Below Suspicion Page 2

  "That morning I woke up—automatically, you know how it is—at a few minutes before eight. When Alice tapped at the back door, I went out in a dressing gown and unlocked the door. But it was very cold, so I went back to bed again and dozed for a while. Mrs. Taylor usually didn't call me before ten o'clock at the earliest.

  "Then, when it was barely quarter to nine, the bell started ringing frantically.

  "Frantically! In long bursts with little spaces between. I thought it was Mrs. Taylor, angry all over again. So I rushed out without troubling to get dressed. But it wasn't Mrs. Taylor. When I got to that front room. . . ."

  Joyce paused, with a little trembling jerk of her head and body.

  "Alice Griffiths met me in the front passage," she said, "and took me in. Alice stood at one side of the bed, with a tea tray. On the other side of the bed, Emma the cook had just dropped the bell-push. The bell-push was hanging just beside Mrs. Taylor's cheek.

  "And Mrs. Taylor—well, she was lying on her side, drawn up together, in a tangle of bedclothes. I knew she was dead. Her face had that awful caved-in look of dead people. Alice and Emma just turned round and looked at me, glassy-eyed, as though they'd been drugged.

  "On the bedside table was a tumbler, with a teaspoon in it and whitish sediment at the bottom. Beside the tumbler was an open tin of Nemo's salts. Mrs. Taylor's fingerprints were on that tin." Joyce added with no change of tone. "So were mine."

  Outside the two barred windows, the muddy red sky had changed to blue-black. The electric light was bleaker, harsher, more merciless.

  Patrick Butler's grey hat and gloves lay on the table. His dark-blue overcoat hung open as he teetered back in the chair, making the chair squeak. With his eye fixed on a corner of the ceiling, the big man smiled a far-off enigmatic smile. Then the chair bumped back on the floor again, and he looked at Joyce.

  "This tin of Nemo's, I believe," he said briskly, "was the tin usually kept in the stable. It contained only antimony?"

  "Yes."

  "Nemo's salts," Butler pursued, "are not effervescent. If somebody had given her that tin—"

  "Given it to her!" said Joyce, and closed her eyes. Her words were edged with horrible irony.

  "Mrs. Taylor," said the barrister, "would have poured two or three teaspoonfuls of pure antimony into a glass of water. She'd have stirred it round and swallowed the lot without noticing anything wrong. Antimony is odourless and tasteless, like arsenic."

  "But I'm the only person who could have given it to her! Don't you see that?"

  "Well..." He pursed his lips.

  "I was alone with her. The house was locked up inside. Nobody could have got in. They don't believe me when I say the bell didn't ring. I did inherit money from her; and I—was upset and angry about that afternoon." Then out came the question she had been trying to strangle back from the first moment. "Mr. Butler, have I got any chance?"

  "Look here," he said gravely. "I want you to trust me just a minute or tvvo more, until I've finished examining this stor)'. Can you do that?"

  "All right. Of course. If you say so."

  "Then think back to the time you first saw Mrs. Taylor dead in that bed. Can you see the picture clearly?"

  "Horribly clearly!" She did not tell him that she felt almost physically sick because he had not answered her question.

  "When you first saw the tin of Nemo's on the bedside table, did you connect it in your mind with the one in the stable? The tin of antimony?"

  Joyce stared at him.

  "Good heavens, no! Nobody thought of it, until the police began asking questions. I—I just thought it was a real tin she'd found or dug up somewhere."

  "Tell me what you did after you saw the body."

  "I went to Mrs. Taylor, and touched her. She was cold. Alice and Emma were so frightened they couldn't talk straight; I could hardly understand them. I picked up the Nemo's tin from the bedside table, and looked at it and put it down again. I kept wondering where on earth she'd got it."

  "And that was why the police found your fingerprints on the tin?"

  "Yes. It was."

  "Was this the only time you touched the tin?"

  "The only time."

  "You know, of course, that both Alice Griffiths and Emma Perkins say they didn't see you pick up the tin?"

  Joyce's sick feeling had increased.

  "Yes, I know," she answered. "And it isn't true. Please understand me! I don't say they're not honest. They are honest. But they were too horribly upset; they just don't remember. People often don't remember things like that, even when you remind them."

