Below Suspicion (24 page)

"Wha' do?"

"Throw"—a gush of smoke billowed up the stairs—"on the step where I am."

"Ain't sane! 'Ow I know you don't bash me anyway?"

Butler, despite a burning throat, would have found breath to speak clearly if he spoke it in hell.

"The word of a gentleman."

Gold-teeth never knew, never guessed, that the look on his own face at that word 'gentleman' brought him very close to death. Butler's arms

quivered as he held up the bronze weight; but he controlled himself.

A bundle of papers, white and grey and greenish, flew out of the murk and landed on the step by his right foot. Butler set his foot on it. Then, an intolerable weight released, he tipped the bronze statue to his left over the stair-rail.

"Get out."

Gold-teeth wavered, half paralyzed. "Wossat?"

"You fought fair. Withdraw all charges. Get out."

Gold-teeth hesitated. Then he ran stumbling up the stairs, unable even to cough, blinded and beaten, past Butler to the trap at the top of the stairs and out.

Butler, trying to shift his foot, reeled and almost pitched down the steps. Bending over, he seemed in his own mind to take minutes before he groped for and gathered up the hot bundle of papers. With fire crawling up the hangings beside him, he ascended the stairs.

In a room now impenetrable with smoke except where yellow gushes shot upwards and rolled, the black statuette of Satan grinned alone among the flames.

At half past two on the following afternoon, Mr. Charles Den-a)V ham sat in his office digesting lunch and glancing over the newspaper, which the morning's pressure of business had not enabled him to read.

It was Thursday, March 22nd, precisely one month to the day after the death of Mrs. Taylor. Though there has been much shifting-about of offices between barristers and solicitors in the Temple, after the blitzes and the V weapons, Charlie Denham steadfastly maintained his former rooms in an entry in Johnson's Court.

In his own privacy, sitting by his desk at a window opening on a narrow passage outside, Charlie Denham was as neat as a cat—the thin black line of moustache, the dark hair parted and polished, the steadfastness of purpose about him. A brisk coal fire burned in the grate.

Denham, for good moral effect, always brought the Daily Telegraph to the office. But invariably he read the Daily Floodlight, which, though of only a few pages, has managed to become more American, and infinitely worse American, than any American tabloid.

Frowning, Denham caught one headline:

PRIVATE INQUIRY AGENT

STRANGLED WITH RED BAND

And, in a hanger:

Have CJue, Police Say

The day outside the window was bitter cold, but clear and once or twice sunny. Denham ran his eye quickly down the story:

Shortly after six o'clock last night, the body of Mr. Luke Parsons, head of a Private Inquiry Agency, was found by a charwoman cleaning the offices of

number 42b Shaftesbury Avenue, W.I. The victim was found sitting upright in the chair behind his desk. He was strangled with a red band or cord, looped round his neck and then slowly tightened by a pencil tvdsted round and round in the top. Previously he had been stunned by a blow on the head, police say.

Denham, frowning as though still more puzzled, gave an exclamation of annoyance. He read on, skipping.

Miss Margaret Villars, the dead man's secretary (picture on front page) states that Mr. Parsons appeared violently agitated since an interview with a client, who gave the name of Robert Renshaw, at 3.30 P.M. At 5 P.M. Mr. Parsons told Miss Villars that she could leave early. The time of death. . . .

On the desk at Denham's elbow, the telephone rang. He was impatient. But, when he heard from his clerk who wanted to speak to him, he became eager and almost schoolboyishly excited.

"Hello?" said the breathless voice of Joyce Ellis.

"Hello, Joyce," Denham replied, and eyed a memorandum pad. As though to hide fiercely repressed emotion, even when alone, he picked up a pencil and drew designs.

"Have you seen a newspaper?" Joyce asked.

"Yes." Denham was mildly disturbed. He sketched a couple of crosses and started on a house. "It's a bit unpleasant. I knew him slightly, Joyce."

In imagination, now, anyone could see Joyce, with her black bobbed hair and grave face and large grey eyes, sitting back to stare at the telephone.

"You knew him slightly? Isn't he one of your closest friends?"

"Good Lord, Joyce, I never—" Denham stopped. "Who are you talking about?"

"Pa-Mr. Butler!"

"Pat Butler?" Denham dropped the pencil. "What about him?"

"They never print the whole truth in the papers. It may be worse than they say. Not that I care, of course," Joyce said quickly, "but I do feel that. . . . Have you got the Daily Telegraph there?"

