The Knocker on Death's Door

CHAPTER 6

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History had repeated itself with phenomenal exactitude. The position of the prone body was a copy of Gerry Bracewell’s position when found, one hand crumpled down from the sanctuary ring. The second absentee from the now gap-toothed border of white stones along the edges of the grass had been dropped in almost identically the same place as the first. Under the unconscious man lay a large torch, glass and bulb broken, instead of a battered briefcase. By all appearances he had been examining the door at close quarters when he had been hit from behind. It was certainly proving very unhealthy to show too much interest in that door.

The bald skull was lacerated and bleeding, but Brian had made no mistake; the man was alive. The doctor, kneeling over him while the ambulance attendants stood by with stretcher and blankets, pronounced it as his opinion that the victim was in no danger of dying, and that the attack must have been made only very recently, which confirmed Brian’s story of interrupting it at the crucial moment, and suggested both to George and Sergeant Moon, though neither of them said a word, that the boy’s arrival had in fact prevented the completion of this duplication of death. The victim laid out helplessly, the stone coolly positioned for the second and final blow, and suddenly Brian running across the road from the vicarage, an apparition in black P.V.C. He might look like one of Cocteau’s demons, but he had been a guardian angel to this harmless, intrusive crank whose name, according to the papers he had on him, was Herbert Charles Bristow.

Unless, of course, George thought, unobtrusively studying Brian’s interested, impassive face, unless Brian himself had been the one who picked up the stone and laid out the inquisitive stranger at the foot of the door. No apparent reason why he should, but then there were no apparent reasons as yet why anyone should. A cool young card, this boy, and the timing would fit perfectly, in addition to the great convenience of not having to believe, in that case, in the elusive figure of someone in a long brown coat or robe, like a monk, who had vanished at speed among the trees. But if Brian had both provided the tableau and instantly reported it, then there had been no intention to murder, but only to remove the intruder from the scene without being identified.

Concussion, probably fairly bad, the doctor said. Don’t expect to get anything much out of him for two or three days, and don’t expect him to know much about whoever hit him even when he is coherent again. That was fairly obvious advice. Nothing was more certain than that the victim’s attention had been concentrated avidly on what he was examining, and the victim’s back solidly turned on the world. If he had heard steps and turned, even at the last moment, the blow would not have been positioned so accurately at the very back of his head.

It had stopped raining soon after two o’clock, so on the paths, and especially in the places where the gravel had worn thin and mud had gathered, there might be a chance of discovering the most recent footprints. But the wet grass would show them nothing, and according to Brian the assailant had fled among the trees and so to the rear of the church, which meant grass most of the way. They would have to go over every inch. He might have left some trace behind. Trees in the dark are scratchy, aggressive beings, retaining stray threads and bits of wool pile never missed by their owners. There was a whole day of the finicky, meticulous work policemen hate most in store for them; and the day, heaven help them, was Sunday. You can’t keep a church congregation from pursuing its Christian rites on the sabbath day, not even for the sake of a murder investigation. But with the vicar’s help they might be confined to one approach.

They lifted the injured man carefully, swathed him in blankets and carried him away to the ambulance. The doctor took his car and followed his patient. The stone was shrouded in polythene and dispatched, with the broken torch, to the forensic laboratory. The plainclothes and uniformed men available dispersed to patrol the entire surroundings of the church. And in the temporary office in the vicarage Dave and Brian put their evidence formally on record. Until then there had been no time for the finer details, but they were sure of their times, and they had their statements clear in their minds.

“He must have heard me coming through with the bike,” Brian said, and was momentarily disconcerted by his own words, and stopped short.

“That’s the understatement of the year,” confirmed Sergeant Moon emphatically. “He must have if he wasn’t stone-deaf.”

