The Knocker on Death's Door gfaf-10

by Ellis Peters

  “In a maxi, you mean?” He didn’t want to admit the idea at all. The broad, fair brow sweated for the first time. “I suppose it could have been, but honestly I don’t think so. She’d have to be as big as a man—I mean, well, lots of women are as big as some men, but this one—it’s hard to judge, but I’d say going on six feet if not over. Quite as tall as me. I wish now I’d gone after him, but there was this chap lying there, and I had to find out how bad he was, and do something about him…”

  “All right,” said George mildly, “I think that’s all, thanks, Brian. You can push off to bed now.”

  “Oh, and one thing,” supplemented Sergeant Moon pleasantly, “not a word about monks, brown robes and elusive figures. Not that it’ll make a blind bit of difference, they’ll be on to it before morning anyhow, but do me a favour, don’t you set it going.”

  “No, Sergeant,” said Brian with unusual serenity and complacency, “I won’t.”

  He departed, drained but satisfied. Looking back, he tried to fault his own performance, but not too enthusiastically, and wasn’t sure whether he could or not. These proficiency tests crop up at the most unexpected moments; you rise to them or you don’t. He had no special feeling of having fouled this one, as he crawled into bed and fell asleep.

  “I just wanted to mention,” said Dave, “though you probably know it already, that apparently all the regulars in the bar of the ‘Duck’ were putting on their usual performance last night for this poor soul who got laid out. I wasn’t there myself, but Dinah told me. Ed Jennings was prophesying doom, and Saul was being the scoffer this time. Nearly everybody was in on the act. I don’t know if it may have suggested something to somebody—a joke that turned sour. I just mention it.”

  “Perhaps,” George said, “we could have a quiet word with Miss Cressett tomorrow—very discreetly, and get the general tone. We shall have to talk to everyone who was present, eventually, but her account would certainly help us a lot. If a joke was intended, and got out of hand, somebody will cooperate. Thank you for your assistance. I’m sorry to have kept you so long. Good night!”

  Good morning would have been more appropriate, although, this being Sunday, the village appeared to be still fast asleep. But as Sergeant Moon said, as soon as Dave had left them, the word would be going round any moment now that the monks of Mottisham Abbey had struck again.

  “The boy won’t talk, once he’s said he won’t,” he said with certainty, “but the grapevine will have it before daylight. And by the way, young Brian could have, but didn’t. Don’t ask me how I know—simply I’d know if he had. In that case I might even have a glimmering why.”

  “Don’t bother about him, he’s all right. He wasn’t just shocked when I suggested it might be a woman, he was genuinely afraid it might!”

  “Hmmm, yes, I did wonder about that. And do you really think it might?” asked Sergeant Moon curiously.

  “What, six feet high and a dead shot with a twelve-pound rock? Not a chance in a million! Women have the necessary capacity for malice, all right,” said George, “and the cold blood, and every other requisite—but not the accurate aim.” He settled down at the table to work out the best deployment of his available manpower for the next twenty-four hours, and only after some minutes of concentration reverted uneasily to his previous pronouncement. “I think!” he said dubiously; and with burgeoning alarm and slightly disoriented faith: “I hope!”

  “Ha!” snorted Sergeant Moon tolerantly, “where women are concerned, you and young Brian are two for a pair!”

  Sunday passed in a semi-daze after the police visit, which was discreetly timed and considerately conducted. They had let Dinah have her sleep out and, Dave catch up with his, and given him time, when he was in circulation again, to acquaint her with what had happened in the night. But all day long she kept saying helplessly: “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it! They didn’t mean him any harm, not any of them. You know what they’re like, they just close up against the invader, and the more superior he is, the more they make him pay for it. But they never hurt anyone!” She said “they” only because she was referring in particular to the inner circle of the community, which was male; what she meant, what she would have said if she had stopped to think more deeply, was “we.”

  Late in the evening Hugh telephoned, from one of the northern checkpoints on the circuit.

