Below Suspicion Read Free

cook. All of them, by Mrs. Taylor's order, had to be out of the house by nine o'clock. And they were.
    "Then, as usual, I remade Mrs. Taylor's bed. I propped her up, and put some books and a packet of cigarettes on the night table. My last job of the day was to go round and lock up the house like a fortress: doors, windows, everything. The last thing I did was turn the key in the back door.
    "My bedroom is near the back door. I read for a while, and then went to sleep in spite of the high wind. And all night, Mr. Butler, that bell in my bedroom didnt ring."
    Joyce bent forward, hands locked together.
    "They say I'm lying, Mr. Butler. They say the bell was in perfect working order; and it was. They say Mrs. Taylor must have rung the bell when she felt that horrible pain coming on. But she didn't. I swear she didn't. I'm a light sleeper, and I should have heard it.
    "Oh, God, I almost wish I had lied! I wish I'd said I took a couple of sleeping pills, or something. Tliere were plenty of them in Mrs. Taylor's medicine cabinet. But if you're innocent, I thought, the law won't hurt you. It can't. That's what we're brought up to believe. I never had a life. And now I'm locked up here, waiting to be hanged."
    ("Never had a life?" thought Butler. "With that face and especially that figure? Come, now!")
    But no hint of his sardonic amusement appeared in his big, ruddy, long-nosed face.
    "You're getting ahead of the story," he reminded her sharply, as a slap for hysteria.
    "I'm sorry!" said Joyce, pulling herself together. Again contrition shamed her. "I'm terribly sorry. I've got a whole army on my side when vou believe I'm innocent."
    "Yes. Well." Suddenly he flushed. "Next morning?"
    "Every morning," said Joyce, "I woke up at eight o'clock to unlock the back door and let Alice in. Alice would light the fire in the kitchen range downstairs, and any other fires that had to be lighted. A little later Emma, that's the cook, would come in and prepare Mrs. Taylor's morning tea; Alice took it to her at half-past eight.
    "That morning I woke up—automatically, you know how it is—at a few minutes before eight. When Alice tapped at the back door, I went out in a dressing gown and unlocked the door. But it was very cold, so I went back to bed again and dozed for a while. Mrs. Taylor usually didn't call me before ten o'clock at the earliest.
    "Then, when it was barely quarter to nine, the bell started ringing frantically.
    "Frantically! In long bursts with little spaces between. I thought it was Mrs. Taylor, angry all over again. So I rushed out without troubling to get dressed. But it wasn't Mrs. Taylor. When I got to that front room. . . ."
    Joyce paused, with a little trembling jerk of her head and body.
    "Alice Griffiths met me in the front passage," she said, "and took me in. Alice stood at one side of the bed, with a tea tray. On the other side of the bed, Emma the cook had just dropped the bell-push. The bell-push was hanging just beside Mrs. Taylor's cheek.
    "And Mrs. Taylor—well, she was lying on her side, drawn up together, in a tangle of bedclothes. I knew she was dead. Her face had that awful caved-in look of dead people. Alice and Emma just turned round and looked at me, glassy-eyed, as though they'd been drugged.
    "On the bedside table was a tumbler, with a teaspoon in it and whitish sediment at the bottom. Beside the tumbler was an open tin of Nemo's salts. Mrs. Taylor's fingerprints were on that tin." Joyce added with no change of tone. "So were mine."
    Outside the two barred windows, the muddy red sky had changed to blue-black. The electric light was bleaker, harsher, more merciless.
    Patrick Butler's grey hat and gloves lay on the table. His dark-blue overcoat hung open as he teetered back in the chair, making the chair squeak. With his eye fixed on a corner of the ceiling, the big man smiled a far-off enigmatic smile. Then the chair bumped back on the floor again, and he looked at Joyce.
    "This tin of Nemo's, I believe,"