The Knocker on Death's Door

CHAPTER 13

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THEY stood staring at each other with wide, horrified eyes across the draggled coat and the brittle, broken leaf. Hugh opened his lips to blurt out something unguarded, a protest, a cry of rejection, an appeal—no, more likely a demand!—for reassurance, but Dinah motioned him urgently to be quiet, and he swallowed his distress and cast one brief, alarmed glance at the bed. It was impossible to talk there. No revelation, however stunning, had a right to intervene in the struggle now on in this room between life and death.

It was the intensity and helplessness of their silence that made it possible for them to hear Robert’s footsteps on the stairs. Hugh came out of his stupor with a shudder, rolled up the coat hastily and pushed it to the back of one of the shelves. He had scarcely closed the door upon it when Robert came in.

“I’ve made you some coffee and sandwiches,” he said, in a muted half-voice that was less disturbing than a whisper. “You go down and get them in peace. I’ll sit with her while you’re away.”

“You should be sleeping,” said Dinah as quietly.

“Later, when the nurse is here. I’ve called Doctor Braby again,” he said, and looked long and sombrely at the figure in the bed, withdrawn and immune. “I’m worried about her. She doesn’t rally. I think he should see her again.”

“But really I don’t need anything,” Dinah began gently. But Hugh’s brows were signalling her urgently to accept, to come away out of here where they could talk; and Hugh’s hand was persuasive at her elbow, drawing her toward the door. They needed time to consider what it really was they had discovered, to come to terms with what they knew, before anyone else need know it. Yes, she thought, he’s right. Why put it off? It won’t go away, and it can’t be kept secret. We’ve got to talk. Why not now? She yielded to the coaxing hand that urged her away. “Oh, very well—it’s kind of you, Robert, I’ll be back very soon.”

Hugh closed the bedroom door very softly and cautiously after them. The house crowded in upon them, heavy, ancient and cold, as they crept down the stairs in silence. Dinah had glanced back just once as the door closed, and seen Robert seated again beside his mother’s bed, indestructibly patient, lonely and durable; the man who made coffee, filled hot-water bottles, put fresh, aired sheets on the bed for the nurse, brought up books for her to read, thought of everything and did everything that was needed in this house. There might have been a whole generation instead of six years between him and Hugh. Then he was shut in and they were shut out, and the vast treads of the stairs creaked softly under their feet; and she realised that they were hurrying, that they were frantic to reach some enclosed place, with at least one more solid door between themselves and the pair upstairs, where they could turn and look at each other without concealment at last, and say everything they had to say.

Robert had laid a tray as meticulously as for a full-dress party, and placed it on a low round table of Benares brass in the drawing-room, and even plugged in a little electric fire on the vast empty hearth, a spark in a cold cavern. One standard lamp was switched on beside the table; the rest of the room receded into darkness. Hugh closed the door behind them, and leaned back against it with a huge sigh of wonder and dismay.

“My God, Dinah, what are we going to do?”

She didn’t answer. She had walked on into the room as soon as he released her arm, moving automatically towards the circle of light in which the table stood, though she had no more thought of coffee at that moment than he had. She even touched the arched handle of the porcelain pot, vaguely, as if she wondered what she was doing here, and could only associate her presence with these small evidences of Robert’s scrupulous attention to his guest. Her hand dropped. She looked up at Hugh, still pressed against the door with his arms spread and his head turning tormentedly from side to side.

“It can’t be true, can it? Can it? That coat—and this cold of hers—the next day she was worse, suddenly much worse… You remember how it rained when you drove me over here that night?”

Yes, she remembered. She noted, too, realising it for the first time, that when he spoke of the Abbey he never said “home”. Home was the flat over the workshop. Grooms should live above the stables.

“Then she knew everything about it—all the time she knew,” he said in a drained whisper. “Not Robert…”

Dinah gazed back at him large-eyed across the table. “No, not Robert. I should have known.”

Hugh heaved himself away from the door, and began to pace helplessly about the room, grinding his heels into the frayed carpet: a few steps away from her, a few steps back again.

“Not Robert—Mother! The poor old girl, she must have been mad! Dinah, she must have been mad, mustn’t she? Why should she want to slug a poor harmless crank for hanging round that damned door, unless she knew what was wrong with it? And if she knew that, then she knew why… She must have been the one who… There isn’t any other possibility left, is there? But why? Why? Who was this fellow they found, anyhow?”

