Below Suspicion (28 page)

Butler scarcely heard her.

"I never realized," he snarled, "that every bit of evidence against her, every bit I thought or spoke to this dictaphone," he pointed, "applied equally well—or far more so!—to you.

"Never mind! I repeat: we go back to you on the night of the 22nd. How did you get from Balham to Hampstead and back? By Underground, of course. You had a friend and informant at Renshaw's house, who tipped you off by 'phone to everything that happened here—"

"Who?"

"Kitty Owen. She certainly doesn't like Lucia; you should have seen the look she gave Lucia on one occasion I remember. But Kitty has a purely schoolgirl worship for you. It's abject; it likes to be abject; it'll do anything. Yet I swear Kitty knew nothing about your visit to Dick Renshaw's on the night of the 22nd. All she did was give you information.

"My evidence? You'll hear it later.

"You knew that everybody would be away from 'Abbot's House' that night except Lucia. Lucia didn't sleep in her husband's room, but in a room down the gallery. You knew that Dick Renshaw had gone away the day before on one of his trips to spot the lie of the land for witch-cult poisonings in distant cities. Above all, you believed (Lucia told several of us) that Renshaw would be back in a day or two.

"You 'believed' that, I say. Not even Miss Cannon would trouble to clean the room, to change the water in the bottle, before he returned. So you crept into the house—how? Because the lock on the back door was a Grierson, just as at Mrs. Taylor's. And you dissolved a heavy dose of antimony in Renshaw's water-bottle, almost a month before he actuaJiy drank it.

"And the picture changes. Everything becomes reversed, like that damned cross you're wearing now. In fact, you drew the reversed crosses in the window-sill dust at the same time you poisoned the bottle."

Butler paused, and sat down.

His rage was evaporating, his voice calm and sardonic. Joyce Ellis, as though not thinking of murder at all, was smiling at him in a meditative way.

"It was quite all right that night, you know," she told him. "I got home by the last Underground train. I felt nice and sleepy. I locked the back door and left the key in it. I didn't even think of the antimony tin when I went to bed. But next morning, after I'd let Alice into the house. . . ."

"You got a shock, perhaps?" he inquired politely.

"A horrible shock!" said Joyce.

She turned towards him that face of eager innocence, the lips half-parted and the grey eyes wide, which she had turned towards him at Holloway prison. It gave him a shock, because there seemed to be no parody in it.

But inwardly, always inwardly, she was rejoicing, delighting, revelling in her ability to put on these masks. He wouldn't understand; it was a part of her religion.

"You see," Joyce went on in her soft voice, "Alice Griffiths said at the trial that when she discovered Mrs. Taylor's body she'd run 'to the backstairs passage' and spoken downstairs to the cook. That's very near the door of my bedroom, of course. She shouted, 'For God's sake come up here; something awful's happened.' All of a sudden I remembered the tin of antimony I'd hidden in my room. It was gone. I knew what had happened. When the bell began to ring, I—"

"You didn't know what to do, poor innocent?"

"It was awfully clever of you," Joyce assured him, with triumph gleaming out, "to explain my saying 'Wliat's the matter? Is she dead?' to Alice. And to twist Alice and Emma so they wouldn't swear I never touched the tin that morning. I couldn't think of a story myself. But then—as soon as I met you—I knew you were going to get me acquitted."

"And why was that, me dear?"

Joyce's eyes glittered with admiration.

"It was your confidence, your self-confidence. You treated me almost as—"

"As Dick Renshaw would have done?"

"Yes, that low swine!" Joyce touched the inverted cross to quiet herself. "But, of course," her mood changed again, "I couldn't tell you, any more than I could tell the police, where I'd really been on the night Mrs. Taylor died.

"For what's the good of me, of my Master's teaching, if any man is e\er sure I'm telling the truth? So I agreed to say just what you wanted me to say. It was a dreadful moment—did you notice, in court, how upset I got?—when Alice told about that banging door? I thought I hadn't killed Dick, of course, but then they might have connected him with me and our rites in the chapel. Tliat was sacred."

"You know," Butler said, "I should like to read your thoughts."

Joyce leaned forward with eyes which had a frank, unmistakable expression; it had nothing to do with murder.

"I should like to read yours," she said.

