The Knocker on Death's Door gfaf-10

by Ellis Peters

  “And the cause of death?”

  “Your sergeant has it in a neat little pillbox, signed and sealed and headed for ballistics. A bullet in the brain, my boy. Entered through the left temple, probably at close range—a few feet at the most. Looks like a .25 to me, one of the vest pocket jobs.”

  “Yes,” said George, “that sounds right. The first shot missed him and buried itself in the door, the second, fired at shorter ranger still, took its time and got him. He couldn’t get away, not from there. There wasn’t any way out—it only looked as if there was.”

  “Thanks very much for that instalment, George. Tell me the whole thrilling story some time over a bottle.”

  “Certainly,” said George, “if you’re paying.”

  “On my derisory fee?”

  Dr. Goodwin rang off with his usual aplomb; and George returned, not elated but encouraged, to his cellar. Sergeant Moon had scrupulously refrained from touching the lining behind the pockets in the case.

  “You could have gone ahead,” said George, raising the clammy blue lid again. And in answer to Moon’s look of inquiry: “He was shot. Seemingly with the same type of cartridge by the same gun and at the same time. He was the reason for the hole in the door, for the floor being taken up and refusing to lie down properly again, for the knocker being put on to cover the hole, and for the door being moved in the hope of avoiding any investigation into why it dragged. A very, very important man. I really wonder why! What made him so important?”

  “And how long does Goodwin reckon he’s been here?” asked Sergeant Moon, watching George’s probing finger slide into the gap where the adhesive had perished, and ease its way along the back of the pocket.

  “Anything from three to eight or nine years, on present estimate. Which could put him right back into old Robert’s time, of course…”

  Gummily the lining parted from the frame, and now there was not mistaking what the victim had secreted there. Behind the twin pockets were aligned two damp and odorous wads of paper, engraved in steely blue. Not a fortune, but still quite a respectable little nest-egg in five-pound notes. And behind them a thin, dark-blue book with a coat of arm in gilt, and two little oval windows, the upper of which presented them with a still perfectly legible name in a printed hand:

  “Mr. T.J. CLAYBOURNE.”

  “Well, well!” said Sergeant Moon reverently. “Somebody who put him here got rid of every direct identification they knew about, but they didn’t know about this. Pretty cagey, wasn’t he? He had his passport with him, and he had his savings, and it looks as it he was heading for somewhere healthier, only not fast enough.” He peered curiously at the cover. “L. Issued at Liverpool. Pity passports don’t actually carry the owner’s address anywhere, but we can soon get it from Liverpool. Better than a dental chart, any day.”

  George was carefully parting the bluish pages, spotted with mildew and limper than originally, but still capable of being turned cleanly, and still retaining their text. “Profession! Sales representative. Covers a multitude of sins and virtues both. Place and date of birth: Kirkheal Moor, Lancashire, September 15th, 1931. Height: 5 feet 1/2 inches. Description— what do we want with a description, there he is!”

  And there he was, in the two by one-and-a-half inch photograph opposite, a small-featured, oval, slightly ferrety face topped with wavy dark hair worn short and parted on the left. Rather startled eyes stared wildly, as usual in passport pictures, but their colour seemed also to be dark, and their setting well-shaped and spacious. George turned the page. “Yes, here we are—the Liverpool stamp. He was alive in February 1965, at any rate. That’s when this was issued.”

  “If we can prove it belongs to our corpse,” Brice pointed out diffidently. “Maybe we do need that dental chart, after all.”

  “Wait a minute, there’s something else here inside the back—a newspaper cutting.” George slid it out and unfolded it, and Sergeant Moon and Brice leaned close to look over his shoulders. It had been cut from the middle of a page, apparently, for it bore no upper margin, but as soon as Brice set eyes on the clear black type and lay-out he said what they were all thinking: “That’s the Midland Evening Echo, I’d know that style anywhere.”

  Spread out carefully before them, limp but intact, was a two-column heading:

  “Obituary: MIDSHIRE LANDOWNER AND

  SPORTSMAN KILLED IN

  HUNTING FIELD.”

  Someone had found more than a thousand words to say about the deceased, more renowned in his death than in the last twenty years or so of his life, or at least renowned in a different and more printable way. It had not, after all, been possible to celebrate his principal local activities without running the risk of a libel action, but his death had been just as colourful and entailed no such dangers.

  The very clear photograph, printed web offset in one column, was unmistakably of Robert Macsen-Martel the older, lean, racy and handsome in hunting pink, on top of the ageing horse which had finally broken his neck and its own at an impossible fence on the shoulder of Callow, in February 1965. Only in this picture horse and man shone glossier and younger than on the day of their death. The widow must have given the editor a photograph at least ten years old.

  Hugh arrived with a rush and an outcry just as they all three had their heads together over his father’s obituary. They heard voices clashing in the hall above, Hugh’s loud and agitated, demanding to know what the hell was going on here, where the intruders were and what they thought they were doing there, anyhow, Robert’s low but sharp, ordering him with considerable asperity to keep his voice down, which rather surprisingly he suddenly did. George pocketed the passport and the cutting instantly, and Sergeant Moon flicked the folded coat out of sight under the trestle table, and dropped the lid of the suitcase.

