The Knocker on Death's Door gfaf-10

by Ellis Peters

  “It would hardly be very easy to sleep, in the circumstances,” he said with the fleeting ghost of a smile.

  “I understand that, but it would be well to try. There’s no reason at all for you to stay up. In the morning I shall have some questions to put to you, probably, but not now.”

  “You’ve finished for the moment?” He did not believe it, but it was one more try to extract a grain of information without actually asking for it.

  “No, we shall be here. There are routine matters to be taken care of, but I need not trouble you with them at this stage.”

  For a moment they stood watching each other, both faces polite, controlled and completely closed. Robert was not going to ask, and plainly George was not going to tell him anything.

  “I hope Mrs. Macsen-Martel is resting quietly?”

  “Thank you, yes—she is asleep.”

  There was no need to be in any way uneasy about Robert’s movements. He never had deserted his family and his family house, and he would not desert it now. Whatever happened, he would be here to face it.

  “Good night,” said George.

  “Good night, Chief Inspector.” He drew back into the inexpressibly forlorn nocturnal emptiness of his drawing-room, and quietly closed the door.

  CHAPTER 10

  « ^ »

  Inevitably, the word had gone round before morning. Sergeant Moon had sometimes been known to claim that people in Middlehope passed the news around in their sleep. The gathering pressmen began to be turned back firmly by a patrol car at the drive of the Abbey, and though Middlehope people never collected in a crowd and stared, or never directly, more than usual of them passed by the site, either on the road or above on the hill, and in their oblique way observed and registered everything there was to be seen, and not a few things that could only be guessed at. It became expedient to make an official statement that a body had been found, before it was made unofficially over every counter and bar and garden hedge in Mottisham. George took care of that job early, to get it over and get the press off his back. The information issued was the minimum possible in the circumstances, simply that the body of a man had been found, in undisclosed circumstances but on the Abbey premises, that investigations had been continuing all night and would continue, and that no further statement could yet be issued, pending full examination of the remains. All other questions he quashed for the moment. That was enough for them to know on his authority, however much they—or at least the natives—might add all too accurately on their own.

  So now everyone knew; it had reached the stage of being acknowledged, and would soon be in print. The evening paper normally got its first edition into the shops by noon, today they would probably beat that time.

  The village had other news to circulate, a curious corollary to the headlines from the Abbey. The doctor had been early at the house again, as everyone knew, for his had been the only non-police vehicle allowed past the gate. What was more, he was expected to pay a second visit after surgery was finished. Not merely bronchitis now, said the village darkly, but pneumonia. And for all her hardihood, the old lady hadn’t that much strength to fall back on, it was going to be touch and go.

  Jenny Pelsall brought the news to the garage when she came at eight to open the office. It was worse than Dinah had ever dreamed possible. The previous evening had been a forewarning, yes, but not of this. They’ll be getting up the floor, Alix had said, and in the dusk and the confusion of her mind of yesterday, Dinah had believed her; but in the security and ordinariness of home it was hard to retain that belief. And now in full daylight, on a surprisingly bright and sunny morning—perhaps too bright to last—the stunning truth appeared monstrously inappropriate and brutal. In particular the old woman’s illness, which evidently had not been diplomatic after all.

  “And Hugh will be home almost any moment!” she said, almost wishing him away again, somewhere rallying or racing happily at the other side of the country; except that even there the news would reach him as soon as he switched on the car radio, and there it might well fall upon him even more heavily. Here at least he had his own friends, his own interests and even his own home, clear of the shadow of the Abbey and its unaccountable horrors.

  “It’s lucky he’s broken away as far as he has, anyhow,” Dave said, reading her mind.

  “Yes, I know, but still she is his mother, and he’s as fond of her as anyone could be—I know she doesn’t exactly attract affection. And Robert’s his brother, whatever he’s done… Oh, I know he doesn’t miss them much and doesn’t go near them any oftener than he can help, not when things are normal. But when something like this happens,” said Dinah with conviction, “he’ll be off there like a shot to back them up, I bet you.”