  Butler gave her a quick, curious look, with the same enigmatic quality as the smile he had directed at a corner of the ceiling.

  " 'Even when you remind them,' " he repeated. "I wonder!" Then: "Had Mrs. Taylor vomited during the night? Don't look so bewildered at the question, my dear. Had she?"

  "No. That—that was the first thing that Dr. Bierce asked. But we looked all over the place; and she hadn't."

  "When someone swallows a large dose of antimony, you know, the person is usually violently sick inside fifteen or twenty minutes."

  "But she was poisoned with antimony!" cried Joyce. "When they had me up before the magistrate for committal, and they presented the evidence they're going to give against me in court, the pathologist said it was antimony!"

  "Ah, yes," murm.ured Butler with satisfaction. He raised his eyebrows. "That's one of the best features of our legal system. They've got to present their whole case before the magistrate. Whereas we don't have to; we merely reserve your defence. By God! They don't know a single card in my hand!"

  His bass voice, though low-pitched, rang with exultation.

  "I can't stand this!" Joyce said uncontrollably. "Please, please, please! Is there any chance for me at all?"

  "I'll tell you," he answered quietly. "If you trust me, and follow my advice, the prosecution haven't a leg to stand on."

  Again Joyce stared at him, her soft mouth opening. He was regarding her with a beaming and humorous quirk which, to anyone less under his spell than Joyce Ellis, might have seemed almost horrible.

  "The prosecution haven't got a leg to stand on?" she cried.

  "Exactly."

  "Don't make fun of me! Please don't make fun of me!"

  Butler was genuinely hurt. "Do you think I'd make fun of you, my dear? I mean exactly what I say."

  "But the evidence before the magistrate ..." She searched her mind. "You weren't before the magistrate!"

  "No. But my junior was."

  "And as for—for preparing a case to defend me "

  "Acushla!" he chided her, with Dublin again tinging his voice. "I've already prepared your defence. I've been out at Mrs. Taylor's house, and questioned the witnesses. That's why I want you to stop worrying."

  "But suppose you're wrong!"

  "I am never wrong," said Butler.

  He did not say this in the least arrogantly, though intellectual arrogance was at the root of it. He stated a fact as simply as he might have said he always spent his holidays in the south of France.

  Joyce's mind was befuddled, whirling with only a few coherent thoughts. She was quite innocent; she really hadn't killed Mrs. Taylor. But this, to the impassive faces and pointing fingers which hemmed her into a corner, hadn't seemed to matter. She had raged and screamed —inwardly; never letting it show—against the filthy injustice of it. And now. . . .

  It was not quite true, as Patrick Butler believed, that she had fallen in love with him. But it was as nearly true as makes no difference, and a few more meetings would make it desperately true. To her he seemed godlike, almost like . . . and again she traced designs on the table. She would do anything for him, anything to preserve his good opinion! Her heart beat so suffocatingly that she could hardly see him.

  Butler laughed.

  "Mind you," he pointed out, "it's not that I can't be v^ong about other things. I can be wrong about backing a horse. I can be wrong, God knows, about m
aking an investment. I can even be wrong, though seldom, about a woman."

  Joyce, despite her position, with the hangman almost touching her shoulder, felt a stab of jealousy.

  "But I'm never wrong, believe me, about the outcome of a trial or in sizing up witnesses. Now!"

  Here Butler's tone sharpened, and he leaned forward.

  "There are just two points, vital to your defence, that I want to have clear before I go."

  "Go?" repeated Joyce. She looked round the room. "Oh! Yes! Of course you've got to go." And she shivered.

  "The first point," Butler went on, "is about the bell-push hanging over Mrs. Taylor's bed."

  "Yes?"

  "I've seen it, you know. As you say, it's a white button-bulb, on a long white wire. It hangs above and at one side behind a brown walnut bed, from the 'sixties or 'seventies, with a high scrolled headboard and peaked top. When you saw Mrs. Taylor dead in the morning, you say the bell-push was hanging almost against her cheek?"

  "Yes; that's true!"

