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

  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 Tired eyes,, darker brown, so withdrawn that there was no knowing whether they were indifferent to her, or simply burdened past caring.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.

  CHAPTER 3

  « ^ »

  DAVE started back for the vicarage at a run. The nearest telephone was there, and the vicar had to know, in any case, and was by far the most suitable person to stand guard over the scene until the police arrived. The one thing everyone knows about the scene of a crime—especially a murder—is that nothing must be moved or touched until the whole circus has had its way. That this was a crime was not in doubt for a moment. And not merely a murderous assault, but a murder. The large, jagged stone that lay in the middle of the flagged path, ominously stained, had not fallen out of the trees; there was a gap among the whitened stones fringing the grass, to show where someone had plucked it from, and there was the dark, muddied red hollow in the photographer’s skull to show what the same someone had done with it. There was no misting of breath on metal when Dave held his silver lighter against the open lips, the hand he touched gingerly was marble-cold. It never entered his head to think of a doctor. Doctors weren’t going to do anything for this poor devil from now on, except haggle over the time and the exact cause of his death. The Reverend Andrew, a realistic soul, accepted what he was told without demanding that it be repeated. When he said something he meant it, and not being lavish or fluent with words, he expected to have the few he did use taken as gospel. Moreover, he recognised a like directness in Dave. He waved him at once to the telephone, and galloped off towards the churchyard, to mount guard over the body that must have lain unguarded all night. And Dave called, not headquarters at Comerbourne, as the vicar would probably have done, but Sergeant Moon, up the valley at Abbot’s Bale. The moment the outside world laid an encroaching hand on the property, privacy or peace of mind of Middlehope, the whole valley closed its ranks.

  “Stand by, and we’ll be down there in a quarter of an hour,” said Sergeant Moon. “Don’t leave him alone, but don’t let anyone touch anything.”

  “No, that’s taken care of—the vicar’s keeping an eye on him.”

  And Dave went to join him. The Reverend Andrew was examining everything in the south porch with appalled but fascinated eyes, as closely as he could without disturbing anything. He wasn’t a native, and he was young enough and innocent enough to find life in Middlehope a little wanting in action—being excluded by his office from about nine-tenths of what action there really was. He would have been horrified if it had so much as entered his mind that he could be glad of a murder; but here was one on his doorstep whether he wanted it or not, and it was impos
sible not to feel a decided curiosity, and even a certain distinctly pleasurable excitement.

  “Desecrated!” he said, looking over his shoulder at Dave from his precious door. “This means we shall have to get it reconsecrated all over again.”

  “A pity we can’t just do the same for him,” Dave said drily. He couldn’t take his eyes from the misshapen head and the jagged stone with its stained edges. He thought of fragments of hair and skin adhering, to make the manner of the assault certain, and of fingerprints to identify the hand that had held the weapon. But no, not from that stone, not a hope! It was a bright, whitish lump, full of mica crystals, without a smooth surface anywhere on it. More likely, perhaps, to have abraded the attacker’s fingertips when he struck with it, and collected some sample of skin or blood tissue that might lead to him by another way. There was a police forensic laboratory in Birmingham; the full treatment would be available within a couple of hours at the most.

  The thought was at once reassuring and chilling, as though the valley had already been invaded by the apparatus of unlawful death, as indeed it had from the moment the stone was plucked out of the grass. No going back now. Dave had never felt himself so much a native. He also felt, to tell the truth, a little sick, but no one looking at his dour, quiet face would have realised it.

  If he had ever entertained any idea that the law moved slowly and sleepily in these parts, he was soon disabused of it. Sergeant Moon and one of his constables came rattling down the valley from Abbot’s Bale in the sergeant’s old Ford within thirteen minutes, slipped the car inside the vicarage drive, and arrived without alerting the village. The relief and security Dave felt at the very sight of the big sergeant was illuminating; after all, he was only Middlehope at all by marriage, but of his membership in the islanded community here there could no longer be any doubt. He might have been there since before Eliseg’s grandson set up the memorial pillar to him, over in Wales. He even walked and talked like a Middlehope man. Easy to see why he never wanted to move away, not even for promotion. What did he want with promotion, when he was already, after his fashion, a minor prince?