  It was a little before ten o’clock when Hugh drove in, with Ted Pelsall grinning beside him, the pair of them in high spirits. There had been no broadcast statement on the case as yet, and they had made no stop on the way, it seemed, so there had been nothing to give them any warning. Hugh sent a blare on the horn re-echoing from the wall as they turned in at speed and drove through into the rear yard. All the nearer half of the village heard it, and pricked up their ears. That would be Hugh coming home. Poor Hugh, what a homecoming!

  Dinah had been watching for him, and was out in the yard to meet him as he opened the driver’s door and unfolded himself with a spring and a shout. He had an absurd Welsh doll under his arm, a present for her—not the solemn kind, but a randy caricature. His hair was on end, and his face was beaming; if his eyes looked a little tired, that was the only fault she could find with his appearance, and that was excusable, after what had probably been a very short night. She knew him. If she hadn’t insisted on his having a night’s sleep after his long stint, he would have driven straight back as soon as the results were confirmed; but as she had, he had probably borrowed half the hours of the night to spend with some of the friends and rivals he seldom saw between rallies.

  He hugged and kissed her. Dave came out, sober-faced, to join them.

  “Didn’t bring you the trophy, after all, old boy. Sorry about that, but it was a grand day out, take it all round…”

  “Hugh,” Dinah began urgently, “listen, something’s happened here…”

  The doll was thrust into her arms. “Here you are, love—name of Blodwen. I won her in a raffle at the seediest club I think I’ve ever been in. Sorry about such a poor showing, Dave, I didn’t seem to hit my form until midnight.”

  “I dropped a couple of points for us, anyhow,” Ted owned sadly, “taking him up the wrong track on one of the mountain sections.”

  “Hugh, will you listen…?”

  He began to pick up the story from Ted, as gaily as ever, and then something in their faces reached the steadier part of his intelligence and stuck like a burr. He stopped, looking from Dinah’s face to Dave’s, and back again; the brightness ebbed out of his smile, leaving it lingering after its significance was lost.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked wonderingly. “Talk about solemn faces!” He was only puzzled and disquieted as yet, not alarmed. “What’s happened?”

  Dinah told him, briefly, accurately in so far as she had facts to offer him, and without once exclaiming or repeating herself.

  “Oh, no!” he said in an almost soundless whisper. His hands slipped down Dinah’s arms and held her wrists for a moment, in some kind of private communication. Then he put her hands away from him gently. “But it’s crazy! How could there be…? They must be out of their minds… or else they’ve put out this statement as a bait, to start something quite different happening—to bust this other case wide open, somehow. That’s possible, surely? The other isn’t possible! How could there be a body? Why should there be?”

  “We don’t know, Hugh, nobody knows. All they’ve said is just that they found it. Everything else is rumour. I suppose the police just possibly might give out something that isn’t true,” Dave said dubiously, “if they thought it would bring the killer into the ope
n, but I don’t think it’s very likely.”

  “And Rob’s all on his own with that load!” said Hugh. “Mother, on top of everything! I must go to him.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Dinah promptly.

  “No, love, you won’t! I don’t want you in that set-up at all.”

  “But your mother—I could make myself useful.”

  “No, let me go and see, first. If we need someone, honestly, I’ll come running to you.” She saw by his eyes, which had lost their easy brightness and were looking far beyond her, narrowed to confront threatening distances, that he was already a long way from them. So they let him go without protest, and without venturing to offer more help and solidarity than he would allow.

  “If there’s anything we can do, call us,” Dave said.

  “I’ll do that. But all this is too absurd to stick, I tell you it’s crazy. Look, I’d better leave you the Porsche, Ted wants to go over her. Can I take the Mini?”