“I don’t know that,” said Dinah. Her voice sounded to her curiously distinct and pitched a little high, as though she stood a long way off, and had to make it reach not only Hugh, but herself. “All I know is who killed him. Not why.”

“Yes… there’s no escaping that now, is there?”

“And it wasn’t Robert,” she said, with the same distant, hypnotic authority.

“No, not Robert. So what, for God’s sake, are we going to do now?”

In the moment of silence she heard the ticking of the clock, and would have liked to know how its hands stood, but it was shrouded in darkness in a corner of the room, and in any case she could not turn her eyes away because of the intensity with which Hugh’s eyes held them.

“And it wasn’t your mother,” she said.

For a moment he thought he had not heard her correctly, though she had incised the words upon the stillness between them with all the clarity of an engraving; then he knew that he had, and that she had meant what she said, and after all his restless and agonised writhings he was suddenly quite still, intent and silent while he studied her.

“But that’s crazy!” he said. “You saw her coat, still green and damp from being rolled away like that on Saturday night, all soaked with rain. And stuck with yew needles— what more could we possibly need than that? Damn it, Dinah, it was you who found it!”

“Yes, I found it. Does that prove who wore it? Somebody wore it to steal out to the churchyard, I give you that. How can we be so sure it was your mother?”

“But, hell, Dinah, you just found it hidden in her room…”

“Yes… the one place in the house, you tell me, that hasn’t been searched. The best place to hide something. I wonder,” said Dinah, “if the gun’s there, too? She wouldn’t know, would she? For two days now she’s been either asleep or more or less in a coma. Anybody could have hidden the coat there.”

A gust of incredulous laughter shook him. “Anybody, the girl says! For God’s sake, how many people were there in the house?”

“There was one extra last Saturday night,” said Dinah. “There was you!”

He took two or three hasty steps towards her, as though he wanted to use his hands, the brusque persuasion of his body, to recall her to herself and put an end to this grotesque nightmare of distrust and misunderstanding. She did not move to meet him, nor to recoil from him, but kept her place, the brass table solidly between them.

“Dinah, you don’t know what you’re saying. You can’t mean this!”

“I know what I’m saying. You slept in this house on Saturday night. I drove you over here, as you just reminded me. Who else belonging to this house knew there was going to be a watcher prying round the church porch all night? Had your mother been in the bar listening? Had Robert? But you had! You knew! ‘If the monks don’t get you, the devil will,’ you said. And you had a fine monk’s robe all waiting for you here by the garden door. You’d be surprised, Hugh,” she said, “how many details a girl notices when she’s paying her first visit to people who may be going to be her in-laws. I saw the worn rugs in the hall, the old coats in the lobby. The kind of old coats most houses keep, pensioned off, just for running out in the rain when you’ve forgotten to shut the garage door—or popping out to feed the chickens, if you keep chickens. I remember that old camel coat very well. It could make a fine monk out of anyone in the dark, man or woman, and it wasn’t in your mother’s wardrobe then.”

“But, by God, all you’re saying is that any of us could have put it on. Because I told them all about that fool of a ghost-hunter, when I came in, that night—they may not have been there to hear it for themselves, but they knew, all right. How could I know she’d get up in the small hours and go blundering out there to catch her death?”

She stared steadily into his face, and everything about him seemed to her a kind of charade, expertly played, the warmth of his voice, full of indignant innocence, the hurt anger of his eyes, that could meet hers even now without evasion and without blinking; but all wasted, because she knew the answer before the charade was played.

“And what about her shoes, Hugh? If she went out in the wet grass on Saturday night, where are the shoes she wore? Every pair she had in her wardrobe is dry and polished. Who cleaned them and put them away for her? By the next morning she was too ill to get up.”

He opened his lips to answer that, too, with the same assurance and the same indignation, without a pause, never at a loss; but she raised her voice abruptly, and rode over him.

“No, don’t bother to think up any more lies, it wouldn’t alter anything. Do you know what I found in the pocket of the coat? It was intelligent of you to pull it off and put it in your pocket, if it was hanging loose, because if it had dropped off in the churchyard they’d have found it, for certain. But you really should have remembered to take it out when you got back to the house.”

