Ellis Peters - George Felse 10 - The Knocker On Death's Door (6 page)

“Yes, that’s true, not an attractive night. Then there’s nothing else you can add? Nothing that might be relevant in any way?”

“There’s one thing that’s just
too
relevant,” said Dinah abruptly. She looked at Hugh for guidance, but he was gazing back at her with eyes wide in wondering inquiry. “But it isn’t a matter of fact at all, and you’ll think I’m crazy. If it wasn’t for the—the resemblance…”

“Tell me,” George suggested, “and let me judge.”

“It’s what Dave told us about how he was found, huddled up facing the door, and with his hand stretched out touching it—as if he’d been holding the knocker when he was struck, and just slid down the door as he fell. Last night Robert told us a story about that door. There’s supposed to have been another queer death connected with it, centuries ago.”

Light had dawned on Hugh. “Oh,
that
! But that’s just nonsense, it doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means there could be people who think of the door in that way, plenty of people. It could even mean that someone might try to reproduce what’s supposed to have happened all that time ago—supposing he wanted to kill at all, that would be one way of creating a complete fog around the act, wouldn’t it? Even if there’s nothing at all in the superstition itself, it could be effective, couldn’t it?”

“What is this story? The door’s supposed to have killed someone before?” asked George.

“Not so much killed him as refused to save him.” Dinah told the story, as nearly as she could remember them in the words Robert had used. “But Mrs. Macsen-Martel said how odd, she couldn’t remember hearing that legend before.”

“My mother hears only what she wants to hear,” Hugh said indulgently, “and she hates all this superstitious mush. If she met a couple of ghostly monks pacing along the gallery, she’d walk straight through them and pretend they weren’t there. There are plenty of odd stories, there always are about old houses. But none of us ever think about them at all unless we’re prodded. Dinah did
ask
about the door.”

She admitted it. “Yes, I began it. But isn’t it queer that this man Bracewell should be killed just there—close to the door—touching it? Exactly the same!”

“Oh, come off it!” protested Hugh bracingly. “Any moment you’ll be crediting it that the devil took this one, too!”

“
I
shan’t,” said Dinah, “but once the word gets round, half Middlehope
will
. Maybe that’s what somebody
wants
to happen.”

George made no comment, merely thanked her and took his leave. But as he drove down the valley towards Comerbourne and the unpleasant and lengthy rendezvous at the mortuary, he could not help feeling that Dinah might turn out to be a true prophet. Much worse, the first whispers of words like “devil.” “witchcraft.” “ghost,” would bring the representatives of the more sensational Sunday papers converging on Middlehope like hounds in full cry. Some fast and determined work was indicated, if they were to escape that fate.

He went over the facts and possibilities with Sergeant Moon, at something after ten o’clock that night, in the room the Reverend Andrew had placed at their disposal. George was just back from the post mortem, a conference with his superintendent and his Chief Constable, and a round of brief calls arising. Moon had sat tight in Mottisham and pumped all his most useful acquaintances in addition to all the relevant witnesses. Both were tired, and George had still to compose his first report, which was a matter for great care, since the future charge of the case largely depended upon it. “That’s it, then. We know his movements for most of the day. Arrived in the village about a quarter to twelve, noon, yesterday, and left his car at Cressett’s for repair, taking his briefcase with him. Had lunch at the Martel Arms and asked about a room. Left there, still carrying his briefcase, but having unloaded his night things from it, about two. Was seen by four different people during the afternoon. Three of them noticed him strolling round the church, but not paying any special attention to the door more than any other part—or not letting himself be noticed doing it, at any rate—and one saw him walking on the hill overlooking the Abbey, about four o’clock. This one says he was carrying binoculars. One of those who saw him in the church is quite positive that he had a small camera, and was photographing the few bits of medieval carving inside there. He remembers the flash bulbs going off. Incidentally, Bracewell expressly told Cressett that he hadn’t brought a camera with him this time. About five he came back to the hotel, had some tea and sandwiches, and sat around and read the evening paper for a while. He was still there at opening time, and had a drink and another snack at the bar, but said he wouldn’t be in to dinner, and asked for a sidedoor key, which in any case Mrs. Lloyd always gives her guests, it’s less trouble than having to let them in. It was then getting dark, and also misty. So far we haven’t found anyone who actually saw him alive after he left the hotel, which was at about a quarter past seven.