  They would have given him anything he asked, to the limit of what they had, but all he wanted was the loan of the company Mini, which was partly his in any case. He did not stop to eat anything, or to wash, but swerved away to where the little car was stabled, at a purposeful walk which in a moment became a headlong run.

  “I’ll call you, love!” he yelled at Dinah through the window, and was away out of the yard at speed, and heading for the Abbey.

  Robert came down the stairs slowly and wearily after the doctor’s car had driven away down the drive. George was waiting for him in the doorway of the drawing-room.

  “Is it possible for you to leave Mrs. Macsen-Martel alone for a little while? I quite understand that you must be free to make what ever dispositions are necessary for her care, and I’ll curtail our dealings accordingly at this stage, but it’s time that you and I had a preliminary interview.”

  “My mother is asleep again,” said Robert. His voice was flat and drained, but he was in complete control of himself. “I’m at your disposal.”

  “Shall we make use of this room, then? With your permission, of course.” Sergeant Collins was already installed in an unobtrusive position beside the window, half screened by the curtains, with his notebook on his knee. Robert sat down in one of the big leather chairs, and George closed the door and came over to face him.

  “We’ve reached a stage when I should like to get some answers from you. But first it’s my duty to caution you that you are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so. But if you do, what you say may be taken down in writing and given in evidence.”

  “Does that mean,” asked Robert, “that you are going to charge me with something?”

  “No, it does not. Not at present, certainly, and not necessarily at any future time, either. The caution is routine even before questioning which may not result in a charge. I have issued it, and you have heard it. You know your rights.”

  “Yes,” he agreed composedly, “I understand.”

  “By now I believe you must know, like everyone else, the gist of the statement I’ve issued to the press. But I’ll repeat it for your benefit. Under the floor of your wine-cellar we have found the remains of a man’s body. The press has not, as a matter of fact, been told where we found him, but I am telling you. I am not yet in a position to give more details. You, on the other hand, may be able to tell me a good deal more about him, if you will.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you,” said Robert. “It’s known, of course, that the abbey had rather a bad reputation in its last years, and there are a number of stories of brawls and stabbings among the few brothers left in the community.” His voice was so laboured and slow that he might almost have been falling asleep there before George’s eyes, and small wonder if he did, for almost certainly he hadn’t closed his eyes all night. “Very regrettable, I admit, to find a body on these premises, but perhaps not all that surprising? The house may even be over a part of the old cemetery that was private to the brothers.”

  “I admire your gallantry, but I hardly think you’ve accounted adequately for our find. You think he may be a relic of the final disorders of this house in the sixteenth century, do you?”

  “It’s the first thought that occurs to me,” said the weary voice steadily.

  “In brown laced shoes, made in Leicester not ten years ago? With a fibre-glass suitcase full of clothes on top of him? Try second thoughts!”

  “I can’t help you. I’m sorry!”

  “Oh, come, you can do better than that. This is your house. We have been excavating in your cellar. The outside world can hardly break in here to bury its bodies. Very few people have access here.”

  Silence.

  “Do you know who this man is? And how he got here?”

  Silence.

  “You can do yourself no good by withholding information, we’ve recovered sufficient personal possessions to identify him ten times over. It’s merely a matter of a few days’ work, why not tell us now?”

  “I can’t help you,” said the voice, with carefully husbanded and curiously restored strength, as if George had said something inadvertently encouraging. And maybe he had. A few days, he had said. Maybe a few days was salvation. Or at least the bare hope of salvation.

  “We are dealing with a death not many years old, with a man who apparently entered your house bringing a large suitcase of clothes with him, and did not leave again. Are you suggesting that this could happen without your knowledge?”

  “I am not suggesting anything. I have nothing to say.”

  “Then how do you account for such a discovery as we have made?”

  “I don’t account for it. I have nothing to say.”

  The voice had found a dead level of stoical endurance from which it did not intend to be moved.

  “Very well, we’ll leave it at that for the moment, but I must ask you not to attempt to leave the house.”