She leaned towards him across the table, holding it out on the palm of her hand. A small, plain horn button, still tethered to a fine green thread, with a few torn fibres of grey-green wool attached.

“But you didn’t think about it, and now you’ve missed your chance. And it was bad luck, wasn’t it, that I happened to be the one to find it. The one person who couldn’t fail to know it again. The one person who could swear you were wearing it last Saturday night.” She was vibrating like a taut bowstring, not with fear or even shock now, but with the current of knowledge suddenly streaming through her to earth, things she had always known and never acknowledged before. “I knitted the cardigan. I stitched these buttons on. How many men do I knit for? I hardly know how to knit, beyond plain and purl! It was an aberration, even when I did it for you.”

She hardly knew who this could be, talking with her voice, through her throat, still quietly but now with a kind of ferocity of which she had not known she was capable. But the man facing her she knew, through and through she knew him, and there was no longer anything he could say or do that would fool her. He was still smiling, baffled, hurt, shaking his head over her, opening his mouth to protest once again, to breathe sweet reason and blow even this away. And he could do it better than anyone she had ever known but never again well enough to take her in.

“No, don’t tell me Robert borrowed your clothes! Make up your mind which of them you want to frame, and stick to it! You took whatever you fancied of his, I can see that now, but never the other way round. Like that gold pencil you were telling me about—the cap that turned up in the cellar It hadn’t been there long, had it? Before all this began, about three weeks ago, I remember you signing for a parcel in the office with a gold pencil—that wouldn’t be the same one, would it, Hugh? The one Robert lost a long time ago? Did they let you into the cellar where they were digging, Hugh? Mightn’t they have done that purposely, just to see what turned up afterwards, where nothing was before? You’re not the only clever one! Did you ever think of that?”

He had not. She saw the thought sharpen the brightness of his eyes into the bleak grey of steel, while his appalled, compassionate smile for her unaccountable madness remained fixed.

“Oh, yes, all kinds of things come back to me now. Who escaped from this house and left the others holding the baby? You did! Who relied on Robert’s determination to protect your mother and keep your name clean? You did! Who landed him in this hell and left him to cope with it alone? You did! Who’s been busy planting evidence to saddle him with the murder, now that it can’t be hushed up any longer? You have! And who’s willing now to switch from his brother to his mother for scapegoat if it looks a better bet? You are!”

“Dinah!” he said, quite softly.

“I don’t know who that man was, or why you shot him, but I know you did,” she said with absolute finality.

“Do you, Dinah? And the photographer, too? And that idiot of a psychic researcher on Saturday night? What, all of them, Dinah?”

“All of them,” said Dinah.

“Then what makes you think I’ll stick off at you?”

She hardly saw the movement of his hand, because she was so intent on his face, which had dropped all its pretence of shock and innocence and vulnerability, and was gazing at her with steady, calculating concentration. This was more like Hugh, the Hugh she had known, who kept no rules but his own, and changed even those to suit his present convenience; Hugh bright, hard, self-centred and resolute. How often in the past she had called him awful, a devil, told him he didn’t give a damn for anyone, telling herself, at the same time, the exact truth of what she knew; but what she had always failed to do was to take these truths seriously. Now she knew better. And now he had taken one deliberate step towards the circle of light from the lamp, to let her see the gun in his hand.

“That’s one thing you were wrong about, Dinah girl. This wasn’t hidden in Mother’s room, it was among my shirts, over there at the flat. I picked it up this evening. It’s loaded. And Dad and I always kept his little war souvenir in good working fettle. We used to practise at a target in the garden. It doesn’t make a very alarming sound, through these walls it wouldn’t carry far. But it kills, Dinah.”

“Yes,” she said, “we know it kills.”

Such a tiny thing, blue-black; the barrel jutting out of his fist couldn’t have been more than three inches long, and the whole small weapon scarcely six. It was hard to believe in it, harder still to be afraid of it. She might as well have been looking at a toy, and yet she had good reason to know that it could kill. And curiously, it mattered a great deal that she had never had any practice in being afraid. It cannot be learned all in a minute. In particular she had never before had any reason to be afraid of Hugh, and now that she had good reason, she found it difficult to take even this seriously. In theory she believed; in practice, however incredibly, she suddenly laughed aloud. It disconcerted and yet for a moment encouraged him. She had known him,perhaps, better than he had known her.

