The Knocker on Death's Door

CHAPTER 2

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THE photographer from Birmingham reappeared in Mottisham unexpectedly on a Tuesday morning of mid-October, shortly before noon. It was the first foggy day of the autumn, in a month which tended to be productive of thick mists in the deep, river-threaded cleft of Middlehope; but it was not the low visibility that brought the stranger crawling into the forecourt of Cressett and Martel at approximately fifteen miles an hour, and caused him to heave a sigh of relief at his safe arrival. Somewhere along the road from Comerbourne he had hit a stray stone, probably shed from a lorry, and his steering had begun to afflict him at the most inconvenient moments with a terrifying judder. He had no intention of driving a car with that sort of handicap any farther than he had to on a foggy day, and Dave’s was the first garage at the Comerbourne side of the village. The driver clambered out thankfully, and Dave came out from the workshop to serve him.

He recognised the shock-head of straw-coloured hair and the slightly racy clothes at once. “Oh, hullo, back again? What’s the trouble?”

The photographer was willing to talk. His name was Gerry Bracewell, he lived in Edgbaston—he produced a business card to prove it—and he had just driven over to take one more look at that church door, and maybe the house it came from, too. Very interesting thing, that, he said with a sly, self-satisfied smile. And now his steering had practically packed it in on him, and could Dave do anything about it by this evening? Or tomorrow morning, if necessary, he might be staying overnight in any case.

“Taking photographs in this weather?” Dave couldn’t refrain from asking him casually.

Bracewell grinned. He had an amiable, cocky, knowing smile that belonged to the city. “Haven’t even brought a camera along this time. No, just interested. You never know where there may be a story lurking, do you? Pictures I can get later if there’s anything in it.” He prowled the yard while Dave looked at the sick Morris, and for the first time his eye fell upon the two names above the entrance. “Martel? Is that the same one?”

“It’s all right,” said Dave from the driving-seat, “he’s gone into Comerbourne with a respray job. Yes, it’s the same one. He’s my partner.”

“One of the Macsen-Martels? That lot that gave the door back to the church?”

“The one that got away,” said Dave. “He’s been working here with me nearly four years. It’s what he likes doing, and what he’s good at.”

“Well, bully for him! A bit of a card, isn’t he?”

“That leg-pull in the ‘Duck’? They like their fun. I wouldn’t take too much notice, if I were you.”

Bracewell came closer. “He fall out with his folks, or something? I mean, it’s a bit unusual to find somebody like him cutting loose like this and working with his hands, isn’t it?”

“Not particularly. Inevitable, I should say. Feudal families are living in changed circumstances these days. All the land that went with the house is gone long ago, there never was much money. Robert works in an office, Hugh works here. They have to live.”

Not a talkative chap, Bracewell thought. Dave had told him nothing he couldn’t have got from anyone in the village. “This National Trust business. You think they’ll take the place on?”

“I think they will. It’s more or less agreed, I believe.” He himself did not think all that highly of the Abbey as an architectural monument; just a stark grey stone house with a single vast expanse of roof, and blunt, massive chimneys; but apparently there were those who did. Parts of it dated from Edward the Fourth, so they said, notably the vaulted cellars, but Dave was as little impressed by mere age as was Hugh himself. But the urgent fact was that there was no money to maintain the property, the roof, according to Hugh, leaked in half a dozen places, and something had to be done about it quickly. Either sell it—which would probably mean selling it for demolition and redevelopment—or else get the National Trust to take it over, help to maintain it, and permit the former owners to continue in residence on condition that they showed it perhaps once a week. Well, that was about as good a deal as Robert was likely to get.

“But what’s the door got to do with it? Why move a door?” Bracewell’s tone had sunk to a confidential level. “Won’t the National Trust people object, anyhow?”

“Not if it didn’t belong there, why should they? They’ll want to take over something as authentic as possible.” He slid out of the car again, and wiped his hands. “All right, leave her with me, and I’ll see what I can do. I don’t think it’s so bad. I’ll try and have it ready for you this evening, barring emergencies.”

“Fine! How late are you on the job?”

“Six, officially, but I’ll be here.” He nodded towards the house, solid and stolid in pleasant, mottled brick beyond the yard and the pumps.

