The Knocker on Death's Door gfaf-10

by Ellis Peters

  The former dressing-room was small by the standards of this barn-like dwelling, with a lower ceiling, and paler walls. The bed was immaculate beneath a candlewick spread, and there were towels laid out, and even a little trough of books installed on top of the chest of drawers. He had left nothing for anyone to do. Unless, perhaps, something could be done about those personal things one tends not to carry on short-term visits because of their bulk. The nurse was coming from Comerbourne, where she probably inhabited a small, centrally-heated flat; she might be none too well-prepared for the bleak chilliness of the Abbey. The travel dressing-gown, for instance, is liable to be a thin nylon housecoat—“because it folds up like a handkerchief”. And those thin plastic folding slippers, comfortable enough on a carpeted floor in a new town block, would be like walking barefoot for penance on these flagged floors and bare board corridors. Perhaps something more substantial could be offered, whether she actually needed it or not.

  There was obviously only one room in which to look, since there was only one woman resident in the house. Dinah went back into Mrs. Macsen-Martel’s room. The old woman had not moved. The sheet over her chest lifted just perceptibly with her shallow, feeble breathing; she was so frail that her body scarcely swelled the covers enough to cast a shadow in the firelight.

  Cautiously Dinah turned the handle of the large wardrobe that filled one end of the room, and tentatively pulled at the door, which opened easily and silently. The first section was all shelves, most of them half-empty; but beyond that came the central hanging section, smelling of some protective against moths, and of the faded lavender bags that were slung on the hangers. The old woman could have bought nothing new for several years. Everything here was good, solid country stuff, but years out of date; and beneath the hanging garments were arrayed a dozen pairs of shoes, all old, well-kept, and meant to last, every pair polished and immaculate, but every pair mended at least once. Dinah found a pair of sheepskin slippers with rubber soles. They might well be too big, for the old lady’s tall frame needed feet made to the same measure, but they would at least be warm. She put them on one side, and began to look through the coats and dresses, but the only dressing-gown she found was of printed silk, no protection against the draughts from these ancient windows. She stood back and looked over the array of open shelves again, and a fold of thick brown woollen cloth caught her eye.

  It looked just the kind of material of which winter dressing-gowns used to be made, though why it should have been rolled up and pushed to the back of one of these pigeon-holes was more than she could guess, when everything else in the wardrobe was kept with such meticulous care.

  She reached in and drew it out, and the moment they made contact with it her fingers registered a minor shock of astonishment, for it felt cold and damp to the touch. She held it up and let it unroll, and it swung down to brush the floor, hanging crumpled and stained from her hands. On her it would have swept the carpet, but it was not a dressing-gown, after all, it was an ancient camel coat, probably at least twenty years old. Its skirts, which had been the outermost layer of the roll, were dry, but soiled at the hem with greenish stains, as if from wet and muddy grass. The shoulders and back were distinctly damp, and the, multiplicity of creases into which the cloth had set showed that they had been damper still, and for some considerable time.

  Dinah’s mind, stung into violent action, reviewed times, intervals, happenings, a rainy night, an apparition in brown… Could thick cloth like this stay damp, she wondered, as long as three days? Yes, rolled up tightly like that and pushed into that narrow shelf, probably even that long.

  There were a few lank, dank threads of autumn gossamer, fouled with minute fragments of dirt and dead leaves, on one sleeve. And speared into the collar she found two narrow dark spines of yew leaves.

  She stood there with the coat dangling in her hands, and suddenly she felt cold from head to foot, with a chill that seemed to invade her from without, eating through skin and flesh into her bones. Sometimes the mind connects too quickly, the body’s energy is used up in a convulsion of awareness. She seemed to hear her own mental processes at work, like listening to a tape recording of herself, but with the inward ear.

