The Knocker on Death's Door

CHAPTER 4

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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:

Country Houses of the Midlands.

Number Five: Mottisham Abbey,

Midshire.

There was no mistaking that long, lofty roof, that thick block of chimneys. The photographs were good and well printed, and had caught house and garden at their summer best. There were two shots of the exterior, one focused across all that remained of a wall of the refectory, barely breaking the soil, one from the best corner of the garden, over a jungle of roses. The lichen-yellows and sage-greens in the roof tiles made an exotic print; and that tall, erect, distinguished-looking fellow in the authentic country tweeds and leather elbows, with wild grey hair still curly and crisp as heather, was Robert Macsen-Martel, senior, a year or so before his death. Sixty years old, but looking at least ten years younger, with a smile that could fetch the birds out of the bushes—literally, according to Saul Trimble.

Dave turned the page, and found a central-double-page spread with three more pictures: the dove-cote in the garden, the panelled hall, the drawing-room.

Not the wine-cellar door! Was that the point? Was that what Bracewell had been hoping to find?

He turned back to the previous page. “Text by Alix Trent. Pictures by Gerry Bracewell.”

“It’s the house up there, where it happened, isn’t it?” said Bobbie Bracewell, watching him narrowly.

“Yes, this is the house. The one the door came from.”

“That’s what I thought. So the police ought to have this. I don’t know whether it means anything—but it meant something to him, all right. Or something that isn’t there meant something to him. Take it back with you.”

“All right, if that’s what you want.” He hesitated, aware suddenly of her peculiar desolation, which had not been created, but only revealed, by the loss of a husband. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think he was looking for this Alix Trent—or not for her own sake. If he went to the trouble to get this back-number from somewhere, after all this time, it was for these pictures. When he was on a job like that, I suppose he’d take a fair number of pictures, and the author or the editor would choose the ones they wanted to use? There’d be more than just these few?”

“Sometimes he’d take as many as thirty to get three, provided the magazine was paying for everything.”

“And after he’d looked at these, and failed to find what he wanted, he started turning out all his own files again?”

She shook her head sadly. “That wouldn’t do him any good, either. He never kept any but his few best negatives more than about three years, not where the work was commissioned. What space would he have for filing thousands of pictures in a place like this? He was always going to have a proper filing system and a proper library some day. When our ship came in—only we spent too much time pushing the boat out!” She laughed, and was again grave. “I’ll have to go and put my face on, it’s time I went. But I suppose I could have a look through them, just in case…”

“Yes, do that,” said Dave, and got up from the kitchen table. “Thanks a lot for the coffee. Now just tell me where I can put the car for you, and I’ll be getting back.”

He walked away from Number 10 Clement Gardens, towards the nearest bus-stop, and he had never been so glad that he wasn’t married. The last thing she had said to him, as he left, was: “Call in again some time, if you’re this way. You’re welcome any time.” And the kindling spark he had seen in her eye might have been merely the stimulus of preparing for the day’s work, but might equally well have been the first signal of a reviving interest in men—all those men who were still alive and not on a slab in the mortuary. Whatever its source, it made up his mind for him that he was never going to call in at Number 10 again. He didn’t dislike her, he was sincerely sorry for her, she even inspired a sort of respect by her rigorous honesty; but he was never going to see her again if he could help it. He’d take her magazine to Sergeant Moon or to Chief Inspector Felse, and he hoped she’d go through all those negatives and transparencies her husband had kept—at least it would give her an interest for an evening or two, and help her over the worst, even if she found nothing—but from this on, let the police take care of anything she produced.