“Right, but if I’m not here before six, I’ll probably be staying over, so don’t wait around for me. If I don’t show tonight, I’ll be in pretty early tomorrow. O.K.?” He fished a plump and elderly briefcase out of the back of the Morris, and departed with a confident and springy step towards the village.

Dave Cressett had run the garage for twelve years, ever since his father’s early death. He was thirty-four now, and a highly responsible, taciturn and resolute thirty-four into the bargain, having assumed mature cares early. His stature was small, his manner neat, unobtrusive and workmanlike, and his appearance nondescript, with a set of pleasant, good-natured features that seemed to be made up of oddments until he smiled, when everything fell beautifully into place. He didn’t smile too often, because he was by inclination a serious soul; but it was worth waiting for. Not a firework display like Hugh’s dazzling laughter, which he shed so prodigally all around him, but the comforting and dependable radiance of. a good fire. Everything about him was equally reliable; which was why business had prospered for Cressett and Martel. Hugh tuned and raced the firm’s cars, with dash and success, but it was on Dave that the clients depended.

Dave had known Hugh since school days, though there were five years between them. He had known Robert, too, for he was within a year of Robert’s age; but nobody had ever really known Robert, sunk as he had been beneath the weight of being the heir, even if there was precious little to inherit, and threatened to be progressively less, and ultimately nothing at all, barring a monstrous minus of debts, if his father lived much longer. Hugh was different. Hugh was carefree, did what he liked and asked afterwards, mixed with whatever company he pleased and never asked at all, got his face dirty and his nails broken playing around with motors when he should have been accumulating O and A levels, and didn’t give a damn for his Norman blood or his aristocratic status. In fact, he was so like his delightful, unpredictable, eighteenth-century anachronism of a father that there was no mistaking the implications. They represented, between them, a late burst of demoniac energy in a line practically burned out. You had only to look at the mother— seven years older than her husband, and his first cousin; they always interbred—and the elder brother to see what had happened to the race, long since bled into debility, overtaken and left standing by history. Tenacious stock, time had shown that, but exhausted at last. Somebody had to break out, marry fresh blood, get fresh heirs and plunge into fresh activities. The ghost of the name would take some laying, but Hugh already stood clear of it, neutral as a clinical observer from outer space. After all, the crude reality was that the name meant nothing now; the doctor and the hotel-keeper ranked higher in importance than the attenuated representatives of past glory, and the vigorous incomers from the towns far higher. Hugh was the one who took the realities as they came, and did not feel his powers and possibilities in any way limited.

For Dave all these considerations were very relevant indeed, because Hugh had worked himself into a partnership nearly four years ago, and the tacit understanding between him and Dinah had been growing and proliferating ever since. It wasn’t even a question of waiting for a concrete proposal; people like Dinah and Hugh didn’t function in that way, they simply grew together without words, and some day, still without words and without question, got married. If Dave knew his sister and his partner, that day was creeping up on them fast.

As far as Dave could see, it wasn’t going to have much to do with him, when it came to the point. Dinah was ten years his junior, and he had had to be father and mother to her, as well as brother, but she was twenty-four years old now, and a remarkably self-sufficient young woman, who ran the house, did the firm’s books and occasionally relieved Jenny Pelsall in the office, with apparent ease. She had all the equipment she needed, a heart, a head, a chin and a backbone. She was a pocket edition, like her brother, but good stuff lies in little compass. He wasn’t worried about Dinah, she’d find her own way, and if she chose Hugh, she wouldn’t be choosing him just for a blinding smile and a light hand on a gear-lever.

He’d got her as far as consenting to go and spend this particular evening with his people at the Abbey; the first formal encounter, this would be, but no amount of Norman blood—or blood of the princes of Powis, either, for that matter—could intimidate Dinah. And, as Hugh said, what the hell, we’re not tied to the place, we don’t have to stick around here if we don’t want to. Admittedly it’s a bit of an ordeal, Robert’s pretty dreary, to say the least of it, and the old girl’s virtually petrified in her devotion to her sacred line. But don’t let it throw you, we don’t have to see much of them when we’re married. And Dinah had said thoughtfully that she supposed they had to get it over sooner or later. Just so long, she had said, as you bring me home before I blow my top. We may not have to live in the same village afterwards, but we do have to live in the same world. And he had promised gaily, all the more readily because bringing Dinah home gave him the best excuse possible for not sleeping overnight at the Abbey. He retained his room there to please his mother, and slept in it when he had to, but he much preferred the free life in the flatlet they’d made for him over the workshop in the yard. Grooms, he said, ought to live above the stable.

