The Knocker on Death's Door gfaf-10

by Ellis Peters

  “Thank you, you’re very considerate. How can I help you?”

  The strangest thing was that there seemed to be no curiosity in him. Tension, yes, interest, yes, wariness, yes, but no curiosity. Everything about this house Robert knows already, thought George, it’s merely a question of how much others may know. And the old lady upstairs, doped with antibiotics and rustling on the edge of pneumonia? Was it equally certain that there was not much to be known here that she did not know?

  “By giving me carte blanche,” said George, “to make a complete and thorough search of any part of the premises I feel to be necessary. Notably your wine-cellar, where we were a little while ago.”

  Something immediate and extreme, though hardly visible, happened to the clay-pale features. They petrified before George’s eyes into grey granite, about as durable as anything in the world. The blue-grey eyes were like the inlaid eyes of a late Egyptian bust, brilliant and hard in lapis-lazuli, alabaster, silver, black stone and rock crystal, more alive than life, and yet fixed for ever in one dead stare.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t think you have shown the necessity for any such move. What evidence can these premises possibly have to offer concerning a murder that took place somewhere else? I understand it’s with that case that you’re concerned?”

  “The door that has played such a prominent part in the murder and attempted murder with which I’m dealing,” George pointed out patiently, “formerly hung in your cellar. I don’t regard that as irrelevant. Will you give us permission to investigate as we think fit—on the site?”

  He waited, and the stone figure sat motionless, head raised, as if he listened for a faint call from upstairs. He closed his eyes for a moment; the lids were lofty, blue-veined, chiselled into pure, simplified lines like the eyelids of a dead man on a tomb. When he opened his eyes again they were human, defensive and inexpressibly weary.

  “I admitted you, Chief Inspector, as a normal visitor. What you propose I regard as abnormal and inadmissible. I understand that I have the right to reserve any such permission as you are demanding—”

  “Requesting,” George corrected him very gently.

  “Requesting, if you prefer. I beg your pardon. I’m sorry, but I can’t accommodate you.” He rose from his chair; so did George. “Good evening, Chief Inspector!”

  “Am I to take it,” asked George mildly, “that you insist upon a search warrant? Certainly that’s your right. But innocent people often waive it.”

  “I do require to see a warrant—yes. I think we should avail ourselves of these safeguards. They were provided for a purpose.”

  George reached into his briefcase, and fished out the warrant he had taken out with a magistrate in Sergeant Moon’s own proprietary village of Abbot’s Bale before mounting this operation. “Very well! I would have liked to have your co-operation freely offered, but you’re certainly within your rights. These also are provided for a purpose.” He held out the warrant before Robert’s eyes. “Please satisfy yourself that everything is in order.”

  Robert read, and remained standing for a long while unmoving. The stone ebbed gradually into clay again; his shoulders sagged, the lines of his face dragged downwards into a kind of resigned despondency, and melted and refined still further into a purity of withdrawal such as George could not remember ever seeing before in all his experience. When everything becomes impossible, you go into yourself; you do not necessarily close the door, but you make sure that no one else comes in after you; there is a ban on the entrance, but outward there is still a clear view, even if it has to be upon ruin. And there you sit down and watch, as unwaveringly as a viewer before a compulsive television screen.

  “In that case, of course,” said the remote voice coldly from somewhere within the enclosed place, “I recognise your authority. I can only protest at what I feel to be an unwarranted intrusion—warrant or no! But of course you must do your duty.”

  He sat down. It was more like the folding up of a jointed figure when the human hand is withdrawn. His long fingers gripped the arms of his chair and clung, but all the rest of him was lank and limp in the black leather cushions. Once he looked up at the ceiling, again listening with strained attention; but after that he was quiescent.

  “We’ll try not to disrupt your existence or your house too much,” said George, “and in particular not to disturb your mother in any way.”

