn't Hadley say anything to you?" demanded Dr. Fell, blowing out smoke. "Haven't you looked at a newspaper today?"

"No."

"Your friend Luke Parsons, of 'Discretion Guaranteed,' " the doctor

told him, "was strangled yesterday afternoon between five and six o'clock. It happened in his own office. He was stunned and then strangled with a long piece of elastic, privately dyed red."

Patrick Butler put down the revolver, and sprang to his feet. Through his mind for many hours—lost, but sometimes recurring—had gone those words 'band or cord or lace.' He stood with his hands dug into the pockets of his blue dressing gown, with the nightmare on him.

"Not the garter again?" he said.

"A form of it, of course. It was always used, by the witch-cult, in death by strangling, for one certain offence."

"What offence?"

"Betrayal," said Dr. Fell, and blew out a long cloud of cigar smoke.

There was a silence. Butler, v^ath a guilty knowledge that he had paid the money for betrayal, called up in mind the sweating, terrified face with the drooping dyed moustache. He retreated from it; he wouldn't face it.

"Modem secret societies, you know," Dr. Fell mused, "are mere tyros in their quickness to flash out and kill. In Scotland, in 1618, a man named John Stewart was to go on trial for witchcraft. He was fettered in his cell when two clergymen—Scottish ministers, mind you!—visited him in his cell. The visitors had hardly left when some officers of the court entered to escort Stewart to the courtroom. They found him already dead, strangled (I quote), 'with a tait of hemp, or string made of hemp, supposed to have been his garter or string of his bonnet.' "

Dr. Fell's cheeks distended, and he blew a smoke ring.

"Then," he said, "there was that weird business of John Reid. Again in Scotland, Renfrewshire, in 1698. He was to go on trial for witchcraft; and they found him strangled with his own neckcloth. Again I quote:

" 'It was concluded that some extraordinary Agent had done it, especially considering that the Door of the Room was secured, and that there was a board set over the window which was not there the night before when they left him.'

"By thunder," exclaimed Dr. Fell, "it's among our first locked-room problems! The locked room, to ignorant persons, is supposed to exist only in the minds of fiction-writers. Even an old duffer like myself can name half a dozen real ones offhand. Er—by the way. . . ."

Butler was not listening.

"I've brought you," pursued Dr. Fell, "a box of selected books on witchcraft and its allied arts. Some of the early writers, like Scot or

Glanvil, you may find heavy going. But the later authorities, Notestein and Summers and Murray and L'Estrange Ewen and Olliver, are both sound and easier reading than most of the older ones."*

"Dr. Fell! Wait! Hold on!"

Again the wood fire crackled and popped. All day Butler had been trying to look at it casually, without having it remind him of any event last night. But the black goat-face of a statue in the fire came back to him among these logs. And there was a worse matter now.

"Luke Parsons!" he said. "What time did you tell me he died? Between five and six o'clock?"

"Yes. About that."

"I left the man at four o'clock!"

"So Hadley tells me. The description of you was good." Then Dr. Fell spoke sharply, all attention. "Parsons's secretary testified he didn't leave his office, and had no more visitors. But he did make a 'phone call just as soon as you left; the secretary doesn't remember the number. Within two hours, probably much less. . . ."

Dr. Fell's hand made a savage chopping motion in the air.

"Rather quick work. Hey?" he added.

"But how can you be absolutely certain it was a witch-cult murder?"

"The police have a clue. I mean they actually have, though it isn't mentioned in the press." Again Dr. Fell drew a deep wheezy breath, and looked up. "You observed, probably, that Parsons's office wasn't very clean or tidy? Oh, ah! In the dust on his desk, somebody drew three more reversed crosses."

"That finishes it," Butler said after a pause.

"I'm afraid so. Anybody could have entered that block of offices, after the secretary left at five o'clock, without being noticed. It's only one flight up. And no place is so anonymous as a business-place."