Sometimes he sounded, sometimes he even looked, like his dead father, who had come head-over-heels off a horse at an impossible fence five winters ago, when the Middlehope hounds drew the shoulder of Callow, and everyone else diverged cravenly towards the gate. He had fallen on his head and shoulders and broken his neck, and there went the last survivor of the eighteenth century in these borders, trailing his comet’s-tail of heroic stories, amorous, bibulous and equestrian. For years he’d arrived and departed as unpredictably as hurricane weather, vanishing whenever he got too far into debt or into difficulties, or too many local girls were in full cry after him with paternity suits, reappearing after his wife and son had got things under control again, and always finding a warm welcome waiting. Hugh had his fierce good looks and sudden disarming moods of sweetness and hilarity; but Hugh didn’t run after women or plunge head-down into debt. He doted on cars, raced them, doctored them, made respectable money out of them. And Dinah was his only girl.

The fog thickened a little again towards evening, and Hugh was late getting back from Comerbourne. The resprayed car had to be delivered to one of the new houses on the other side of the village, which meant a ten-minute walk back from there; and Dinah was ready and waiting some time before the back door crashed open in the usual headlong style, to indicate that the junior partner was home. He came in wreathed in chilly mist and glowing apologies, six feet of tightly strung nervous energy even at the end of the working day.

Dinah rose and picked up her coat. She was wearing a plain, long-sleeved shift in a delirious orange-and-olive print, that stopped short five inches above her knees.

“You’ll shake the old lady rigid,” Dave observed, eyeing her impartially.

“From all accounts she already is rigid, anyhow. Begin as you mean to go on, I say. After all, she knows her darling boy, she wouldn’t expect him to come around with a nun.”

Hugh took the wheel as of right. It was rare for him to consent to be a passenger. She thought his touch a little edgy, though as assured as ever. Very revealing, that, Dinah considered. It looked as if he was a little more worked up about this confrontation than he pretended, and certainly more than she was.

“You won’t like it,” he said, confirming her speculations as to his state of mind. It was as near an apology for his family as he was ever likely to get.

“You never know, I might. I’m contra-suggestible. I might even like your folks, it has been known to happen in these cases.”

He gave a hollow laugh. “That’ll be the day! Still, we needn’t even stay within range, when we’re married. We could go abroad, if you’d like it. I bet you and I could do well in Canada. Did you ever think about it?—clearing out and starting fresh somewhere else?”

“No,” said Dinah comfortably, “I never did. And you never did, either, until tonight. Anyhow, who said we were going to be married? Relax, boy, it won’t be that bad!”

He relaxed a little. They were feeling their way steadily along the misty green lane behind the hotel, watching for the open gate that led into the Abbey drive. The entrance was narrow and dark, shrouded in trees. Nothing was left of the monastic buildings that had once stretched clean across the centre of the present village, except the lumpy bases of walls just breaking the ground in two places in the shrubberies. Only the abbot’s lodging remained. They saw the long level of the high roof faintly against a clearing sky, the thick column of the chimneys. Only two lighted windows broke the murky dimness. The house looked dank, dilapidated and cold.

“Look, Dinah, once we’re installed, I’ll take Robert away for a bit—don’t you think?—and let you get down to it in earnest with Mother. You won’t mind, will you? We won’t stay away long. But I’m betting on it that once you’ve broken the ice she’ll be eating out of your hand.” He rolled the car to a halt before the crumbling porch, and turned and gave her a slightly strained smile. “After all, that’s the way you affected me, isn’t it?”

“Straight in at the deep end!” mused Dinah. He was evidently more disturbed by the whole thing than she had guessed. “All right, kill or cure. Maybe we’ll end up in Canada, after all.”

