The Knocker on Death's Door

CHAPTER 8

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He had been relying on Dinah to be present and equal to the occasion, as sisters should be when welcoming possible future sisters-in-law, but he had still refrained from telling her any more than that he was fetching a Miss Trent from Birmingham to volunteer some important information to the police, and might— might!—be bringing her home for tea later on. Not a word about how important the lady and the occasion were to him. So he could hardly complain when he found no Dinah in the house to greet them. Earlier in the day he had felt that he would need her as a guarantee of his seriousness and respectability; but when it came to the point, Alix and he were so relaxed and so close, after fulfilling their public duty, that they had no need of any third party or any guarantees.

Dinah, as was her habit in such circumstances, had left a note to explain her absence, written on the white card round which a new pair of stockings had once been folded inside its plastic envelope, and propped on the kitchen table, so that he could not miss it when he went to make tea.

“Gone out,” she had written unnecessarily. “Robert M.-M. rang up and asked me over to tea. Very pressing! Something fishy, or why pick the day Hugh’s away? Must go, if only out of curiosity.

Hugh called. Pipped for first place by just two points. Shame!

Dinah.”

“Something wrong?” asked Alix, observing the slight frown the note called up.

“Oh—no, not really, I suppose. Unusual, though!” On impulse he gave her the note to read; provided she chose to be, she was already as good as one of the family. “Of course, they did break the ice by asking her over to dinner a few days ago, but that was with Hugh. What can he have to discuss with Dinah that wouldn’t have waited until Hugh gets home tomorrow? Unless it’s about Hugh! And there’s no mention of the mother.”

“M-M.—that’s this Macsen-Martel family?” She was almost completely in the picture now, she knew who Hugh was, and what were his relations with his mother and brother. “Still, you know, they are his people. Maybe the elder brother feels bound to make an effort to be social.”

But she knew very well the source of his uneasiness. Suddenly every thread of this murder case seemed to be tracing its way back to the old house where the Macsen-Martels, entrenched and isolated, staved off a changing world. However reluctant he might have been to put his reservations into words, he would very much have preferred that Dinah should not go there alone.

“Excuse me a moment, I’ll just find out if she took the Mini.”

No, said Jenny Pelsall, looking up from her typewriter in the office, Dinah had chosen to walk. She had left probably no more than a quarter of an hour before Dave’s return.

He came back into the kitchen to find Alix making tea.

She looked at ease and at home, as though she had already mapped the working outfit in her mind’s eye.

“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling at him, “I shouldn’t take things for granted like this, but it seemed a pity just to let the kettle boil for nothing. Did she take the car?”

“No—walked. It gives me a good excuse to go and call for her, later on, but she hasn’t been gone all that long, so I suppose we’d better give them an hour or so. After all, it’s broad daylight.”

“And still will be in an hour’s time, or practically. I’ll come with you, if you like, I can be part of your excuse.”

“Would you, Alix?” Everything that prolonged her stay confirmed his conviction that in a sense she would never again be leaving. They had tea together in the kitchen, which had certainly not been his original intention. Whatever vicissitudes their relationship might be in for later, it had undoubtedly made the leap into intimacy with a speed and surefootedness in which Dave could hardly believe.

And after tea, when a decent interval had elapsed, they set off to rescue Dinah.

It was cold in the huge drawing-room at the Abbey, and the windows, pinched between heavy curtains faded with long use, brought in too little light, although the day was clear and the time still only late afternoon. But Robert had placed the small tea-table close to the fire, and turned Dinah’s chair—the most comfortable in the room, she noticed— considerately towards the warmth. He was a punctilious host; but then, so he would be even to his enemies.

Dinah had put on her most becoming dress, not so much to charm as on the principle of arming herself for battle with every weapon she had. She was even looking forward, with natural curiosity, to the encounter; with even more curiosity now, because there was no sign of the old lady, and the table was clearly prepared only for two. Robert had apologised at once, and with slight embarrassment, for his mother’s absence.

