The Knocker on Death's Door

George turned the page. “Yes, here we are—the Liverpool stamp. He was alive in February 1965, at any rate. That’s when this was issued.”

“If we can prove it belongs to our corpse,” Brice pointed out diffidently. “Maybe we do need that dental chart, after all.”

“Wait a minute, there’s something else here inside the back—a newspaper cutting.” George slid it out and unfolded it, and Sergeant Moon and Brice leaned close to look over his shoulders. It had been cut from the middle of a page, apparently, for it bore no upper margin, but as soon as Brice set eyes on the clear black type and lay-out he said what they were all thinking: “That’s the Midland Evening Echo, I’d know that style anywhere.”

Spread out carefully before them, limp but intact, was a two-column heading:

“Obituary: MIDSHIRE LANDOWNER AND

SPORTSMAN KILLED IN

HUNTING FIELD.”

Someone had found more than a thousand words to say about the deceased, more renowned in his death than in the last twenty years or so of his life, or at least renowned in a different and more printable way. It had not, after all, been possible to celebrate his principal local activities without running the risk of a libel action, but his death had been just as colourful and entailed no such dangers.

The very clear photograph, printed web offset in one column, was unmistakably of Robert Macsen-Martel the older, lean, racy and handsome in hunting pink, on top of the ageing horse which had finally broken his neck and its own at an impossible fence on the shoulder of Callow, in February 1965. Only in this picture horse and man shone glossier and younger than on the day of their death. The widow must have given the editor a photograph at least ten years old.

Hugh arrived with a rush and an outcry just as they all three had their heads together over his father’s obituary. They heard voices clashing in the hall above, Hugh’s loud and agitated, demanding to know what the hell was going on here, where the intruders were and what they thought they were doing there, anyhow, Robert’s low but sharp, ordering him with considerable asperity to keep his voice down, which rather surprisingly he suddenly did. George pocketed the passport and the cutting instantly, and Sergeant Moon flicked the folded coat out of sight under the trestle table, and dropped the lid of the suitcase.

“That’s young Hugh home, breathing fire by the sound of it.”

“I’d better have a word with him, too, I suppose. Though from all accounts he managed to break away some time ago—small blame to him.”

“Hasn’t slept in this house oftener than about five or six times a year, for years now,” Sergeant Moon confirmed, “and then only to please the old lady. But blood’s thicker than water, seemingly, when it comes to the point.”

George ran up the stone steps, and collided with Hugh at the top. A vivid, distressed face, still slightly travel- stained from the drive home, glared into his. The young man’s impetuous rush carried them irresistibly a tread or two backwards down the stairs again, and George gave way obligingly and let himself be persuaded. Hugh saw below him the open dark cavern of the cellar doorway, the lights concentrated in one corner, where two men sifted soil patiently into a bucket, and the rectangle of empty blackness cutting between. A look of total shock, blank almost as unconsciousness, dropped like a mask over his face, and melted into scared and agitated humanity again only with painful slowness. He pressed a few steps lower, against the steadying barrier of George’s arm, and looked round at the trestle table and its load, the suitcase closed now, the clothes covered with a piece of sheeting. The heavy, chill odour of disturbed earth hung upon the air and stirred sluggishly at every movement. Hugh’s nostrils dilated and quivered like those of a high-mettled horse.

“It’s true, then,” he said. His tone as unexpectedly flat and practical, as though he had shed his excitement, at any rate for the moment with his uncertainty. “They told me you’d issued a statement—is that right?—that you’d found a body somewhere in the house, Rob said you were down here. I couldn’t believe it—I still can’t. I don’t see how it’s possible. It has to be some grisly mistake—or else it’s a plant…”

“By the police, you mean?” George asked mildly.

“No, I didn’t mean that—but damn it, even if I did, please remember that’s no more incredible to you than your version is to me.” Hugh’s eyes flared again; one of them he had rubbed with fingers lightly soiled by grease, and unwittingly awarded himself a black eye which gave him a curiously youthful and disarming appearance. “I wish to hell I’d been here.”

“I wish you had, but it wouldn’t have altered events at all,” George said reasonably, “apart from being a comfort and encouragement to your family, of course. As for what you call our version, we haven’t one. We’re confronted with a series of realities. The pattern is obscure, and we’re not in the habit of jumping to conclusions too soon.”

“Come off it!” said Hugh shortly. “You’ve questioned my brother, you’ve cautioned him, you’ve dug up the floors in his house, and you try to tell me he’s not under suspicion of anything? And I tell you straight, if it’s a choice between believing Robert’s done anything wrong, and believing the police are liars, I know which I’ll take. That’s another for your series of realities! But there could be other people with an interest in planting bodies where they don’t belong…”

“Such as the murderer?”

“Or murderers.”

“And entry to this house is so easy?”

“Criminals manage to get in wherever they want to get in urgently enough, don’t they?” He was arguing fiercely and intelligently now, but there was something in his eyes all the time that said he was fighting a rearguard action, and in his heart knew it very well. “I’ve heard of houses robbed while the whole damn’ family were gawping at the telly. And out of anywhere they want to urgently enough, too—like prison, for instance. Don’t tell me nobody could ever, in any circumstances break in here and have the whole night to himself. Just two people sleeping in the house, and walls a foot thick! And as far as I know that cellar was never locked—there was nothing in it, so nobody went there much…”

“Believe it or not,” said George patiently, “we even think of things like that. Also of simple possibilities like lost keys being copied, or houses occasionally being let or loaned while the family is away on holiday. And now you’re here, maybe you’ll be able to help us about things like that. If you’ll wait for about ten minutes, upstairs in the drawing-room, one of us will come and join you, and we’ll examine the outside possibilities.”

They were all watching him, even the two men inside the cellar, all with closed faces but sympathetic eyes. There was nothing he could do but retreat, since nothing which had been found here could now be canceled out. He