Tlie attraction of the woman was like a hypnotic or a drug. We shall be saved through the flesh, said the ritual of the Black Mass. Momentarily Butler fought his way out of that allurement.

"I mean—" he stopped. "The police suspected you from the start. You were under arrest in just a week. During that time, they'd watch you if you made visits. Did you try any 'phone-calls?"

"I rang Kitty. Poor, dear Kitty! Dick himself introduced her to the worship, but she Hked me. I asked Kitty if Mr. Renshaw had retumed. Kitty said no, but he'd be back before the end of the week surely. I told her the water must not, must not, be changed in that water-bottle."

Butler was as tense as she.

"I thought so!" he said. "You couldn't 'phone her, and you didn't dare see her, after you were arrested. But they did allow you newspapers. And not one word did you see—as you must have, if it had happened— about Renshaw's death. You believed the water had got poured out, just as it might have been."

"Oh, yes. I was afraid he couldn't be dead. I knew it!"

"In other words," said Butler, "you regarded yourself as innocent. The consciousness of guilt never touched your mind. You could rave inwardly about irony and filthy injustice: as you did aloud to me. But, by thunder! (As a friend of mine would say) nothing else clouded you. Someone could have written down your thoughts, up to and during the trial, and it would have been quite fair in the detective-story sense. Not after the trial—any afternoon paper would have told you Renshaw was dead."

"Dead," breathed Joyce, "and deposed."

"And after the trial," sneered Butler, "you still tried to make me believe you were innocent. In that coffee-room across from the Old Bailey, you even had the ner\e to tell me a story which gave you away: about a shutter banging instead of the back door. And I hurt you, I tore your vanity, when I told you that you were as guilty as hell."

"What a queer phrase!" smiled Joyce. "But you attracted me most horribly. I wanted to stay near you. Didn't you ever find me attractive?"

Butler, who was fighting shadows in his own mind, got up. He didn't want to say what he said; it blurted itself out.

"I dreamed about you last night."

Joyce also stood up. Tliey were so close they could almost have touched each other. Joyce moved closer.

"Oh? What did you dream?"

"I dreamed I v^'as kissing you, just as I kissed Lucia before that."

"Only kissing?" murmured Joyce. "How tame your dreams must be."

"And when I did have my arms round Lucia"—the impulse to reach out towards Joyce was almost irresistible—"just once, I thought of you."

The pink lips curled. "Why was that?"

"Because I knew," Butler snarled, "I knew in my heart, or whatever pretentious modem damned term you want to call it, that you were a murderer and I had to forget you. But I never knew until tonight—and I admit it was a shock—that you enjoyed wholesale poisoning for profit. Even though we got on the track of the witch-cult the very night you were acquitted,"

"Oh?" Joyce said sharply.

Any mention of the witch-cult, a holy thing which she had risked her life to keep secret, turned Joyce cold and wary. She backed away.

"You said we," Joyce breathed. "Who got on the track of it?"

"Faith, me dear, I was speaking editorially! Nobody knows but me-self."

Joyce drew a quick breath, "You were saying?"

"Well! I went out to Lucia's house at Hampstead, There were such things as black candle-wax and reversed crosses and mention of red garters. . . ."

Through his mind, in the finger-snap time of pause, went everything Dr. Fell had told him late that afternoon,

Dr, Fell, arriving at Lucia's house on Tuesday evening shortly after Butler, had already seen through the real meaning of the trial. "Sir, nobody considered the evidence!" And: "Both sides were looking up into trees for the roots and digging underground for the branches." Joyce Ellis was innocent of the death of Mrs. Taylor—because Joyce wasn't in the house. Where was she? She would have explained: unless her errand had been so deadly that she dared not explain and dared not risk explaining. What errand? Well, William Griffiths had testified that two large doses of antimony were gone from the tin.

Hence that bumbling exclamation from Dr. Fell: "When I heard Mr. Renshaw had been murdered, I can't say I was surprised." And: "Surely it was at least reasonable that somebody would be murdered!"

What knocked the learned doctor into a heap, what caused him to mutter and groan and make faces, was Lucia's testimony: that the water-bottle which killed Renshaw had been rinsed and refilled before Renshaw's death. Apparently Joyce couldn't have done it.

Butler, out of his reverie in an instant, was speaking to Joyce.