“She would have been happy to see you again, I know, but unfortunately—perhaps Hugh may have mentioned it to you?—she has a very bad cold. She’s been in bed since yesterday, the doctor is rather worried about her.” He accepted Dinah’s expressions of concern correctly, and went on to talk of other things, with some constraint but admirable fluency. The guest must not be pestered with family troubles and illnesses.

Everything he did and said, Dinah could have predicted; or so she thought repeatedly through the first half of this tête-à-tête. Of course he would take it for granted that she should preside, and place the tray conveniently to hand for her. Of course he would talk about general subjects until she had nibbled her way through a few minute sandwiches and a scone or two, and enjoyed her first cup of tea. First the social demands must be met, only later can a host talk business with a guest. But there was business to be talked, she sensed it in every meticulous word he spoke, and every nervous but controlled movement he made. A sad, withdrawn, proud, chilly person, she thought, gazing back steadily into his face because he was watching her with such undisguised and earnest concentration. His eyes reminded her of the eyes of certain portraits, trained so unwaveringly upon the observer that the presence of the sitter is palpable, alive inside there, behind the motionless trappings, but unable to get out. Perhaps no longer even wanting to get out.

“Hugh was hoping to win the Mid-Wales this year,” she said, making exemplary conversation in her turn when he fell suddenly and intensely silent. “It’s a pity—still, he did come in second, and there’ll be other years. I suppose events here recently haven’t exactly been conducive to concentration, not for any of us. It takes a lot to put Hugh off his stroke, but murder in the village isn’t a trifle, and we’ve all been rather shaken up.”

She had never seen Robert anything but pale, but now it seemed to her that his face had chilled into a clay-like shade of grey. His long fingers moved nervously on the arm of his chair. He leaned to tease the fire into brightness, and drop another meagre log at the back. To escape her glance for a moment? Whatever it was he wanted to say, he was finding great difficulty in embarking upon it.

“Miss Cressett, please don’t think I am interfering in any way… I know you’ll realise that as Hugh’s elder brother I have a natural and permissible interest in his plans and prospects, but I certainly have no right to more than interest. Will you forgive me if I presume to ask you a question? You need not answer it if you don’t wish, of course, but I hope you’ll feel able to be indulgent towards the liberty I’m taking, simply because I am his brother. I gather that Hugh is—very fond of you. But… do you—has he asked you to marry him?”

Her hackles had gone up long before he reached the end of this curious speech, and the only thing that prevented her from diving headlong into prophetic anger on the spot was her acute awareness of the appalling effort this approach had cost him. She felt it in his too intense stillness rather than in any visible excitement. The lines of his mouth had drawn thin and taut, as if in pain, and he was looking at her with what she could only think of as desperation. Out-of-date patricians who find themselves faced with the task of warning off undesirable girls from hoping for marriage with the younger son of the blood, she thought, ought not to be so sensitive. But could it really be what it sounded like? Surely nobody still existed as behind the times as all that? Living, human fossils!

“We’ve never discussed ourselves or our affairs in those terms, exactly,” she said coolly.

“No, that I can believe, of course. But you must know his feelings, and… and your own.”

Dinah smiled; for a moment she even wanted to laugh. This sort of thing was absurdly easy, when it came to the point; it was he who was at a disadvantage.

“Is one necessarily always so sure of one’s own feelings?” she asked innocently.

He got up suddenly from his chair, and walked away from her to the nearer window. She saw him in profile, tall and thin and straight, quite in control of himself and yet curiously agitated. With his face still turned away from her he said:

“Miss Cressett, you’re young and able and modern, and—please let me say it!—very attractive. You have all your life before you. Don’t take any step without being absolutely certain of what you’re doing. At your age there’s no need to be in a hurry, and mistakes are more easily made than rectified. You know Hugh’s background. You know what his family is, what its history has been—all those centuries of us… The record’s there to be read, surely you must know how difficult it would be—how precarious…”

She stopped him there, stung out of her complacency. “Really, I think we’d better drop this. Don’t say any more, please.”