Butler looked at the fire, and saw Parsons's face as well as the goat-head's.

"One murderer." He kicked at the logs. "Mrs. Taylor and Dick Ren-shaw and Luke Parsons—one murderer!"

* Reginald Scot, The Discoueiie ot Witchcraft (third edition from first of 1584; London, 1665). Joseph Glanvil, Saducismus Triumphatus (London, 1681). C. W. Olliver, An Analysis oi Magic and Witchcraft (Rider & Co., 1928). C. L'Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism (Heath Cranton, 1933). Margaret Alice Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Montague Summers, The History oi Witchcraft and DemonoJogy (Kegan Paul, 1926). Wallace Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England from i^^8 to 1718 (Washington, 1911).

"The murder of Parsons," Dr. Fell said dryly, "would not have been trusted to anybody like Gold-teeth or Em. So you see, my dear fellow, that wdth two lines of attack converging against you. . . ."

Butler picked up from the chair the leather holster with the Webley. Then he shouted for his chauffeur. "Johnson!" he bellowed. "Johnson!"

When Johnson entered, stolid and bullet-headed as ever, with his chauffeur's cap in his hand, Butler was leaning against the mantelpiece with his most negligent eighteenth-century pose.

"By the way, Johnson," he said in the voice which could charm anybody. "Did you put up the practice targets in the cellar?"

"Yessir. Against piles of sandbags. No chance of trouble then."

"Now look here, old man." Butler was like an elder brother. "This is Thursday: your day off, and Mrs. Pastemack's too. Didn't I tell you both to leave three hours ago?"

Johnson concentrated hard on the cap in his hands. "Rather stay, sir, if you don't mind. I'm a handy bloke lots of ways."

"Nellie will be furious, you know."

"Nellie can wait."

"I can't do it, old man. Didn't you hear what I told Mr. Hadley over the 'phone?"

"Well, sir-"

"I told him," Butler explained agreeably, "that if he dared to give me any alleged 'police protection,' I should take great pleasure in shooting the ears off any ruddy copper who appeared. This is my show, Johnson. You're an Englishman. Can't you understand that?"

"Very good, sir."

"Then you promise that you and Mrs. Pasternack will be out of this house in ten minutes?"

Johnson nodded. He went to the door and turned. He did not speak loudly, but his voice held a violence deeper than that.

"Give 'em something-something'd blank, sir," the voice burned. "Shove it up their something-something'd this-and-that!"

"Thanks, Johnson," said the delighted Butler, "I'll try."

The door closed. Butler took the Webley from its holster, swung open the barrel so that the ends of the brass cartridge-cases gleamed, and snapped it shut with a click which sounded loudly in the quiet room,

"Gold-teeth!" he added.

"For the love of Bacchus," roared Dr. Fell, "will you tell me why you still have such an animus against Gold-teeth? From the—er—I suspect bowdlerized account you gave us last night, you broke his nerve. . . ."

"Oh, yes. That was easy."

"And got exactly what you wanted. Then what's still wrong with you?"

(He floored me twice. He could have done it till I was senseless. He made me look clumsy and idiotic and helpless. My ancestors had a good code: there are some things you don't square except with steel or a buJIet.)

Aloud Butler said, "There's another matter between us, as you imagine."

"What makes you think he'll be here tonight?"

"Those papers on the window, for one thing. And of course I sent him as insulting a telegram as possible, care of the Love-Mask Club. He may not get the telegram, but he'll get the message. I warned him what to expect."

"Guns?"

"Naturally!" Butler's eyebrows went up. "I told him to bring one."

Then Butler chuckled,

"It took a bit of explaining," he added, "to get all that past the post-office as a joke. But it worked."

With the colour of Dr. Fell's face, it is never possible for him to achieve any pallor. But, aside from breathing out gusts of smoke past the cigar, he spoke in a comparatively mild tone.