The door opened ponderously but silently on a long, flagged hall, none too adequately lit, that stretched clean through the house and ended at a broad Gothic window. Dinah’s alert eye noted worn mats, bare panelling, a vast oaken staircase, the stone newels of what must be the steps down to the cellar, just to the left of the terminal window, and a narrow little lobby bearing away to the right, and ending in a garden door. The coats that hung in the lobby were so old and so frequently dry-cleaned that they had outlived all their original quality and cut, and most of their colour. Even if there had been nothing else to betray their age, the length of the nearest, a woman’s classic camel coat, would have been enough. Mrs. Macsen-Martel was tall, but even on her this skirt would practically reach the ankle. Everything had been good in its day; and for everything within sight its day was long over.

Someone had heard them come. A door on the right, beyond the stairs, opened, and Robert came out to greet them.

It was the first time Dinah had had the opportunity to study him at such close quarters, and she gazed at him with candid interest, looking for some resemblance to Hugh. The long, lightweight bones were the same, the hollowed cheeks, even the deep setting of the eyes, but in place of Hugh’s vivid colouring and mobility, this one was neutral-tinted and hesitant, almost deprecating, of movement. A profound, almost a fastidious reserve dominated everything in his face, the brown eyes that were at such pains to avoid staring at her, the long, level mouth that opened stiffly to welcome her.

“Miss Cressett, I’m so glad you could come. Let me take your coat.” But he moved too slowly, and Hugh had already taken it. “Do come in, my mother’s looking forward to meeting you.” She was surprised but thankful that he didn’t say: “We’ve heard so much about you from Hugh.” Maybe he was leaving that for the old lady. Someone was certainly due to say it before the evening was over.

Hugh took her possessively by the elbow, and steered her into the drawing-room. Large, lofty, chilly, with a vast fireplace and a very modest fire in the distant wall, and a few good but threadbare rugs deployed artfully to make the maximum impression of comfort where there was little that was comfortable. A great deal of splendid but sombre furniture—there was money there, at any rate, if they cared to realise it—and one superb, high-backed, erect chair placed near the fire and facing the door, with the old woman enthroned in it. A tableau especially for Dinah’s benefit; she had to walk approximately twenty-five feet across the bare centre of the room to reach her hostess, with the faded, lofty-lidded eyes watching and appraising her every step of the way. All those exposed inches of smooth, slim thigh in honey-beige tights, the short, almost boyish cap of dark-brown hair, and greenish eye-shadow, the fashionable chunky shoes that Dave called her football boots… But if I’d worn a crinoline, she thought, watching the old woman’s face every bit as narrowly as her own face was being watched, I should still have come as a shock.

Hugh did the only thing he could do to break the tension, and did it beautifully. He dropped Dinah’s elbow and swooped ahead of her, shearing through the invisible cord that linked the two pairs of hostile female eyes; he stooped and kissed his mother’s grey and fallen cheek, and warmed her face for a moment into genuine life.

“Hullo, Mother! Here’s Dinah, I promised I’d bring her to see you, didn’t I?” He reached for Dinah’s other hand as his mother put up an emaciated claw and allowed her bony fingers to be clasped for a moment in Dinah’s short-nailed, well-scrubbed, capable hand. It was like holding a dead bird, starved in the winter cold. Two rings, old-fashioned ones, but those were surely real rubies in them… and that long string of beads dangling into her lap to complete the elongated effect of every line of her body was neither of glass nor cultures, but pearls. Of course, she’d been from the branch of the family with some money left, until she married Robert senior, and he got his hands on most of it and sent it flying like skittles… I am a right bitch, thought Dinah, shocked behind her dutiful smile. I should blame her for walking round me with her hackles up, what else do I deserve? And penitence gave her a surge of positive benevolence. She wondered if she dared kiss… No, there was no invitation being signalled. On the contrary, the released hand was flexing inflexible fingers delicately under the edge of the dun-coloured lace stole, as if the clasp had bruised them.