  Three nights ago, Saturday night, the psychic research man was knocked on the head. It poured with rain that night. The grass in the churchyard is long, and would be very wet. There are yew trees there. Someone was seen there in a long, brown robe, like a monk, vanishing among the trees. Someone who went there knowing there was something that must not be investigated about that door, and afraid that the researches would not all be psychic. Then that same someone knew about the bullet-hole, if it is a bullet-hole—knew, in any case, about whatever it is that shouldn’t be there and had to be covered up.

  Perhaps they had been looking for more than a gun when they searched the house. But they had not searched this room. Impossible to intrude upon mortal illness. There is, after all, only one sure way to escape consequences, and that is to die. She even turned back to the bed to look again at the sleeper, to make sure that this was still sleep. For a moment she would almost have been willing to believe that even mortal illness can be induced, when the need is great enough. But the old woman, austere and still, lay coldly indifferent to all suspicions, the faint rustling in her chest her only comment.

  Dinah slid her hand into the right-hand pocket of the coat she held, and her fingers closed over a small round object. Damp here, too, from a rain-wet hand that had thrust this little thing within. She felt the left-hand pocket, and the lining was dry.

  The door opened so quietly behind her that she did not hear it, but the soft steps on the interval of bare boards reached her ears, and she swung round almost guiltily. Hugh had come in on tip-toe, flushed and relaxed from his bath, but gingerly and uneasy in a sickroom, and was looking at her with a surprised smile, because she had started so violently.

  “Did I startle you? Sorry!” he whispered. He had dressed fully again, evidently he was prepared to come and sit out the vigil with her, and drive her home as he had promised, if the nurse came in good time. “Whatever have you got there?”

  He came nearer, still treading stealthily, still smiling. She wanted to roll up the coat and thrust it away again out of his sight, but it was far too late for such a move. Mutely she let him take it from her. In a whisper she said: “I was looking for a warm dressing-gown—for the nurse…”

  “Where did you find…?” He broke off there on a sharp, indrawn breath, seeing the wardrobe door open. His hands, suddenly intent, felt at the woollen cloth here and there. One of the yew spines came away and lay in the palm of his hand. He stared at it, and Dinah saw his face tighten and shiver, saw him shake his head and stare again. He, too, could connect, as rapidly as anyone.

  In a frightened whisper, barely audible at all, he said: “Oh, no! Oh, my God—Mother!”

  CHAPTER 13

  « ^ »

  THEY stood staring at each other with wide, horrified eyes across the draggled coat and the brittle, broken leaf. Hugh opened his lips to blurt out something unguarded, a protest, a cry of rejection, an appeal—no, more likely a demand!—for reassurance, but Dinah motioned him urgently to be quiet, and he swallowed his distress and cast one brief, alarmed glance at the bed. It was impossible to talk there. No revelation, however stunning, had a right to intervene in the struggle now on in this room between life and death.

  It was the intensity and helplessness of their silence that made it possible for them to hear Robert’s footsteps on the stairs. Hugh came out of his stupor with a shudder, rolled up the coat hastily and pushed it to the back of one of the shelves. He had scarcely closed the door upon it when Robert came in.

  “I’ve made you some coffee and sandwiches,” he said, in a muted half-voice that was less disturbing than a whisper. “You go down and get them in peace. I’ll sit with her while you’re away.”

  “You should be sleeping,” said Dinah as quietly.

  “Later, when the nurse is
here. I’ve called Doctor Braby again,” he said, and looked long and sombrely at the figure in the bed, withdrawn and immune. “I’m worried about her. She doesn’t rally. I think he should see her again.”

  “But really I don’t need anything,” Dinah began gently. But Hugh’s brows were signalling her urgently to accept, to come away out of here where they could talk; and Hugh’s hand was persuasive at her elbow, drawing her toward the door. They needed time to consider what it really was they had discovered, to come to terms with what they knew, before anyone else need know it. Yes, she thought, he’s right. Why put it off? It won’t go away, and it can’t be kept secret. We’ve got to talk. Why not now? She yielded to the coaxing hand that urged her away. “Oh, very well—it’s kind of you, Robert, I’ll be back very soon.”