"But the idea that you couldn't have done the poisoning, because you were in prison," he said, "was knocked endways as soon as an investigator looked at tlie water-bottle on Renshaw's bedside table."

"What about it?"

"There was still about an inch of water left. And it was stale."

"Stale?"

"Yes. Full of those tiny beads that gather in water when it's been standing for days or even weeks. Could it have got stale in twenty-foui hours, since Kitty was supposed to have filled it? That didn't seem possible, with a glass inverted over the top to protect it. All the same, an experiment was tried at Mrs. Taylor's house.

"A water-bottle, with glass over it, was left to stand for twenty-four hours. At the end of that time it was crystal-clear, vidthout a bead of any kind. It would clearly remain fresh for a long time."

In Butler's imagination, voices echoed and re-echoed out of that dark house.

("What do you see?" "Nothing, I am glad to say. Absolutely nothing/" And: "Poison? This experiment had nothing to do with poison!")

Butler lighted a cigarette. His hand was unsteady, but he forced words:

"The water in Dick Renshaw's bottle had been there for a long time. When anybody considered this with certain odd features of your case, it began to appear more than odd. But how could the water in that bottle be stale, when Kitty had refilled it?

"For meself, sweetheart, I at first slightly misinterpreted the facts. I knew Kitty had made an exchange of bottles. I knew she used the knitting-bag as a cover. But I was staring eye to eye with truth, never seeing it.

"A telegram arrived on Monday, March 19th, to say Renshaw would be home that night. The room must be cleaned, the water-bottle refilled. But Kitty, implacably true to your instructions of weeks before, would not let the water be changed. And what did she do?"

"She has told me," observed Joyce coolly. "Kitty is loyal, though not alone to me. To him."

"Him?"

Again Joyce took out the inverted cross, and kissed it.

"W^iat Kitty did," snapped Butler, "was to take a filled water-bottle, clean water, from another bedroom. She put that in her knitting-bag. She picked up the poisoned bottle of stale water, and slipped it into her knitting-bag when she went into the bathroom. It was the clean water-bottle she emptied, rinsed, and refilled to put in the bag. It was the same old poisoned bottle she put back on the table.

"Didn't I tell you," Butler said sarcastically, "that we saw all evidence exactly the wrong way round?"

Joyce laughed.

"Dick Renshaw was in a temper when he got home," Butler said. "Furthermore, he was having a row with Lucia. He never noticed the staleness of the water he drank." Butler, smoking the cigarette in short fierce puffs, threw it into the fire.

"He thought Lucia had done it," Butler added. "And most people thought you were now below suspicion."

"Below suspicion?"

"You'd been cleared in court of Mrs. Taylor's death," Butler refrained from adding that Dr. Fell had steadfastly maintained Joyce's innocence here, which he had never called 'murder* but only 'death.' "So most people, when Renshaw was murdered, could rule you out as causing both deaths.

"But remember Kitty Owen! Whether Kitty guessed the water might have been poisoned before that, she was smacking well certain when Renshaw died. But she was loyal! Oh, yes! She'd already done you a service, when there was to have been a Black Mass in the Black Chapel the night before Renshaw died."

Joyce, gliding back into the chair with the bulky handbag beside her, grew rigid. "How do you know there was supposed to have been—"

Butler groaned.

"The black wax-stains were fresh. When would have been the obvious night for the Mass? You parody Christian ritual, don't you? The 18th was a Sunday!

"I don't know why Renshaw didn't get back to celebrate it; we may never know. Mrs. Taylor, his second in command, was dead. You, the third in succession, were in prison. There wasn't any priest to perform the ceremony, even though the black candles had to burn at the altar and the goat-god statuette displayed. Somebody had to go and tell the masked assembly there'd be no ceremony.

"Who would do it? Kitty, of course! She was very close to two out of three of the leaders. And those candelabra were personal treasures: Renshaw liked to have a pair at home, as Mrs. Taylor did, to gloat over them. Oh, Kitty was always ready to show her superiority over Lucia Renshaw!"

"You're wrong in saying I did it for the money," said Joyce. "I should only have used it—for his work."

And she touched the cross. Her unwavering, half-smiHng fixity of expression began to unnene him again. He stumbled away, past the dictaphone, and stood with his back to the dying fire.