“So kind of you to give up an evening to a dull old woman like me, Miss Cressett. Do sit down…” She gestured vaguely towards a velvet hassock that would have installed Dinah at her feet, but Hugh was splendidly blind, and whisked up a comfortable leather chair close to his mother’s, to establish them as equals. Dinah gave him a lightning glance that would have liked to turn into a wink, and sat down with as little display of leg as she could manage. Appeasement was not in her nature, but whenever she looked at poor Hugh she had pacific thoughts.

“Perhaps you would care for a glass of something? I don’t drink myself, but perhaps a sherry…?”

“I brought a case of Traminer,” said Hugh unexpectedly, “we can try it with dinner if it suits. I was in town, and had to wait all day for my job, so I went shopping, and got hold of a real bargain. It’s Jugoslav, but it’s as good as most that comes out of Alsace. I know, I’ve tried it! Come and help me fetch it in, Rob, it’s in the boot of the car.”

If it really was, Dinah thought with deep interest, then he’d popped it in there before he even came into the house. Indeed he must have dropped it off inside the yard before he delivered the respray job across in Greenfields, and installed it ready for delivery on his return. Her attention was caught in a new and grave way. If Hugh was as keyed up as all that, scheming with cases of wine and worrying about the impression she was going to make on his mother (not to mention the impression his mother was probably going to make on her!) then there was really nothing else for it, he must be in love. And she thought, calmed, assuaged and flattered, having someone like Hugh that much in love is a good reason for being in love with him. She had always wondered. Now she began to feel certain.

Robert—how silent he was, did he never have anything to say in this household?—brought her a glass of sherry. She looked up in his face as she accepted it; such a middle-aged face, and he was only thirty-five, after all. Bleached, brownish hair, straight as pen-feathers, cropped close; not a badly shaped head at all, but so defeated, so inanimate. Tired eyes,, darker brown, so withdrawn that there was no knowing whether they were indifferent to her, or simply burdened past caring. He almost never spoke, but his voice was low, pleasantly pitched and sad; yet distantly disapproving, too. He was not on her side. Beware of the gentle people who do not rant, but nevertheless are not amenable to anyone’s wiles. In his way he was as rigid as his mother.

And that, as Dinah discovered when they were left alone together, was pretty rigid. The air seemed to clarify as soon as the men were out of the way. Like a sudden change of wind sweeping the mist from a battlefield.

“Hugh has told me so much about you, Miss Cressett.” (She’d known that was coming, sooner or later! It meant: Be careful, I’m warned, I’m on the alert!) “He thinks very highly of you. Do tell me something about yourself, my dear, I don’t think I’m acquainted with your family. What was your father?”

“He owned the same garage we run now. His father was a very early motorist in these parts, a pioneer, and Father followed in his footsteps. And so has my brother David— Hugh’s partner…”

“Ah, yes, of course. I know from Hugh that your brother is in trade.” It sounded like a category, the way she said it, and probably it was. “And where were you at school, Miss Cressett?”

Dinah told her, bluntly: the village primary, then the secondary modern at Abbot’s Bale. “I wasn’t an academic type. Mine are mostly manual skills. I keep house. Quite well, I believe. At least no one complains.”

“I’m quite sure you are good at everything you attempt. One feels so out of date these days.” Her long fingers strayed languidly among her pearls. The long, straight lines of brow, nose and chin, in profile, looked like a caricature of Edith Sitwell. The grey hair, drawn closely back into that great knot on her nape, weighed down her whole head and shoulders into an effete arc the moment she relaxed her guard. “In my day gels were educated to such different ends. We had not to reckon with trade, of course… This has become such a commercial world, has it not?” She leaned back with a sigh, and all the oblique grey planes of her face, and shoulders, and fleshless bust slithered downwards into a pyramid of discouragement and decay. “The name Cressett is old… are you connected with the Northamptonshire Cressetts, by any chance?”

“I doubt it,” said Dinah cheerfully. “But I don’t suppose there’s anyone in my family who can trace his ancestors back more than three generations, four at the most, so of course we could be. As far as I know, we’re Middlehope stock from way back.”

The old lady closed her eyes for a fraction of a second, perhaps praying for strength. The catechism went on steadily: What were your mother’s family? What are your interests? Are you fond of music? You play of course? (Naturally a lady plays the piano, however badly.)

