The Knocker on Death's Door gfaf-10 Read online

  The old woman was exceedingly tall and ramrod erect, a residue of desiccated flesh shrunk tightly to attenuated bones, and draped with old-fashioned and shapeless tweeds of no particular colour. Under an ancient felt hat, worn dead straight on lank grey hair drawn into a bun on her neck, the long, narrow, aristocratic face looked out with chill disapproval at the world, as though she had ceased to expect anything good from present or future.

  “She looks,” said Bunty thoughtfully, “like that bronze bishop at Augsburg—the one with the bad smell under his nose.”

  “Bishop Wolfhart Roth,” said Sergeant Moon understandingly. “Now you come to mention it, so she does.” And it was entirely typical of him that he should be able to haul out of his capacious memory not only the face but even the name of a German bishop some unknown artist had caricatured in bronze in the fourteenth century.

  Her son was like her, but not yet mummified. Tall, thin, with long, narrow bones and a long, narrow face, withdrawn, distrustful, austere. An uncomfortable family, Bunty thought, watching them disappear under the vicar’s trees, but too faded now to discomfort the populace of Mottisham overmuch.

  They were gone, it was over. The sergeant flapped a huge white hand in a final salute, and withdrew to his duty, waving the VW on towards home. Bunty turned to stare into the porch as they passed by, and try to catch a glimpse of the door that had brought press photographers and scholars into the wild territory of Middlehope. Old trees crowded close, darkening the cavity of the porch. She caught a faint flash of pale, pure colour, old wood restored to the light from under the patina of centuries of dirt and neglect; but that was all.

  “Sorry!” said George. “Did you want to stop and have a look at it? I couldn’t hold up the procession, but we can pull round into the pub yard if you like, and walk back.”

  “No, never mind.” Bunty settled back in her seat, her thoughts returning pleasurably to the prospect of getting home and getting the Aga lit and the house warmed. “I don’t suppose there’s anything so remarkable about it. Nothing to fetch us back for another look.”

  Whatever minor fate had been jolted by George’s assessment of the Middlehope crime potential, and Moon’s acceptance of it, must also have recorded, and with the same malice, this complacent comment—probably under the category of famous last words!

  There were still three reporters and one press photographer left over from the jamboree when Hugh Macsen-Martel and Dinah and Dave Cressett entered the public bar of “The Sitting Duck” that evening. Saul Trimble, trading on his antediluvian appearance as usual, had already lured two of the visitors into his corner, one on either side, and was furnishing them with a few impromptu fragments of folk-history in return for the pints with which, alternately, they furnished him. He had left out his false teeth for the occasion, which added twenty years to his appearance, and put on his old leather-elbowed jacket and a muffler instead of his usual smart Sunday rig. By good luck the bar itself still looked every inch the antiquated country pub for which it was cast, since Sam Crouch, who owned it, was too mean to spend money on modernising it, and had no need to worry about competition. There were two other pubs within reach, but both were tied, while “The Sitting Duck” was not merely a free house, but a home-brewed house into the bargain, one of only three left in the entire county. So the public bar was still all quarries and high-backed settles, furnished with bright red pew cushions, and every evening the place was full. This Sunday evening it was perhaps even a little fuller than usual. The newsmen, strangers from the town, were fair game, and there was the afternoon’s show to talk about.

  Saul was in full cry when Hugh’s party entered. He was using his folk-lore voice, half singing Welsh, half quavering, superstitious old age, and all the regulars were there to egg him on. William Swayne, alias Willie the Twig, the forestry officer from the plantations beyond the Hallowmount, had driven down in the Land-Rover, Eli Platt had closed his by-pass fruit and flower stands early, and come in from the market-garden on the fringe of Comerbourne, Joe Lyon, smelling warmly of his own sheep, steamed gently by the fire with a pint of home-brewed in one hand. It may even have been the beer, rather than the company, that had caused the strangers to prolong their visit into licensing hours.

  “Normans?” Saul was saying with tremulous disdain. “Normans, is it? The Normans were mere incomers here, and never got a toehold, not in Middlehope, not for hundreds of years. The few that got in by marrying here, them we tolerated if they minded their step, the rest—out! Normans, indeed!”

  “I was going by the name,” said the oldest reporter reasonably.

  “Martel? Oh, ah, that’s Norman, that is. The Martel got in with one o’ these marriages I was telling you about. In Henry One, that was, there was no sons to the family, and the heiress, she took up with this Martel, who was an earl’s man from Comerbourne, but had fallen out with his master. Let him alone, they did, when he had the clans of Middlehope behind him, they wanted no extra trouble up on this border. Been Macsen-Martels ever since, they have, right enough, but they’d been here many a hundred years before that—ah, right back to King Arthur and the Romans afore him…”

  “This,” said Hugh in Dinah’s ear, as he found her a chair in the bow window, “is going to be good.” He caught Saul’s impervious blue eye, bright beneath a deliberately ruffled eyebrow, and winked. Saul looked through him stonily into the far distances of inspiration.

