Below Suspicion (18 page)

"Agnes never told me!"

"Well! I thought you might be interested. Because I'm fairly sure he's there tonight."

"Why are you sure?"

"Because I saw the lamp. And he told the policeman," added Dr. Bierce, "that he would be doing an experiment to prove who really poisoned Mrs. Taylor."

Butler sat up straight. Lucia, who had been bending forward with

her golden head in the dingy hght from the Underground Station, suddenly crouched back.

"The house isn't very far from here, is it?" Butler demanded.

"No, no, no!" Dr. Bierce pointed. "Under the arch of tliat railway bridge; turn right up Bedford Hill Road. And—if I may go with you?"

Butler gave quick instructions to the chauffeur. The car hummed into life.

"Doctor," persisted Patrick Butler, "one thing I want to know very much. WTiat was Renshaw's business? I mean his official or outv^-ard business? Lucia here can only talk vaguely of 'factories.' "

"Darling, that's all he ever told me!"

"I don't know his official business," Dr. Bierce retorted dr)4y. "For all I do know, he may have an office in the City and the useful title of 'Agent.' " Here a sardonic smile, music-hall-Scottish in its dourness, pulled down Bierce's lips. "But I can tell you something about the gentleman, from remarks let drop by Mrs. Taylor. I can tell you how he started hfe."

"WeU?"

"He was an ordained clergyman," answered Dr. Bierce.

^T THE top of Bedford Hill Road, on the edge of the Common, the Victorian-Gothic battlements and sham tower of The Priory' loomed vaguely whitish against a black sky. Not a light showed anywhere.

Though the house was exactly like the one at Hampstead, it had not the same "feel" as Lucia's home. Its grounds were larger, behind a low stone wall, but they were ill-kept. It repelled you; it had the chilly stare of someone, much too respectable, who cuts you dead in the street. The trees shielded its bow-windows rather than gracing them.

The limousine had been parked a little way down the hill, lights extinguished. Butler, Lucia, and Dr. Bierce—in that order—moved softly up the stone-flagged path to the front.

"A parson!" Butler kept muttering. "Look here!" Then he remembered the ivory crucifix on the wall of Renshaw's bedroom.

"Where else but the Church," softly asked Dr. Bierce, "could he have used that voice of his? Except on the stage—or at the Bar."

"I know I'm like him, curse it!"

"S-h-h!"

"Did you know about this, Lucia? About the past?"

There was no reply. And Butler insisted. "Did you?"

"No. I didn't know about it." Lucia pressed the white scarf round her neck. "But once or twice I thought it might be. Just little things. And you're not like him." She pressed Butler's arm. "You're not like him at all; you must know that."

"Try the front door!" suggested the misleadingly harsh voice of Dr. Bierce.

The front door, though in Mrs. Taylor's lifetime secured by lock and bolt and chain, was not now secured in any way. It opened, on dense

blackness, when Butler turned the knob. But he knew what he would meet. A faint scent of damp stain and decay was mingled with the ineradicable tinge of the perfume worn by dead Mrs. Taylor.

"Anybody got an electric torch?"

Dr. Bierce was prompt. "I always carry one. Here!"

Inside, as at Hampstead, was the same passage, with two rooms on each side of it, leading to a large rear hall. But, whereas at Hampstead the drawing room had been the first door on the right, here the entrance to the front bed-sitting-room was on the left.

Butler was drawn there as compellingly as though hands pushed him. The others followed, Dr. Bierce closing the front door. The beam of Butler's electric torch touched the open doorway to Mrs. Taylor's room; then it moved to a little table near by.

On the table stood an old-fashioned lamp, a white globe painted with flowers on a white china. Butler picked up the lamp and shook it.

"There's oil inside," he said, as the splashing rose loudly in stillness. "But the lamp's stone cold. There's nobody here tonight!"

"I tell you, I saw the light! Dr. Fell "

"He couldn't be walking about in the dark, could he?"

Handing the electric torch back to Bierce, Butler took the globe off the lamp, kindled the wick with a pocket-lighter, and replaced the globe. Its pale whitish light, with a tinge of the unearthly, drew round them the atmosphere of the 'sixties in the last century.

As though to defy bogles, Butler strode through the doorway into Mrs. Taylor's bedroom. He did not turn round, or hold up the lamp, until he reached the middle of the room.