“Look, Dinah, all I’ve done is what I had to do, and I’m going through with it, and my God, surely you’re not the one to stop me? Hell, you think I don’t know you’ve been fond of me? And I wanted you, and I still want you. Dinah, I’m getting out of here…”

“You won’t get out,” she said. “They’ll be watching the gates. They’re not as green as you think.”

“I’ll get out. There are other ways than through the gates. The Porsche’s there in the yard at home, they’re not watching that. Dinah—come with me!”

For one moment she actually thought he meant it. It made no difference, she had already recoiled with so much detestation that no possible tenderness or hope in him could have survived the implications; but for one single instant she almost believed he wanted her to go with him alive. Then she knew better than that. She was the one dangerous witness now. If he forced her out of here with him, she would not last long. Now she knew exactly where she stood. If only she knew the time! How long to nine o’clock and Dave calling for her? How long to the return of Chief Inspector Felse who had left, mysteriously, before noon? He would not leave his case unvetted overnight.

“You’re coming,” said Hugh very softly, “whether you choose to or not.”

“How far?” said Dinah. “Where will you ditch me, Hugh? And how far do you think you’ll get, afterwards? How’s your passport, Hugh? Where will you get passage out? You don’t know the professional routes, do you?”

“Dinah,” he said, moving gently in upon the table that stood between me, “you used to love me—I know you loved me…”

“God!” she said, sick and furious with revulsion, “if you could only know how I despise you now! It isn’t even the killing—it’s the treachery—the cowardice...”

“Shut up!” he said in a muted scream that rasped his throat raw. “Shut up, or I’ll kill you here and now…”

“Kill me, then! Fetch them in running! What will that do for you?”

He came on quietly, in cold control of himself again after that brief outburst. His thigh touched the rim of the table. Without taking his eyes from her or relaxing for an instant the steadiness of his aim at her body, he lowered his free hand, took the rim of his palm and hoisted the table on one leg, wheeling it aside from between them. She moved promptly to circle with it as it swung, but he had manoeuvred her into a corner, and now she had nowhere to retreat from him.

She waited for him to move slowly round the rim towards her, and then suddenly she gripped the edge of the table with both hands and heaved it upright, aiming the coffee-pot at him. China and sugar and sandwiches went flying, the brass table-top struck him on the hip, but he stepped sharply back, hardly spattered, and the gun steadied again upon her. Hugh planted a foot deliberately in the wreckage and walked through it, crushing and breaking, his eyes never deflected from their aim.

“You’re coming with me, Dinah, love, whether you want to or not. You’re coming with me a little way…”

Her shoulders were flattened against the wall; she could not move any farther. His free hand came out, carefully, smoothly, and gripped her by the wrist.

The door opened, a small, prosaic, normal sound. Robert came quietly into the room and closed the door after him.

He looked as he always looked, pallid, colourless, calm, the very fibre of his clan, worn down to the essential substance but made to last for ever. He paused in the doorway to set his course, and after a moment of taking stock he began to move forward into the room. And everything went into slow motion and synchronised with his advancing steps.

Hugh dropped Dinah as if she counted for nothing; perhaps now she did. She squared her shoulders against the wall, and watched, helpless to do more. Everything had been taken out of her hands. Even the gun ignored her now, its minute, steely eye trained upon Robert.

But she was not quite forgotten, after all. Suddenly Hugh had remembered her mettle and taken her back into account. She saw that he was moving gradually aside, the gun never wavering, to work himself into a position where he could cover both of them, and no one could get behind him. Dinah moved, too, abruptly aware of the possibilities, stooping in one flashing movement to scoop up a knife from the wreckage of the table, and slide along the wall. But she had moved too late; she could not get out of his vision again, and he knew too much to shift his aim even for an instant, but still he was aware of what she did.

“Drop it, Dinah! On the tray, where I can hear!”

She could not risk the shot that would not even be fired at her. The knife tinkled back harmlessly among the fragments of china.

“Robert,” said Hugh, softly and earnestly, “it isn’t much I’m asking you for, this time. Not even to lie. Only a head start, that’s all, just time to get away. Nothing new has happened—there needn’t be any alarm. Just give me tonight, that’s all I want. Just tonight—and your silence…”

Robert had halted, only a few steps into the room, when Hugh moved to put a wall at his back. Slowly he turned to face him directly again.