“What I mean,” persisted Brian sturdily, “is that anybody who lives around here knows my bike, they’d know that about two or three minutes after the racket stopped—no, it takes longer than that, I always switch off and bring her quietly on account of the Rev.—say about like five or six minutes after—I should be walking across home. Not always through the churchyard, sometimes I go round, but still I should be somewhere around, and might see something.”

“You have a distinct point there,” said George with interest. “So you think this was somebody who didn’t know the habits of everybody around here. Somebody who might even think you’d driven straight through.”

“Or else somebody very cool,” said Brian, feeling his way visibly with every word. “Because, you see, it was raining, and I must have taken less time than usual over putting the bike away. I shoved her in the vicarage shed, where he lets me keep her, and ran for it as soon as I’d locked the door. Really ran, all down the drive and across the road and up the path, to get round to the lodge by the south porch. I reckon I cut at least two and a half minutes off the course. Maybe he was counting on these two and a half minutes, and didn’t have them. Maybe he’d forgotten about me until he heard me go rocketing through, and then he thought, all right, what does it matter, I know that chap’s timing to the second. Only this time he didn’t. Maybe he took a shade too long over hitting him again, and all of a sudden I was pelting up the path like a greyhound, and he had to cut his losses and drop his rock and get out. Either it’s somebody who doesn’t know at all,” said Brian with great care, “or somebody who knows absolutely, to the minute. Somebody right inside, or right outside.”

“And then, of course,” said Sergeant Moon amiably, “that still leaves one more person—you, laddie.”

“Yeah,” agreed Brian, gazing back at him steadily and not visibly disturbed by the suggestion, “I thought of that, too. I suppose I could have. There’s nothing I can say about that, except that I didn’t. I didn’t even know he was there. Sure I could have picked up the stone and bashed him, and then dropped it and run back to the garage and knocked up Dave—only I’m not green enough to suppose that would give me an alibi, so if I had knocked him out I should just have gone home and said nothing. Dad would probably have been the one to find him, this being Sunday. Also he’d probably have been dead, after a night out in the rain and cold.”

“I’m doing you the favour of supposing that you never wanted him dead,” said Sergeant Moon reasonably.

“If I was desperate enough to want him knocked flat, I’d be desperate enough to prefer him dead rather than talking,” pointed out Brian, and smiled, a genuine if rather cagey smile.

The sergeant, unruffled, cast a glance at George. “You want him anymore, sir?”

“This figure you saw,” said George, thoughtfully, “could it possibly have been a woman?”

The boy, so little capable of surprise in other directions, was ingenuously astonished by this, a thought which had never for a moment occurred to him. Belligerent modern as he was, he had delightfully old-world ideas about women. He thought about it, and visibly the very possibility disturbed him. George put away for good the suspicion that there had been no elusive brown figure, and with it the faint reserve he might otherwise have felt about Brian himself.

“In a maxi, you mean?” He didn’t want to admit the idea at all. The broad, fair brow sweated for the first time. “I suppose it could have been, but honestly I don’t think so. She’d have to be as big as a man—I mean, well, lots of women are as big as some men, but this one—it’s hard to judge, but I’d say going on six feet if not over. Quite as tall as me. I wish now I’d gone after him, but there was this chap lying there, and I had to find out how bad he was, and do something about him…”

“All right,” said George mildly, “I think that’s all, thanks, Brian. You can push off to bed now.”

“Oh, and one thing,” supplemented Sergeant Moon pleasantly, “not a word about monks, brown robes and elusive figures. Not that it’ll make a blind bit of difference, they’ll be on to it before morning anyhow, but do me a favour, don’t you set it going.”

“No, Sergeant,” said Brian with unusual serenity and complacency, “I won’t.”

He departed, drained but satisfied. Looking back, he tried to fault his own performance, but not too enthusiastically, and wasn’t sure whether he could or not. These proficiency tests crop up at the most unexpected moments; you rise to them or you don’t. He had no special feeling of having fouled this one, as he crawled into bed and fell asleep.

