Below Suspicion (2 page)

"I looked back up the road, with the spiky trees all blowing and the houses as though they were frozen; and I didn't know what to do. Mrs. Taylor had said to come back directly. So I went back. When I got there. . . ."

Here Butler interrupted her.

"Just a moment," he said. "Was there anybody else in Mrs. Taylor's room when you returned?"

"Oh. Yes! Alice was there. Alice Griffiths is the coachman's wife; she's a kind of general housemaid and parlourmaid. Alice is middle-aged and a bit crotchety; but she's always been very nice."

"Go on!"

"When I told Mrs. Taylor about early-closing day, and said I'd go in to the West End straightaway, she was so angry that she wouldn't hear of it. She said she wouldn't have anv Nemo's, now, if her life depended on it. She said everything was against her. She also looked at me and shouted, 'I know a young lady who'll get no bequest now, just as soon as I ring my solicitor.' And Alice heard her.

"You see, Mrs. Taylor had left me five hundred pounds in her will. I knew it; everybody knew it. I hadn't done anything to deserve it. But she had. Mr. Butler, please believe I wouldn't kill anybody for five hundred pounds—I mean, or for money of any kind. The trouble is, you can't explain afterwards. And nothing else happened, until the dreadful thing happened."

Joyce pressed the palms of her hands over her face, fingers hard against the eyes. Then, gritting her teeth for the worst part of what she had to say, she stumbled into it.

"At half-past seven," she said, "I took Mrs. Taylor her dinner on a tray. She'd—well, thawed out a good deal, though once or twice she talked about Nemo's salts and how good they were for the digestion. I simply don't know what to say to remarks like that; so I didn't say anything.

"Did I tell you there were three servants, if you don't include me as a servant? Anyway, the servants were Alice Griffiths, and Bill Griffiths, and Emma the cook. All of them, by Mrs. Taylor's order, had to be out of the house by nine o'clock. And they were.

"Then, as usual, I remade Mrs. Taylor's bed. I propped her up, and put some books and a packet of cigarettes on the night table. My last job of the day was to go round and lock up the house like a fortress: doors, windows, everything. The last thing I did was turn the key in the back door.

"My bedroom is near the back door. I read for a while, and then went to sleep in spite of the high wind. And all night, Mr. Butler, that bell in my bedroom didnt ring."

Joyce bent forward, hands locked together.

"They say I'm lying, Mr. Butler. They say the bell was in perfect working order; and it was. They say Mrs. Taylor must have rung the bell when she felt that horrible pain coming on. But she didn't. I swear she didn't. I'm a light sleeper, and I should have heard it.

"Oh, God, I almost wish I had lied! I wish I'd said I took a couple of sleeping pills, or something. Tliere were plenty of them in Mrs. Taylor's medicine cabinet. But if you're innocent, I thought, the law won't hurt you. It can't. That's what we're brought up to believe. I never had a life. And now I'm locked up here, waiting to be hanged."

("Never had a life?" thought Butler. "With that face and especially that figure? Come, now!")

But no hint of his sardonic amusement appeared in his big, ruddy, long-nosed face.

"You're getting ahead of the story," he reminded her sharply, as a slap for hysteria.

"I'm sorry!" said Joyce, pulling herself together. Again contrition shamed her. "I'm terribly sorry. I've got a whole army on my side when vou believe I'm innocent."

"Yes. Well." Suddenly he flushed. "Next morning?"

"Every morning," said Joyce, "I woke up at eight o'clock to unlock the back door and let Alice in. Alice would light the fire in the kitchen range downstairs, and any other fires that had to be lighted. A little later Emma, that's the cook, would come in and prepare Mrs. Taylor's morning tea; Alice took it to her at half-past eight.

"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 making 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...."