  “I’ve got five minutes in hand, so I had to call you. Maybe there won’t be another chance till the finish. Everything’s going fine.” He told her, volubly, the clinical details, how the engine was running, how well he was doing on timing, and how few points they’d lost. “How are things with you?”

  “Fine,” she said mendaciously. “Only it’s started raining again now.” She was sorry for the police, doggedly parting grass-blade from grass-blade round the churchyard, under the dripping trees. “What’s it like up there? Usually it rains far worse than here.”

  “No, not bad at all. Nothing but an occasional shower all day. Ted sends his love. He’s just getting everything possible filled up again with coffee. I’m going to need it before the night’s out, but with a bit of luck we’re well in the running.”

  “Take care of yourself. And call me after the finish, just to prove you’re in one piece still.”

  “I will. Be good, girl!”

  She came back into the living-room with a carefully bland face, and Dave knew that she hadn’t said a word about the night’s developments to Hugh. Why put him off his stroke when he was in the middle of something dear to his heart?

  Sunday night in “The Sitting Duck” was like the sober phase of a wake. Even the jokes had gone into black, though they were still present. Eb Jennings never came in on a Sunday, preferring his pint at home after all the business of the day was over; and it was Brian who came to fetch it for him. He stayed long enough to consume half a pint on his own account, with his elbows spread comfortably across the corner of the bar counter.

  “Still at it, are they?” asked Saul Trimble.

  “No, called it off for the night. What can you do in the dark?”

  “I swear there was more of ’em outside, picking bits of lint off the trees and scraping crumbs of earth into pillboxes, than there was of you lot inside singing ‘Through death’s dark vale I fear no ill.’ ”

  “He isn’t dead,” said Brian practically.

  “He would have been, from all accounts, if you hadn’t showed up.”

  Nobbie came and leaned her fair head and impudently pretty face across the bar towards Brian. “D’you know they’ve been grilling all of us, everybody who was in last night, about this Bristow fellow? In case some of the boys set up some sort of a fright for him in the night. But they never! Well, you know, don’t you? It is true, isn’t it, that you saw something? Go on, do tell us! You know what they’re saying? They’re saying when the door was moved back again, the abbot came with it! It was something like a monk you saw, wasn’t it? Go on, you can tell me,” she coaxed, her voice sinking to a confidential whisper. “I won’t say a word to a soul, honest, if you don’t want me to.”

  Ellie Crouch materialised as if by magic, and tapped her daughter smartly on the shoulder. “Come on, are you serving here or not? Can’t you see Mr. Swayne’s waiting for a refill?”

  Nobbie withdrew to her duty with a toss of her blonde head. Brian had always wondered why Mrs. Crouch had to shove her oar in every time Nobbie spoke civilly to him. Not that it mattered, because he was not in the least interested in Nobbie, he thought her fat and fair, and he liked his girls active and dark. Still, he wondered what the old lady (Ellie was a year older than his own mother and nearly as pretty!) had against a likely lad like him.

  “You don’t want to let young Brian Jennings get too familiar with you,” said Ellie confidentially to her daughter, after Brian had departed. “After all, they haven’t solved this affair, have they, and he was in the middle of it this time, you can’t be too careful.” Her conscience pricked; she couldn’t rea
lly believe that the police suspected the Jennings boy, any more man she did, but all means are fair means in a crisis. “You can do better than a verger’s son,” she concluded, again doing herself less than justice, for in fact the distinct possibilities and attractions of the verger’s son were the chief cause of her disquiet.

  “Him?” said Nobbie, astonished. “Oh, Mom! Why, he used to sit next to me nearly all through school. Me go overboard for Brian? It’d feel like necking with me own brother!”

  Sometimes Ellie Crouch’s family, in their forthright innocence, came out with things that made her blood run cold.

  The office telephone rang at about eleven o’clock on Monday morning, and Dinah went to answer it in the certainty that it would be Hugh with the final placings.

  “It’s too early,” Dave warned her. “They won’t have all their sums done for hours yet, and what’s the good of reporting a provisional result?”