Thank God, they were coming back. There went the outer door, hollowly closing, and in a moment more the two brothers came rather quietly, rather warily, into the room. At least the Traminer was real enough, Hugh had a bottle in one hand and a corkscrew in the other. They bore themselves, Dinah thought, a little stiffly, as if there was some related awkwardness even between them. They had so little in common that with all the goodwill in the world communication might well be an effort for both.

“Dinner’s ready,” Robert said. “Will you come, Mother?”

Over dinner it was much easier, though the table in the large, chilly room, even when reduced to its minimum proportions, was too big for comfortable conversation between four people. But at least there were four of them, and every time the catechism showed signs of being resumed Dinah could answer monosyllabically, and then address some quick remark to one of the men, even if Hugh did not anticipate her need, as he frequently did. She had felt a certain amount of childish curiosity about the meal itself, and the manner of its presentation. Would the old lady have cooked it herself? Not much doubt that she could, that was one of the things gels in her day had been expected to master. But in all probability on this occasion the cooking had been done by the same local help who brought in the dishes. Plain, good English cottage cooking, nothing elaborate and nothing expensive. And having installed the joint and vegetables on the sideboard—the pudding being cold— the cook said good night and departed, plainly for home. It was Robert who served everything, silently, unobtrusively and attentively. Once there had been some four or five servants living in at the Abbey; now there was Robert, and Robert was everything. Dinah tried to imagine Hugh shouldering this load, tamed into this grey tameness, and the picture was so absurd as to be almost indecent.

Mrs. Macsen-Martel could even say: “I’m so glad you find the veal to your liking, Miss Cressett,” in such a way as to make Dinah feel that she had been eating like a hungry wolf. And indeed she was hungry; emotional excitement always had that effect on her.

“It’s really excellent,” she said defensively, and turned on Robert with the first thing that entered her head. After all, that celebrated door was the chief event of the past week in Mottisham, what could be more natural than to show curiosity about it?

“I’ve been dying to ask you about that door you gave back to the church. It’s almost the only thing—I mean apart from bits of the stone fabric—that’s left from the Gothic church, isn’t it? The rebuilders in the last century finished off almost everything else that survived. So it’s really very important, being local work, too. With a long history like that, it must have some legends attached to it, hasn’t it?”

Robert seemed to emerge with a spasmodic effort from the glum abstraction into which he sank between his bouts of hospitable assiduity. She saw his long bones convulsed for an instant as he hauled himself back into awareness of her.

“They might be anything but true,” he said with evident reluctance. “They do exist, yes, but only as legends.”

“My dear,” murmured the old lady, her thin brows elevated into her dust-coloured hair. “The cellar door? Legends? I’ve never heard that it was anything more than a door. What legends?”

“There isn’t any documentary evidence, how could there be?” Robert sounded tired, but as always, obliging. “The abbey library was quite simply bundled out and burned, so we shall never know whether there were any written records. Probably not, the abbey had a blameless reputation up to the fifteenth century, its decline was part of the general rot that was partly responsible for the Dissolution—or at least for the ease and general consent with which it was carried out. And what was in the chronicles was usually a hundred years past—by the end there weren’t any chroniclers. I doubt if the last four could write English, much less Latin.”

“You mean it’s true,” asked Dinah, astonished, “that there were only four brothers left here at the end, and they weren’t any model of holiness?”

“They were anything but. And for that there is good evidence. You know something about the end of the abbey, men?”

“I didn’t,” she admitted honestly, “except that they were talking about it in ”The Sitting Duck‘ on Sunday night.”

“They?”

“Saul Trimble,” Hugh supplied with a reminiscent grin. “And believe me, he shouldn’t be underestimated. The essence of his nonsense is that about sixty per cent of it at least is good sense. It makes it more baffling. Even sceptics make inquiries, and get converted.”