He was now facing the dead woman's bed, with its scrolled and pointed wooden headboard a dull brown, its white bell-cord hanging. Its head was set against the inner wall of the passage. Its mattress had been stripped of bedclothing. But it was wicked; it was leering. He would not have been surprised to see fat Mrs. Taylor, with her painted face and her dyed hair, sitting in a pink nightgown and looking at him.

Butler glanced round. The rays of the lamp, a disembodied pallor with small flower-shapes, dimly showed him the horsehair furniture mingled with a few easy-chairs, the clutter of marble-topped tables, the mantelpiece with its clock, the little bathroom built in the deep alcove between this room and the room behind it. The shutters were closed on the bow-window at the front. Nothing was changed since Butler last saw it.

"Pat!" Lucia, who had followed him into the room on tiptoe, glanced quickly at the bed and away from it. "If Dr. Fell's been here, he's gone now. What are we doing in this house?"

"God knows. Wondering if it's haunted, I suppose."

Dr. Bierce, as a man of science, seemed to twitch his nose with skepticism.

"Some kind of experiment—!" he began.

"But what kind of experiment?" Butler swept the lamp round. "Everything's the same. Everything is "

And yet it wasn't. Butler stopped abruptly.

"Who," he demanded, "who put that water-bottle on the bedside table?"

"Water-bottle?" echoed Lucia.

"When Mrs. Taylor was poisoned, there were only two important things on that bedside table besides the electric lamp. One: a tin containing poison. Two: a glass with a spoon in it. There certainly wasn't a water-bottle. But look at it now!"

On the bedside table, which was at the left of the bed as you faced it, stood a (dead) electric lamp with a fringed yellow shade. Beside it was a water-bottle—rather like the one in Dick Renshaw's bedroom—over whose top a glass had been inverted. The bottle was half full.

"It's like...." Lucia's voice trailed away in a gulp. "Well, you know what it's like! But why should it be here?"

"I don't know. Old Madame Taylor, so far as I ever heard, didn't own a water-bottle at all."

Butler approached the bedside table. The pale light of his lamp turned his companions' faces into the pale masks of strangers, yet all were as absorbed as though they feared the bottle might explode. Patrick Butler picked up the glass and inspected it. It was clean and polished. Putting down the glass, he picked up the bottle. He sniffed at its contents. Experimentally he lifted it towards his mouth....

"For God's sake don't do that/" exclaimed a wheezy voice, so close at hand that Butler almost dropped the bottle.

They had been too absorbed to hear even the elephantine approach or cane-tap of Dr. Gideon Fell. Dr. Fell, who was too big to go through the doorway by frontal approach, stood sideways there and held up a very small lamp with a cylindrical glass shade. The little flame shone on a distressed pink face, eyes peering over disarranged eyeglasses on the black ribbon.

"Or, if you must meddle with it," wheezed Dr. Fell, with even deeper distress, "I beg of you not to drink the water. It's poisoned."

Butler set down the bottle hastily.

"Thanks, I won't. Excuse me, but is this your experiment to show who really poisoned Mrs. Taylor?"

Dr. Fell frowned. He maneuvered sideways through the door, his shovel hat on his head and his cane hung over one arm beneath the back-flung cloak.

"Mrs. Taylor?" he repeated. "No, no, no! My dear sir, you have got the facts backwards. My experiment, if I can dignify it by that name, is concerned with an important point in the poisoning of Richard Ren-shaw."

"And—have you cleared it up?" asked Lucia.

Dr. Fell gave her a vaguely benevolent look and bow, like an absent-minded Old King Cole, and nodded to Dr. Bierce. Peering down the mountainous slopes of himself, he managed with some difficulty to extract a large gold watch from among the ridges of his waistcoat. He blinked at it.

"By thunder, it can be cleared up now!" he said, replacing the watch with agony. "That bottle has been on the table for well over twenty-four hours, which gives a good margin. Let us see, now!"

"What is it?" cried Lucia.

Dr. Fell picked up the bottle. Holding it near the pale globe-lam-p in Butler's hand, he advanced his own tiny yellow-flamed lamp so that the bottle was brightly lighted between them. The water was crystal-clear; the glass surfaces shone. Dr. Fell studied the bottle, tilting it back and forth.

"Well?" prompted Butler, conscious of heat and excitement without knowing why. "What do you see?"

Dr. Fell let out a gusty sigh of relief.

"Nothing, I am glad to say. Absolutely nothing!"