  “Thank you,” said the dead voice, “I appreciate that.” George went out to summon his reserves from the stableyard. It was almost dark now, the October evening had settled in clear and still, even the twilight breeze had dropped. A mute and eerie calm closed in upon the Abbey. Two carloads of police moved quietly through the hall to the cellar stairs. They had picks with them, crowbars, shovels, everything they needed to excavate the floor of the cellar. Robert made no effort to get up and watch their passage or their progress. There was no need; whatever they found, he would be appraised of it all too soon.

  After a while he went up to sit with his mother, though her sleep, stertorous and halting as it was, shut him out beyond appeal. At least he could take care of her as long as he was free to do so.

  Quarters were cramped inside the cellar by the time they had installed a couple of lights powerful enough for their purpose, and deployed enough men to be able to deal, one by one, with the huge flagstones. This must, George thought, have been merely the private wine-cellar of the abbot’s lodging, for it was of no great size. Perhaps at some time other, related chambers, rendered unsafe by decay, had been sealed off, and this one buttressed to continue in service. There must once have been more rooms than this; but this was going to be enough to keep them busy all night.

  They numbered the flagstones, and stacked them in order against the wall of the anteroom as they were prised up from their seating. The photographic team recorded the scene at every stage. And what with the concentration of lights and the hard labour in an enclosed space, everyone began to sweat, even in this chilly underground atmosphere.

  The soil they uncovered was darkly grey and hard-packed, with seams of reddish gravel. They had begun in the centre of the room, for two good reasons; they had more room to work there, and therefore someone else bent on hiding rather than finding would also have found this the easiest place to begin; and the deepest grooves left by the old door just touched the edges of the stone they chose to displace first. If the door had not dropped, then the stones must have risen. Flags may indeed rise and fall slightly with the vicissitudes of frost and thaw, but in that case they do not wait six hundred years before suddenly heaving themselves high enough to foul a door; and these scars were not more than a few years old. Something more than the seasonal vagaries of the English weather had unsettled this floor. Given time, thought George, it might have re-settled completely; but the evidence left by the door would still have been there, ineradicable.

  “What exactly are we looking for?” asked the photographer confidentially, between sessions.

  “Anything that shouldn’t be there,” said George laconically.

  Their guess was as good as his, that was the truth of the matter; but the photographer shrugged and withdrew to his work again philosophically under the impression that the C.I. was being cagey. Yet he and everyone else in the group, if required to guess, would have come up with the same answer. What we’re looking for, George thought grimly, is a motive; but what we’re going to find is a man. What else gets itself buried secretly under a cellar floor? A man—or a woman, of course. The indications were so positive that there was no eluding them; yet they made no sense. They had one murder and one attempted murder on their hands, but nowhere in all this curious affair was there the least suggestion of a person lost, either man or woman. If this piece of the puzzle really existed, it was a piece that fitted in nowhere.

  But if it existed, it was here, and they would find it.

  It took them some time, but they had the whole night, and could afford to go about it methodically. When they had uncovered
the entire centre of the floor, the cross-lights showed an area which seemed to vary slightly in colouring and texture from the surrounding hard-packed soil. They staked it out carefully and began to dig. Eight feet long, approximately, and five or six feet wide. Big enough. Big enough to receive the thing to be hidden, and for the contortions of whoever had hidden it. The earth grew more friable and workable after the first crust was off. As they removed it, it was piled carefully in the open space against the rear wall, where two sweating constables began to sift it under a strong light for any unforeseen trifles it might disgorge.

  The boots of the diggers gradually vanished below soil level, a rectangle of darkness sank into the earth. Picks were discarded after the first foot or so, and the shovel went on steadily hefting out dark clots of earth to add to the growing heap at the back of the room. By midnight they were three feet down, and Constable Barnes had just taken over the shovel. He was one of Sergeant Moon’s young men, six feet three of solid countryman, with a light step and a light hand, a serviceable brain and an invaluable gift for looking simple-minded. His sense of touch was extremely sensitive. He drove in the spade, and halted in mid-thrust, refraining from pressing home the stroke.