“Found in his room afterwards, his pyjamas, a paperback thriller, toilet and shaving kit, and that’s all. Found under the body, his briefcase, containing a number of letters of no particular significance that I can see so far, some from girls, some to do with photographs used by various papers; a fairly strong torch, the binoculars mentioned before, and a number of flash bulbs, filters and other equipment. But no camera! So what? It isn’t in his hotel room, it isn’t in the briefcase, yet he had it. The evidence is sound. So maybe someone who came on him by night in the south porch not only wanted him out of the way, but also wasn’t taking any chances on what he might have on record in that camera. In which case whoever it was would probably remove the film and discard the camera. If he was panicky enough he might even make a mistake and leave some prints on it.”

“He wouldn’t,” said Sergeant Moon pessimistically.

“Well, if he was sure he hadn’t, and cool enough, he’d simply drop it somewhere in the churchyard. Where better, once the film was out? So that’s one job, find that camera.”

“That’s for me. Go on, what about the postmortem? How much can the time be narrowed down?”

“Not nearly enough,” admitted George. “Just about what I expected. Reece Goodwin says the man was dead certainly before midnight, probably before eleven, but he won’t be more exact than that. We know he was alive at a quarter past seven. That’s four hours at least. Maybe we’ll manage to narrow it down by finding someone who saw him later. We’ll try. He was hit twice, Reece says. I’ll spare the medical language, but it adds up to the fact that someone picked up the stone and clouted him with it hard enough to lay him out. He was standing when that blow was struck, and probably stooping forward. It might have killed him, in any case, but X was taking no chances. He hit him again, very carefully and thoroughly, as he lay on the ground. And that was that. Fractured skull—an understatement, it was caved in like a soft-boiled egg. Surprisingly little bleeding, considering. He may have lived approximately fifteen to twenty minutes afterwards, but even if he’d been found at once he’d have died.

“And now we’ve got little Miss Cressett passing on— quite rightly—this curious legend that some poor wretch of a monk dabbled in black magic four hundred odd years ago, and was knocked off by the devil at the foot of that same door, and in just that attitude, when the sanctuary knocker burned his hand and made him loose his hold. Heaven rejected him, and hell got him. Tell me, Jack, did you ever hear that particular legend about Mottisham Abbey?”

“George, my boy, I never did, to tell you the truth. But don’t make too much of that, either, we’re prodigal about legends here, we spawn ’em and forget ’em. I could have heard it and paid no heed, a dozen times over. Only I don’t think so. Bear it in mind, but don’t go overboard about it.”

“The old lady said much the same, apparently. She didn’t recall it, but didn’t totally reject it. I called round at the Abbey on my way out this morning, Jack, just to check with Robert Macsen-Martel. He confirmed that he had obliged with the story when Miss Cressett inquired. He said it was a tradition in the family, but didn’t vouch for it in any other way. Very aloof and indifferent. I asked him how it happened that his mother didn’t recognise the tale. He said his mother’s memory was not what it once had been, and of course she’d known the story, but she took no stock in such superstitions, and so put them out of mind almost wilfully. Which was more or less what the young one—Hugh—said, too. The mother I didn’t see.”

“Few people do,” said Sergeant Moon. “She’s so aristocratic she’s become used to existing alone in a rarefied world. It gets narrower and narrower as you get older. She belongs to an older time in more ways than one, you know—she and the son both. They pay on the nail for everything, and they keep their word. The old man’s debts—he ran ’em up time and again, and absconded as soon as things got too hot for him—those two paid off every time, to the last penny. Is that such a barren virtue as it sometimes seems?” The sergeant came down to earth with an acrobat’s agility. “What about the widow? Ghosts, doors and churchyards are all very well, but when a wife’s murdered, check up on the husband, and when a husband’s murdered, check up on the wife. This solitude would make a sweet cover for a dead ordinary killing from dead ordinary motives.”

“Blonde,” said George tersely, “thirty-ish, good-looking, a city tough. Had to be. She works, too. According to friends and neighbours, their marriage ran in the offhand way that sometimes results when both partners go on working after the wedding, with no special end in view except more money. They had rows, plenty of them. Lately she seems to have had occasional men, and he occasional women. But they both stayed jealous. It wasn’t any secret, when they felt like it they told the whole block. She didn’t weep over him, but she wasn’t up to providing much information, either. I’ll be seeing her again tomorrow.”

He closed his notes with a brisk slap, and yawned exhaustingly. “We’ve got a choice. Is this a case about a door, and only incidentally about a man? Or is it a case about a man—this chap Bracewell—and only incidentally about a door? You tell me!”

“I wish I could say the door didn’t matter,” the sergeant owned mournfully, “I wish I could believe somebody simply copped his enemy here by chance, and left us holding a corpse that isn’t ours by right. But something tells me the door genuinely matters. Why should he come back, else? George, I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all.”

