The Knocker on Death's Door

She darted him a brief, shrewd glance. “I know what you’re thinking: Her heart’s not broken, by a long chalk. And no more it is. What’s the use of pretending? We haven’t mattered much to each other for a long time. Having a fling got pretty boring together, he found himself other partners. It’s all right, the police know it all, it doesn’t mean a thing now, but I told them, anyhow. Sure we had rows, rows all the time. He went off for days when he felt like it, and there was always a girl behind it. Only last week we had a row again—how was I to know it was going to be the last one ever? There was this girl be used to know, a few years ago… she did feature articles for one of the magazines he used to do pictures for. They worked together a lot, around five or six years ago. She’d do interviews with people, or pieces about places, and he’d do the art work. And last week, after he was up there in your part of the world, suddenly he started looking for her again. He thought I didn’t know, but I did. He went to the magazine offices—I know because he came in with an old number from way back, and sat down with it and started thumbing through it as though he expected to find her telephone number, and then he swore and threw the thing across the room, because whatever it was he was looking for, he hadn’t found it. But when I went to pick it up he made good and sure he got there first. I saw the date, though, it was some time in 1964. They did a whole series together that year, I knew then there was something between them. Then he walked out, and didn’t come back until the Friday, and not a word to be got out of him, all he did all the weekend was turn out all his old pictures and slides, hunting for something. I might as well not have been here… I might as well have been dead.” The word shocked her into silence for a moment. She contemplated it bleakly, and accepted it: “And now he’s dead.”

“Did you tell the police all this?” Dave asked.

“I told them everything I could think of, my whole life story, not that I suppose it means anything now. I told them where I was Tuesday night, too, but how do you prove you were in a cinema? Not even a local, but in the city. From a quarter to five, when I left the office, I could have been anywhere. I didn’t come home. What for, I knew he wouldn’t be here!” Her pallid, unmarked morning face had quickened into painful and positive life. Whatever was left of it now, once she had been in love with her husband, and for all her disillusionment she still had not broken the habit of reckoning with him—or, as now, with the blank where he had been.

“But you did tell them about this business with the magazine?” Dave insisted. “Because he must have had a reason for hunting up an issue six years old.”

Surprise came as a relief to her. She looked up at him with fresh animation. “You really think it could mean something? I did tell them, yes, but I didn’t make all that much of it. I never thought… Here, wait a minute! You could do something for me, at that.”

She got up quickly, and clacked out of the kitchen with more spring to her step than he had yet heard in it; and in a moment she was back with a limp and dog-eared magazine in her hand, Country Life-size, once glossy.

“I didn’t give them this yesterday because I didn’t know where it was. I thought he’d taken it away with him, but he hadn’t, he’d only hidden it. I was turning out his papers and letters last night, after they’d gone. I found this shoved at the back of his transparency files. You’re going back there anyhow—give it to that inspector for me.”

She put it into his hands. He had occasionally seen copies of it before, but half of it was social gossip, provincial at that, and lacking for him both general and local interest, and he had never bought a copy himself in his life. The Midland Scene—glossy monthly published right here in Birmingham, but belonging rather to the outer shires than to the city. July 1964, and consequently full of regattas, tennis, gardens open to the public, stately homes on show, and country race meetings. In the winter it would be hunt balls, meets, the exploits of midland skiers abroad, winter sports and annual dinners. The paper was good, the layout elaborate, the colour- printing first-class. He turned the pages, full of social events and comments that seemed to him as remote as Mars; and he came to a feature article with pictures, the centre-piece of the colour pages:

Country Houses of the Midlands.

Number Five: Mottisham Abbey,

Midshire.

There was no mistaking that long, lofty roof, that thick block of chimneys. The photographs were good and well printed, and had caught house and garden at their summer best. There were two shots of the exterior, one focused across all that remained of a wall of the refectory, barely breaking the soil, one from the best corner of the garden, over a jungle of roses. The lichen-yellows and sage-greens in the roof tiles made an exotic print; and that tall, erect, distinguished-looking fellow in the authentic country tweeds and leather elbows, with wild grey hair still curly and crisp as heather, was Robert Macsen-Martel, senior, a year or so before his death. Sixty years old, but looking at least ten years younger, with a smile that could fetch the birds out of the bushes—literally, according to Saul Trimble.

Dave turned the page, and found a central-double-page spread with three more pictures: the dove-cote in the garden, the panelled hall, the drawing-room.

Not the wine-cellar door! Was that the point? Was that what Bracewell had been hoping to find?

He turned back to the previous page. “Text by Alix Trent. Pictures by Gerry Bracewell.”

“It’s the house up there, where it happened, isn’t it?” said Bobbie Bracewell, watching him narrowly.

“Yes, this is the house. The one the door came from.”

“That’s what I thought. So the police ought to have this. I don’t know whether it means anything—but it meant something to him, all right. Or something that isn’t there meant something to him. Take it back with you.”

“All right, if that’s what you want.” He hesitated, aware suddenly of her peculiar desolation, which had not been created, but only revealed, by the loss of a husband. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think he was looking for this Alix Trent—or not for her own sake. If he went to the trouble to get this back-number from somewhere, after all this time, it was for these pictures. When he was on a job like that, I suppose he’d take a fair number of pictures, and the author or the editor would choose the ones they wanted to use? There’d be more than just these few?”

“Sometimes he’d take as many as thirty to get three, provided the magazine was paying for everything.”

“And after he’d looked at these, and failed to find what he wanted, he started turning out all his own files again?”

She shook her head sadly. “That wouldn’t do him any good, either. He never kept any but his few best negatives more than about three years, not where the work was commissioned. What space would he have for filing thousands of pictures in a place like this? He was always going to have a proper filing system and a proper library some day. When our ship came in—only we spent too much time pushing the boat out!” She laughed, and was again grave. “I’ll have to go and put my face on, it’s time I went. But I suppose I could have a look through them, just in case…”