"But the poison. . .."

"My dear sir!" said Dr. Fell, who was startled and bewildered. "Poison? This experiment had nothing to do with poison!" And he put the bottle, as well as his little lamp, on the bedside table.

Patrick Butler closed his eyes, counted slowly to ten, and opened his eyes again.

"Just a moment," he said in a voice of such authority that Dr. Fell blinked. "Let's get one thing straight. Sometimes these cryptic remarks

of yours sound like mere hocus-pocus, and sometimes they sound feebleminded."

Dr. Fell looked guilty.

"But the man who solved that Vampire case, and the poisoning at Caswall Moat House," Butler went on, "is no fool. His remarks aren't mumbo-jumbo."

"They aren't," Dr. Fell assured him. "They aren't, really."

"In my opinion," said Butler with the same hammering tone, "you see some link between two pieces of evidence; the link would seem obvious if you pointed it out. But your mind darts off to some other aspect of the case. And you've quite sincerely forgotten what we're talking about when we ask questions about that link." Here Butler assumed his eighteenth-century manner. "Sir, will you accept a challenge here and now?"

"Sir," intoned Dr. Fell, rearing up and adjusting his eyeglasses, "I shall be delighted."

"Then prove my judgment is correct. What is the Murder Club? How does it work? What are the clues to it? And above all," Butler's wild curiosity reached frenzy, "under what cloak does it operate? Can you—or will you—tell us that now?"

Dr. Fell, whose huge goblin shadow covered the door as Butler raised the pallid lamp, looked back at him with clear eyes and without absent-mindedness.

"I can," repeated Dr. Fell, "and I will. You deserve to know the dead-liness of the enemy you are fighting."

"And that is?"

Through the dead and silent house, making Butler's ner\'es jump, clove the strident ringing of a telephone-bell.

"That 'phone," said Lucia abruptly, "has been cut off for weeks!"

Dr. Fell shook his head.

"By some fortunate accident or even design: no. That's how I have been able to keep in touch with Hadley. Will you excuse me for a moment?"

Butler was in despair.

( H he tries to get away from me, ii I don't hear this story within the next iew minutes, I'll follow him as I mean to follow Luke Parsons.)

Dr. Bierce, cap in one hand and medicine-case in the other, was contemplating the wooden bedstead with a strange expression Butler could not read; it reminded Butler of a face, perhaps out of history, which

eluded him. Lucia, biting her hp in perplexity as though she wanted to know the truth and yet didn't want to know it, seemed about to speak. Then she sent a startled glance at the door.

In the doorway stood Miss Agnes Cannon.

"Well!" said Miss Cannon, with a sort of mild and fizzing hauteur. She continued with the same words Dr. Bierce had used: "Then you decided to come here after all."

Colour tinged Lucia's cheeks.

"I did," Lucia said, "but no thanks to you! Why didn't you give me Dr. Bierce's message?"

Miss Cannon, wearing a trim buff-coloured coat and with a blue scarf over her head with a knot under the chin, continued to fizz like a human Bromo-Seltzer as she drew off her gloves. She glanced slowly round the room, and seemed emotionally moved.

"Mildred Taylor!" she said. "In this room died one of the finest and noblest characters I have ever known." Then, abruptly, she answered Lucia's question. "You are a child, Lucia. You will not allow me to do my duty and take care of you. If anyone came here, I decided that it should be myself."

"What on earth," cried Lucia, "do you think you can do here?"

"I flatter myself," said Miss Cannon, flashing her pince-nez, "that I am a woman of the world. I know human nature and its ways." Her glance at Butler, though casual, was charged with significance. "You did not even inform me where you were going, or with whom."

"Oh, Agnes, stop it!"

Miss Cannon opened her handbag, threw her gloves inside, and closed the bag with a snap.

"Nor did you know," her voice quivered, "nor did you know, when you rushed home to dress for dinner, that the police had searched the house this afternoon? No, you did not know it."

For a second Lucia seemed to stop breathing. "Did they search my room?"

"Among all the rest. Obviously."

"What were they looking for?"

"They did not inform me. However, they had a search-warrant. I compelled Chief Inspector Soames to produce it."

Lumbering footsteps sounded in the passage. When Dr. Fell entered sideways and loomed up over them, radiating energy like the heat of a

furnace, Miss Cannon seemed to melt away into a dim corner. Dr. Fell's expression was grave as he peered at Butler.