"And now, in addition to a possible gun-battle in Cleveland Row, you have the more subtle leader of the witch-cult approaching from another direction. Man, you don't understand!"

"No," said Butler, rounding the syllable. "No, I don't understand. But I am going to understand, according to your own promise."

"Hey?"

"Last night," Butler stated with great distinctness, "I showed you the only possible way in which Dick Renshaw could have been murdered—if we exclude Lucia, which I do. I proved that Kitty Owen was the only possible guilty one. I showed how a substitute water-bottle, in the knitting-bag, was replaced for a really poisoned bottle. All you did was gibber in meaningless phrases. But you swore you'd explain tomorrow. All right—this is tomorrow."

lyS BELOW SUSPICION

"Yes," sighed Dr. Fell, in a dull voice. "I think I'd better explain."

Butler sat down in his chair, his arm hanging over the chair-arm, his forefinger in the trigger-guard of the Webley.

"Let's begin with essentials," Butler suggested, "We have, as I said, three murders and one murderer."

Dr. Fell frowned. "In a sense, yes."

"In a sense?"

"Yes. One of the alleged murders—" He stopped, disturbed. "Then there is the question of servants. In this affair we have two maidservants of extraordinarily different character.

"One is Mrs. Taylor's maidservant, Alice Griffiths, the conventional middle-aged domestic. Now I Icnow Alice GriflBths was telling the truth, just as I know Joyce Ellis is innocent. But the other one is Mrs. Renshaw's maidservant, Kitty Owen. And Kitty Owen is not a conventional domestic, and she is not telling the truth. Whereas she ought to be below suspicion."

"One of the things I like about you," commented Butler, with real interest, "is the pellucid clarity of your style. Addison is nowhere. Macaulay is left at the post. Anatole France swoons with envy. Curse it, can't you say a plain thing in a plain way?"

"Certainly."

"Then what do you mean by 'below suspicion'?"

"In a detective story"—Dr. Fell puffed at the cigar—"no person is above suspicion. But there are several types who are below it. Any person serving as a detective, for instance. Any minor character. Any servant: because a servant, who may only enter to say 'The Archbishop awaits' is a wooden mask without a character to be read. But Kitty Owen, by thunder, is in a different class. And finally . . . But I had better tell you. I may—er—have unconsciously misled you last night."

And Dr. Fell began to explain.

18

WHEN Dr. Fell began to speak, the hands of the little marble clock on the mantelpiece stood at ten minutes to four. When he finished, the clock had just pinged out half-past five.

Patrick Butler, sick at heart despite himself, sat with his head in his hands and his eyes closed.

True, it had been a lively session. Butler's quick mind, with its additional information and its sharp inferences, built up the case almost as much as Dr. Fell. It was an intellectual exercise; he had to do it.

Except for the necessary verifying of some details, the case lay complete as a jigsaw puzzle on a table. But, unlike a jigsaw, it was simple. Unlike a jigsaw, its clues were bright colours which leaped to the eye. Finally, a fact unknovm to those who gabble ignorantly about jigsaws, it moved with action and was rounded out with character.

Ping! went the clock on the mantelpiece.

"You see?" inquired Dr. Fell.

The fire had dropped to red-veined white ash, with a few black stumps beyond the andirons. The room was chilly and almost dark, as Butler realized with a start. Five-thirty. He must get himself into fighting-spirit for. . . .

He got up, with difficulty from the pain of bruises. From a large wood basket he picked up several logs, and dropped them on the fire amid an uprush of sparks. Since he had landed so few good blows last night, it was odd that his hands were so numb. He switched on shaded wall candles on either side of the mantelpiece.

"Better close the curtains," he said.

Still sick at heart, he walked across to the wall opposite the fireplace, and looked out of the windows. In this part of Cleveland Row, the open and paved space of Stable Yard stretched as lifeless as a bjway in ancient Rome. Over to his right, a dim street-lamp touched the black-