Ellis Peters - George Felse 10 - The Knocker On Death's Door (18 page)

“What happened to him? He’s dead, isn’t he?”

George told her the bare facts. No one was going to be embarrassed by this woman’s tears, or feel obliged to try and comfort her. The mention of Midshire and Mottisham clearly meant nothing to her; but she knew her responsibilities.

“You’ll be wanting me to identity the body, I suppose. Tomorrow’s closing day, I could come down then. And I suppose there’ll have to be an inquest before I can get to bury him?” She knew her duty. There was even something admirable in her acceptance of it, after all affection had been drained away out of her blood.

‘’I don’t think it will be necessary for you to see the body. If you can tell us who his doctor was, and in particular his dentist, the medical evidence will take care of that. But your help would be invaluable in identifying his belongings. And there’s money which will probably be reclaimable, and which must be yours unless he had a wife.”

She shrugged, but rather resignedly than coldly. She was not in the least interested in his money. “No, he never married. Too restless, always on the move, job to job and place to place ever since he was eighteen. I gave him money when he needed it. He never came unless he did.”

“Tell me about him. It might help us to find out what he was doing in our part of the country, and who could have killed him.”

“What is there to tell you? I brought him up alone, and I brought him up good, and let me tell you, that isn’t easy on your own. But he took after his dad, not after me. Come the time he was seventeen, I never knew where he was, and he’d had three jobs and wrecked the lot. And at eighteen he went off with some smart-aleck friend of his, and I didn’t see him for three years. Three or four times your folks came here asking after him, but always when he wasn’t here. Whether he did all the things they think he did, I don’t know. Far as I know, he only went to gaol once, and that was for some sort of fraud, not a big thing—he got six months. I don’t make any secret of it, I’m responsible for my record, not his, and there isn’t the man born that can say I’ve done him out of a farthing. I tend my own garden. He let his run wild. Twice he took money from me, besides what I gave him. I knew that. I never said nothing that was between him and me, and what never touched a soul besides I forgave him. He wasn’t cruel or vicious. He wasn’t even bad. Only feeble and shiftless and wanting it to come easy.”

As an epitaph, in her passionless voice, it was not so harsh as it might have been; and now her eyes, so dark and full and meant to be sensuous, had a curious measured softness in the unchanged marble hardness of her face. And George thought, if only somebody could have got her out of here, and stirred her deeply enough to make her forget the narrow, cold springs of her own righteousness, what a woman this could have been!

“And when was the last time you saw him?”

“Oh, about five years ago. It was round about the thaw, as I remember, February or March it would be. He came on the quiet, without a word beforehand, like he always did, and after dark, the way I thought he must have been mixed up in something shady and wanting to lie low. But he never told me anything about his affairs. Still, that was the only time he talked about emigrating. Tried to borrow some more money off me, but I hadn’t got it to give him, and a gift it would have been, loans to him always were. I don’t know, he may just have felt like getting out and starting fresh somewhere else, I can’t say it wasn’t so. But what I thought was that the police were after him for something, and he needed pretty bad to get out. If I’d had more, I’d have given it. But now you tell me he had money.”

“If he meant to go abroad, he needed all he could get. And he never said anything to you about a place called Mottisham? Or a family named Macsen-Martel? Nothing to indicate why he should go to Midshire at all?”

“I never heard mention in my life of any such people,” she said, “or any such place. He never told me anything. He was too afraid I might tell the truth if I was asked.”

It seemed that she had told him everything she knew, and there was nothing more to be discovered here, unless through the man’s police record. She would come down by the motorway coach tomorrow, report at the Comerbourne headquarters address George had given her, and look without flinching at the remnants of her son’s property, even at his body if need be; and she would take away the remains, once the coroner had issued a burial certificate, and station the sanctity of a notable funeral like a sign of the cross between her sorry child and his damnation. And George could believe that she would be victorious.

She was showing him out, with commanding dignity, when the whole case suddenly opened again like a miraculous flower blooming by violent stages in a trick film. From where he had been sitting, his view had commanded three quarters of the whole room, but not the section at his back, on the left of the doorway. As Mrs. Claybourne went to open the door, she halted briefly and nodded in that direction. There was a massive china cabinet in the corner there, its top scattered with home-crocheted lacey doyleys, and sporting a large wedding-photograph as centre-piece.

“
Him
I blame,” she said, flashing the first dark fire George had seen in her. “If
he’d
been different, everything would have been different.”