“No, I can’t stop now, I must try to make you realise… If only I knew how!” he said in a voice that was almost a groan. His hand was gripping the folds of the curtain so hard that a little flurry of dust-motes floated out slowly and uncurled upon the air; she saw them in the cross-light from the window.

“Don’t try too hard, because the one thing I’ve liked about you,” said Dinah, bristling, “is that you find this so hard to do.”

They were concentrating so furiously upon each other that neither of them heard the soft crunching of gravel under the wheels of a car rolling slowly up the drive.

“I suppose it was your mother who asked you to approach me—though as the head of the household, of course, you must feel pretty strongly yourself, too. What is it you find so unsuitable about me?”

He swung round on her with a face so transfigured by shock and consternation that it was like looking’at a new person, suddenly dauntingly alive and acutely vulnerable. But whatever he was about to say remained unsaid; for loud and suddenly the door-bell rang.

The sudden blaze of light in him went out on the instant. He stood for a moment breathing slowly and deeply, himself again, correct and calm.

“Please, excuse me, there’s no one else here to answer it.”

Dinah sat quivering a little with exasperation, rage and amusement, as he went to open the door. Dave’s voice, familiar and welcome, advanced into the hall. A girl’s voice after it, low-pitched and cool; he’d brought his Miss Trent with him to extricate his sister from the ogre’s castle. Not that Dinah felt herself to be any damsel in distress, but after the moment she had just experienced she had to admit that withdrawal was going to be a little more civilised in company. And after all, this was probably the last time she need ever enter this house. She rose from her chair as they all came into the room, and met them with a creditable smile, looking round for her bag and gloves as though the visit had drawn to a perfectly normal conclusion.

“I’m sorry if we’re too early,” said Dave, “but I knew you hadn’t got transport, and I thought we’d better fetch you. Alix won’t have too much time to spend with us, and I wanted you to meet her. I’m sure Mr. Macsen-Martel will understand.”

“Of course,” said Robert, a little stiffly, but not noticeably more so than usually. His manner could never be described as relaxed. “It was very good of Miss Cressett to give me her company at such short notice.” He looked at her, and his face was drawn and pale and fastidious as always, the long, straight strands of light-brown hair lying lank and dry on his high forehead. Somewhere behind the fixed, painted eyes the live creature lurked, either in ambush or in prison. Perhaps both at once.

So departure was easy. Robert fetched her coat, but it was Dave who took it from him and held it for her. Alix made a little light conversation about the house and its history. Alix might be a very dependable ally, Dinah thought, appraising her. Then they were all out on the doorstep, and Dave was opening the door of the car for the girls to get into the back seat together.

“Good-bye, Mr. Macsen-Martel!” No need to give him her hand; she was glad about that.

“Good-bye, Miss Cressett!”

They were back where they had started from, with the difference that he wouldn’t dare try that again. The door closed upon them, Dave got into the driving-seat; the car circled the island of flower-beds and moved away down the drive. Robert stood for a moment where they had left him, and then turned and went back into the house.

“You did come just a little too early, as a matter of fact,” she said, stretching in the back seat with a sigh of relief. “He never really got started on what he wanted to say, but by all the signs his job was to put me off marrying Hugh. Put me off or pay me off—he never got as far as offering me money, I really do wonder if he would have! Who do they think they are, with their ridiculous anemic faces and their feeble blue blood? In this day and age, I ask you! Hugh will be furious! At least, he would, only I haven’t the faintest intention of ever telling him.”

“He’s not the only one,” said Dave grimly from the driving seat, “who’s got a right to be furious.”

“But that’s nothing, you should hear how his mother says ‘in trade’—about you, love! She’s the one who gave Robert the job of getting rid of me, of course, to do him justice he wasn’t all that happy about it. She kept out of the way. Said to be ill in bed and under the doctor, but I suspect it’s a diplomatic illness.” Dinah was simmering down somewhat more slowly than she had expected of herself; was it possible that she could be really upset about such an absurd interview?