  Hugh closed the bedroom door very softly and cautiously after them. The house crowded in upon them, heavy, ancient and cold, as they crept down the stairs in silence. Dinah had glanced back just once as the door closed, and seen Robert seated again beside his mother’s bed, indestructibly patient, lonely and durable; the man who made coffee, filled hot-water bottles, put fresh, aired sheets on the bed for the nurse, brought up books for her to read, thought of everything and did everything that was needed in this house. There might have been a whole generation instead of six years between him and Hugh. Then he was shut in and they were shut out, and the vast treads of the stairs creaked softly under their feet; and she realised that they were hurrying, that they were frantic to reach some enclosed place, with at least one more solid door between themselves and the pair upstairs, where they could turn and look at each other without concealment at last, and say everything they had to say.

  Robert had laid a tray as meticulously as for a full-dress party, and placed it on a low round table of Benares brass in the drawing-room, and even plugged in a little electric fire on the vast empty hearth, a spark in a cold cavern. One standard lamp was switched on beside the table; the rest of the room receded into darkness. Hugh closed the door behind them, and leaned back against it with a huge sigh of wonder and dismay.

  “My God, Dinah, what are we going to do?”

  She didn’t answer. She had walked on into the room as soon as he released her arm, moving automatically towards the circle of light in which the table stood, though she had no more thought of coffee at that moment than he had. She even touched the arched handle of the porcelain pot, vaguely, as if she wondered what she was doing here, and could only associate her presence with these small evidences of Robert’s scrupulous attention to his guest. Her hand dropped. She looked up at Hugh, still pressed against the door with his arms spread and his head turning tormentedly from side to side.

  “It can’t be true, can it? Can it? That coat—and this cold of hers—the next day she was worse, suddenly much worse… You remember how it rained when you drove me over here that night?”

  Yes, she remembered. She noted, too, realising it for the first time, that when he spoke of the Abbey he never said “home”. Home was the flat over the workshop. Grooms should live above the stables.

  “Then she knew everything about it—all the time she knew,” he said in a drained whisper. “Not Robert…”

  Dinah gazed back at him large-eyed across the table. “No, not Robert. I should have known.”

  Hugh heaved himself away from the door, and began to pace helplessly about the room, grinding his heels into the frayed carpet: a few steps away from her, a few steps back again.

  “Not Robert—Mother! The poor old girl, she must have been mad! Dinah, she must have been mad, mustn’t she? Why should she want to slug a poor harmless crank for hanging round that damned door, unless she knew what was wrong with it? And if she knew that, then she knew why… She must have been the one who… There isn’t any other possibility left, is there? But why? Why? Who was this fellow they found, anyhow?”

  “I don’t know that,” said Dinah. Her voice sounded to her curiously distinct and pitched a little high, as though she stood a long way off, and had to make it reach not only Hugh, but herself. “All I know is who killed him. Not why.”

  “Yes… there’s no escaping that now, is there?”

  “And it wasn’t Robert,” she said, with the same distant, hypnotic authority.

  “No, not Robert. So what, for God’s sake, are we going to do now?”

  In the moment of silence she heard the ticking of the clock, and would have liked to know how its hands stood, but it was shrouded in darkness in a corner of the room, and in any case she could not turn her eyes away because of the intensity with which Hugh’s eyes held them.

  “And it wasn’t your mother,” she said.

  For a moment he thought he had not heard her correctly, though she had incised the words upon the stillness between them with all the clarity of an engraving; then he knew that he had, and that she had meant what she said, and after all his restless and agonised writhings he was suddenly quite still, intent and silent while he studied her.

  “But that’s crazy!” he said. “You saw her coat, still green and damp from being rolled away like that on Saturday night, all soaked with rain. And stuck with yew needles— what more could we possibly need than that? Damn it, Dinah, it was you who found it!”

  “Yes, I found it. Does that prove who wore it? Somebody wore it to steal out to the churchyard, I give you that. How can we be so sure it was your mother?”