But the magazine under his arm bothered him. Here was confirmation, if nothing more, that Gerry Bracewell had seen something that puzzled, intrigued and excited him about that church door at St. Eata’s, and had wanted desperately to hunt up the pictures he had once made of the house in which the door had then hung. To compare? To confirm some nagging suspicion in his own mind that there was something changed about it? Could he have forgotten, in six years, exactly what pictures he had taken? Was it only a shot in the dark that there might have been a photograph of that door in its old position? Or did he know he’d photographed it? As many as thirty pictures to get three, his wife had said. He couldn’t remember which of his batch the magazine had chosen, he had to get hold of a copy of the article first. When that failed, what next? The negatives, presumably, would belong to The Midland Scene. So the next step would be—supposing the whole thing was urgent enough, and promising enough—to consult their records. Another disappointment? After he’d thrown the magazine across the room in fury and frustration he’d disappeared until the Friday, and only after that had he settled down grimly to turn out all his dead, past pictures, just in case he’d missed it. So before Friday he’d thought of something and someone else he might try. And drawn another blank.

Who or what filled in that gap? Alix Trent? The author of the series might well possess prints of all the pictures concerned, but apparently she hadn’t storage space, either. And the picture wasn’t her work, only an illustration by someone else, she had no copyright in it, why keep it?

All he had to do was get off the bus and make his way to New Street station, and go home. And so he would have done, if the editorial offices of The Midland Scene had not been so close to the city centre, and he had not had at least half an hour to wait for a train.

The office was in a new glass and concrete block, smart, sterile and cold, with a fountain and the pillars of Baalbek in the hall; but two floors up, where The Midland Scene lived, the premises had settled down into a practical workaday scale and style. A minute front office housed only a receptionist and a telephonist. Dave asked after Alix Trent, and where he could contact her in connection with one of her articles. The receptionist willingly explained that Miss Trent was not on the magazine’s pay-roll, but was a freelance who often did work for them, and the office would naturally forward any communications to her. Dave was duly grateful for the information, but had thought of getting in touch with Miss Trent personally while he was here in town—if, of course, she lived in Birmingham. The receptionist examined him sternly through her iris-tinted butterfly glasses, and pondered whether he looked a proper person to be given Miss Trent’s address. She was a nice girl, about eighteen and a half by the look of her, with a head of smooth blue-black hair like a well-groomed rook, and the scimitar points of her raven wings stabbed her pink cheeks and made hollows there. She looked over her glasses, because she could see better that way. On the whole, she thought he looked a harmless creature; and Miss Trent was known to be capable of dealing with most eventualities.

“It’s in Handsworth, close to the park, I’ll write it down for you.” Which she did, earnestly.

Dave thanked her, and hesitated. “Look, would you mind telling me—are you on here regularly?”

“Yes, days,” she said, and took off her glasses altogether, the better to consider him.

“Do you know if anyone inquired after Miss Trent here last week? I believe a friend of mine may have called in on the same errand.”

He must have sounded casual enough and innocent enough. She pondered, visibly turning back the pages of her memory.

“Well, yes, one person did—but I don’t think that could be the one you’re thinking of, it was one of the photographers who sometimes works for us. He used to work with Miss Trent quite a lot, so I’m told, a few years back. They told me it was O.K. to tell him.” She looked momentarily anxious, but not because death had leaned over her shoulder. She was young, she had something better to do in her spare time than read the crime news.

“No, that wouldn’t be my man. Never mind, thanks, anyhow.”

“He didn’t come just for that, actually,” the girl said, “he came to go through our library pictures for something he wanted, but I don’t think he found it. We don’t keep material that hasn’t been used for publication, you see, not for more than a year or so—not unless it’s of exceptional interest.”

“No, of course not. I suppose space is always a problem.”

“These new places,” she told him with conviction, “look huge, but you try working in them! There isn’t room to swing a cat, let alone a camera.”

Dave went out and took a bus towards Handsworth from the nearest bus-stop.

At something after ten o’clock, Alix Trent opened the door of her Edwardian semi wide, as only large-minded people do, and looked at her unexpected visitor with mild inquiry. As she stood on her three-inch doorstep, her eyes were exactly on a level with his.