  “That’s young Hugh home, breathing fire by the sound of it.”

  “I’d better have a word with him, too, I suppose. Though from all accounts he managed to break away some time ago—small blame to him.”

  “Hasn’t slept in this house oftener than about five or six times a year, for years now,” Sergeant Moon confirmed, “and then only to please the old lady. But blood’s thicker than water, seemingly, when it comes to the point.”

  George ran up the stone steps, and collided with Hugh at the top. A vivid, distressed face, still slightly travel-stained from the drive home, glared into his. The young man’s impetuous rush carried them irresistibly a tread or two backwards down the stairs again, and George gave way obligingly and let himself be persuaded. Hugh saw below him the open dark cavern of the cellar doorway, the lights concentrated in one corner, where two men sifted soil patiently into a bucket, and the rectangle of empty blackness cutting between. A look of total shock, blank almost as unconsciousness, dropped like a mask over his face, and melted into scared and agitated humanity again only with painful slowness. He pressed a few steps lower, against the steadying barrier of George’s arm, and looked round at the trestle table and its load, the suitcase closed now, the clothes covered with a piece of sheeting. The heavy, chill odour of disturbed earth hung upon the air and stirred sluggishly at every movement. Hugh’s nostrils dilated and quivered like those of a high-mettled horse.

  “It’s true, then,” he said. His tone as unexpectedly flat and practical, as though he had shed his excitement, at any rate for the moment with his uncertainty. “They told me you’d issued a statement—is that right?—that you’d found a body somewhere in the house, Rob said you were down here. I couldn’t believe it—I still can’t. I don’t see how it’s possible. It has to be some grisly mistake—or else it’s a plant…”

  “By the police, you mean?” George asked mildly.

  “No, I didn’t mean that—but damn it, even if I did, please remember that’s no more incredible to you than your version is to me.” Hugh’s eyes flared again; one of them he had rubbed with fingers lightly soiled by grease, and unwittingly awarded himself a black eye which gave him a curiously youthful and disarming
appearance. “I wish to hell I’d been here.”

  “I wish you had, but it wouldn’t have altered events at all,” George said reasonably, “apart from being a comfort and encouragement to your family, of course. As for what you call our version, we haven’t one. We’re confronted with a series of realities. The pattern is obscure, and we’re not in the habit of jumping to conclusions too soon.”

  “Come off it!” said Hugh shortly. “You’ve questioned my brother, you’ve cautioned him, you’ve dug up the floors in his house, and you try to tell me he’s not under suspicion of anything? And I tell you straight, if it’s a choice between believing Robert’s done anything wrong, and believing the police are liars, I know which I’ll take. That’s another for your series of realities! But there could be other people with an interest in planting bodies where they don’t belong…”

  “Such as the murderer?”

  “Or murderers.”

  “And entry to this house is so easy?”

  “Criminals manage to get in wherever they want to get in urgently enough, don’t they?” He was arguing fiercely and intelligently now, but there was something in his eyes all the time that said he was fighting a rearguard action, and in his heart knew it very well. “I’ve heard of houses robbed while the whole damn’ family were gawping at the telly. And out of anywhere they want to urgently enough, too—like prison, for instance. Don’t tell me nobody could ever, in any circumstances break in here and have the whole night to himself. Just two people sleeping in the house, and walls a foot thick! And as far as I know that cellar was never locked—there was nothing in it, so nobody went there much…”

  “Believe it or not,” said George patiently, “we even think of things like that. Also of simple possibilities like lost keys being copied, or houses occasionally being let or loaned while the family is away on holiday. And now you’re here, maybe you’ll be able to help us about things like that. If you’ll wait for about ten minutes, upstairs in the drawing-room, one of us will come and join you, and we’ll examine the outside possibilities.”

  They were all watching him, even the two men inside the cellar, all with closed faces but sympathetic eyes. There was nothing he could do but retreat, since nothing which had been found here could now be canceled out. He looked with doubt, distaste and apprehension at the draped table and the closed case, and again at the cave of the cellar. He shook his head helplessly and wretchedly.

  “You see it, and it still isn’t credible! I can’t get it into my head at all.” He frowned abstractedly, and hauled out his handkerchief to wipe from his knuckles the smudge of oil he had just detected there. “Can I go in? I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like—I haven’t been in there for years.”

  “If you want to. Be careful how you go!”

  The two constables squatting over the slowly diminishing mound of soil and the sieve looked up momentarily as he came in, and having withdrawn their eyes from the brightness on which they had been concentrating, saw only a tall, dark figure cutting off the light from the doorway, a deeper shadow added to what was already obscurity. He was at the edge of the trench almost before he realised it, and pulled up sharply with a hissing, indrawn breath, recoiling with one hand outstretched for balance until he touched the wall. He stared down into the hole, and George, close behind him in the doorway, felt rather than saw his shivering. When George took him gently by the elbow and turned him again towards the light of day, he yielded to the suggestion docilely, and allowed himself to be steered to the foot of the staircase.