"Er—yes. Somewhere."

"Wait! I've got one here." There was a rustling of paper over the 'phone. "It's just a tiny item at the bottom of an inside page. It's headed, 'K.C. Injured in Fire.' "

"Well?"

"I'll read it. It says, 'Mr. Patrick Butler, the famous K.C. sometimes called The Great Defender' "—Joyce's voice grew tense, with something like a sob in it, and then went on quietly—" was slightly injured in a fire which broke out early this morning in a church in Balham, S.W, Mr. Butler, whose injuries were mainly bruises, is understood to have received them in escorting others out of the church. The origin of the fire is as yet unknown.' "

Joyce broke off. "Charlie, what on earth was he doing in a church early in the morning?"

"I don't know."

"You're his friend. Couldn't you go round and make sure he's not badly hurt?"

"I'm very sorry for Pat, of course." Denham gripped the pencil hard. "But must he monopolize our conversation alJ the time?"

A pause. "I'm sorry."

"You could go and see him, couldn't you?" asked Denham, his face expressing a passionate hope that she would say no.

"I can't. Not yet."

"Good! I mean, that's most unfortunate. Why not?"

"Because I did go there. I wanted to give him some information." Joyce paused. "I don't mind his being inconsiderate; he can't help that. But when he started to be dramatic I rather preached him a sermon. So I said I wouldn't go back until I could prove who the real murderer is."

"Murderer? What do you know about that?"

"I think I've guessed all along," Joyce answered slowly. "But I can't prove it."

Denham hesitated, fingering the pencil and then throwing it down.

"Listen, Joyce!" (A clerk, if one had entered then, would have been astonished to see Charles Ewart Denham almost pleading.) "Let's forget Pat, can't we? Why not have dinner with me tonight? And I'll call on Pat this afternoon, if you like."

"Thanks awfully, Charlie. Dinner would be wonderful." Joyce added, "He lives in Cleveland Row. I wonder what's going on there now?"

What was going on now, at the house in Cleveland Row, could be described as a row or even a riot.

Dr. Gideon Fell, arriving on the doorstep behind a taxi-driver who lugged a box of books, was admitted by Mrs. Pasternack to a little eighteenth-century passage. The large wooden box bumped the floor.

lyO BELOW SUSPICION

The taxi-driver, off like a flash when Dr. Fell absent-mindedly handed him a pound note for a six-and-ninepenny drive, allowed Mrs. Paster-nack to close the front door.

From beyond a closed, white-painted door on the left issued the sound of several angry voices.

"It's only the doctor, sir," Mrs. Pastemack whispered in apology.

"Now look here," said the voice of the doctor, evidently an old friend. "The swelling in your face has practically gone. You're lucky to have got off with only one black eye, and no teeth lost. Still, you've got 'em. Your body-bruises are painful, and so are your hands."

A Dublin accent answered him. "Ah, begob!" roared the voice of Patrick Butler. "And what would the likes of ye know about medicine?"

"Never mind what I know. The fact remains that Mr. . . . Mr. . . ."

"O'Brien, sorr," spoke up a hearty and confident voice, "Terence O'Brien."

"Mr. O'Brien," said the doctor, "is not going to give you a boxing-lesson today."

" 'Tisn't that. Doctor!" said Mr. O'Brien with dignity. "But would ye believe it, now? The idjit expects me to tache him the noble art in one lesson!"

"And why the hell not, ye spalpeen?" yelled Patrick Butler.

"Ah, bejasus," moaned Mr. O'Brien. "I'll come again tomorrow."

"And so shall I," agreed the doctor.

Both of them, on their way out, passed Dr. Fell. Mrs. Pastemack tapped on the white door. Dr. Fell, maneuvering in, found himself in a rather small but admirable library; it's white-painted book-shelves rose to the ceiling on every side except that of the two v^ndows facing Cleveland Row, and part of the wall opposite, where a log fire crackled under an Adam mantelpiece.

Patrick Butler, wearing a dressing-gown and not quite reasonably presentable, stood with his back to the fire. He resumed his normal speech and his easy air when Dr. Fell entered, but he was not calm. Gesturing towards the leatlier easy-chair at one side of the hearth, Butler sank back in the other chair beside the dictaphone.

For a time there was silence except for Dr. Fell's wheezy breathing.

"Are you—harrumph—feeling better?" asked the leamed doctor.