“I just wanted to mention,” said Dave, “though you probably know it already, that apparently all the regulars in the bar of the ‘Duck’ were putting on their usual performance last night for this poor soul who got laid out. I wasn’t there myself, but Dinah told me. Ed Jennings was prophesying doom, and Saul was being the scoffer this time. Nearly everybody was in on the act. I don’t know if it may have suggested something to somebody—a joke that turned sour. I just mention it.”

“Perhaps,” George said, “we could have a quiet word with Miss Cressett tomorrow—very discreetly, and get the general tone. We shall have to talk to everyone who was present, eventually, but her account would certainly help us a lot. If a joke was intended, and got out of hand, somebody will cooperate. Thank you for your assistance. I’m sorry to have kept you so long. Good night!”

Good morning would have been more appropriate, although, this being Sunday, the village appeared to be still fast asleep. But as Sergeant Moon said, as soon as Dave had left them, the word would be going round any moment now that the monks of Mottisham Abbey had struck again.

“The boy won’t talk, once he’s said he won’t,” he said with certainty, “but the grapevine will have it before daylight. And by the way, young Brian could have, but didn’t. Don’t ask me how I know—simply I’d know if he had. In that case I might even have a glimmering why.”

“Don’t bother about him, he’s all right. He wasn’t just shocked when I suggested it might be a woman, he was genuinely afraid it might!”

“Hmmm, yes, I did wonder about that. And do you really think it might?” asked Sergeant Moon curiously.

“What, six feet high and a dead shot with a twelve-pound rock? Not a chance in a million! Women have the necessary capacity for malice, all right,” said George, “and the cold blood, and every other requisite—but not the accurate aim.” He settled down at the table to work out the best deployment of his available manpower for the next twenty-four hours, and only after some minutes of concentration reverted uneasily to his previous pronouncement. “I think!” he said dubiously; and with burgeoning alarm and slightly disoriented faith: “I hope!”

“Ha!” snorted Sergeant Moon tolerantly, “where women are concerned, you and young Brian are two for a pair!”

Sunday passed in a semi-daze after the police visit, which was discreetly timed and considerately conducted. They had let Dinah have her sleep out and, Dave catch up with his, and given him time, when he was in circulation again, to acquaint her with what had happened in the night. But all day long she kept saying helplessly: “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it! They didn’t mean him any harm, not any of them. You know what they’re like, they just close up against the invader, and the more superior he is, the more they make him pay for it. But they never hurt anyone!” She said “they” only because she was referring in particular to the inner circle of the community, which was male; what she meant, what she would have said if she had stopped to think more deeply, was “we.”

Late in the evening Hugh telephoned, from one of the northern checkpoints on the circuit.

“I’ve got five minutes in hand, so I had to call you. Maybe there won’t be another chance till the finish. Everything’s going fine.” He told her, volubly, the clinical details, how the engine was running, how well he was doing on timing, and how few points they’d lost. “How are things with you?”

“Fine,” she said mendaciously. “Only it’s started raining again now.” She was sorry for the police, doggedly parting grass-blade from grass-blade round the churchyard, under the dripping trees. “What’s it like up there? Usually it rains far worse than here.”

“No, not bad at all. Nothing but an occasional shower all day. Ted sends his love. He’s just getting everything possible filled up again with coffee. I’m going to need it before the night’s out, but with a bit of luck we’re well in the running.”

“Take care of yourself. And call me after the finish, just to prove you’re in one piece still.”

“I will. Be good, girl!”

She came back into the living-room with a carefully bland face, and Dave knew that she hadn’t said a word about the night’s developments to Hugh. Why put him off his stroke when he was in the middle of something dear to his heart?

Sunday night in “The Sitting Duck” was like the sober phase of a wake. Even the jokes had gone into black, though they were still present. Eb Jennings never came in on a Sunday, preferring his pint at home after all the business of the day was over; and it was Brian who came to fetch it for him. He stayed long enough to consume half a pint on his own account, with his elbows spread comfortably across the corner of the bar counter.