  “But, hell, Dinah, you just found it hidden in her room…”

  “Yes… the one place in the house, you tell me, that hasn’t been searched. The best place to hide something. I wonder,” said Dinah, “if the gun’s there, too? She wouldn’t know, would she? For two days now she’s been either asleep or more or less in a coma. Anybody could have hidden the coat there.”

  A gust of incredulous laughter shook him. “Anybody, the girl says! For God’s sake, how many people were there in the house?”

  “There was one extra last Saturday night,” said Dinah. “There was you!”

  He took two or three hasty steps towards her, as though he wanted to use his hands, the brusque persuasion of his body, to recall her to herself and put an end to this grotesque nightmare of distrust and misunderstanding. She did not move to meet him, nor to recoil from him, but kept her place, the brass table solidly between them.

  “Dinah, you don’t know what you’re saying. You can’t mean this!”

  “I know what I’m saying. You slept in this house on Saturday night. I drove you over here, as you just reminded me. Who else belonging to this house knew there was going to be a watcher prying round the church porch all night? Had your mother been in the bar listening? Had Robert? But you had! You knew! ‘If the monks don’t get you, the devil will,’ you said. And you had a fine monk’s robe all waiting for you here by the garden door. You’d be surprised, Hugh,” she said, “how many details a girl notices when she’s paying her first visit to people who may be going to be her in-laws. I saw the worn rugs in the hall, the old coats in the lobby. The kind of old coats most houses keep, pensioned off, just for running out in the rain when you’ve forgotten to shut the garage door—or popping out to feed the chickens, if you keep chickens. I remember that old camel coat very well. It could make a fine monk out of anyone in the dark, man or woman, and it wasn’t in your mother’s wardrobe then.”

  “But, by God, all you’re saying is that any of us could have put it on. Because I told them all about that fool of a ghost-hunter, when I came in, that night—they may not have been there to hear it for themselves, but they knew, all right. How could I know she’d get up in the small hours and go blundering out there to catch her death?”

  She stared steadily into his face, and everything about him seemed to her a kind of charade, expertly played, the warmth of his voice, full of indignant innocence, the hurt anger of his eyes, that could meet hers even now without evasion and without blinking; but all wasted, because she knew the answer before the charade was played.

  “And what about
her shoes, Hugh? If she went out in the wet grass on Saturday night, where are the shoes she wore? Every pair she had in her wardrobe is dry and polished. Who cleaned them and put them away for her? By the next morning she was too ill to get up.”

  He opened his lips to answer that, too, with the same assurance and the same indignation, without a pause, never at a loss; but she raised her voice abruptly, and rode over him.

  “No, don’t bother to think up any more lies, it wouldn’t alter anything. Do you know what I found in the pocket of the coat? It was intelligent of you to pull it off and put it in your pocket, if it was hanging loose, because if it had dropped off in the churchyard they’d have found it, for certain. But you really should have remembered to take it out when you got back to the house.”

  She leaned towards him across the table, holding it out on the palm of her hand. A small, plain horn button, still tethered to a fine green thread, with a few torn fibres of grey-green wool attached.

  “But you didn’t think about it, and now you’ve missed your chance. And it was bad luck, wasn’t it, that I happened to be the one to find it. The one person who couldn’t fail to know it again. The one person who could swear you were wearing it last Saturday night.” She was vibrating like a taut bowstring, not with fear or even shock now, but with the current of knowledge suddenly streaming through her to earth, things she had always known and never acknowledged before. “I knitted the cardigan. I stitched these buttons on. How many men do I knit for? I hardly know how to knit, beyond plain and purl! It was an aberration, even when I did it for you.”

  She hardly knew who this could be, talking with her voice, through her throat, still quietly but now with a kind of ferocity of which she had not known she was capable. But the man facing her she knew, through and through she knew him, and there was no longer anything he could say or do that would fool her. He was still smiling, baffled, hurt, shaking his head over her, opening his mouth to protest once again, to breathe sweet reason and blow even this away. And he could do it better than anyone she had ever known but never again well enough to take her in.