Below Suspicion (17 page)

What stopped him was something Lucia would not have understood, and which he did not understand himself. Why was it that—even while he was kissing Lucia—there had at once sprung into his mind the image of Joyce Ellis?

To the devil with Joyce! He wasn't interested in Joyce. He hadn't even thought of the woman since he had seen her this morning. These infernal tricks played by the imagination. . . .

"Besides," Lucia was saying, with a sidelong look, "we're going on a little journey."

Butler shook himself awake.

"Not that it matters a hang," he said, "but where are we going?"

Lucia fended him off by reaching forward and tapping on the glass panel behind the driver.

"Your chauffeur has instructions," she said.

The car slid into gear and moved away. Lucia, though her eyes still shone and there radiated from her an aura as palpable as a touch maneuvered to keep Butler away from her.

"What—what did they say about your 'phone-call?"

" Thone-call?"

"To Scotland Yard!"

"There was a Flying Squad car in Old Compton Street. They'll have got to Gold-teeth's club," he snapped his fingers, "like that. They'll have nabbed the only two men we want, Gold-teeth and another called Em. We were talking today, you remember, about two men hired by your husband to put an operative from Smith-Smith in hospital?"

Lucia sat very still, her mouth partly open. Any mention of Dick Renshaw seemed almost to hypnotize her, and Butler hated this. Noiselessly the limousine eased round Cambridge Circus, and down the long stretch of Charing Cross Road, while Butler told her about the night's events.

"You can bet a fiver," he concluded, "that they're the same two men. They were ready for me; they knew I was coming. That's why there was so much personal malice in it. The ordinary hired thug does his job as impersonally as a butcher chops meat. These beauties. . . ."

Again, in imagination, he saw Em fitting on the knuckles and Gold-teeth's far-away look of pleasure.

Lucia was staring at the floor.

"What will happen to them now?"

"Tomorrow morning," Butler said grimly, "I appear before the beak and charge 'em with felonious assault."

"But—Pat!" Lucia's voice was warm, with pleasure and pride in it. "You did most of the assaulting, didn't you?"

"Technically, yes. That's why the charge may be difficult to establish. But the actual charge doesn't matter. We've got to hold 'em and hammer 'em about something else. What do they know about the head of the Murder Club?"

"Can you . . . can you prove they do know anything about the head of this Murder Club? Even if it really exists? Can you prove they know anything about it?"

"No! And, actually, maybe they don't know."

"Who," Lucia spoke thoughtfully, "could have told them you would be in the billiard-saloon tonight?"

"In my opinion, a large-moustached rat named Luke Parsons, alias Smith-Smith of 'Discretion Guaranteed.'" Butler's anger simmered, and yet his imagination was full of black doubts. "The trouble is, that large moustached-rat was really scared white. He didn't want any trouble. Oh, no! Not any kind of trouble! Why should he warn tv^'o nobodies, like Gold-teeth and Em, that he'd just betrayed 'em? He wouldn't have warned anybody. Unless. . . ."

"Unless what?"

"Unless," replied Butler, whacking his fist down on his knee, "he warned the head of the Murder Club."

There was a silence, while Butler remained blind to everything about him.

"I've been on the wrong track!" he declared. "I am never wrong, believe me, when it comes to the guilt of a given person or the issue of a trial. This time I wasn't wrong; I only started on the wrong track. Instead of following Gold-teeth and Em, I should have concentrated on the large-moustached rat named Parsons.

"Lucia, he knows who the head of the Murder Club is! He's cornered and mesmerized by the head of the Murder Club! That's why he turned the colour of a tallow candle when he thought he heard Dick Renshaw's voicein the outer office! That's why. . . ."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"Wait!" groaned Butler. "Let me think!"

"Pat, dear!"

"Eh?"

"Will you listen to me?" Lucia begged softly. There was a tenderness in her voice, a submissiveness, which moved him deeply because he had never (quite) expected to hear it there. Lucia stretched out her arms. "Will you come here for a moment, please?"

It was an invitation he had no wish to disregard, though it definitely did interfere with thinking. After a time Lucia spoke in a muffled voice, her head against his shoulder.

"I was thinking," she murmured, "about your Inn. I'm stupid about those things; Charlie Denham told me. But don't you belong to one of the Inns of Court?"

"Yes, certainly! Why do you ask?"

