Below Suspicion (14 page)

The girl's attempt at the proper reply was almost pathetic.

"Have you an appointment?"

"No, I'm afraid not." Butler raised his voice. "But I think he'll see me. My name is Renshaw."

From the adjoining office Butler could have sworn he heard the sharp metallic squeak of a swivel-chair. Red buses were grinding and bumbling into each other beneath the windows; he could not be sure. Yet there was no mistaking the quiver of the girl's arm, the quick upturn of her eyes behind the spectacles, as she reached out for the 'phone.

"Don't bother to do that," Butler said quickly, and patted her hand. "I'll just go in and see him."

And he sauntered across and opened the door.

He had hoped, perhaps, for some faintly startling effect. But he got more than he could possibly have anticipated.

In an even dingier room, behind a flat-topped desk facing the door, sat a lean middle-sized man whose old-time police-moustache was too black for his age and too big for his face. His jaw had dropped. His face

was the colour of a tallow candle. He sat there petrified, with one leg twisted round the leg of the swivel chair.

Tlie room was a grey blur, shaken by traffic vibrations against the two windows on the right. Butler allowed a slight pause before he pretended astonishment.

"Great Scott, what's the matter?" Then he simulated realization. "Stop a bit! You didn't mistake me for my brother, did you?"

From somewhere in the direction of Mr. Luke Parsons, whose eyes bulged among their wrinkles, issued a sound like, "Brother?"

"Yes. My brother Dick. He died two days ago, poor fellow."

"O-er!" breathed Mr. Parsons, untwisting his leg from the swivel chair.

"I've been living in the States for the past six or seven years." Butler closed the door. "I thought perhaps. . . ."

"You don't look like him; that's fact," said the man with the bald head, still fascinated. "But that voice! And the way you—" He stopped. "Oh, ah; you're his brother. The States, you say?"

"Yes. I took the first plane when I heard of Dick's death."

"Now there's a place," said Mr. Parsons bitterly, "where firms like mine have got rights. How does the Yard look on a private firm here? Like dirt. I've got no more rights than"—his finger stabbed in the general direction of the people in Shaftesbury Avenue—"than any of them."

"That doesn't matter." Butler lowered his voice. "I have a little business, of a strictly private nature. ..."

Even the police-moustache was galvanized to a quiver.

"My dear sir!" murmured Mr. Parsons, with a bad imitation of a bank-manager soothing a rich client. "Sit down! Sit down!" He hastily bustled out with a wooden chair, and sat back again. "If you'd give me the facts, now?"

"It's a little difficult to begin."

"Of course, of course! It often is. There's a lady in it, perhaps?"

"In a way, yes."

"Painful but natural," the lean old bald-head assured him, with a commiserating shake of the head. "And you know our motto, sir: Discretion Guaranteed. Now if you'd look on me as a sympathetic friend, eh?"

"The fact is, I've been in business in the States."

"Ah. May I make so bold as to ask the nature of it?"

Butler played a leading card.

"The same business Dick organized here," he replied, fixing his eyes on his companion's. "But I think our 'cloak' is better established."

For a moment he thought he had gone too far.

Mr. Parsons's face was again the colour of a tallow candle, while the swivel-chair squeaked and cracked. In this greyish room (electricity and heat again off) it was so cold that each could see the steam of his own breath.

And Patrick Butler, for the first time, began to feel he had stepped across into an eerie borderland from which he would not soon emerge. What was terrifying old walrus-moustache? A suggestion of wholesale poisoning—that might well do it, yes. But Mr. Parsons had blenched only when he heard mention of the organization's 'cloak.' What cloak, in sanity's name?

"If you'll excuse me," said Mr. Parsons in the genteelest of voices, "I don't want nothing to do with it."

"Look here," Butler said sharply, "I don't think you understand me."

"No?"

"No. I don't want to involve you in my affairs." Then he laughed. "You may remember, some time ago, that my brother had a little trouble with his wife?"

The bulbous eyes were wary. "Did he?"

"Naturally, Dick got a couple of brisk lads to—excuse me!—operate on one of your men. I want to know where I can find those two, and take them back to the States with me. That's all I want."

"Sorry. Dunno anything about it."

"If," Butler said suddenly, and made a feint of reaching for identification papers in his inside pocket, "if you doubt I'm Bob Renshaw. . .."