"Frankly," replied Butler with a certain grimness, "not much. For

one thing, it hurts to talk. But talking, sir, is a luxury in which I shall indulge myself even when the hearse carries me to the cemetery."

"Speaking of conversation," observed Dr. Fell, "did you 'phone Mrs. Renshaw this morning?"

Butler gritted his teeth, another painful process. But last night he had again dreamed of Joyce Ellis, and of kissing her as he had kissed Lucia. It exasperated him.

"I 'phone no woman," he said.

"My dear sir! Consider what happened last night!"

"I am considering it, believe me!"

"No, no! Mrs. Renshaw and Dr. Bierce and I were standing in tlie grounds outside both upper and lower chapel. We had no notion of a fight or a fire or anything else. All of a sudden, a smoky-faced man in something like evening dress staggered out of the door and ran for the front gate. A few moments later you appeared. Have you any idea of your appearance at that time?"

"Curiously enough, I had no time to think about it."

"You handed me the bundle of papers," persisted Dr. Fell, "made an elaborate apology for being longer than three minutes, and then collapsed in a dead faint!"

"I have never fainted in my life," Butler said coldly.

Dr. Fell made a hideous face and a bothered gesture.

"Well, say that you were momentarily indisposed. Mrs. Renshaw— don't grit your teeth!—took one look at you and your papers, and walked away. She was shocked and upset. Archons of Athens! Can't you consider women simply as women—"

"That is my invariable habit."

"—and not as feminine counterparts of yourself? How on earth she got home last night," scowled Dr. Fell, "I can't understand. She certainly didn't go v/ith us." Dr. Fell reflected for a moment, his eye roving. "Finally," he added sharply, "I understand from Hadley that you refuse to prefer any kind of charge against this man George Grace, whom you call Gold-teeth."

Butler's mood changed. All thoughts of Lucia were swept out of his mind.

"Gold-teetli," he repeated, with soft and unholy relish.

Then he turned towards Dr. Fell an expression which gave even that seasoned person a qualm.

"I didn't know the fellow's name was George Grace," Butler said, "until I rang Hadley this morning. Do you know what was pasted on the outside of my window this morning? Two of them, one on each front window beside the door. Mrs. Pasternack found them. Look here!"

From the pocket of his dressing gown, with something very like tenderness, he took a curled and partly torn slip of paper whose printing—in block capitals—had been a little smeared by its removal from the window.

It said:

YOU AND ME HAVENT FINISHED. G.G.

An ember popped in the fireplace. It was grovdng colder as the afternoon drew on, with a suggestion of mist outside the windows.

"This is the showdown," said Butler, tapping the arm of his chair. "This is the third and last round."

"Yes," agreed Dr. Fell, and blinked at the floor.

Butler's voice began to rise. "Do you remember Hadley's offer last night? That they could easily arrange for me to get a firearms licence if I called at Scotland Yard?"

"Yes. I remember it."

"I've sent Johnson there. Johnson also bought a gun and ammunition. You see," Butler continued, "I've changed my mind since I talked to Hadley at Claridge's on Wednesday. These worms don't understand it if you merely outwit 'em. They don't know they're being outwitted. They understand only one thing."

From the other side of the chair, vidncing as pain caught him, Butler fished up a Webley .38 revolver in an oflScer's leather holster.

"Let the so-and-so come," he breathed through stiff jaws. "Let him come tonight. I've stopped playing. Either I get him, or he gets me."

"If Gold-teeth visits you tonight," said Dr. Fell in a curious tone of voice, "you realize he will not be alone?"

"Good! Let him bring his pals. I don't mind."

Dr. Fell shook his head. That sense of disquiet nearing real alarm, which had been muttering inside him, grew again as palpable as the heat of a furnace.

"Gold-teeth's pals!" he said. "Very well. But I did not necessarily refer to them. Don't you see that, if anyone tries to kill you tonight, there will be two sets of enemies and two converging lines of attack?"

"How do you mean, two?"

"The leader of the witch-cult as well!" retorted Dr. Fell, beginning to fire up still further. "Dash it all, man! Gold-teeth, Em, a few unnamed others, we may class among the gangsters. I question whether any of them, with the exception of Gold-teeth, knows about the witch-cult."

"But Gold-teeth definitely does know!"

"Precisely. He knew enough to select just the right papers from all that mass in the hollow top of the confessional box, and leave the rest behind."