  “I’ll get them,” volunteered Dave, and went off through the crowd to the bar, where Ellie Crouch and her nineteen-year-old daughter, christened Zenobia but Nobbie to her friends, dispensed home-brewed and presided over the scene like a couple of knowing blonde cherubs, deceptively guileless of eye.

  “If you’m going by names,” pursued Saul, warming almost into song, “it’s the Macsen you want to think about, my lads. You know who Macsen was? He was the same person as Maximus, King of the Britons, back in the fifth century. And if you don’t believe me, go and look for yourselves at the inscription on the Pillar of Eliseg, up north there by Valle Crucis, and there you’ll see it in Latin…”

  “Are you telling us you can read Latin?” demanded the youngest reporter dubiously.

  “Course I can’t, nor never needed to, and if I could, I couldn’t make out the letters on that stone, but there’s those who have, and turned it into English for you and me both. Look it up in the libraries! ‘Maximus the King,’ it says, ‘who slew the King of the Romans… ’ Macsen Wledig, the Welsh called him. And do you know who the King of the Romans was, the one he slew? He was the Emperor Constans, that’s who, and uncle to King Arthur himself. And ever since Macsen Wledig was Prince of Powis there’ve been Macsens in Middlehope.”

  “How do you know?” objected the young reporter boldly. “Are there still records of all this? After all that length of time?”

  “There’s better than written records. There’s the records that have come down by word of mouth from father to son and mother to daughter. Why, my old granny could have recited you the pedigree of every family in this village nearly back to Adam, just like in the Bible. The women… the women were the keepers of the traditions ever, since time started. Now that’s all gone. Progress we’ve got, and it’s cost us everything else we had, whether we wanted it or not…”

  “He’s beginning to ramble,” Dinah said softly. “Hadn’t you better give him a shove back on to the rails?”

  Someone else, however, did that in Hugh’s place, and very effectively. The last of the photographers sat on a high stool at the end of the bar, a big, hearty man just running slightly to flesh, with a shock of untidy straw-coloured hair and inquisitive eyes. He hadn’t been priming Saul, he hadn’t been doing much talking, but it was plain that he had missed nothing.

  “What about this door?” he said. “If it was originally one door of the church, how did it get into their house in the first place?”

  Saul trimmed his sails nimbly, got halfway through an unplanned sentence, decided to revise it, and created a
mild diversion by peering meaningfully into his empty pint-pot. One of his two interlocutors took the hint and filled it again.

  “It got there because they took it, along with a few other things, when the monastery here was closed down under Henry Eight, that’s how. A very nice bit of carving it is, you can see that, and made locally, so the experts say, and there’s bits inside the old part o’ the church by the same hand. Closed down, the monastery was, and the brothers turned out on to the road. The abbey church was looted and abandoned for a while, and then it was took over for the parish church and repaired again. And the Macsen-Martels sided with the commission, they did, and they got the abbot’s lodging to live in, and that’s how the door came to be there.”

  “And what,” the photographer wanted to know, “put it into their heads to give it back now? Nobody knew about it. Nobody was asking for it. Nobody was in any position to ask for it. Are you telling me they suddenly went to the trouble and expense of having the thing cleaned and restored, after all this time, just in a fit of belated honesty? It doesn’t make sense.”

  They all turned to look at him more carefully, for the tone of his questioning was curiously more purposeful than that of his colleagues. Dave came back with the drinks, and put Dinah’s half-pint into her hand. Hugh levelled black eyes above the rim of his pint-pot. “Who is he?” he asked softly. “Not a Comerbourne man, I know them all.”

  “Brummagem, I think. Some freelance.” Dave was uninterested; he didn’t question other people’s declared motives for what they did.

  “Don’t,” warned Saul unexpectedly, his voice receding hollowly into a cavern of senile solemnity, “don’t ask me about that! There’s reasons for wanting to have things—like a good cellar door when you’re setting up house and there’s one standing handy—and reasons for wanting not to have things any longer when they begin to turn malignant towards them that took them out of their right place. Don’t forget ’tis a church door. Better for everybody, maybe, to put it back where it was afore, and have the bishop say the good words over it that it might be glad to hear. Mind, I’m not saying it is so, I’ve only said it might be so. I haven’t even said it would be effective, have I? Just that there’s no harm in trying.” And he shook his grey head as though he foresaw the failure of this belated attempt at exorcism of something unnamed and undefined. “Did you know what sort of monastery we had up here at the finish?” he asked mildly. “There were only four o’ the brothers left to take to the roads, and a beggarly sort of place they kept here. Hospitality for the stranger, my eye! There were strangers slept here overnight that never got where they were going. It was a long way for any bishop to come, to see for himself what was going on. And then, bishops are as fond of sleeping safe as the next man. No, I wouldn’t say Mottisham Abbey had a particularly holy reputation in its last days. Even the church, they say, saw some very odd goings-on before the finish.”