  “Something here—something soft but tough, that gives— Hold on!” He went to his knees, and began to excavate with hands nearly as large as the spade. Something allowed itself to be coaxed out of the soil, earth crumbing from it as he found an edge and eased it into the light. Fabric, beginning to rot, for his fingers went through the threads when he exerted too much force, but still tough enough to hold together. A button appeared, and as he scraped the soil away, another. When he turned the edge he held, there were fragments and frayed ends of a thinner fabric, a lining.

  “Tweed,” said Barnes, thumbing the remnants. “There’s nobody inside this—look, just thrown in, folded double.” He scraped industriously until he got it free, and handed it up out of the trench, gently shaking into recognisable form a man’s coat. It was of no colour now but the colour of the earth, but the laboratory would have enough material here to keep them busy for a week.

  “It looks as if we’re arriving,” said George, sitting on his heels at the edge of the grave. “Take it gently from now on, he shouldn’t be far below. If a coat had to be disposed of, there could be a hat, as well.” The coat had settled one thing. This wasn’t one of old Robert’s ladies, more importunate and inconvenient than the rest, which had been one of the possibilities in George’s mind.

  “I went digging with one of the Birmingham University archaeologists, couple of seasons back,” said Barnes surprisingly. “He’d have had me brushing away delicately with a little soft paint-brush, just to open up a ruddy post-hole, and here we go digging for real men, not their artifacts, with picks and shovels, and one night to do it in. If you ask me, there’s something queer about that lot of values, history or no history.” But all the time he was on his knees at one end of the excavated trench, using his great hands, feeling for the strangers in the soil. “Who wants a post-hole, anyhow? When I volunteered, I thought I was going to dig out the foundations of a whole damn’ castle before lunch, and the bones of half the garrison after. All I found was a couple of bits of pottery, and a beef bone, and a bit of charred wood. I din’ think much of that. I never went again.”

  “Is that why you joined the force?” George asked with genuine interest. The huge, artistic, subtle hands smoothing away the layers of soil had halted, gently probing, quivering like a water-diviner’s willow twig.

  “Maybe. Live men matter more, I reckon.” He withdrew his hands for a moment, brushed off loam and flexed his fingers. “Something else here. Not a hat. Not cloth this time. Something hard—listen.” He had uncovered a small medallion of some flat, dingy surface, hardly distinguishable from the earth surrounding it except by its firm level. He rapped on it with his knuckles, and it gave forth a small, hollow sound, muted by the masses of earth gripping it on all sides. “All right, I reckon the shovel isn’t going to hurt this lot much.”

  He stood up, and began to slide his spade along the level surface, exposing it gradually from end to end. Dull, clay-coloured leather or imitation leather—the sound suggested the latter, and after all, today’s plastics are practically indestructible. Barnes scooped away the earth from round it, and heaved it out of the ground by one end. A large, rigid-framed suitcase, substantial but lightweight, probably fibre-glass.

  “Hmmm, all his belongings, too,” said George. “Shouldn’t be much of an identification problem, once we find the owner.”

  They hoisted it out with great care and lifted it aside. If there is anything proof against dissolution, terrifyingly enough, it must be plastic matter. Some day we may bury ourselves under a mountain of our own ingenious refuse, imperishable and dead, a cosmic paradox in pastel colours, obscenely mute, naked, textureless and perpetual. And only our computers will survive to record our submersion. In a medieval cellar haunted by centuries of living and dying, the survival qualities of this synthetic creation seemed particularly out of place.

  “That’s been bought new within the past six or seven years,” said Barnes, briefly considering the thing as he handed it out. “That sort of lock hasn’t been going much longer. Our Louie bought one something like it when she sailed for Canada to take up a job as a typist, that’d be five years back, or thereabouts. She got married a year after she went there—ask me, that’s what they want these girls for. There’s a lot of room for a lot of people in Canada.” He retired abruptly into his pit. By this time it had become his, he was in sole charge of it. “If I was getting rid of a bloke and his belongings,” he said hollowly out of the grave, “I’d put him down the lowest level, too.”