"Well . . . Are they going to like it, Pat, if you testify in the police-court tomorrow about a Soho brawl where you were concerned? Mr. Denham said—"

Barbed jealousy, of anybody or anything, stung him. "When did you see Charlie Denham?"

"Today. After lunch. Anyway, he said that at the trial yesterday you got up and deliberately called the judge an old swine."

Butler shrugged his shoulders. "I called the old swine an old swine," he pointed out simply.

"But mightn't your Inn disbar you? And now you've got a brawl in Soho; and what would happen if you did something awful to this man at the detective-agency, on top of all the rest of it?"

Now this, of course, was quite true. Yet it had never even entered Butler's head to do anything else. He stared at her.

"Don't you understand?" he demanded. "I'm doing this for you.'"

"I know that, dear!" Lucia was crying. "I know! And I love it. Especially when you take chances and—" She swallowed hard. "But don't you understand that sooner or later—Mr. Hadley said so at lunch— you're going to get hurt?"

"I didn't get hurt tonight, did I?"

"No, dear. But you were awfully lucky!"

Patrick Butler looked at her. He looked at her again. Sensing the change, Lucia glanced up. Very carefully and deliberately Butler removed his arms from round her. He edged across and sat in the opposite corner of the car, with all the arrogance of a Roman emperor.

"It would appear," he observed offliandedly, to the glass panel in front of him, "that I am lucky."

Lucia's voice was conscience-stricken. "Darling! Wait! I didn't mean. . . ."

Butler waved his hand.

"This evening/' he continued in his courtroom voice, "two gentlemen attempt to put me in hospital. By the merest luck, a whim of chance ha ha, both these gentlemen are themselves in great need of medical attention. You and I, in a night-club devoted to spivs and amateur prostitutes, are cut off by several more than two of them. Yet by blind luck we walk out as free as air."

"Pat! Please listen to me!"

Then Butler's tone changed.

"Where the hell are we, anyway?" he demanded. "What are we doing here? Where are we supposed to be going?"

Looking out the side windows and the back window, he became again conscious of a world outside.

They were crossing Westminster Bridge towards the Surrey side. The avenue of tall lamps threw trembling reflections deep in the water, as though, someone had written, the ghosts of suicides were holding up torches to show where they had drowned. Through the rear window of the car, far behind, Butler could see the great clock-tower, with its illuminated face, towering grey-black above grey-black Parliament roof-ridges.

The shock and clang of Big Ben, on the quarter-hour after nine, quivered in vibrations as well as sound. It roused Butler to an icy courtesy.

"May I again ask, Lucia, where we are going?"

Lucia, white-faced and shrinking back, regarded him with eyes of hurt and reproach. Then she tumed her face away.

"To Balham," she muttered. "That is, if you still want to go."

"Ah," said Butler. Even his eyebrow-raising was overdrawn. "By Balham, I presume, you mean Mrs. Taylor's house?"

"No, I don't!"

"Then will you be good enough to explain?"

Even Lucia's movement, as she tumed her shoulder farther away, said, 'I hate you!' But she replied in a light, lofty tone.

"You heard last night, I think, that I inherited three houses. One at Hampstead, Mrs. Taylor's at Balham, and the third is at Balham too. It's a little place. It—it's never been lived in, really."

"And this," asked the astounded Butler, "is what you call an 'adventure'?"

No reply.

"At a time when I should be after Luke Parsons, and working in your interest, you want us to explore a potty little house that's never been lived in?"

"You beast!" flamed Lucia, whipping round for a brief and tearful look at him. "You may find more than you think!"

You may find more than you think.

That sentence, from Lucia, was vaguely disquieting. Mist, almost invisible, hovered over the black Thames. Westminster Bridge was like a swept, lonely dance floor.

Patrick Butler, already forgetting how furious he had been, now felt contrition and wished to apologize. But he was really in love with Lucia; his pride blared at him; and his usual fluent speech would have been thick in his mouth. So he folded his arms and stared straight ahead. Lucia also stared straight ahead. There they sat like a pair of dummies, while the car hummed through dismal Kensington and Brixton.

Unspoken recriminations hovered in the air during that long drive. Butler, meditating dark thoughts of suicide, had his black world broken unexpectedly.

"Look out, you iooU" yelled the muffled voice of the chauffeur.

Brakes screeched faintly; the heavy car skidded and stopped dead; both its passengers were flung forward.