  “Take it from me, we don’t go to that sort of trouble except with good reason.”

  “No—I believe you!” He was quaking gently with shock and revulsion, and drawing in deep, hungry breaths of slightly milder, cleaner air. With a foot on the lowest tread of the stairs he turned a grimly thoughtful face.

  “Who was he?—this man you found?”

  “So far he remains unidentified,” said George.

  “Well, whoever he is, he can’t be anything to do with us.”

  “In that case, time will show as much. Now we’d like your help in a while, but just now we have some loose ends to tie up here. If you’ll wait upstairs—Why not go up and see your mother in the meantime?”

  Hugh departed, once his mind was made up, as impetuously as he had arrived. They stood listening as his crisp, almost angry footsteps receded along the hall above towards the stairs, changed tone on the broad oak treads, and climbed out of earshot.

  “And now,” said George briskly, “I want the best roadmap you can find at short notice, Jack, for Lancashire and the north. And Brice, there’s a special job for you right here, while I’m away.”

  CHAPTER 11

  « ^ »

  IT was approaching noon as George drove up the M6, with the map spread on the passenger seat beside him, and Kirkheal Moor heavily underlined, for fear he should never be able to find it again. According to the directories it was a small market town in one of Lancashire’s surprising islands of rural peace, shrunken now but still individual between the city complexes; on the map it was printed so small as to be almost invisible. So much the better: perhaps the electoral roll would be modest enough to be easily combed, perhaps the place would be so much of a survival that the postmaster or the vicar would know everyone who lived there, and where to put his finger on him.

  He should, no doubt, have borrowed a driver who had been in bed overnight; motorways were not for people who had gone short of sleep. But police resources were never large enough, and there was still a lot to be done at Mottisham; and there were no rested men to spare. George tanked up with coffee, drove fast but steadily, and kept his mind as well as his eyes on the road.

  He had consigned the Abbey to Brice’s care. Collins would be withdrawing himself and all his accumulated notes to the vicarage office, and if he got through all the conceivable checking and re-checking of reports before evening he would have done well. Brice’s squad had still to sift and replace all the soil removed from the floor; and its other main job was the gun. Brice just might have enough manpower to search the whole house for it before night; he had begun already before George left. It was more than dubious whether they would find it, of course, there had been some years to dispose of it, but they must at least make sure it was not in the Abbey. Hugh, questioned as to whether there had ever been a gun in the house, had candidly listed the good sporting guns which had quit the walls one by one as the money ran out, and had had vague recollections that his father had brought back some sort of minor souvenir from North Africa at the end of the war, but had not the least idea what had happened to it—probably that had been sold, too, if it had any cash value—and didn’t remember seeing it for years. It was typical of Robert, senior, that he had had a very dashing war record indeed, though too picaresque and irregular to raise him higher than major; and also typical, and one of the better things about him, that he had shed the “major” as soon as he shed his uniform, and refused to acknowledge such a form of address ever after.

  As for Robert, junior, careworn and remote, withdrawn for much of the time into his mother’s bedroom, he had declined to answer questions about guns as he had declined to answer questions about bodies in the cellar. His eyes and his manner said that he knew everything; but his tongue stated monotonously that he had nothing to say.

  So there was George, heading north through Cheshire and thanking God for the motorways which had enabled the police, as well as the criminals, to cover long distances with the minimum of effort; while at the back of his mind lingered the anxieties Sergeant Brice had to deal with in his absence. All the men now on duty in the Abbey had been working without respite for more than twenty-four hours, and would be clocking up several hours more before they could go home and sleep. So we quit the Abbey this evening, George had ordered. Seal the cellar, find the gun if you can, ask any questions that may occur to you, but at the end of the day send the lot of them home to get a proper break. Nobody’s going to run, not while the
old lady is so ill. And we have enough fresh men to mount a watch on the front and rear approaches to the house, which is all that should be necessary.

  In the meantime—he was sweeping past the exit for the Keele service area at the time, and wondering about another coffee and a ’phone call home—there was the ghost of Robert, senior, whispering all the time at his shoulder. People had loved and admired that Robert—not having to live with him, of course, but just seeing him stride across the horizon in his own decorative fashion, safely at a distance. People had also hated him, people who had suffered from him or for him, people who had been forced to come to close quarters, instead of idolising from a distance. What was the truth about him? And why, above all, why should the unknown man from the cellar be carrying, safely secreted with his most precious possessions, a notice of this Midshire squire’s death? Clearly this had somehow come to his notice—no great wonder, for the Echo covered a third of England and two-thirds of Wales—and had brought him to the Abbey. Plus, don’t forget, a substantial sum of money, a large suitcase full of clothes, and a valid passport, brand-new just as Robert, senior, staged his spectacular death. A little man, discreetly on the run with what he had. And showing up at the Abbey in the hope of more? But on what grounds? What hold could an obituary give him over Robert’s heirs? And did he know how little there actually was for them to inherit?