  "Good!" Butler agreed with relish. "But, when you put her to bed the night before"—he leaned farther forward across the table—"where was the bell-push then? Was it hanging near her, or had it got swung round behind the bed?"

  Fiercely Joyce searched her memory. "Mr. Butler, I honestly don't remember."

  "Think, now! Surely you'd have noticed its position automatically? In case she called you during the night?"

  "No. Because she never did call me during the night. Mrs. Taylor honestly thought she never got a wink of sleep—Alice will tell you that.

  because Alice was in the house before Mrs. Taylor employed me—but actually she slept like a log."

  "Think!" insisted Butler, with his hypnotic blue eyes on her. "Picture the room! The yellow-striped wallpaper, and the old sitting-room furniture, and the bed! Where was that bell-push?"

  Joyce did her best.

  "I've got a vague sort of impression," she answered honestly, "that it was swung round behind the bed. Mrs. Taylor gestured a lot when she talked. But I "

  "Excellent!" breathed her counsel, with a keen compliment in his glance. "My second and last question—"

  "But that's only an impression!" protested Joyce. "Anyway, what difference does it make? I can't think...."

  "Stop!" said Butler. "Don't try to think. Let me do the thinking. Now my second and last question, I repeat, is about the back door and the key to the back door."

  "I remember all about that, anyway!"

  "Ah? That's splendid, my dear! You told me, I think, that the last thing you did before going to your room that night was to lock the back door?"

  "Yes!"

  "There's no bolt on the back door, as we both know. Only the key. Now tell me: is this the key to the back door?"

  Fumbling inside his overcoat, he reached into his side pocket and produced a key. It was an old key, middle-sized, with a touch of rust-stain, common to the back doors of mid-Victorian houses.

  "Is this the key?" he repeated.

  "Where on earth did you get—?" Joyce checked herself, swallowing. "That's the key," she replied. "I mean: it JooJcs like the key."

  "Better and better" beamed her counsel, returning the key to his pocket. "You further stated"—something of the Old Bailey manner touched his voice—"that you unlocked the back door for Alice GrifEths next morning?"

  "Yes! At eight o'clock."

  "Exactly. Now I feel sure," said Butler urbanely, "you've forgotten something that will be of great help to you."

  "Forgotten something?"

  "Just as you said yourself: when people are very upset, they forget things and have to be reminded." Then he looked her straight in the

  eyes. "I feel sure that, when you went out to unlock the door, the key wasn't in the lock at all."

  "Wasn't in the lock?" Joyce echoed stupidly.

  "No. I feel sure," his glance was meaning, "that you found the key lying on the floor of the passage just inside the door. And you had to pick it up, and fit it into the lock, before you could admit Alice."

  For perhaps ten seconds there was an intense silence. Butler could hear his wrist-watch ticking in this tomb. So as not to embarrass her, he let his gaze wander incuriously over the white-washed walls, himself a figure of blandness and innocence, whistling between his teeth.

  "But that isn't true/" Joyce blurted.

  Patrick Butler, K.C., could not have been more startled if the roof had been shattered as the quiet was shattered.

  "Not true?"

  "No! The key was in the lock."

  Again silence; and she flinched as Butler studied her. His astonishment was mingled with a rising wrath, which tinged his cheeks. What the devil, now, did this girl think she was playing at? She was intelligent; she must see the value to her defence if she said that key was not in the lock. Well, then, what the flaming hell? Unless. ...

  Stop! He'd got it. And, as he thought he understood the reason, all Butler's wrath dissolved in a kind of intellectual admiration. It would be a little more awkward if Joyce Ellis still persisted in play-acting; but he understood. He even saluted her for it. She was a woman after his own heart.

  "Mr. Butler! I—"

  Butler rose to his feet, picking up hat and gloves.

  "You understand, of course," he told her cheerfully, "that this is only a preliminary talk. I shall see you again in a day or two. By that time, I feel sure, you'll have remembered."

  Panic was in her voice. "Mr. Butler, listen!"

  "After all, you know you've been very lucky."

  "Lucky! Oh. You mean in having you to defend me? Believe me, I know that! But—"

  "Tut, now!" said Butler. If the matron had not been watching, he would have chucked her under the chin. "I told you before: you overrate me. No. I mean lucky in the course of events. Poor Mrs. Taylor died on the night of February 22nd. You were arrested ... when?"