George followed her burning glance to the photograph, and felt the short hairs rise like hackles on his neck. Forty years old if it was a day, that photograph, with the bride in a big picture hat and flounced, low-waisted, garden-party dress, the groom in a dark suit and a silk cravat, and both half-obscured by the lilies and carnations of the bouquet; forty years old, but cherished and kept in the shade, and still unfaded. George went a step or two nearer, to confirm what already needed no confirmation.

The woman was a beauty, cream, roses and jet flushed with joy, without a line of hardness in her face, only a little gawky and a little possessive in the day of her triumph. The man was a different creature, accomplished, exuberant, gay, with a crest of fair hair and a blinding smile. Hardly a photograph of him existed in which he was not laughing, and the laugh was memorable. No wonder even an obituary photograph thirty-five years later had still been recognisable; this was a face that did not change even when it aged.

Mrs. Claybourne’s errant husband was identical with that well-known Midshire landowner and sportsman, deceased in the hunting-field, Robert Macsen-Martel, senior.

George swallowed a hasty sandwich and coffee at a pub, and drove back down the M6 in the darkening evening, with all and more than he had come north to find.

No want of motives now, no lack of a link between all these diverse elements.

He had married her! This was the wildest of all. Not just a fast affair, like all the rest, not just a backstairs or coppice seduction, but a cast-iron, unbreakable, unquestionable marriage. George had even gone so far as to confirm it from the church registers, so incredible did it seem. In May 1929, Robert Macsen-Martel had married Rachel Bowman; under a false name, of course, but that did not invalidate the marriage. Mrs. Claybourne and nobody else had been his wife. For this marriage was four years prior to the acknowledged one in Midshire, to his ageing and unattractive cousin with the money, and six years before the birth of the first of his supposedly legitimate sons.

It was a thunderbolt. Why had he done it? Seduce her, yes, inevitably and joyously, but why marry her? He had been younger then, of course, already a roamer and already prodigal with his casual favours. It could even have been when he was in flight from some too importunate Middlehope girl that he had wandered up into these parts under an assumed name, and loitered even after the coast was clear again because of Rachel’s bright eyes. But she couldn’t have been such a completely new experience to him, why go so far as to marry her? Why get caught? The answer, of course, was there plain to be seen. Rachel had been the one he couldn’t get any other way. No marriage, no Rachel. She had had a highly moral upbringing, was as religious as her churchwarden father, and as narrow; and more, she had her affections under control, and was not going to be swept off her moral course by love. Robert had wanted her, what Robert wanted Robert must have, and as quickly as possible, and there was only one way of getting Rachel. She had indeed been remarkably beautiful, maybe he had been genuinely in love at the time. Maybe he had always been genuinely in love—at the time! But there was that streak of ignoble caution even in this act of his—he had been careful to retain the protection of his assumed name, and keep a back door open into his real identity, into which he could escape at need. As he had done, after he had exhausted the possibilities of pleasure with her, and begun to discover the drawbacks. Probably he had never thought of it as a permanent thing at all, just an interlude for which he had to pay slightly more than for most of its kind.

And she, seemingly, had by then begun to discover the drawbacks in him, too, for when he had finally walked quietly out on her she had been relieved, if anything, to be rid of him. Too proud to follow or look for him she might have been, but she had also been too comfortable. Her father had died within the first year of her marriage, the shop was hers, and a better breadwinner than ever Robert had shown signs of being. And above all, unlike her son, she was one of those who have deep roots and do not drag them up merely for an unreliable man.

None of which altered the fact that she had been his legal wife, and was now his legal widow.

And after the wandering husband, the wandering son, taking after his father, coming home when he wanted something, or when he had made some other place too hot to hold him. And just when it was apparently most urgent that he should get out of the country, just when he was trying to borrow or beg more money from his mother to supplement what he had already managed to scrape together, Robert senior broke his neck in the hunting-field, and rated an obituary and a picture in the
Echo
, in an issue which his son happened to see. What a weapon he must have thought he’d acquired. Here was he, prior to those two sons there in Midshire, and there they were just coming into their father’s property, ripe and ready to be milked. So he had gone to Mottisham Abbey, armed with his proofs, either to claim his rights or to extort money. In view of his circumstances, probably to extort money to help him overseas. And he had gone unobtrusively, because he was not anxious to be noticed by the police; so unobtrusively that he had been able to vanish without raising a ripple or being missed by a living soul. How could he know how little there was to claim? The obituary made the Abbey sound imposing, the family old, prominent and respected. And in fact wealth is relative, and impoverished though the Macsen-Martels might be by their own standards, what was left still represented more than many people have to bless themselves with. People have been killed for less—to get it or to keep it.