  Within five minutes more of gentle erosion, using only his hands, he touched something that brought him up short, freezing like a pointer, every nerve taut.

  “He’s here. This is cloth I’m fingering. Not just clothes— feels like blanket. Somebody wrapped him up. I can feel bone inside the cloth. You’d better find me a brush, sir, something soft, I don’t want to break him…”

  The heat and the rank, earthy smell in the cellar had become unbearable. One young constable had had to withdraw hurriedly, and hadn’t come back, small blame to him, and another was looking so green that George found a reason for sending him aloft before he collapsed. In the centre of the minor hell they created, Barnes sat on his heels, intent and immune, a compassionate man obsessed by his calling, and smoothed away methodically the clinging soil from the folds of a carefully wrapped blanket, now frayed into lace. A long shape, tapering away to the spot just in front of where Barnes crouched and stroked and meditated. With every motion of his hands the swathed body surfaced out of the clinging soil. Not a tall man, not above medium height. Intact enough to yield measurements without trouble, and measurements would show whether the coat could be his coat, the clothes in the suitcase his clothes. And emphatically a man, not a woman; a woman is a different shape, at least until she is merely a bundle of bones, and what was inside this blanket was decidedly more than a skeleton.

  “That’s it, sir,” reported Constable Barnes solicitously. “I can rig a couple of slings under him nicely now, and he’ll do fine. I mean, we’ve got to think about burying him again decent, haven’t we? And there’ll be relatives to think about— they wouldn’t like it if we damaged him, and nor would I.”

  He ran his hand tentatively beneath the swathed skull, and tender was not too involved and not too personal a word for his touch, and yet his detachment preserved him from passion. George made a note on the most sacred tablet of his mind that he must have Barnes in the plainclothes branch as soon as it could be contrived.

  Somewhat after midnight they hoisted out without further damage the body of X, sent for the police van and the pathologist, and settled down to the minute examination of the dead man’s belongings. Continuing, at the same time, the laborious sifting of every ounce of soil that had been excavated from his unofficial grave.
<
br />   The van came to take away the body at half past two. Reece Goodwin, aggrieved at losing a night’s sleep but gratified by the bizarre circumstances, had already made a preliminary examination of the remains by that time, carefully unwrapping him from the cocoon of blanket which had preserved him to a remarkable extent. The comparative dryness and coldness of the soil had tended to preserve, also. What they had found was partially a skeleton, partially mummified. The skull was a skull, clothed in dried remnants of flesh but nothing more. The clothes tended to crumble at a touch, and had consequently been touched as little as possible, for they still had, in places, texture and even colour, and the best people to draw conclusions from those were the men at the laboratory. But the shoes, almost immaculate, had challenged observation; almost everything the shoes had to tell they had already surrendered, before he was carefully wrapped up again and whisked away.

  The mortuary van drove up as quietly as possible to the door, and bore away the remains with the minimum of noise and fuss. But when George closed the front door very softly and turned back towards the cellar stairs, there was Robert in the doorway of the drawing-room, lean, erect and stiff as stone, staring at him.

  “Were you looking for me, Chief Inspector?”

  “No, Mr. Macsen-Martel. There’ll be no need for me to trouble you anymore until morning. I should go to bed if I were you.”

  He wanted to know, of course, desperately he wanted to know not merely what they had found—presumably he knew that already, since he was here and wide awake—but what it meant to them, what they intended, how they viewed his own position. What he did not want was to ask; and yet a man totally innocent of what lay in the cellars of his house would have asked long ago, and he must know it. Perhaps he had made a mistake in not overflowing with questions when the search was proposed, but it was late and difficult to begin now, all he could do was try to precipitate questioning from the other side. And that he wouldn’t do, either, because for some strange reason time meant something to him in this connection, and a part of his mind was surely concentrated even now on conserving every moment he could.