“Neither do I,” said George grimly. “And you know who’s going to like it least of all, unless I doctor my report? The Chief Constable. You know him, he takes fright at the drop of a hat, if he thinks we’re in real trouble he’ll yell for the Yard tomorrow morning. And it’s got to be tomorrow morning or never. They’ll curse us to hell if we fetch them in when everything’s congealed like cold mutton fat.”

“George,” Sergeant Moon leaned over the table and spoke with intense gravity, “don’t let him do it. These are our people, and this is our case, and if the southerners get in on it the whole valley will go to ground. It’ll be border warfare all over again, I’m telling you.
Get him to leave it to us
!”

“The door, then, not the man?” said George.

“The door! And I’m staking my reputation!”

ROBERTA Bracewell, Bobbie to her friends, opened the front door of her first-floor flat at No. 10 Clement Gardens, at the improbable hour of a quarter to eight on the Friday morning, and stared suspiciously at Dave Cressett across the threshold. Her fair hair was still in rollers, half-concealed beneath a chiffon scarf, and she had not yet put on her office face, but from the neck down she was immaculate in a grey worsted dress, sheer stockings and thick-heeled patent shoes.

“Mrs. Bracewell?”

“Oh!” she said blankly, seeing a stranger on the doorstep, and her eyes narrowed into hostility. “I thought it was the post. What a time to come calling, I must say.” She inched the door a little nearer closing in his face. “You’re not the press again, are you?”

“No, nothing like that. I tried to telephone you last night, but you weren’t answering, and they told me you went out to work, so I thought I’d better get it here before office hours. But maybe you aren’t going in to work—if not, I’m sorry I disturbed you so early.”

“I’m going in,” she said grimly. “I have to live. Nobody’s going to pay me big money for the story of my life with Gerry, that I know of—a couple of paras and a picture will be all, if they give me that much. And he didn’t leave me much but hire-purchase agreements.”

“He left you a car,” said Dave simply. “I’ve just driven it in from my place, where he brought it for repairs. It’s down in the street now, if you’ll tell me where you want it I’ll bring it in for you.” There were two wooden garages beside the broad drive of the converted Victorian house, but he had no way of knowing which was Bracewell’s. “The police have cleared it, everything’s in order.”

“The car!” she said, astonished. “Will you believe me, I never even thought about his car!” She looked again, and more intently, at Dave. Her face was regular and well-cut, but pale with the dingy city pallor, and her eyes were illusionless. “You’re from there?” she said. “The place where it happened?”

“Yes, that’s right. He had a bit of trouble with his steering, and left the car with me that day. I had it ready for him by evening, but he didn’t come for it. The police had to go over it, afterwards, but they’ve finished with it now, it’s all yours.”

“Well, well!” she said with the ghost of a laugh. “Something salvaged! Pity it had to be just a car, but even a car helps. I must owe you some money, then.” She set the door wide on a narrow white hall. “You’d better come in. I’ve got time enough, and I daresay you could do with a cup of coffee, starting out as early as all that.”

Dave stayed where he was. “I haven’t put in a bill. It wasn’t you who commissioned the job. That’s all right.”

Her eyes widened a little. She gave him a long, considering look, and then she smiled. “Come in, anyhow, and have the coffee. You’re not the press—and God knows I can’t be sure whether I want that lot to come in droves or stay away from me altogether—and you’re not the police—not that I can complain, they’ve been all right—what could they do about it? Still, somebody to talk to who isn’t either…”

So he went in. What else could he do? She closed the outer door behind them, and clumped along on her chunky heels to the small, primrose-coloured kitchen, all nylon net and blue and white earthenware on a plastic lace tablecloth. The flat was small, hesitant in style, confused in taste, as if she had composed it in hurried five-minute frenzies between the office and whatever her social life consisted of, and forgotten it all the rest of the time. Quite a bit of money had gone into it, but not much effort or thought, and it must surely have been coming to pieces in sheer discouragement long before Gerry Bracewell got himself murdered in some obscure cause in a far-distant village. Yet there were signs that this woman could have been a house-proud wife and mother if she had ever given herself the chance.

She swept her discarded apron from one of the two yellow plastic-upholstered chairs at the kitchen table to make a place for him, and poured him coffee, and then refilled her own cup and sat down opposite him at the table, spreading her arms on the cloth.

Abruptly but quietly she asked: “Did you see him?”

Dave did not even pretend to misunderstand her. “I found him.”