But there was more to preserve in this case than mere inheritance. He couldn’t know into what a hornets’ nest he was venturing. All that pride of place and blood, and then suddenly this unthinkably bitter and comic revelation at the end of it, and the boys bastards! A word almost meaningless in these days, yes—but not to such people as Mrs. Macsen-Martel.

Claybourne had said nothing to his mother about his discovery. Why stir up old mud just when what he wanted most was to get quietly away? No, much better leave her in ignorance. George had said nothing to her, either. The first essential now was to get back to Mottisham as fast as possible, and do what was necessary. Explanations could come afterward.

SERGEANT Brice withdrew his team from the cellar as soon as the last of the soil had been sieved, leaving it still piled against the rear wall. None had been returned to the trench since the fragment of gold pencil had been found, in case the site of the discovery should be significant. All the finds had now been removed; the flagstones were left propped in the antechamber, neatly in order, and the cellar door closed and sealed. So much for that part of the job in hand.

But they had not found the gun.

“There’s the old lady’s room,” said Reynolds. “But we can’t touch that, not now. The doctor’s been again. She’s bad. We can’t possibly disturb her.”

They had looked everywhere else but there, creeping quietly about the first floor in order not to be heard in the sick-room. Robert, going in and out with the doctor, had passed by them in the corridors as if they did not exist, intent only on his own responsibilities. When he was cornered and made to acknowledge the solidity of Brice, below in the hall after the doctor’s car had departed, he was seen to drag himself out of his exclusive preoccupation with a convulsive effort and a shivering shock, like a sleep-walker rudely startled into wakefulness.

“Just one moment, sir—if you wouldn’t mind coming in here to the light.”

Robert allowed himself to be led into his own drawing-room, and into the slanting afternoon light from the window.

“Do you recognise this, sir?”

The fluted gold cap tapered away to a minute star, and there was a pocket-clip like a scroll fastened to its side. It was individual enough to be recognisable once one knew it, and solid enough to be, in any one house, probably the only one of its kind around. Robert looked at it with his slightly dazed eyes, hollow with wakefulness, and said almost automatically:

“Why, yes, it’s mine—but I lost that pencil a long time ago. Where did you find it?”

Brice said nothing; it was not necessary. The words were scarcely spoken when Robert himself, struggling to a plane somewhere nearer full consciousness, knew the answer. True, they had been hunting through the entire house, apart from the room where his mother lay doped and mute and fighting for her life, but not for this, or any trifles like it. There was only one place where such a losable thing, once found, could be of any significance.

The hand Robert had extended to take up the cap faltered, recoiled, swayed in mid-air. Brice, startled, looked up from the hand to the face, saw the abrupt, bluish pallor turn the long features to dead clay, and the eyes roll upwards in their sockets. The tall, thin body began to fold at the joints with infinite slowness, collapsing like a dropped puppet. Everything else had fallen on Robert, and had not felled him, but this tiny thing dropped him as a shot might have done.

Brice cried in alarm: “Here, hold up, sir!” and caught him by the arm; but it was Barnes, huge and imperturbable in the background, a carefully placed witness, who swung a chair forward with monumental presence of mind, caught Robert round the body, and lowered him smoothly into it.

“You think there’d be any brandy around, Mr. Brice?”

Robert drew himself together with a spasmodic effect, heaved a vast breath into his lungs, and opened his eyes. He gripped the arms of the chair resolutely, and drew himself a little more erect.

“Thank you, but I’m all right. I’m sorry, I’m afraid I’ve been up too long… I didn’t mean to distress you.”

They waited, watching the faint colour return to his face; it was never more than faint, but the livid blue tint subsided slowly, his lips regained a flush of pink. He moistened them, and even that was an effort.

“I’m quite all right now, thank you, I never intended to inhibit you, officer, if you want to charge me…”

He waited. Brice remembered the moment for its strangeness, ceremony and civility, all of which were confounding.

“No, sir, at present I’ve no charge to make.”

“But I thought…” Robert shook his head, frowning a little. “I don’t understand,” he said with a deep sigh, and abandoned the effort to find a way through the tangle. And in a moment he tightened his grip on the arms of the chair, drew his languid members together and thrust himself to his feet. Barnes took a step towards him, warily, but he stood quite steadily. “If you’ve finished with me, then, I’ll go back to my mother. You know where to find me if you do need me.”