  “Are you saying,” demanded the photographer bluntly, “that there’s something uncanny about that door?”

  “I’m saying nothing, except that it’s better to be safe than sorry,” mumbled Saul darkly, “and back in the church is the best place for a door the like of that one. Don’t you get too inquisitive, my lad, about things that’s best let alone.”

  “But what went on in the church?” the youngest reporter pressed avidly. “Do you mean black masses, and things like that?”

  “Tisn’t for me to say. There were tales… there were tales…” The veiled eye and withdrawn manner implied that he had heard them all at firsthand, but didn’t propose to share them.

  “Oh, go on!” urged Willie the Twig, fixing Hugh across the smoky room with an innocent grey stare. “Tell ’em about the family curse. Tell ’em what happens in every third generation, ever since the Dissolution…”

  “Young man,” said Saul weightily, playing for time while he readjusted to this uninvited assistance, “there’s some things better not spoke of…”

  “Why?” asked Hugh with interest. “It won’t just go away, whether you speak about it or not, everybody knows it happens.”

  “Every third generation,” prompted Willie the Twig gently.

  “Ever since the last abbot was thrown out to beg, and put a curse on the usurpers for all time…” confirmed Hugh. Dinah dug her elbow sharply into his ribs, but he only smothered a small convulsion of laughter in what was left of his beer, and looked round to claim Dave’s empty pint-pot. “You, Dinah? No? Here you are, Nobbie, love, same again!”

  Saul’s stony eye fixed him balefully. Hugh suppressed his charming smile and gazed back in monumental and brazen innocence.

  “But what does happen every third generation?” the youngest reporter insisted.

  “Every third generation,” Saul said with vengeful deliberation, and his voice sank into the cellar like the demon king disappearing down a stage trap, “the second son is born a witless idiot.”

  “Or a degenerate monster,” Hugh added helpfully.

  “Go on, you’re having us on!” protested the reporter.

  “You think so? You didn’t see the second son at the service this afternoon, did you?”

  “You devil!” whispered Dinah.

  Hugh didn’t even trouble to warn her to silence; he knew she disapproved, or at the very best withheld her approval, but he also knew she wouldn’t do anything to spoil the game, if it amused him.

  “I didn’t even know there was another son,” admitted the oldest reporter, and looked round the assembled and now oddly quiet company for confirmation. Heads nodded and voices murmured; there was another son.

  “Oh, yes, he exists, all right,” Hugh said sombrely, handing along the refilled pint-pot to Dave, and passing a pound note back to Nobbie at the bar. He made a brief, impressive pause, and the interested onlookers obligingly provided him with absolute silence, which he knew exactly when to break. “I’ve seen himl” he said in a sepulchral whisper; and that was all.

  In the electric hush that followed, Nobbie’s sense of mischief got the better of her. She looked round the circle of intense faces, the natives and the strangers, and then deliberately smacked down a handful of silver and coppers on the bar.

  “Your change, Mr. Macsen-Martel!”

  The awful pause felt like a year, but was actually no more than a couple of seconds. Then, with exquisite tact, everyone not directly involved turned, formed new and casual groups, and began to talk abut the weather and football. It was done, and seen to be done, not in order to bury the shock for ever, but merely to keep it on ice while the victims were given a chance to slip away, so that their discomfiture could be properly and privately enjoyed by those who belonged here. And slip away they did, scarlet and speechless and hideously embarrassed. The youngest one, without so much as a word to anyone, simply picked up his coat and slunk out, the other two made a pitiful attempt to carry it off with forced smiles and a sudden pretence that they had just noticed how late it was. The big photographer, who had said least and committed himself least, took his time about withdrawing, and looked round the room defiantly before he went. In particular he looked with fixed interest at Hugh, who had not moved a muscle or said a word to ease the situation.

  “You know, I thought you looked a bit like the old lady.”

  It was an artificial exit line, and Hugh could quite well have said: “Liar!” Instead, and just as devastatingly, he said: “God forbid!” which shook the photographer considerably more.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said uneasily. “Fine, straight old lady for her age. Must be seventy, I suppose?” His eye flickered round the bar once again. “Very interesting evening! And a very interesting door!” he added with recovered assurance, and walked out with a curious private smile on his face.

  The inhabitants stirred, sighed, cautiously stretched, expanding to fill the quitted space.

  “Did you have to do that?” Hugh asked Nobbie reproachfully.

  “Did you have to?” murmured Dinah resignedly.

  “Com
ing to something,” marvelled Willie the Twig, “when those boys get hypersensitive.”

  Saul put back his teeth, and ordered one of Ellie Crouch’s pork pies. And Nobbie, patting her blonde kiss-curl into place, said complacently. “I reckon I won, anyhow. And they won’t be back in a hurry.” For so far from inviting alien custom, “The Sitting Duck” was constantly compelled to protect its limited supplies of home-brewed in the interests of its regulars.

  Nevertheless, within ten days one of the strangers did come back. And this time to stay.

  CHAPTER 2

  « ^ »

  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.