In the narrow gateway, which it was necessary to approach with great care from either direction, they came nose to nose with another car turning slowly in. A police car, with three men in plainclothes aboard. Both cars halted politely, as if in neighbourly conversation. The police car began to back out and clear the gate, and then as abruptly stopped; a window was rolled down, and George Felse leaned out.

“Mr. Cressett?—I thought I knew the car!” The door opened, and George came loping alongside. “Have you still got Miss Trent with you?” It was not yet dusk, but there between the overgrown trees a green twilight hung, obscuring colours and outlines.

“I’m here,” said Alix, lowering the window.

“If your friends wouldn’t mind waiting a quarter of an hour or so, Miss Trent, will you come back with me to the house? I’m going to have a look at the cellar where the church door used to hang, and I’d be very grateful if you’d come with me and see if you notice anything—anything at all—to remark on.”

Alix began to say: “But wouldn’t Mr. Macsen-Martel be more…” but she let the sentence die away on her lips. “Yes, I see,” she said. Until that moment it had not been clear to her that she was the only remaining witness, on this particular subject, who could be regarded as disinterested. Robert’s role was not yet clear, and no doubt he would be expected to co-operate, too; but that tall, thin figure of his was beginning to cast a long shadow. “Yes, I’ll come, of course,” she said, and got out of the car.

“I’ll back up under the trees there, where there’s room to pass,” said Dave, “and let you through. We’ll wait, Alix.”

The police car slid by, long and dark, and rolled to rest in front of the doorway of the house. And correct and impenetrable as ever, Robert opened the door to them.

“Good evening,” said George. “You remember me? Chief Inspector Felse—I’m in charge of the inquiry into this murder case, I had occasion to call and see you some days ago, the day the body was discovered, in fact. I wonder if you can give me ten minutes or so of your time, just long enough to show me the site where the door used to hang before you gave it back to the church. Oh, by the way, I believe you and Miss Trent have already met. Miss Trent did a feature article on the house a few years ago, and remembers the wine-cellar as it was then. I was lucky enough to meet her and her friends in your gateway, and I took the liberty of asking her to come back with me. I hope we don’t come too inconveniently?”

His voice was cool, neutral and disarming. And if Robert was going to inquire about a search warrant, he would have to do so now, and in doing so surrender altogether too much of the cramped room he had for manoeuvring. But Robert’s face remained impassive, apart from the faintest air of distaste and weariness, and he looked at them without apparent disquiet, and stepped back from the doorway courteously to allow them in.

“Of course not. I realise the extreme pressures there must be on your time, Chief Inspector. Mine is very much less valuable. Please come in, Miss Trent. I didn’t know you’d seen the Abbey before. I should have been glad to show you the house if I’d realised, though I’m afraid we haven’t always been able to maintain it as we should have liked. In the future I hope it will be possible to look after it properly.”

He closed the outer door, and they stood in the chill, dusky hall. The arched window at the far end of the room shimmered greenly with the movement of leaves, in the rising wind of the October evening. It gave almost the appearance of a french door opening on to the garden, but when they drew nearer Alix saw that outside the glass the ground fell away, so that this floor was six feet or so above the level of the sloping lawn below. The cellars beneath this rear part of the house were only partially buried.

“This way,” said Robert, and turned left beside the window, where two massive stone newel posts jutted, and a broad, open stairway descended some eleven or twelve feet into a flagged passage, too wide, perhaps, to be truly a passage, more of a square lobby. They could see only part of the paved floor from the head of the stairs; and across the grey surface, more dimly than here above, the restless shimmer of light and shadow ran like the movement of a brook from right to left. Somewhere on the right there was a window or an open grille above ground-level, through which the light and movement of the outer world could still enter.

“Be careful on the stairs,” said Robert scrupulously. “The treads are very worn. Shall I go first?”

As soon as he switched on a light below, the pattern of flowing, reflected light from outside the window paled and submerged into the flat grey stone of the flooring. The wide treads of the stairs were hollowed two inches deep, and none of them had ever been replaced. Alix thought of all the feet that had passed up and down here over the centuries to achieve that bended bow of stone at every step. Towards the foot of the stair they already had a ceiling over their heads, and at once there was a hollow echo, distant and delayed, as though someone unseen and unknown trod always one step behind them. And some eight feet from the foot of the stairs the new cellar door came into view, directly facing them.

