The Knocker on Death's Door gfaf-10

by Ellis Peters

  “Few people do,” said Sergeant Moon. “She’s so aristocratic she’s become used to existing alone in a rarefied world. It gets narrower and narrower as you get older. She belongs to an older time in more ways than one, you know—she and the son both. They pay on the nail for everything, and they keep their word. The old man’s debts—he ran ’em up time and again, and absconded as soon as things got too hot for him—those two paid off every time, to the last penny. Is that such a barren virtue as it sometimes seems?” The sergeant came down to earth with an acrobat’s agility. “What about the widow? Ghosts, doors and churchyards are all very well, but when a wife’s murdered, check up on the husband, and when a husband’s murdered, check up on the wife. This solitude would make a sweet cover for a dead ordinary killing from dead ordinary motives.”

  “Blonde,” said George tersely, “thirty-ish, good-looking, a city tough. Had to be. She works, too. According to friends and neighbours, their marriage ran in the offhand way that sometimes results when both partners go on working after the wedding, with no special end in view except more money. They had rows, plenty of them. Lately she seems to have had occasional men, and he occasional women. But they both stayed jealous. It wasn’t any secret, when they felt like it they told the whole block. She didn’t weep over him, but she wasn’t up to providing much information, either. I’ll be seeing her again tomorrow.”

  He closed his notes with a brisk slap, and yawned exhaustingly. “We’ve got a choice. Is this a case about a door, and only incidentally about a man? Or is it a case about a man—this chap Bracewell—and only incidentally about a door? You tell me!”

  “I wish I could say the door didn’t matter,” the sergeant owned mournfully, “I wish I could believe somebody simply copped his enemy here by chance, and left us holding a corpse that isn’t ours by right. But something tells me the door genuinely matters. Why should he come back, else? George, I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all.”

  “Neither do I,” said George grimly. “And you know who’s going to like it least of all, unless I doctor my report? The Chief Constable. You know him, he takes fright at the drop of a hat, if he thinks we’re in real trouble he’ll yell for the Yard tomorrow morning. And it’s got to be tomorrow morning or never. They’ll curse us to hell if we fetch them in when everything’s congealed like cold mutton fat.”

  “George,” Sergeant Moon leaned over the table and spoke with intense gravity, “don’t let him do it. These are our people, and this is our case, and if the southerners get in on it the whole valley will go to ground. It’ll be border warfare all over again, I’m telling you. Get him to leave it to us!”

  “The door, then, not the man?” said George.

  “The door! And I’m staking my reputation!”

  CHAPTER 4

  « ^ »

  ROBERTA Bracewell, Bobbie to her friends, opened the front door of her first-floor flat at No. 10 Clement Gardens, at the improbable hour of a quarter to eight on the Friday morning, and stared suspiciously at Dave Cressett across the threshold. Her fair hair was still in rollers, half-concealed beneath a chiffon scarf, and she had not yet put on her office face, but from the neck down she was immaculate in a grey worsted dress, sheer stockings and thick-heeled patent shoes.

  “Mrs. Bracewell?”

  “Oh!” she said blankly, seeing a stranger on the doorstep, and her eyes narrowed into hostility. “I thought it was the post. What a time to come calling, I must say.” She inched the door a little nearer closing in his face. “You’re not the press again, are you?”

  “No, nothing like that. I tried to telephone you last night, but you weren’t answering, and they told me you went out to work, so I thought I’d better get it here before office hours. But maybe you aren’t going in to work—if not, I’m sorry I disturbed you so early.”

  “I’m going in,” she said grimly. “I have to live. Nobody’s going to pay me big money for the story of my life with Gerry, that I know of—a couple of paras and a picture will be all, if they give me that much. And he didn’t leave me much but hire-purchase agreements.”

  “He left you a car,” said Dave simply. “I’ve just driven it in from my place, where he brought it for repairs. It’s down in the street now, if you’ll tell me where you want it I’ll bring it in for you.” There were two wooden garages beside the broad drive of the converted Victorian house, but he had no way of knowing which was Bracewell’s. “The police have cleared it, everything’s in order.”

  “The car!” she said, astonished. “Will you believe me, I never even thought about his car!” She looked again, and more intently, at Dave. Her face was regular and well-cut, but pale with the dingy city pallor, and her eyes were illusionless. “You’re from there?” she said. “The place where it happened?”

  “Yes, that’s right. He had a bit of trouble with his steering, and left the car with me that day. I had it ready for him by evening, but he didn’t come for it. The police had to go over it, afterwards, but they’ve finished with it now, it’s all yours.”

  “Well, well!” she said with the ghost of a laugh. “Something salvaged! Pity it had to be just a car, but even a car helps. I must owe you some money, then.” She set the door wide on a narrow white hall. “You’d better come in. I’ve got time enough, and I daresay you could do with a cup of coffee, starting out as early as all that.”

  Dave stayed where he was. “I haven’t put in a bill. It wasn’t you who commissioned the job. That’s all right.”

  Her eyes widened a little. She gave him a long, considering look, and then she smiled. “Come in, anyhow, and have the coffee. You’re not the press—and God knows I can’t be sure whether I want that lot to come in droves or stay away from me altogether—and you’re not the police—not that I can complain, they’ve been all right—what could they do about it? Still, somebody to talk to who isn’t either…”

  So he went in. What else could he do? She closed the outer door behind them, and clumped along on her chunky heels to the small, primrose-coloured kitchen, all nylon net and blue and white earthenware on a plastic lace tablecloth. The flat was small, hesitant in style, confused in taste, as if she had composed it in hurried five-minute frenzies between the office and whatever her social life consisted of, and forgotten it all the rest of the time. Quite a bit of money had gone into it, but not much effort or thought, and it must surely have been coming to pieces in sheer discouragement long before Gerry Bracewell got himself murdered in some obscure cause in a far-distant village. Yet there were signs that this woman could have been a house-proud wife and mother if she had ever given herself the chance.

  She swept her discarded apron from one of the two yellow plastic-upholstered chairs at the kitchen table to make a place for him, and poured him coffee, and then refilled her own cup and sat down opposite him at the table, spreading her arms on the cloth.

  Abruptly but quietly she asked: “Did you see him?”

  Dave did not even pretend to misunderstand her. “I found him.”

  “I see!” She lowered her eyes. “Poor old Gerry,” she said after a moment, with resigned composure. “He was a bastard to me, but he didn’t deserve that. Maybe he wasn’t any more of a bastard to me than I was to him, when it comes down to it. How do I know? It just went sour, what does it matter now whose fault it was? I tell you, though, if we had it to do again we wouldn’t set about it the same way, I’d see to that. Not that there’s ever likely to be a second chance. I don’t even want any family now. Leave it, we said, we won’t get caught like some of the kids do, not even a year having fun and in come the brats and the bills, and most likely the debt-collectors, too. Not for us, thanks! We’ll both keep working, we said, get some capital, get things, enjoy life, plenty of time for settling down when we’ve had a fling. Trouble is, you get to like having a fling, and it goes on and on, and you don’t want to let go of it, and all of a sudden…” She let the hypothetical case slip away from her; her face tightened, staring stonily at her own si
tuation. “All of a sudden you’re a widow, and he’s on a slab in a mortuary.”

  “I’m sorry!” said Dave helplessly, both cold hands cupped round his mug of coffee, which if instant was at least hot. He didn’t know what else to say.

  She darted him a brief, shrewd glance. “I know what you’re thinking: Her heart’s not broken, by a long chalk. And no more it is. What’s the use of pretending? We haven’t mattered much to each other for a long time. Having a fling got pretty boring together, he found himself other partners. It’s all right, the police know it all, it doesn’t mean a thing now, but I told them, anyhow. Sure we had rows, rows all the time. He went off for days when he felt like it, and there was always a girl behind it. Only last week we had a row again—how was I to know it was going to be the last one ever? There was this girl be used to know, a few years ago… she did feature articles for one of the magazines he used to do pictures for. They worked together a lot, around five or six years ago. She’d do interviews with people, or pieces about places, and he’d do the art work. And last week, after he was up there in your part of the world, suddenly he started looking for her again. He thought I didn’t know, but I did. He went to the magazine offices—I know because he came in with an old number from way back, and sat down with it and started thumbing through it as though he expected to find her telephone number, and then he swore and threw the thing across the room, because whatever it was he was looking for, he hadn’t found it. But when I went to pick it up he made good and sure he got there first. I saw the date, though, it was some time in 1964. They did a whole series together that year, I knew then there was something between them. Then he walked out, and didn’t come back until the Friday, and not a word to be got out of him, all he did all the weekend was turn out all his old pictures and slides, hunting for something. I might as well not have been here… I might as well have been dead.” The word shocked her into silence for a moment. She contemplated it bleakly, and accepted it: “And now he’s dead.”

  “Did you tell the police all this?” Dave asked.

  “I told them everything I could think of, my whole life story, not that I suppose it means anything now. I told them where I was Tuesday night, too, but how do you prove you were in a cinema? Not even a local, but in the city. From a quarter to five, when I left the office, I could have been anywhere. I didn’t come home. What for, I knew he wouldn’t be here!” Her pallid, unmarked morning face had quickened into painful and positive life. Whatever was left of it now, once she had been in love with her husband, and for all her disillusionment she still had not broken the habit of reckoning with him—or, as now, with the blank where he had been.

  “But you did tell them about this business with the magazine?” Dave insisted. “Because he must have had a reason for hunting up an issue six years old.”

  Surprise came as a relief to her. She looked up at him with fresh animation. “You really think it could mean something? I did tell them, yes, but I didn’t make all that much of it. I never thought… Here, wait a minute! You could do something for me, at that.”

  She got up quickly, and clacked out of the kitchen with more spring to her step than he had yet heard in it; and in a moment she was back with a limp and dog-eared magazine in her hand, Country Life-size, once glossy.

  “I didn’t give them this yesterday because I didn’t know where it was. I thought he’d taken it away with him, but he hadn’t, he’d only hidden it. I was turning out his papers and letters last night, after they’d gone. I found this shoved at the back of his transparency files. You’re going back there anyhow—give it to that inspector for me.”

  She put it into his hands. He had occasionally seen copies of it before, but half of it was social gossip, provincial at that, and lacking for him both general and local interest, and he had never bought a copy himself in his life. The Midland Scene—glossy monthly published right here in Birmingham, but belonging rather to the outer shires than to the city. July 1964, and consequently full of regattas, tennis, gardens open to the public, stately homes on show, and country race meetings. In the winter it would be hunt balls, meets, the exploits of midland skiers abroad, winter sports and annual dinners. The paper was good, the layout elaborate, the colour-printing first-class. He turned the pages, full of social events and comments that seemed to him as remote as Mars; and he came to a feature article with pictures, the centre-piece of the colour pages:

  Country Houses of the Midlands.

  Number Five: Mottisham Abbey,

  Midshire.

  There was no mistaking that long, lofty roof, that thick block of chimneys. The photographs were good and well printed, and had caught house and garden at their summer best. There were two shots of the exterior, one focused across all that remained of a wall of the refectory, barely breaking the soil, one from the best corner of the garden, over a jungle of roses. The lichen-yellows and sage-greens in the roof tiles made an exotic print; and that tall, erect, distinguished-looking fellow in the authentic country tweeds and leather elbows, with wild grey hair still curly and crisp as heather, was Robert Macsen-Martel, senior, a year or so before his death. Sixty years old, but looking at least ten years younger, with a smile that could fetch the birds out of the bushes—literally, according to Saul Trimble.

  Dave turned the page, and found a central-double-page spread with three more pictures: the dove-cote in the garden, the panelled hall, the drawing-room.

  Not the wine-cellar door! Was that the point? Was that what Bracewell had been hoping to find?

  He turned back to the previous page. “Text by Alix Trent. Pictures by Gerry Bracewell.”

  “It’s the house up there, where it happened, isn’t it?” said Bobbie Bracewell, watching him narrowly.

  “Yes, this is the house. The one the door came from.”

  “That’s what I thought. So the police ought to have this. I don’t know whether it means anything—but it meant something to him, all right. Or something that isn’t there meant something to him. Take it back with you.”

  “All right, if that’s what you want.” He hesitated, aware suddenly of her peculiar desolation, which had not been created, but only revealed, by the loss of a husband. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think he was looking for this Alix Trent—or not for her own sake. If he went to the trouble to get this back-number from somewhere, after all this time, it was for these pictures. When he was on a job like that, I suppose he’d take a fair number of pictures, and the author or the editor would choose the ones they wanted to use? There’d be more than just these few?”

  “Sometimes he’d take as many as thirty to get three, provided the magazine was paying for everything.”

  “And after he’d looked at these, and failed to find what he wanted, he started turning out all his own files again?”

  She shook her head sadly. “That wouldn’t do him any good, either. He never kept any but his few best negatives more than about three years, not where the work was commissioned. What space would he have for filing thousands of pictures in a place like this? He was always going to have a proper filing system and a proper library some day. When our ship came in—only we spent too much time pushing the boat out!” She laughed, and was again grave. “I’ll have to go and put my face on, it’s time I went. But I suppose I could have a look through them, just in case…”

  “Yes, do that,” said Dave, and got up from the kitchen table. “Thanks a lot for the coffee. Now just tell me where I can put the car for you, and I’ll be getting back.”

  He walked away from Number 10 Clement Gardens, towards the nearest bus-stop, and he had never been so glad that he wasn’t married. The last thing she had said to him, as he left, was: “Call in again some time, if you’re this way. You’re welcome any time.” And the kindling spark he had seen in her eye might have been merely the stimulus of preparing for the day’s work, but might equally well have been the first signal of a reviving interest in men—all those men who were still alive and not on a slab in the m
ortuary. Whatever its source, it made up his mind for him that he was never going to call in at Number 10 again. He didn’t dislike her, he was sincerely sorry for her, she even inspired a sort of respect by her rigorous honesty; but he was never going to see her again if he could help it. He’d take her magazine to Sergeant Moon or to Chief Inspector Felse, and he hoped she’d go through all those negatives and transparencies her husband had kept—at least it would give her an interest for an evening or two, and help her over the worst, even if she found nothing—but from this on, let the police take care of anything she produced.

  But the magazine under his arm bothered him. Here was confirmation, if nothing more, that Gerry Bracewell had seen something that puzzled, intrigued and excited him about that church door at St. Eata’s, and had wanted desperately to hunt up the pictures he had once made of the house in which the door had then hung. To compare? To confirm some nagging suspicion in his own mind that there was something changed about it? Could he have forgotten, in six years, exactly what pictures he had taken? Was it only a shot in the dark that there might have been a photograph of that door in its old position? Or did he know he’d photographed it? As many as thirty pictures to get three, his wife had said. He couldn’t remember which of his batch the magazine had chosen, he had to get hold of a copy of the article first. When that failed, what next? The negatives, presumably, would belong to The Midland Scene. So the next step would be—supposing the whole thing was urgent enough, and promising enough—to consult their records. Another disappointment? After he’d thrown the magazine across the room in fury and frustration he’d disappeared until the Friday, and only after that had he settled down grimly to turn out all his dead, past pictures, just in case he’d missed it. So before Friday he’d thought of something and someone else he might try. And drawn another blank.