“Quite a lot of the monastic houses had degenerated badly by that time,” Robert said, “especially the more remote ones that were a law to themselves. And ours was pretty remote. This tale about the church door belongs towards the end. They say one of the brothers—there must have been more than four then—had made the classic pact with the devil, signing away his soul in return for diabolical help in this world, especially at raising spirits, and then tried to back out of the bargain at the crucial hour by taking refuge in the church. But wherever he tried to enter, the doors remained barred against him. In his despair he fell on his knees in the south porch and clutched at the sanctuary knocker, as the best he could do, but the cold iron burned his hand as if it had been red-hot, and forced him to loose his hold. And the devil took him.” Robert’s quiet voice quivered momentarily. Such a pale, still face… Dinah shivered, watching him. She had never really noticed him before, only recorded externals, measuring a potential enemy. “Not physically, however. According to the story, the monks came down for Prime, and found his body huddled at the foot of the door, stone dead. No marks on him, not even a burned hand.”

“How very odd,” said the old lady with detached disapproval, “that I never remember hearing this nonsense before! And what nonsense it is! Just a perfectly ordinary door!”

“I quite agree,” admitted Robert. “Most such stories are nonsense, but people go on telling them. The door has always been credited—or discredited—with being haunted, but I can’t say we ever had any odd experiences with it here, or noticed anything queer about it. I don’t know— maybe we’re just inured, because we lived with all these things so intimately and so long. The time might come when one took even ghosts for granted, and failed to see them…”

Dinah shuddered and shook herself. Perhaps, she thought, even that could happen, when you belong only to the past; not even to the present, much less the future. And she thought, well, yes, there’s always Canada—or Australia, where you have to be real or people fail to see you!

She thought of the antique iron beast, playfully proffering his twisted ring of hope, and grinning as it burned the desperate hand that reached for it. For the rest of the evening—mercifully it was short, old people retire early— she could not get it out of her head. She was grateful to Hugh for his delicacy and affection when he broke up the coffee-party in the drawing-room—Robert had made the coffee, of course!—and took her tenderly home through the thinning fog, at a slow speed which permitted him to keep an arm about her all the way. He was warm, quiet and bracing. She was practically sure that she loved him.

Dave was brewing tea in the kitchen when she came in from the yard, with Hugh’s kiss still warm and confident on her lips, and her backward glance still illuminated by the light from Hugh’s flat over the stable. He hadn’t drawn the curtains, and he had just hauled off his shirt and plunged across the bedroom towards the shower-room beyond. Then the light went out, and the October night swallowed him. Good night, Hugh!

“That Brummagem bloke didn’t come in for his car,” Dave said. She hardly heard him, she was so far away. “He must be staying overnight. He said he might. Wonder what on earth he expected to find worth his while in these parts?”

“Ghosts, hobgoblins, pacts, devils… who knows?” said Dinah, yawning. “Witchcraft and such is news these days, didn’t you know?”

“How did it go?” asked Dave curiously.

“Oh, not so bad! They’re dead,” she said simply, “but never mind, Hugh’s alive.” She wandered to bed, hazy with Traminer. Dave watched her go, reassured. As for Bracewell, he’d be in early in the morning, just as he’d said.

But early is a relative term, and freelance photographers, perhaps, keep different hours from office workers, garage proprietors and such slaves of the clock. The Brummagem bloke had still not put in an appearance to claim his repaired Morris when Dave drove the vicar’s third-hand Cortina back to the vicarage, on its new tyres at just after nine o’clock, as promised. His nearest way back to the garage was through the churchyard. Thus it was Dave who happened to be the first person to pass close by the south porch on this misty Wednesday morning, and casting the native’s natural side-glance towards the legendary door within, register the startling apparition of size ten shoe-soles jutting into the dawn.

There was a man inside the shoes. The dim light under the trees drew in outline long, trousered legs in flannel grey, the hem of a short car coat, bulky shoulders under brown gaberdine, straw-coloured hair spilled on the flagstones from a lolling head that was not quite the right shape.

Dave advanced by inches, chilled and yet irresistibly drawn. He saw an extended arm, fingers and palm flattened against the foot of the closed door. He stepped over the sprawled legs, and peered at the motionless face. The eyes were open, glazed and bright, glaring at the shut door, straining after the calm within. The jaw had dropped, as if parted upon a desperate cry for help.

The photographer from Birmingham, who had sensed a story here in the barbarian territory of Middlehope, and staked his freelance reputation upon cornering the scoop, was never going to file his story after all. He was dead and cold at the foot of the sanctuary door.