He walked slowly but firmly to the door, and let himself out. In a moment they heard him climbing the stairs.

Hugh drove into the yard at the garage towards six o’clock, and let himself into the house by the back door. Dinah was just beginning her preparations for the evening meal, and had the makings of a salad on the kitchen table, but she put down her knife and pushed the chopping-board away when Hugh came in. She had been half-expecting him all the afternoon.

“Dinah,
would
you come? We don’t know who else to ask. Only until night…”

“Is she worse?” asked Dinah. “What does the doctor say?”

“He’s getting a nurse to come out for nights, but she won’t get here until about nine o’clock. We’ll be all right tomorrow, old Nurse Taylor—you know, the retired one— she’s willing to come in tomorrow, but she couldn’t make it today. It’s just until nine o’clock, this one night… Rob’s just about out on his feet, he hasn’t closed his eyes for thirty-six hours. And you know me,
I’m
no good…”

“Idiot, shut up!” said Dinah bracingly. “Of course I’ll come. I’m not much good, either, but it’s only a matter of using a bit of nous, that’s all.”

She made some tea for him, and forced him to eat something before they left; who knew if he’d even thought about such mundane things, in this mood? She talked sense to him, prosaically; he had never demanded poetry of her.

“Now look, she’s past seventy… nearly seventy-two, isn’t it? Don’t get to thinking you’ve somehow
done
this to her, she’s seventy-two, and it happens. Do you know how many people over fifty this ’flu’s knocked off, the last two years? Well, then…”

Dave came in to hang up the workshop keys, and she told him everything. Nobody had to explain to her that Dave didn’t want her to go. Nobody had to explain to Dave that she was going, anyhow. They didn’t argue about it.

“I’ll come round and fetch you at nine, then,” said Dave.

“I can bring her back,” objected Hugh. “Earlier, if the night nurse shows up before then.”

“All right, but if she isn’t back by nine I’ll come round anyhow.”

“I’d better slip across the yard and pick up some more clothes,” Hugh said. “It looks as if I shall have to stay over there for a while.”

He came down in a few minutes to join Dinah in the yard, carrying a small case, which he tossed into the back seat of the Mini. They sat in silence for a while as he drove out along the lane towards the Abbey. It was nearly dark; the hummock of the rising ridge beyond the village lay limp and quiet like a sleeping lizard. The trees were losing their leaves rapidly now, the next high wind would strip the more exposed branches bare.

“Are
they
still there?” asked Dinah at length. The open gate of the Abbey drive was just coming into sight.

“No, they’ve packed it in for the day, seemingly. They’ve closed up the cellar and taken everything away. It’s dead quiet in the house now, but I expect they’ll be back in the morning. The chief inspector went off just before noon, but his sergeant’s been probing all round the place ever since.”

“Looking for what, do you think?”

“A gun, I suppose—at least, they’ve been asking all sorts of questions about whether there ever was a gun in the house, so I take it that’s what they’re after.”

She thought about that for a moment in sombre silence. Bracewell had been battered to death with a stone, the unfortunate psychic researcher, now conscious but still disoriented in hospital at Comerbourne, had also been attacked with a stone. So if the police were looking for a gun, it could only be in connection with the body they had found here in the Abbey. This one must have died by shooting. Dinah had good reason to be able to guess where the body had been found, under the flags of the cellar floor, which had lain level and unmarked when Alix had first seen it, six years ago, and now was scarred from the movement of the door. What could it be the police had found when they removed the knocker from that door, the knocker that Alix said didn’t belong there? Oh yes, all Mottisham knew that they had removed it, the grapevine had not been foiled for long! The knocker must have been put there to hide
something
, and whatever the
something
was, it had sent the police hotfoot to the Abbey to continue their investigations on the spot. They had known where to look, and had had a very good idea of what they were looking for. A dead man. A
shot
man. Bullets that killed sometimes passed clean through their victims and lodged in a wall or a tree or the earth beyond. Had this one lodged in the door? That could be one more reason for removing the thing from a site where it betrayed too much, to the safe, calm place in the south porch of the church. But the primary reason, of course, was the way it dragged on the flagstones, and called attention to their irregularity.

“Hugh, I’m so sorry! All this is terrible for you.” She would have liked to find something more helpful to say, but what was the use of being optimistic and pretending to believe that a burden like this would simply go away, like a passing illness?