“I see!” She lowered her eyes. “Poor old Gerry,” she said after a moment, with resigned composure. “He was a bastard to me, but he didn’t deserve that. Maybe he wasn’t any more of a bastard to me than I was to him, when it comes down to it. How do I know? It just went sour, what does it matter now whose fault it was? I tell you, though, if we had it to do again we wouldn’t set about it the same way, I’d see to that. Not that there’s ever likely to be a second chance. I don’t even want any family now. Leave it, we said, we won’t get caught like some of the kids do, not even a year having fun and in come the brats and the bills, and most likely the debt-collectors, too. Not for us, thanks! We’ll both keep working, we said, get some capital, get
things
, enjoy life, plenty of time for settling down when we’ve had a fling. Trouble is, you get to like having a fling, and it goes on and on, and you don’t want to let go of it, and all of a sudden…” She let the hypothetical case slip away from her; her face tightened, staring stonily at her own situation. “All of a sudden you’re a widow, and he’s on a slab in a mortuary.”

“I’m sorry!” said Dave helplessly, both cold hands cupped round his mug of coffee, which if instant was at least hot. He didn’t know what else to say.

She darted him a brief, shrewd glance. “I know what you’re thinking:
Her
heart’s not broken, by a long chalk. And no more it is. What’s the use of pretending? We haven’t mattered much to each other for a long time. Having a fling got pretty boring together, he found himself other partners. It’s all right, the police know it all, it doesn’t mean a thing now, but I told them, anyhow. Sure we had rows, rows all the time. He went off for days when he felt like it, and there was always a girl behind it. Only last week we had a row again—how was I to know it was going to be the last one ever? There was this girl be used to know, a few years ago… she did feature articles for one of the magazines he used to do pictures for. They worked together a lot, around five or six years ago. She’d do interviews with people, or pieces about places, and he’d do the art work. And last week, after he was up there in your part of the world, suddenly he started looking for her again. He thought I didn’t know, but I did. He went to the magazine offices—I know because he came in with an old number from way back, and sat down with it and started thumbing through it as though he expected to find her telephone number, and then he swore and threw the thing across the room, because whatever it was he was looking for, he hadn’t found it. But when I went to pick it up he made good and sure he got there first. I saw the date, though, it was some time in 1964. They did a whole series together that year, I knew then there was something between them. Then he walked out, and didn’t come back until the Friday, and not a word to be got out of him, all he did all the weekend was turn out all his old pictures and slides, hunting for something. I might as well not have been here… I might as well have been dead.” The word shocked her into silence for a moment. She contemplated it bleakly, and accepted it: “And now he’s dead.”

“Did you tell the police all this?” Dave asked.

“I told them everything I could think of, my whole life story, not that I suppose it means anything now. I told them where I was Tuesday night, too, but how do you prove you were in a cinema? Not even a local, but in the city. From a quarter to five, when I left the office, I could have been anywhere. I didn’t come home. What for, I knew he wouldn’t be here!” Her pallid, unmarked morning face had quickened into painful and positive life. Whatever was left of it now, once she had been in love with her husband, and for all her disillusionment she still had not broken the habit of reckoning with him—or, as now, with the blank where he had been.

“But you did tell them about this business with the magazine?” Dave insisted. “Because he must have had a reason for hunting up an issue six years old.”

Surprise came as a relief to her. She looked up at him with fresh animation. “You really think it could mean something? I did tell them, yes, but I didn’t make all that much of it. I never thought… Here, wait a minute! You could do something for me, at that.”

She got up quickly, and clacked out of the kitchen with more spring to her step than he had yet heard in it; and in a moment she was back with a limp and dog-eared magazine in her hand,
Country Life
-size, once glossy.

“I didn’t give them this yesterday because I didn’t know where it was. I thought he’d taken it away with him, but he hadn’t, he’d only hidden it. I was turning out his papers and letters last night, after they’d gone. I found this shoved at the back of his transparency files. You’re going back there anyhow—give it to that inspector for me.”

She put it into his hands. He had occasionally seen copies of it before, but half of it was social gossip, provincial at that, and lacking for him both general and local interest, and he had never bought a copy himself in his life.
The Midland Scene
—glossy monthly published right here in Birmingham, but belonging rather to the outer shires than to the city. July 1964, and consequently full of regattas, tennis, gardens open to the public, stately homes on show, and country race meetings. In the winter it would be hunt balls, meets, the exploits of midland skiers abroad, winter sports and annual dinners. The paper was good, the layout elaborate, the colour-printing first-class. He turned the pages, full of social events and comments that seemed to him as remote as Mars; and he came to a feature article with pictures, the centre-piece of the colour pages: