The Knocker on Death's Door gfaf-10

by Ellis Peters

  “You did come just a little too early, as a matter of fact,” she said, stretching in the back seat with a sigh of relief. “He never really got started on what he wanted to say, but by all the signs his job was to put me off marrying Hugh. Put me off or pay me off—he never got as far as offering me money, I really do wonder if he would have! Who do they think they are, with their ridiculous anemic faces and their feeble blue blood? In this day and age, I ask you! Hugh will be furious! At least, he would, only I haven’t the faintest intention of ever telling him.”

  “He’s not the only one,” said Dave grimly from the driving seat, “who’s got a right to be furious.”

  “But that’s nothing, you should hear how his mother says ‘in trade’—about you, love! She’s the one who gave Robert the job of getting rid of me, of course, to do him justice he wasn’t all that happy about it. She kept out of the way. Said to be ill in bed and under the doctor, but I suspect it’s a diplomatic illness.” Dinah was simmering down somewhat more slowly than she had expected of herself; was it possible that she could be really upset about such an absurd interview?

  In the narrow gateway, which it was necessary to approach with great care from either direction, they came nose to nose with another car turning slowly in. A police car, with three men in plainclothes aboard. Both cars halted politely, as if in neighbourly conversation. The police car began to back out and clear the gate, and then as abruptly stopped; a window was rolled down, and George Felse leaned out.

  “Mr. Cressett?—I thought I knew the car!” The door opened, and George came loping alongside. “Have you still got Miss Trent with you?” It was not yet dusk, but there between the overgrown trees a green twilight hung, obscuring colours and outlines.

  “I’m here,” said Alix, lowering the window.

  “If your friends wouldn’t mind waiting a quarter of an hour or so, Miss Trent, will you come back with me to the house? I’m going to have a look at the cellar where the church door used to hang, and I’d be very grateful if you’d come with me and see if you notice anything—anything at all—to remark on.”

  Alix began to say: “But wouldn’t Mr. Macsen-Martel be more…” but she let the sentence die away on her lips. “Yes, I see,” she said. Until that moment it had not been clear to her that she was the only remaining witness, on this particular subject, who could be regarded as disinterested. Robert’s role was not yet clear, and no doubt he would be expected to co-operate, too; but that tall, thin figure of his was beginning to cast a long shadow. “Yes, I’ll come, of course,” she said, and got out of the car.

  “I’ll back up under the trees there, where there’s room to pass,” said Dave, “and let you through. We’ll wait, Alix.”

  The police car slid by, long and dark, and rolled to rest in front of the doorway of the house. And correct and impenetrable as ever, Robert opened the door to them.

  “Good evening,” said George. “You remember me? Chief Inspector Felse—I’m in charge of the inquiry into this murder case, I had occasion to call and see you some days ago, the day the body was discovered, in fact. I wonder if you can give me ten minutes or so of your time, just long enough to show me the site where the door used to hang before you gave it back to the church. Oh, by the way, I believe you and Miss Trent have already met. Miss Trent did a feature article on the house a few years ago, and remembers the wine-cellar as it was then. I was lucky enough to meet her and her friends in your gateway, and I took the liberty of asking her to come back with me. I hope we don’t come too inconveniently?”

  His voice was cool, neutral and disarming. And if Robert was going to inquire about a search warrant, he would have to do so now, and in doing so surrender altogether too much of the cramped room he had for manoeuvring. But Robert’s face remained impassive, apart from the faintest air of distaste and weariness, and he looked at them without apparent disquiet, and stepped back from the doorway courteously to allow them in.

  “Of course not. I realise the extreme pressures there must be on your time, Chief Inspector. Mine is very much less valuable. Please come in, Miss Trent. I didn’t know you’d seen the Abbey before. I should have been glad to show you the house if I’d realised, though I’m afraid we haven’t always been able to maintain it as we should have liked. In the future I hope it will be possible to look after it properly.”

  He closed the outer door, and they stood in the chill, dusky hall. The arched window at the far end of the room shimmered greenly with the movement of leaves, in the rising wind of the October evening. It gave almost the appearance of a french door opening on to the garden, but when they drew nearer Alix saw that outside the glass the ground fell away, so that this floor was six feet or so above the level of the sloping lawn below. The cellars beneath this rear part of the house were only partially buried.

  “This way,” said Robert, and turned left beside the window, where two massive stone newel posts jutted, and a broad, open stairway descended some eleven or twelve feet into a flagged passage, too wide, perhaps, to be truly a passage, more of a square lobby. They could see only part of the paved floor from the head of the stairs; and across the grey surface, more dimly than here above, the restless shimmer of light and shadow ran like the movement of a brook from right to left. Somewhere on the right there was a window or an open grille above ground-level, through which the light and movement of the outer world could still enter.

  “Be careful on the stairs,” said Robert scrupulously. “The treads are very worn. Shall I go first?”