  "Just a week later. Why?"

  "Well! Your case, as it happens, has been crowded into the present term at the Central Criminal Court; that'll be in a little over a fortnight. You'll have been suspected, arrested, tried—and acquitted—in just less than a month. Not bad, eh?" His personality enveloped and smothered her words like a feather-bed. "Good-bye, my dear! Keep your courage up!"

  "Mr. Butler, please listen! It isn't that I mind telling lies. It's only that. . . ."

  But Joyce saw, with a feeling of being trapped afresh, that the matron was already in the room. A blue-clad male warder, his footsteps echoing in the passage, appeared to escort the visitor out.

  Five minutes later, when Joyce was weeping hysterically in her cell, Patrick Butler emerged from Holloway Prison a good deal pleased with himself. The sleek dark hmousine stood a little way off. Johnson, Butler's chauffeur, climbed out to open the door for him. And in the back seat, on a wire of nerves, was Old Charlie Denham.

  "Well?" demanded the solicitor.

  "All W'Cll, me bhoy. And I want a drink. Johnson, drive to the Garrick Club!"

  "Wait!" said Denham. He made so imperious a gesture that the chauffeur's hand dropped from the starter. Then Denham switched on the interior light, so that he could see his companion's face.

  'Old Charlie' Denham was about thirty-two. He was a lean, strong-built young man whose sombre bowler hat, sombre overcoat, hard collar and colourless tie were as professionally correct as the man himself. But he had never been so sombre as he appeared tonight.

  Under a moonlight glow from the roof of the limousine, which shut them into grey-cushioned luxur)' with the dark and cold outside, there were shadow-hollows under Denham's cheek-bones. He wore a thin dark line of moustache, under idealistic eyes and dark eyebrows.

  "Well?" he demanded again. "What did you think of her?"

  Butler considered this.

  "Not my type," he answered amiably. "But very attractive, I admit. Exudes an aura of sex."

  Muscles worked down Charles Denham's jaws. He looked at Butler as though his question had been answered by a bawdy jo
ke.

  "Pat," Denham said slowly. "I think you seriously believe that three-quarters of the women in this world are preoccupied with nothing but sex."

  "Oh, I shouldn't say exactly that." The barrister's grin implied that he meant nine-tenths of them,

  "I suppose it's because that's the only sort of woman who ever gravitates towards you."

  "Well," said Butler, "she gravitated towards me. Very definitely."

  "That's a lie! I don't believe it!"

  "A-a-isy, me son!" exclaimed Butler, genuinely surprised. He studied the other man. "Smitten yourself, are you?"

  "No. Not exactly. That is. . . ."

  "Now the divil bum ye for an old rake!" suggested Butler amiably. His tone changed. "I knew you were old Mrs. Taylor's solicitor, Charlie. But I was wondering why you were so much concerned with the Ellis girl."

  "Because she's innocent, that's why! You believe she's innocent, don't you?"

  Butler hesitated before replying. These two had been friends for several years; but you could never tell about Old Charlie and his British ideals and his infernal conscience.

  "Do you want an honest answer to that," he asked, "or do you want the usual fine pretence between solicitor and barrister?"

  "I want an honest answer, of course!"

  "She's as guilty as hell," smiled Butler. "But don't worry, Charlie. I prefer to have my clients guilty."

  For a moment Denham did not comment. He lowered his head and looked at the tips of his well-polished shoes. A thin wind whistled round the car, making the chauffeur beyond the glass panel pull up the collar of his coat.

  "What makes you think J—Miss Ellis is guilty?" Denham asked.

  "Partly evidence, but mainly atmospheres. I can always tell by atmospheres."

  "Can you? What if you happen to be wrong?"

  "I am never wrong."

  Denham had heard this remark before. Sometimes it maddened him almost to committing what his precise mind called assault and battery. He was losing his sense of judgment and had already lost his sense of humour; nevertheless he was goaded into giving battle.

  "Sol" Denham said, and raised his head. "You prefer to have your clients guilty?"

  "Naturally!" said Butler, raising his eyebrows. He chuckled, "Where's