  Surprised, Robert looked up out of his entrenched and undramatic misery with a sudden gleam of life; he had not expected a respite once the questioning began. “I have no intention of leaving. In any case I couldn’t while my mother is in this state. I spoke with my employers yesterday, they will not be expecting me.” He said “my employers” quite naturally and simply, like any other clerk obliged to request leave of absence because of family illness.

  “Please believe me, I sincerely hope your mother’s condition, at least, will soon cease to be any bar to your freedom of movement.”

  Robert had turned towards the door, but he halted for a moment and looked back; it seemed that he was about to say something, and by the sudden impulsive movement of his lips something a little less guarded and defensive. But after all he swallowed the words unspoken, and went quietly out of the room.

  Sergeant Moon came over to join them at a little before ten. In the antechamber to the cellar they had set up trestle tables and rigged their lights for an on-the-spot examination of suitcase, contents and coat, before they were passed on to the forensic laboratory. Within, Constable Barnes and Detective Constable Reynolds continued to sift the heap of soil doggedly for further treasures, before consigning it again to the depths of the trench. But what they already had, as George saw when the locks of the suitcase had been sprung and the clammy lid carefully raised, was going to be more than enough. The case contained, and in a remarkably good state of preservation though pulpy to the touch and smelling of graveyard clay, everything a man would ordinarily take with him on a journey, a man not overblessed with money or goods, but still sufficiently provided, and in fact rather neat in his packing. The case itself had once been the most imposing item in the collection; it bore all the marks of its burial, but singularly few others, no scratches defacing a surface which was still smooth and dark once the soil was wiped away.

  “New,” said Sergeant Moon with admirable brevity, thumbing earth away from the corner of blue. “Bought for his last trip.”

  The clothes, however, were not new. The underclothes were mended, the shirts had slightly fraye
d collars. Shaving tackle, handkerchiefs, sweaters—some of the things bore laundry marks, some makers’ tabs.

  “Whoever put him there thought that was the last of him,” said George, “or they’d have had all these off. Still…” He cast a glance at the impregnable cellar, the massive flags of the floor. “Yes, you can see their point. They’d hardly expect him to get out of there again.”

  “But no papers,” pointed out the sergeant.

  There was not a letter, not a personal document of any kind, anywhere in the case.

  “Nothing in the coat, either.” Nor had there been any wallet in the pockets of the rotting jacket; if there had been any leather or plastic object there, something would still have remained of it. “No, somebody cleaned him out of all identification—the quick ways, anyhow.”

  George lifted out, layer after layer, the contents of the case, and ran his fingers into the pleated pockets in the back. Nothing there. Well-padded pockets, though. The strong elastication that held the mouths of the compartments closed had still a little spring left in it, and the tough plastic had pulled the cloth lining away from the frame at its outer corners, the adhesive being long ago denatured by damp. Something showed between lining and outer covering, the edge of a wad of paper and a thin rim of black, like the spine of a notebook. George was sliding his finger delicately along the sticky, folded hem of beige cloth to enlarge the opening, when Sergeant Moon leaned down from the hall to announce that Dr. Goodwin was on the line from the hospital mortuary with a preliminary report. George abandoned the suitcase, and went up to take the call.

  “I won’t go into clinical details now, George, you’ll be getting the lot in writing as soon as I can get it to you. But in a nutshell—what you’ve got here is an adult male about five feet seven tall, rather lightly built, one or two medical points that may help an identification—a finger-bone in his left middle finger broken at some time, probably before he was fully grown. And his teeth are his own, and show some dental work that could be a clincher if you get a lead on his locality and can trace the right dentist. I’d say somewhere in his late thirties—not above forty. How long dead? That’s rather a hard one, but at least three years. But the upper limit could be as much as eight or nine. There are contradictory factors—or ambiguous ones, anyhow—there always are in these long-distance cases. I may be able to improve on that estimate, though, when I’ve finished with him.”