  As soon as he switched on a light below, the pattern of flowing, reflected light from outside the window paled and submerged into the flat grey stone of the flooring. The wide treads of the stairs were hollowed two inches deep, and none of them had ever been replaced. Alix thought of all the feet that had passed up and down here over the centuries to achieve that bended bow of stone at every step. Towards the foot of the stair they already had a ceiling over their heads, and at once there was a hollow echo, distant and delayed, as though someone unseen and unknown trod always one step behind them. And some eight feet from the foot of the stairs the new cellar door came into view, directly facing them.

  They stood in a stone box which was almost a perfect cube, except that the ceiling over their heads was a shallow vault instead of flat. In the wall on their right the expected lunette of window—she remembered it now—began at ground level, five feet above the floor on which they stood, and arched to the ceiling, but all it let in now, in competition with the single electric bulb within, was a green dusk rapidly deepening into darkness. Otherwise this small anteroom was empty and bare; and the door facing them was merely a plain new door, a lightweight compared with the one it had replaced, finished in natural oak but of ordinary thickness and without ornament.

  “Not as spectacular as the other one,” said Robert with detached appraisal, “but more in keeping with our circumstances, perhaps. It isn’t locked, if you want to go inside.”

  He pressed the plain, respectable iron latch and pushed the door open, standing back to let them go in. The door swung smoothly, and brought them into a narrow, barrel-vaulted cellar which must surely be the oldest remaining fragment of the Abbey. A low stone settle was built along one wall, and here and there on the wall itself they could trace the round marks left by the rim of large wine-casks. The opposite wall was built off by buttress-like excrescences into three empty compartments. The whole room was bare, clean and cold, and there was nothing in it to be recorded by the mind or the eye.

  Except, perhaps, the slight irregularity of the flagstones inside the doorway, and the shallow, rounded scars that marked some of them. Broken arcs of three concentric circles, centring on the hinges of the door. The outside one of the three was the most noticeable, and reappeared three times on the arc described by the outer edge of the door, which was so wide that it spanned nearly half the cellar when it was opened. Some of the stones were unmarked, some rose slightly higher and carried the scars. The two inner circles s
howed only here and there, and more shallowly. Not from this door, so much was certain; it swung above the marks without grazing anywhere. Perhaps the old one had dropped a little before it was moved. But was that likely, after all those centuries? And the scrape-marks, though not brand-new, were notably paler grey than the rest of the stone, like slate-pencil marks on slate.

  “You remember it like this?” George asked causally.

  “It’s some time ago,” Alix said, “but I do remember it, now that I see it again. I remember the vault—actually it’s rather a nice one, and not very usual—and the size of the flags.”

  Robert stood courteously holding the door wide, not following them within; a gentle indication that though he was willing to co-operate fully, nevertheless even his time had its value, if only to him. His pale face was quite motionless.

  “Thank you,” said George, “I think that’s all, just for the moment. But I would like a word with you still, if you wouldn’t mind waiting until I take Miss Trent back to her friends. You may be able to help me over one or two matters.”

  Robert’s enervated voice said with resignation, but still with immaculate politeness: “Certainly, I’m at your disposal.”

  They climbed the steps, and Robert switched out the light. The arched window showed a clinging, gossamer darkness of trees, dappled irregularly with the pallor of the sky showing through. The hall was ill-lit and hollow-sounding, a desolation. At the front door Robert said goodbye to Alix distantly, and withdrew again into the house, pointedly leaving the door ajar. In the waiting police car, Detective Constable Reynolds and Detective Sergeant Brice sat silent, watching the house while not for a moment appearing to be watching it.

  “Well?” said George quietly, as soon as they were out of earshot in the drive. “Anything to comment on?”

  It was left to her, of course, he was not going to prompt her, she understood that.

  “Yes, something definite, but I don’t know if it means anything. There’s the floor—those marks as if the door dragged. But the door doesn’t drag. And neither did the old one, at least not when I was here previously, six years ago. It isn’t that I remember whether there were any marks on the floor then or not,” she said carefully. “I think I should have noticed at the time if there had been, but I doubt if I should have remembered. But what I do know is that the old door didn’t drag when I came here on that visit. It was beautifully hung—all that weight and mass, and it swung at a touch.”

  “You’ve got a special reason for being so sure of that?” asked George curiously.

  It was the one thing she had not felt it necessary to include in her statement, but she told him now. They were approaching the parked car, and Dave was standing by the door waiting for her.

  “Yes, I have. We were being shown round by the old owner, the one who’s dead. I’m told he had a reputation as a woman-chaser. Well, he lived up to it. While Gerry Bracewell was taking some shots of the carving of the door, our host contrived to shut himself and me on the inner side of it—it was quite easy, obligingly drawing it to so that Gerry could operate freely. And so that he could, too. I moved fast, and the door behaved like silk. I remember what a surprise it was to find such a barrier moving so sweetly to let me out. That’s how I know.”

  “Thank you,” said George. “That sounds absolutely reliable, and may be more useful than you know.”

  But the look she gave him as they parted, level and long and silent, stayed with him as he turned back towards the house; and it was in his mind that her intelligence worked always one step ahead, and that somewhere within her, whether she had yet worked it out or not, she already possessed the full knowledge of the significance of what she had told him, and had foreseen its consequences.