“Terrible for
me
? What do you think it is for Robert? Oh, they haven’t charged him, but I know he’s expecting them to every moment. They showed him something of his they’d found in the cellar—well,
they
didn’t say they’d found it in the cellar, it was Rob who said that—he was sure that’s where they’d got it from. The cap off a gold pencil he used to have. They seemed to think it means something pretty grim…”

“But
why
! I mean, when we don’t even know who this person was, or anything that could possibly connect him with your brother? Why should he want to… What motive can they possibly think he had? And in any case, a cap from a pencil could have been dropped in the cellar any time, it wouldn’t mean a thing.”

“No, not if it was just on the floor somewhere, of course, but if it was… Oh, God, Dinah, I just don’t know! I don’t know anything! Only that if it was a question of protecting Mother, Rob might do
anything
…”

The gravel of the drive, long since more loam than gravel, sputtered dully under the wheels, and they pulled up before the closed door.

When they entered the blue-curtained bedroom on the first floor, Robert was sitting beside his mother’s bed. There was a dressing-room
ensuite
, with a single bed in it, ideal, Dinah thought, for the nurse when she came. With the connecting door wide open she would hear every breath from the sick woman’s bed. In the main bedroom itself Robert had laid and lit a modest fire, and the glow it gave was light enough to see by. It cast an unusual warmth on his pale, attenuated face, underlined the hypersensitive line of his mouth, and outlined his lofty eyelids with deep shadows. He had one hand cupped behind his mother’s pillow, and with the other was holding to her lips a teaspoonful of liquid from the cup he had beside him on a small table. He heard them come, but he did not look up. The old lady appeared to be unconscious, with closed eyes and drawn cheeks, yet when the spoon touched her lips they parted a little, accepting the offered drink.

When the spoon was empty, Robert laid it in the saucer and looked up; his face was reserved, resigned, not troubled by any deep personal tenderness. Only when he met Dinah’s eyes did he smile very faintly.

“Brandy and water. He says it can’t hurt her now, and may still help her.” His voice was low and level, just above the disturbing sibilance of a whisper. He got up and came round the bed towards them. “It was very good of you to come, Dinah. In the circumstances, especially.” His eyes held hers; it appeared to be a half-apology for yesterday.

“I’m glad to be some use. You can leave her with me,” said Dinah in the same muted tone. “You ought to try and get some sleep.”

They left her alone with her patient. Hugh did not go far, she knew, only as far as his own room, a mere hotel room now as far as he was concerned, to empty his case on the bed and strip thankfully for a bath, for she heard the bath running very soon after he had left her. What Robert would do she did not try to guess. How do you sleep when the police are merely waiting at leisure to complete their case against you, and the warrant for your arrest on a charge of murder may be issued at any moment? Poor Robert! Extraordinary Robert, so impregnably patient, distant and proud, the pelican of politeness, the patrician to end patricians! Hugh is right, she thought, in defence of his clan he’d do anything—
anything
! Kill? Well, it would be a kind of duty, wouldn’t it? If there was a threat to the Macsen-Martel name and reputation, everything and everybody outside the magic circle would be expendable.

It was very quiet and still in the main bedroom after the men had gone away. The huge silence of the night came down, and she could feel all about her the immense solidity and force of this ancient house, where even the internal walls were a foot thick, and of native stone.

She refilled a hot water bottle and placed it beside the old woman’s bony feet, and then for a long time she sat beside the bed, and did not more than record what she felt and saw. The bed was a double one, no doubt the patient’s marriage bed long ago. There were no four posts and canopy, yet the frame seemed to have been converted from something belonging to the eighteenth century, broad, bold and sensuous, covered now with faded folkweave, and grinding its castered feet into a threadbare Persian carpet. The fire made the room warm and human, but it must have seemed large, bare and cheerless when the grate was empty. The furniture was on a grand scale, as everywhere in the house, but not outstanding of its kind, only elephantine.

Dinah sat beside the bed and looked at her patient. The old woman’s grey hair, unbraided, spread over the pillows in a silvery cloud, unexpectedly beautiful in its gossamer fineness. Against that silken veil the haughty face, elongated still further by the rigidity of unconsciousness, lay staring starkly upwards through large, closed eyelids, thin nostrils spread, thin mouth drawn down in distaste, the very image of Bishop Wolfhart Roth of Augsburg, with the bad smell under his nose. She was a tomb figure already, except that she breathed, and when Dinah put a spoonful of brandy and water to her lips, the lips moved miraculously and she drank. Something inside her functioned still and desired to live, or it would have disdained the means of living.