She was the brownest girl Dave had ever seen. Her hair was a weighty long bob, the colour of good tan shoe-polish, and glossy as conkers, her lashes and brows were the same tint with an added relish of red, her forehead and cheeks were matt brown in an indescribable shade, flushed with rose and fading into ivory. She wore a shirt-dress in a tint very like her own complexion, saddle-stitched with dark brown, and in the collar she had a gossamer scarf in bright apricot. Her shoes were tan, coffee and cream in a series of fragile straps. Her features were wry and friendly, not at all beautiful, apart from the deep-brown, luminous eyes, which so far remained distantly grave though her large, generous mouth smiled at him.

“Miss Trent?” Dave inquired, and his tone was almost incredulous, so far removed did this girl seem from the racy rival Bobbie Bracewell had been imagining, and so extremely unlikely ever to have had any but business connections with Gerry Bracewell.

“Yes, I’m Alix Trent.”

Her voice was low-pitched, brisk and pleasant, with a note of good-humoured patience in it. He had interrupted her at work, but he didn’t look the type to do so without reason.

“If you could spare me just a few minutes I should be very much obliged. My name’s Cressett. I’m not the police or the press or anything official, and I haven’t any standing, but it’s about Gerry Bracewell’s death.” He saw by her face that she did read the papers, and that she would never be able to feel completely disinterested about the murder of someone she had known and worked with. “I got involved,” he said, “whether I wanted to or not. I found him. And I’ve just come from his widow.”

That struck two notes at once with her, her face was mobile and expressive, she was sorry for Bobbie Bracewell, but also she knew how she herself had been regarded in that quarter, and his coming from the widow could mean several very different things.

“There’s a matter of a feature article you and he handled together,” Dave said carefully, “which seems to be connected in some way with his death. Or at least the house in it does. I believe he came to see you before he was killed.”

“Yes,” she said readily and coolly, “he did come to see me.”

“Don’t misunderstand me—you, his visit to you—this has nothing to do with the case. Only the matter about which he wanted to see you, this is relevant. At least, I think so.”

“But you are not the police,” she said reasonably, and for the first time almost smiled at him with her eyes as well as her lips.

“This is something the police don’t yet know, but will as soon as I get back today. His widow gave me this to take back to them.” He held out the magazine for her to see, and her understanding was candid, neutral and detached. “I thought I might, with luck, be able to take more at the same time. Will you help me?”

“Forgive me,” she said, aware that her smile was getting a little out of hand, “but you do appear such an improbable amateur detective.”

“I’m not one,” he said shortly, “I don’t want to be one, I never shall be one. I’m just the man who found the body, and I happen to belong—I mean belong—to the small, closed community where it happened. I don’t like a man being wiped out anywhere, and especially not in our village. And I don’t like unpaid debts hanging round the necks of innocent people. I want right done, that’s all.”

A long time afterwards, when they knew each other very much better, she told him that what had impressed her most of all, and made up her mind for her there and then about more matters than one, was that the word he used was not “justice,” but “right.” A distinction so narrow and so profound.

“Come in!” said Alix, and set the door wide.

She listened to everything he had to say, and he said much more than he had realised was necessary, because she was a good listener, intent, responsive, with the patience to wait for a slower but possibly more powerful and accurate mind than her own to find the words it needed without prompting. She kept very still while he talked, and she thought deeply and talked openly when it was her turn. Once she had made up her mind there were no half-measures.

“Yes, you’re right, of course, he did come to me. After he’d found nothing in the archives, I suppose. He wanted to know if I’d kept any of the unused pictures from that country house series. He didn’t say which one he was interested in at first, and if I’d had anything to show him I don’t think he’d have committed himself any further, but I don’t keep past material, except file copies of my own work. And it hadn’t seemed likely that there’d be any future sales in that particular set, they were commissioned, and nobody else was going to show interest. As I remember it, all the houses were much the same—after all, the major ones are too well known, it was the small stuff we were concerned with. These tumbledown dumps miles from anywhere, with arthritis in every flagstone—So when it was clear I had nothing to show, then he did begin to probe in another way. That was the first time he actually mentioned Mottisham Abbey. I read the papers, I knew about the door being put back into the church porch, it didn’t take much guessing to decide that he’d been covering the ceremony. He started reminding me of what the house was like, and asking how much I remembered. In the end it came down to what he really wanted. How well did I remember the wine-cellar door.”