  In the back seat of the car Dinah said with a sigh: “I’ve hardly had time even to say hullo to you yet, Alix, and Dave’s only known you a few days, and already we seem to have landed you in more complications than I can add up at this moment, in my confused condition. You won’t let it put you off us, will you? Or off this place? We don’t always behave like this, sometimes we’re more or less normal.”

  “Murder’s abnormal anywhere,” said Alix ruefully. She had told them what had passed in the house, since no one had suggested she should necessarily keep it to herself, and in any case the indications were that it, or its results, would soon be known to everybody. “At least I can’t complain that Mottisham is boring, can I?”

  “But what on earth does it all mean?” Dinah fretted. “Drag marks under a door aren’t so rare, couldn’t the old door have dropped a little during the last few years, since you first saw it?”

  “After being in position and perfect for centuries,” Dave said from the driving seat, “why should it drop suddenly now?”

  “If the National Trust are taking the place over,” Alix said slowly, thinking it out, “then as soon as the agreement is finally made they’ll put their own experts in to see what restorations and renovations are necessary. If a place is going to be shown to the public as a historical monument, then everything possible about it has to be authenticated and documented. Do you suppose that could be the real reason why the door was given back to the church? Not because it once belonged there, but because it would attract too much attention where it was, and might give something away that wasn’t supposed to be given away? Is there any real evidence that it once belonged to the church porch?”

  “Almost everything about the Abbey,” said Dave, “is an open question. Before it folded, this had become a degenerate and disorderly house. Apparently the standard of scholarship was low, and what was left of the library was burned, and most of the records with it. You could make up what stories you like about the last years of Mottisham Abbey, and if you can’t prove ’em, neither can anyone else disprove ’em. The door’s obviously a genuine part of the old abbey set-up, but as for where it belonged, who’s to say?”

  “But Robert Macsen-Martel, apparently, did say. He said it came from the south porch.”

  “He said family tradition said so. Who’s going to argue about family tradition—especially against the family?”

  “He also said,” Dinah pointed out, “that there was this story about the monk and the devil and the sanctuary knocker. But now it seems there wasn’t really a knocker on the door at all, not while it was in the house.”

  “I wonder,” said Dave, as they turned into the Comerbourne road, “what would have happened if they had left the door in position in the house? The prowling experts would be pretty quick to notice if it dragged, wouldn’t they? Old, settled floors and doors don’t suddenly change their habits. If that’s the oldest part of the house, it would have come within the scope of their brief right away. They’d have wanted to put it right, even if they didn’t burn with curiosity to find out how it ever got put wrong. Either re-hang the door, or re-lay the flagstones—one way or the other.”

  Yes, thought Alix, that’s exactly what they’d have done. And now somebody else is surely doing it in their place. But try as she would, she could not see any farther ahead than that, what came next was impenetrable mystery. The question: “Who?” might by now have a potential answer, but the question: “Why?” produced only a blank silence.

  Dinah turned and looked back through the rear window towards the overgrown shrubberies and old trees of the Abbey grounds.

  “I wonder what the police are doing there now?”

  “They’re taking up the cellar floor,” said Alix.

  CHAPTER 9

  « ^ »

  Moving in unobtrusively from Comerbourne without touching the centre of the village, three more police cars had wound their way up the Abbey drive, and found themselves parking space at the rear, in what had once been the stableyard. No one here had owned horses since old Robert broke his neck, and the rank autumn grass was growing high between the cobbles, and the moss shone lime-gold on the roofs. The clock on the stumpy little tower over the entrance had not gone for years; one hand was missing from
its dial, and the weathercock that had once crowned it now sagged upside-down against its side. Both time and season had stopped in Mottisham Abbey.

  There was one more car visiting that evening, but it contented itself with circling the flower-beds, ready to leave again, and Dr. Braby, scuttling in through the hall with his bag and up the stairs to his patient, never realised that the police were in the house at all. Robert had seen him coming, and excused himself with probable relief but undoubted dignity in order to let him in and escort him upstairs. It was nearly twenty minutes before he came back into the dismal, shadowy drawing-room. Standing in the centre of this mouldering and menacing magnificence, everywhere besieged by the evidences of decay and senility, his pallor and stringiness seemed appropriate, as if he had been sucked dry by his environment long ago, and it was too late now for life to offer him any kind of transfusion.

  The doctor’s car fussed busily away down the drive. Robert cast a single glance after the sound, and came back to his duty.

  “I’m sorry, I hope now we shan’t be interrupted again. My mother is giving us cause for anxiety, but she is sleeping now. You’ll forgive me if I go to her occasionally, just to make sure she’s still asleep, and needs nothing. At the moment I’m alone in the house with her, you see. It isn’t easy to get anyone to come out here for private nursing, but by tomorrow Doctor Braby hopes to find me a night nurse, at any rate. And tomorrow my brother will be back.”

  “I very much regret,” George said gently, “having to trouble you at such a time, and I hope Mrs. Macsen-Martel will be improving by tomorrow. But you’ll readily understand that my job doesn’t allow of delays, even on the best of grounds. I’ll try not to let our presence here touch your mother at all.”

  Robert did not question the phrase “our presence here” openly, but his thin brows soared towards his pallid hair.