"No, no, no! If you were dark instead of fair, I'd think I was seeing his ghost."

"We make pretty fair profits in my business." Taking out his notecase, Butler laid a hundred-pound note on the desk.

"I dunno what you're talking about, so help me!"

Butler laid another hundred-pound note on the desk. Despite the cold room his companion was sweating.

"I might," a low hoarse voice admitted, "give you an address where you might find a certain two people. No names in this office. Not ever! And I don't even say you would find 'em. Only you might."

"If you're playing a trick, of course. . . ."

"My God, Mr. Renshaw, would I dare to play a trick?"

Butler pushed the notes across the desk. Tearing half a sheet off a memorandum pad, Mr. Parsons printed an address in block capitals, folded the sheet, and shoved it into his companion's hand. Butler put the slip of paper in his pocket, and stood up.

"Tell me, Mr. Parsons," he said, "why do you dislike our business so much?"

And suddenly Butler had a vision of Luke Parsons, the shabby suburbanite, with his squeezed semi-detached house and his bit of garden.

"If my wife ever saw...." he blurted out.

"Saw what?"

"Ah, I was wool-gathering!" murmured Mr. Parsons, with a ghastly heartiness. "Wool-gathering, that's what I was!"

"You understand, I think, that our little transaction remains confidential?"

"Oh, naturally, sir! You may trust me to the hilt!" breathed Discretion Guaranteed; and reached for the telephone as soon as the door had closed behind his client.

Patrick Butler noticed nothing of this. Hurrying downstairs, he did not open the slip of paper until he had partly emerged from the doorway into crowded Shaftesbury Avenue. Then he stared at the address for so long that grim-faced pedestrians jostled him back into the doorway.

The mist and soot-smell of London was in his lungs, but a colder chill lay at his heart. From his inside pocket he took out the envelope on which Lucia Renshaw had written the address at which he must meet her at eight o'clock tonight. Both addresses were the same: 136 Dean Street, Soho.

"Taxi!" he bellowed, without much hope of getting one. "Taxi!"

To describe his state of mind, during the next few hours, would be merely to sum up with his repeated word, "Nonsense!" Lucia Renshaw could not be mixed up in this business, whatever it was. He had made his decision; he simply knew. And so Butler went home, fighting shadows.

In his little library, at tea-time, Mrs. Pastemack had kindled a great coal fire under the Adam mantelpiece. Facing the fire stood two easy chairs; and beside one of them was his old dictaphone.

It was coincidence, pure coincidence, that Lucia had given him that same address!

Patrick Butler sat down, and fitted a new wax cyhnder to the revolving mechanism. Lounging back in the chair after he had turned on the starting-switch, he watched the cylinder revolve noiselessly before— with a sharp plop—he pressed the button under the speaking-tube.

Then he spoke to it in a fierce and challenging voice.

"Notes," he said, "for the defence of Lucia Renshaw."

The cylinder continued to spin, while he scowled.

"What in hell—no; strike out the 'in hell'—is the 'cloak' for this Murder Club? Aside from murder, what's their racket? It is, obviously, a new one. It cannot be drugs, or white slavery, or anything so dull and stale. Because: not only did it upset the experienced Luke Parsons, but he knew it would shock his wife beyond words. Why?"

Butler released the speaking-button, but plopped it down again savagely:

"Why, at lunch-time, did Lucia Renshaw say: 'Dick chose all my clothes'?"

Again a silence. Then, with more fury:

"Lucia Renshaw, from the first, showed a fondness amounting to passion for—for P.B." (This would have to be taken down by a secretary; he couldn't say 'for myself; he squirmed even as it was.)

"Was this," he went on, "because P.B. bears a strong resemblance, in voice and general appearance, to L.R.'s late husband, Dick Renshaw? Has she unconsciously transferred her affections to another man who looks like him?"

This, Butler remained clear-headed enough to see, was the crux of it all as far as he was concerned. This was why he raged.

He had fallen for Lucia Renshaw, he told himself, past all doubt or hope. He could see her image from last night: in the negligee, stretching out her hands to him. And the image was so vivid that it hurt him. But he was not going to be anybody's substitute or anybody's rival, even a dead man's! He was going to be. . . .