“Robert, I’m not asking you to do it for me. But won’t you, for Mother’s sake…?”

It had been his trump card for years, but this time it fluttered ineffectively to the ground, and Robert’s first advancing step trod it underfoot. The pale, calm face did not change at all.

“It won’t work any more, Hugh. She’s safe enough from you now. She’s dead.”

He halted for a moment, and looked at Dinah, and the fixed lines of his long, tired features softened briefly.

“Go home, Dinah. Just walk out now and take the car, and go. Leave me with him. He won’t try to stop you.” Hugh didn’t move, didn’t make a sound; for suddenly the only weapon he had was the tiny, deadly weapon in his hand, and for all its deadliness, suddenly it was not enough. It seemed to Dinah that she could indeed have walked straight out at the door then, between the two brothers, and got into the Mini and driven away. But she didn’t move, either.

“Go, please, Dinah,” said Robert gently. “I tried to tell you yesterday that you shouldn’t so much as come near us, let alone ever think of tying yourself to one of us for life.”

Hugh drew a long, careful breath. “I don’t believe you. You’re lying to me. She isn’t dead, you’re only trying to kid me into giving up…”

“She’s dead, Hugh. Five or six minutes ago. I came down to telephone Braby. And I heard the table go over. Don’t bet on her any more, Hugh. She’s dead—it’s finished.”

He was walking forward slowly, measured step by step, and his eyes were fixed on Hugh’s face with an unwavering purpose that matched the fixity of the gun’s one minute black eye. And as he came he talked, quietly, coherently, without passion.

“Bad enough that I covered up one murder for you, and kept you fed and indulged with money ever since, so that you’d never feel the need to kill again. Bad enough that I’ve acted as your grave-digger and watchman and nurse all this time, and caused another death, all to keep her from ever knowing what you and he between you have done to her name and her life—the only two people she ever cared about in the world. That’s enough. It’s all over now,” said Robert clearly, “I can call things by their proper names now. You’re a murderer and I’m an accessory. And we’re both bastards. And she’s dead! Thank God!”

Only a few feet separated them now, and still Hugh had not moved. Robert held out his hand with authority for the gun.

“Give that thing to me!”

“Keep off!” said Hugh loudly and violently. “Keep off and let me by, or I’ll fire. I’m clearing out!”

“No, Hugh, you’re not going anywhere. It’s finished.”

Dinah was distantly aware of a loud knocking that seemed to be within her head, for no one else heard it. Then she knew it for the knocker on the front door. The night nurse arriving? The police returning? Dave coming to fetch her home?

“Keep off, I warn you, or I’ll kill you!”

And Robert smiled at him and came on, his hand extended. Dinah understood, a fraction of a second too late, that Robert had his own inviolable reason for moving in like this on an armed and desperate man, a proffered target closing to pointblank range. All he wanted, at least in that moment, was to be dead and done with it, all that long purgatory of horror and disgust. Out in the hall there were men entering, the front door stood open; they would have seen this one subdued light, and it was here they were coming. But Robert did not want them to arrive in time.

Dinah saw the slight convulsion pass through Hugh’s forearm and hand. She shrieked: “Hugh—no!” And perhaps it was her scream that diverted his attention at the very instant of firing, or perhaps in this face-to-face confrontation his hand shook in superstitious dread, and some last instinct in him tried subconsciously to turn the shot aside, for after all, this was his brother. The report of the shot closed with the echo of Dinah’s scream, and Robert’s tall body jerked a little backwards, folded slowly at the knees, and collapsed in an angular heap. And suddenly the room was full of men, Chief Inspector Felse and Sergeant Moon and half a dozen others, and Dave hard on their heels.

George Felse said afterwards that there was one moment when he gave Dinah Cressett up for dead, because she launched herself like fury straight between the police and the gun, which had still five serviceable rounds of .25 ACP ammunition in its eight-round magazine, as they afterwards confirmed. Dinah was not thinking of herself or the police, or the nearness or remoteness of her own death, but only intent on reaching Robert’s body and feeling for the pulse and heartbeat that were still alive in him.

But the moment passed without another tragedy; for Hugh, seeing the hopelessness of resistance, did the only thing left for him to do, and turned his little plaything upon himself.

This time he felt no superstitious terror, and his hand did not tremble. This time he made no mistake.