On the left they could see the red-white-and-blue enamel of an Underground Station sign which said, 'Balham.' On the right towered what looked like the arch of an overhead railway bridge. In the middle hung a traffic-light, green. A lean figure in an Inverness cape and an old tweed cap, someone who carried a doctor's medicine-case, had been concentrating across the street against the green light.

As though by a simultaneous impulse, Butler and Lucia turned to each other.

"I didn't mean it!" Butler said.

"Neither did I!" said Lucia.

There would have been more to this, no doubt, if the lean figure in the old cap had not strode towards the car to exchange words with the chauffeur. Butler picked up the speaking-tube.

"Control yourself, Johnson," he warned the chauffeur. "This is a friend of ours." Then Butler opened the door and called: "Dr. Bierce!"

The figure halted by one side-light. They saw the harassed dark-brown eyes of Dr. Arthur Bierce, with hollows of fatigue beneath them.

"Get in, won't you?" Butler invited. The doctor complied, and the car pulled over to the kerb beside the Underground Station.

Dr. Bierce lowered himself on one of the pull-out seats facing them. When he Temoved his cap, the freckled bald skull again loomed up. He sat there with his medicine-case in his lap, his lower lip drawn down, curt yet kindly, just now on an edge of nerves.

"Then you decided to come here after all!" he said.

"To come here—" Butler, astonished, broke off and turned to Lucia. "Did Dr. Bierce know about this?"

"No!" said Lucia. "I didn't tell anybody! Did I, Ambrose?"

Dr. Bierce grimaced.

"You may have heard," he said to Butler, "that the late Mrs. Taylor called me 'Ambrose.' After Ambrose Bierce, that very fine writer." The doctor's bony fingers tightened round the handle of his medicine-case.

"Bierce's stories," he added, "were grotesque and often horrible. But they were never morbid."

"That is what I wanted to talk to you about," pounced Butler, very much counsel for the defence. "That's why I ventured to stop vou here."

"Oh?"

"We've met only twice. Doctor. Once in court, and once at Mrs. Ren-shaw's last night. But it did seem to me, in court, that you knew much more and were hinting much more—about Mrs. Taylor—than the rules of evidence allowed you to say."

"Yes," Dr. Bierce agreed curtly.

"At Mrs. Renshaw's, then, I asked you why you said that Mrs. Taylor's house 'The Priory,' was unhealthy. We were interrupted before you could answer."

"Yes." The lean face grew more stern.

"Now tell me. Shouldn't you say that Richard Renshaw was on very friendly terms with Mrs. Taylor? On far closer terms, for instance," he nodded towards Lucia, "than her own niece was?"

"Naturally," agreed Dr. Bierce with the same curtness. "Evil always attracts evil."

There was a brief silence.

"You won't understand, Doctor, if I refer to a group which operates under some fantastic cloak/' Butler continued. Dr. Bierce looked at him quickly. "But I think," Butler said, "that Mrs. Taylor was high up in its councils, probably next to the head of it. I think the head of it was Dick Renshaw. And that somebody poisoned them both to assume control."

"Good!" the doctor said tensely, and slapped his hand on the medical bag. "Then why don't you go along to 'The Priory,' now, and make sure?"

Patrick Butler blinked. "To Mrs. Taylor's house?"

"Naturally! Isn't that where you're bound for?"

"No, no, no!" interposed Lucia. "We were going to the other place, the... ."

"There is somebody in the house tonight," said Dr. Bierce.

The words were commonplace enough, yet they had the sinister ring of an understatement in a ghost story.

"But that's impossible!" protested Lucia. "The servants left weeks ago. The electricity's been cut off. The house is all locked up."

"All the same," said Dr. Bierce, "somebody is moving from room to room with a parafEn lamp. Wait! Don't think about burglars or murderers. I think I can tell you who it is. Dr. Gideon Fell."

Lucia let out an involuntary cry. "Dr. Fell?"

"Yes. He was certainly there last night, very late, rummaging the house for evidence of a certain kind. The policeman who found him there, and thought he was a burglar, told me so today. Didn't you get my message?"

"What message?"

"My dear madam," Dr. Bierce spoke somewhat testily, "you weren't in between lunch-time and six o'clock, I know that. But I left a message," Dr. Bierce snapped bony fingers beside his ear, to stimulate memory, "with a certain Miss Cannon."