“Still at it, are they?” asked Saul Trimble.

“No, called it off for the night. What can you do in the dark?”

“I swear there was more of ’em outside, picking bits of lint off the trees and scraping crumbs of earth into pillboxes, than there was of you lot inside singing ‘Through death’s dark vale I fear no ill.’ ”

“He isn’t dead,” said Brian practically.

“He would have been, from all accounts, if you hadn’t showed up.”

Nobbie came and leaned her fair head and impudently pretty face across the bar towards Brian. “D’you know they’ve been grilling all of us, everybody who was in last night, about this Bristow fellow? In case some of the boys set up some sort of a fright for him in the night. But they never! Well, you know, don’t you? It is true, isn’t it, that you saw something? Go on, do tell us! You know what they’re saying? They’re saying when the door was moved back again, the abbot came with it! It was something like a monk you saw, wasn’t it? Go on, you can tell me,” she coaxed, her voice sinking to a confidential whisper. “I won’t say a word to a soul, honest, if you don’t want me to.”

Ellie Crouch materialised as if by magic, and tapped her daughter smartly on the shoulder. “Come on, are you serving here or not? Can’t you see Mr. Swayne’s waiting for a refill?”

Nobbie withdrew to her duty with a toss of her blonde head. Brian had always wondered why Mrs. Crouch had to shove her oar in every time Nobbie spoke civilly to him. Not that it mattered, because he was not in the least interested in Nobbie, he thought her fat and fair, and he liked his girls active and dark. Still, he wondered what the old lady (Ellie was a year older than his own mother and nearly as pretty!) had against a likely lad like him.

“You don’t want to let young Brian Jennings get too familiar with you,” said Ellie confidentially to her daughter, after Brian had departed. “After all, they haven’t solved this affair, have they, and he was in the middle of it this time, you can’t be too careful.” Her conscience pricked; she couldn’t really believe that the police suspected the Jennings boy, any more man she did, but all means are fair means in a crisis. “You can do better than a verger’s son,” she concluded, again doing herself less than justice, for in fact the distinct possibilities and attractions of the verger’s son were the chief cause of her disquiet.

“Him?” said Nobbie, astonished. “Oh, Mom! Why, he used to sit next to me nearly all through school. Me go overboard for Brian? It’d feel like necking with me own brother!”

Sometimes Ellie Crouch’s family, in their forthright innocence, came out with things that made her blood run cold.

The office telephone rang at about eleven o’clock on Monday morning, and Dinah went to answer it in the certainty that it would be Hugh with the final placings.

“It’s too early,” Dave warned her. “They won’t have all their sums done for hours yet, and what’s the good of reporting a provisional result?”

Dinah came back from the telephone with a thoughtful look on her face, and a small spark of curiosity in her eye as she looked at her brother. “It’s for you. It’s a girl. Name of Alix Trent.” It was a name she had never heard, but she carefully kept the question out of her voice. Dave could not even be sure why he had not told Dinah about Alix; perhaps out of the lingering fear that after all nothing might come of it.

His face gave nothing away as he went to the telephone; hut certainly he went with alacrity.

“I know you told me to get in touch with the police,” said the creamy voice of Alix over the line, without preamble, “but I needed to confirm something with you first. I couldn’t be sure whether to trust my memory or not. It was almost the last thing you said to me on Friday, unless I’m making a mistake. You said ‘anything you think of about the door or the knocker.’ You did say ‘knocker,’ didn’t you?”

Yes, that’s right.“ But he couldn’t see where she was leading him.

‘Good, so I wasn’t imagining things. It was the only time you mentioned a knocker, as far as I remember, so I wanted to make sure of my ground before I started anything.”

“You mean you’ve remembered something odd about the knocker?”

“Very odd,” agreed Alix. There was one instant of curious and speculative silence on the line. “There wasn’t any knocker!”