They stood in a stone box which was almost a perfect cube, except that the ceiling over their heads was a shallow vault instead of flat. In the wall on their right the expected lunette of window—she remembered it now—began at ground level, five feet above the floor on which they stood, and arched to the ceiling, but all it let in now, in competition with the single electric bulb within, was a green dusk rapidly deepening into darkness. Otherwise this small anteroom was empty and bare; and the door facing them was merely a plain new door, a lightweight compared with the one it had replaced, finished in natural oak but of ordinary thickness and without ornament.

“Not as spectacular as the other one,” said Robert with detached appraisal, “but more in keeping with our circumstances, perhaps. It isn’t locked, if you want to go inside.”

He pressed the plain, respectable iron latch and pushed the door open, standing back to let them go in. The door swung smoothly, and brought them into a narrow, barrel-vaulted cellar which must surely be the oldest remaining fragment of the Abbey. A low stone settle was built along one wall, and here and there on the wall itself they could trace the round marks left by the rim of large wine-casks. The opposite wall was built off by buttress-like excrescences into three empty compartments. The whole room was bare, clean and cold, and there was nothing in it to be recorded by the mind or the eye.

Except, perhaps, the slight irregularity of the flagstones inside the doorway, and the shallow, rounded scars that marked some of them. Broken arcs of three concentric circles, centring on the hinges of the door. The outside one of the three was the most noticeable, and reappeared three times on the arc described by the outer edge of the door, which was so wide that it spanned nearly half the cellar when it was opened. Some of the stones were unmarked, some rose slightly higher and carried the scars. The two inner circles showed only here and there, and more shallowly. Not from this door, so much was certain; it swung above the marks without grazing anywhere. Perhaps the old one had dropped a little before it was moved. But was that likely, after all those centuries? And the scrape-marks, though not brand-new, were notably paler grey than the rest of the stone, like slate-pencil marks on slate.

“You remember it like this?” George asked causally.

“It’s some time ago,” Alix said, “but I do remember it, now that I see it again. I remember the vault—actually it’s rather a nice one, and not very usual—and the size of the flags.”

Robert stood courteously holding the door wide, not following them within; a gentle indication that though he was willing to co-operate fully, nevertheless even his time had its value, if only to him. His pale face was quite motionless.

“Thank you,” said George, “I think that’s all, just for the moment. But I would like a word with you still, if you wouldn’t mind waiting until I take Miss Trent back to her friends. You may be able to help me over one or two matters.”

Robert’s enervated voice said with resignation, but still with immaculate politeness: “Certainly, I’m at your disposal.”

They climbed the steps, and Robert switched out the light. The arched window showed a clinging, gossamer darkness of trees, dappled irregularly with the pallor of the sky showing through. The hall was ill-lit and hollow-sounding, a desolation. At the front door Robert said goodbye to Alix distantly, and withdrew again into the house, pointedly leaving the door ajar. In the waiting police car, Detective Constable Reynolds and Detective Sergeant Brice sat silent, watching the house while not for a moment appearing to be watching it.

“Well?” said George quietly, as soon as they were out of earshot in the drive. “Anything to comment on?”

It was left to her, of course, he was not going to prompt her, she understood that.

“Yes, something definite, but I don’t know if it means anything. There’s the floor—those marks as if the door dragged. But the door doesn’t drag. And neither did the old one, at least not when I was here previously, six years ago. It isn’t that I remember whether there were any marks on the floor then or not,” she said carefully. “I think I should have noticed at the time if there had been, but I doubt if I should have remembered. But what I do know is that the old door didn’t drag when I came here on that visit. It was beautifully hung—all that weight and mass, and it swung at a touch.”

“You’ve got a special reason for being so sure of that?” asked George curiously.