"Tea, sir?" interrupted the voice of Mrs. Pastemack, accompanied by a rattle as she wheeled in the tea-wagon.

"Oh, to blazes with the tea!"

"Very good, sir."

"Mrs. Pasternack, she is not guilty."

"No, sir."

"Thank you, Mrs. Pastemack. And I am never wrong."

He was in this same mood when he set out on foot, at a quarter past seven, to keep his rendezvous with Lucia.

The mist had thinned a httle, though it was still bitter cold, as Butler circled Piccadilly Circus and again went towards Shaftesbury Avenue. At the London Pavilion he saw a depressing sight.

At each side of the theatre doors, and then bent back along the side of the building, stretched an endless three-abreast queue of those waiting to get into the cinema. They did not speak. They did not move. They waited patiently, dull-eyed in the aching cold, for the hour or hours before they could scramble inside for some escape—any kind of escape 1—from grey life.

Butler, who would not have joined any kind of queue if his hfe depended on it, eyed them as he passed. But why shouldn't they wait there? What else had they to do? They couldn't entertain at home, because they had no food or drink to offer guests; they couldn't be entertained for the same reason. Besides, the question of transportation....

"Transportation!" he exclaimed aloud.

Into his mind had come an idea which might (just possibly might) smash the whole case against Lucia Renshaw.

Striding blindly along the street, he examined this idea until, in the upper and darker region, he turned left into Dean Street.

Dean Street, narrow and slatternly, was partly lighted behind shutters and a few half-drawn blinds. Though a part of the so-called 'Wicked Square Mile,' there was little noise except murmurings from a pub and the sound of a consumptive hand-organ. The wheezy music rose with a rattle like strings.

"She was a poor little dicky-bird. Tweet, tweet, tweet,' said she. . . ."

A number of pavement-nymphs, uglier than Butler had ever seen them, were ranged at one crossing like fielders in a cricket-match. Beyond them, two tall Negroes talked quietly together. He saw nobody else. The grinding of the hand-organ dwindled to a faint tinkle as he strode on.

Then, with a sense of uneasy shock, he discovered Number 136.

Behind an iron railing and down three steps into a shallow area, there was a long and grimy plate-glass window with the word billiards in enamelled letters. By bending down, he could see that the place con-

lOO BELOW SUSPICION

tained three tables and was pretty well filled. Over a glass-panelled door by the window, very clearly, were the enamel figures 136.

"But this can't be—" he began. Then he paused, and looked round him.

True, there was a door at street-level close to 136 on the right. But its peeling paint, its nailed-up look, seemed to indicate it had not been opened since before the war. There was another door on the left, in similar condition. All upstairs windows were dark.

Lucia had spoken of some place, apparently a club, where you could dine and dance. And Lucia, the fastidious, wouldn't suggest a club where you entered by way of a sleazy billiard-saloon? Yet it was just the place to find two alleged tough-lads who. . . .

Butler glanced at his wrist-watch. He had more than ten minutes before it was time to meet Lucia. And he was not conspicuous; it had been no trouble at all to find a disreputable suit, and his greasy overcoat and soft hat both dated from 1938.

He sauntered down the three stone steps, and opened the glass-panelled door.

The room breathed a redolence of beer, though nobody was drinking it. A dramatic chck-click of billiard balls, a dramatic exclamation, greeted him out of a clatter of talk. The three tables, set lengthwise to each other down a deep room, had no overhead canopy lights. Three pale yellow electric-bulbs hung on short cords from the ceiling, drawing shadows round nondescript men in faded gaudy shirt-sleeves.

Then Butler spotted another door.

It was well down the room on the right, a little beyond the end of the third table. Butler sauntered towards it.

Nobody noticed him, or so he thought. Only one table, the first towards the front door, was being used for billiards; they played snooker at the second; and at the third—so strongly has lingered the influence of the American G. L—they played American pool.

That other door, in the right-hand wall beyond the third table, had a key in it. Also, it was unlocked. Butler discovered this when he leaned unobtrusively with his back to the door, hands behind him. It could not lead to any cupboard, because there was a line of light under the sill. Butler slipped the key out of the door and slipped it into his pocket.

At the pool table, its narrow end towards him and a few feet out to the left, the last ball thudded and dropped into the far right-hand pocket. The man who held the cue, a sleek-haired young man in a