She looked up at Dave, across her plain, practical, uncluttered workroom, and smiled. Smiling made her mouth slightly oblique, one corner flicking engagingly upwards.

It sounded hopeless. One house in a series of at least five, one minor feature in the house, one visit… “It was expecting a lot,” Dave owned ruefully.

“As it happens, I had some reason to remember it, though not enough to be much use to him, apparently. I do remember it was a nice piece of carving, though very dark and coated with a rather nasty varnish…”

“They’ve removed that,” said Dave.

“Good for them! It did look well worth cleaning up. But nobody said a word, about any legends attaching to it, not to us, at any rate. Of course, it was the old man himself who showed us round, and he wasn’t the kind to retail legends, from what we saw of him. He scoffed at the whole thing. I was slightly offended, to tell the truth, after all I was twenty-three then, and took my job very seriously, and I expected patrician elderly gentlemen to take their historic houses seriously, too. He didn’t. He told me exactly what he thought of old, cold, insanitary stone houses, and said if my rag thought so highly of the place they could have it, he was only waiting for a reasonable offer. He was a character. And handsome, too. Not to say oncoming! What I chiefly remember about the wine-cellar is that he contrived to close the door—or partially close it—with himself and me inside, while Gerry was making some shots of the outside.”

“Then he did photograph the door?” Dave interrupted quickly.

“Oh, yes, both he and I were quite sure of that, that’s why he was hunting for the prints, but none of us had kept them—they weren’t used, as you’ve seen. And when we were alone inside there, not to make a long story of it, old Mr. Martel made a very debonair but very determined pass at me, and I had to whip the door open pretty smartly and make a discreet getaway. The things I know about that door are not so much visual, consequently. What I remember most is how surprised I was, considering its size, at the sweet way it swung. Whoever hung it knew his business. It balanced beautifully, even though it wasn’t all that well cared for, and creaked a little in motion.”

It sounded absolutely authentic. Given the late Robert’s reputation, it would have been unthinkable for him to be shut in a cellar with an attractive twenty-three-year-old girl and not make a pass at her. He would have considered it an opportunity wasted, almost a dereliction of duty.

“But nothing else strikes you about the door as you remember it?—the door or the knocker?”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry! If only I knew what sort of something, even!”

“If only I could tell you,” he agreed ruefully. “Well, thanks, anyhow. I shall have to pass on all this to the police. You won’t mind?”

The heavy, smooth cap of russet hair swung again. “I don’t mind. I’ll keep thinking about it. Something might occur to me.”

He knew he had interrupted her in the middle of a job, there was paper in the typewriter on the desk at the window, and a sheaf of loose pages beside it to be copied. He knew he ought to go, and was even aware that he would be well advised to go now, if he intended ever to come this way again. The time for knowing her better was not yet; but it would come.

“Yes, do keep it in mind. If you think of anything that even may be significant, would you let the Midshire C.I.D. know about it?” He had the wit not to ask her to regard him as the natural intermediary, and send her afterthoughts to him.

She had risen with him, to accompany him to the door. She had a long, free, self-reliant step, and when she gave him her hand it was significant, the seal on an agreement. At the last moment, before he turned towards the gate and she closed the door, she said with deliberation: “A photograph might help, if your local paper carried one. Look in, when you’re in town again, and if you’ve got a picture, bring it with you.”

It was the measure of her impact that there was no echo at all. Bobbie Bracewell might never have existed. All he felt was that simple and exhilarating lift of the heart assuring him that he would see Alix Trent again, that it was she who was making the approach easy for him.

“I will,” he said, and walked away from her down the path with The Midland Scene under his arm, and a sense of sudden achievement flooding his senses, as though the sun had come out.