It was the one thing she had not felt it necessary to include in her statement, but she told him now. They were approaching the parked car, and Dave was standing by the door waiting for her.

“Yes, I have. We were being shown round by the old owner, the one who’s dead. I’m told he had a reputation as a woman-chaser. Well, he lived up to it. While Gerry Bracewell was taking some shots of the carving of the door, our host contrived to shut himself and me on the inner side of it—it was quite easy, obligingly drawing it to so that Gerry could operate freely. And so that he could, too. I moved fast, and the door behaved like silk. I remember what a surprise it was to find such a barrier moving so sweetly to let me out. That’s how I know.”

“Thank you,” said George. “That sounds absolutely reliable, and may be more useful than you know.”

But the look she gave him as they parted, level and long and silent, stayed with him as he turned back towards the house; and it was in his mind that her intelligence worked always one step ahead, and that somewhere within her, whether she had yet worked it out or not, she already possessed the full knowledge of the significance of what she had told him, and had foreseen its consequences.

In the back seat of the car Dinah said with a sigh: “I’ve hardly had time even to say hullo to you yet, Alix, and Dave’s only known you a few days, and already we seem to have landed you in more complications than I can add up at this moment, in my confused condition. You won’t let it put you off us, will you? Or off this place? We don’t always behave like this, sometimes we’re more or less normal.”

“Murder’s abnormal anywhere,” said Alix ruefully. She had told them what had passed in the house, since no one had suggested she should necessarily keep it to herself, and in any case the indications were that it, or its results, would soon be known to everybody. “At least I can’t complain that Mottisham is boring, can I?”

“But what on earth does it all mean?” Dinah fretted. “Drag marks under a door aren’t so rare, couldn’t the old door have dropped a little during the last few years, since you first saw it?”

“After being in position and perfect for centuries,” Dave said from the driving seat, “why should it drop suddenly now?”

“If the National Trust are taking the place over,” Alix said slowly, thinking it out, “then as soon as the agreement is finally made they’ll put their own experts in to see what restorations and renovations are necessary. If a place is going to be shown to the public as a historical monument, then everything possible about it has to be authenticated and documented. Do you suppose that could be the real reason why the door was given back to the church? Not because it once belonged there, but because it would attract too much attention where it was, and might give something away that wasn’t supposed to be given away? Is there any real evidence that it once belonged to the church porch?”

“Almost everything about the Abbey,” said Dave, “is an open question. Before it folded, this had become a degenerate and disorderly house. Apparently the standard of scholarship was low, and what was left of the library was burned, and most of the records with it. You could make up what stories you like about the last years of Mottisham Abbey, and if you can’t prove ’em, neither can anyone else disprove ’em. The door’s obviously a genuine part of the old abbey set-up, but as for where it belonged, who’s to say?”

“But Robert Macsen-Martel, apparently, did say. He said it came from the south porch.”

“He said family tradition said so. Who’s going to argue about family tradition—especially against the family?”

“He also said,” Dinah pointed out, “that there was this story about the monk and the devil and the sanctuary knocker. But now it seems there wasn’t really a knocker on the door at all, not while it was in the house.”

“I wonder,” said Dave, as they turned into the Comerbourne road, “what would have happened if they had left the door in position in the house? The prowling experts would be pretty quick to notice if it dragged, wouldn’t they? Old, settled floors and doors don’t suddenly change their habits. If that’s the oldest part of the house, it would have come within the scope of their brief right away. They’d have wanted to put it right, even if they didn’t burn with curiosity to find out how it ever got put wrong. Either re-hang the door, or re-lay the flagstones—one way or the other.”

Yes, thought Alix, that’s exactly what they’d have done. And now somebody else is surely doing it in their place. But try as she would, she could not see any farther ahead than that, what came next was impenetrable mystery. The question: “Who?” might by now have a potential answer, but the question: “Why?” produced only a blank silence.

Dinah turned and looked back through the rear window towards the overgrown shrubberies and old trees of the Abbey grounds.

“I wonder what the police are doing there now?”

“They’re taking up the cellar floor,” said Alix.