  Dinah came back from the telephone with a thoughtful look on her face, and a small spark of curiosity in her eye as she looked at her brother. “It’s for you. It’s a girl. Name of Alix Trent.” It was a name she had never heard, but she carefully kept the question out of her voice. Dave could not even be sure why he had not told Dinah about Alix; perhaps out of the lingering fear that after all nothing might come of it.

  His face gave nothing away as he went to the telephone; hut certainly he went with alacrity.

  “I know you told me to get in touch with the police,” said the creamy voice of Alix over the line, without preamble, “but I needed to confirm something with you first. I couldn’t be sure whether to trust my memory or not. It was almost the last thing you said to me on Friday, unless I’m making a mistake. You said ‘anything you think of about the door or the knocker.’ You did say ‘knocker,’ didn’t you?”

  Yes, that’s right.“ But he couldn’t see where she was leading him.

  ‘Good, so I wasn’t imagining things. It was the only time you mentioned a knocker, as far as I remember, so I wanted to make sure of my ground before I started anything.”

  “You mean you’ve remembered something odd about the knocker?”

  “Very odd,” agreed Alix. There was one instant of curious and speculative silence on the line. “There wasn’t any knocker!”

  CHAPTER 7

  « ^ »

  It was the simplest discrepancy possible, and it had never for one moment occurred to him. He couldn’t help reacting with: “Are you sure?” though the last thing he had intended was to cast any doubts on anything for which Alix vouched with such certainty.

  “Absolutely sure. I couldn’t tell you any details of the carving now, but I do know it was just a great carved door, with nothing whatever stuck on it, except the big iron latch and lock that fastened it.”

  “But why?” he wondered blankly. “Why, in that case, should anyone have put a knocker on it now?”

  “I can think of one good reason,” said Alix sensibly. “It had one originally, which for some reason was taken off, and when they gave the door back to the church they simply restored the knocker, too.”

  “Yes. That makes sense.” But it was plain from the tone of his voice that he was not satisfied. If Bracewell had been mistakenly pursuing a mystery which was no mystery, and a scoop which was no story at all, why should anyone want to kill him? Why knock the second inquisitive stranger on the head? “I can think of one not so good one, too. To hide something queer about that part of the door.”

  “Yes,” she agreed after a startled pause, “that’s also possible.”

  Bracewell had had a camera with him on his second visit, though he had denied carrying one. Everyone knew Brian had found it in the waste dump in the churchyard, minus the film. According to a witness, Bracewell had been photographing details of the oldest carving in the church. Checking whether everything matched, the period, the workmanship, the type of iron, the decorative style? Or if not actually checking on these things for himself, compiling a file of evidence for someone who could?

  “You never mentioned to Bracewell about there being no knocker?”

  “It never arose. If you hadn’t spoken the word I should never have thought about it.” And she added reasonably: “But he had his own memories of that trip, he may well have hit on the same point in the end. He went back to investigate on the spot, anyhow.”

  He had, and look where it got him!

  “Alix, the police ought to hear this from you, and as soon as possible. Are you free, if I come along and collect you now?”

  “Yes,” she said without hesitation. “How soon can you be here?”

  “In about an hour and a quarter.”

  “Good, I’ll be waiting.”

  Opportunity dazzled him, suddenly turning the tragedies of Mottisham bright side out. “And then come home and meet my sister. Have tea with us. You needn’t hurry back, need you?”

  “No,” said Alix, “I needn’t hurry back.”

  It was somewhat after three o’clock that afternoon when Alix and Dave left the temporary police office at the vicarage. Sergeant Moon closed the door upon them reverently, and let out a great breath of mingled wonder, elation and achievement.

  “The door! I always said it was the door! As simple as that! Who says we never get any luck? A very nice little witness, that!”

  Detective Constable Reynolds, who had taken down Alix’s brief and brisk statement at her dictation, and was now watching her furtively through the window out of the corner of his eye, as she walked away with Dave down the vicarage drive, also thought her a very nice little witness, but reflected sadly that she seemed to be already booked. She had certainly tossed a fire-cracker into the workings of the case.

  “Well, do we get the thing off?” asked Sergeant Moon practically.

  “We do, and right away,” said George. “We also get a check on the question of whether it does or doesn’t belong where it is.” He lifted the telephone and dialled the forensic laboratory. “Your young Crowe is the man of his hands around here, Jack, isn’t he? Get hold of him and tell him what the job is, and he’ll tell us what tools he wants.”

  “He’s already got all the tools there are,” said Sergeant Moon.

  “That’s the style!” He turned to the telephone as the distant voice hailed him. “Hullo, Joe? George Felse here. Can you get hold of Professor Grazier for me, and get him out here as soon as possible? If he’s not available, find me somebody else who knows about ironwork—especially medieval ironwork. And I mean knows! Somebody who can date things within a quarter of a century, and locate them by district, school, master, or whatever goes for iron. If he knows as much about stone and wood carving of the same period, all the better. Make it urgent.” He cradled the receiver. “Get some of your boys on the gates, Jack, and ward off all witnesses for the present. This is one even the grapevine may miss if nobody actually sees it. This bunch of yours—you know this?—work mainly by intelligent deduction. Sometimes I think we ought to recruit the bar of the ‘Duck’ en masse into the force. But who’s to deduce a silly, simple move like taking the knocker off a door?”

  It took the expert an hour and a half to get out to Mottisham, but it took Constable Crowe, that solid, silent, deft-handed countryman, just about as long to detach the four heavy bolts that secured the knocker to the door. Their heads were buried among the burgeoning leaves that sprouted from the mane of the mythical beast, and spread out into a round plaque flattened against the oak. Crowe dealt with them one by one, delicately and slowly, reluctant to deface even the black paint with which—surely misguidedly?—they had been coated along with the knocker. Evidence was evidence; and besides, they might find nothing beneath, and be faced with the necessity of restoring what they had displaced. The first minor revelation came when he had removed two of them, and the whole mass of iron submitted to being moved slightly in its place, to reveal a frilled edge of thick, soiled varnish beneath. The knocker had not been disturbed when the door was cleaned. Therefore the knocker had n
ot been restored to its place only when the move to the church was contemplated, and the necessary cleaning begun, but at some previous time and for some other reason. After Alix Trent’s visit; yet before the transfer to the National Trust was contemplated.

  The third bolt came away with a slight, grating protest, and was laid aside on a sheet of newspaper beside the other two. The beast’s head, sanctuary ring and all, could now be turned in a half-circle before it jarred and stuck, and Crowe turned it gently back again.

  The fourth bolt was tenacious, but subject to manipulation because it was the last. Crowe withdrew it, laid it beside its fellows, and used both hands reverently to dislodge and lift away the entire weighty mass of the knocker, beast, ring, leaves and all. It left the wood with an audible sucking sigh, and he placed it upon the extended sheet of polythene set to receive it.

  Shoulder-high to a man of medium height, chest-high to a man a little taller, the irregular, rounded blot of old varnish darkened like a wen against the pale, scoured oak. At first glance that blank, uncleaned surface appeared to be all they had uncovered; on closer inspection there was one minute freckle on its smoothness, a little to the left of centre, a round mole where the glancing light clotted, as though the varnish had been applied over an oblique knothole. Only this knothole was not darker, but faintly paler than the surrounding wood.

  “Touched up,” said Crowe, and gouged delicately at the spot. The varnish flaked. He scraped a few shreds of dry matter into his palm. “Plastic wood. Somebody filled up—a hole.” He didn’t want to name it more exactly, not yet. No one else wasted words on it, either. It was plain that this had been done some time before the restoration was undertaken. “Want me to drill it out?”

  “Do that,” said George, “and go carefully.”

  Busy as a terrier at a rat-hole, the drill kicked back pale, powdery shreds of plastic wood, and buried itself deeper and deeper into the mass of the door. What can you hide in a door? George had asked earlier. And where? There it is, a slab of wood with two sides, everything about it visible to the naked eye. No, not quite everything.