The Knocker on Death's Door

looked with doubt, distaste and apprehension at the draped table and the closed case, and again at the cave of the cellar. He shook his head helplessly and wretchedly.

“You see it, and it still isn’t credible! I can’t get it into my head at all.” He frowned abstractedly, and hauled out his handkerchief to wipe from his knuckles the smudge of oil he had just detected there. “Can I go in? I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like—I haven’t been in there for years.”

“If you want to. Be careful how you go!”

The two constables squatting over the slowly diminishing mound of soil and the sieve looked up momentarily as he came in, and having withdrawn their eyes from the brightness on which they had been concentrating, saw only a tall, dark figure cutting off the light from the doorway, a deeper shadow added to what was already obscurity. He was at the edge of the trench almost before he realised it, and pulled up sharply with a hissing, indrawn breath, recoiling with one hand outstretched for balance until he touched the wall. He stared down into the hole, and George, close behind him in the doorway, felt rather than saw his shivering. When George took him gently by the elbow and turned him again towards the light of day, he yielded to the suggestion docilely, and allowed himself to be steered to the foot of the staircase.

“Take it from me, we don’t go to that sort of trouble except with good reason.”

“No—I believe you!” He was quaking gently with shock and revulsion, and drawing in deep, hungry breaths of slightly milder, cleaner air. With a foot on the lowest tread of the stairs he turned a grimly thoughtful face.

“Who was he?—this man you found?”

“So far he remains unidentified,” said George.

“Well, whoever he is, he can’t be anything to do with us.”

“In that case, time will show as much. Now we’d like your help in a while, but just now we have some loose ends to tie up here. If you’ll wait upstairs—Why not go up and see your mother in the meantime?”

Hugh departed, once his mind was made up, as impetuously as he had arrived. They stood listening as his crisp, almost angry footsteps receded along the hall above towards the stairs, changed tone on the broad oak treads, and climbed out of earshot.

“And now,” said George briskly, “I want the best roadmap you can find at short notice, Jack, for Lancashire and the north. And Brice, there’s a special job for you right here, while I’m away.”

CHAPTER 11

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IT was approaching noon as George drove up the M6, with the map spread on the passenger seat beside him, and Kirkheal Moor heavily underlined, for fear he should never be able to find it again. According to the directories it was a small market town in one of Lancashire’s surprising islands of rural peace, shrunken now but still individual between the city complexes; on the map it was printed so small as to be almost invisible. So much the better: perhaps the electoral roll would be modest enough to be easily combed, perhaps the place would be so much of a survival that the postmaster or the vicar would know everyone who lived there, and where to put his finger on him.

He should, no doubt, have borrowed a driver who had been in bed overnight; motorways were not for people who had gone short of sleep. But police resources were never large enough, and there was still a lot to be done at Mottisham; and there were no rested men to spare. George tanked up with coffee, drove fast but steadily, and kept his mind as well as his eyes on the road.

He had consigned the Abbey to Brice’s care. Collins would be withdrawing himself and all his accumulated notes to the vicarage office, and if he got through all the conceivable checking and re-checking of reports before evening he would have done well. Brice’s squad had still to sift and replace all the soil removed from the floor; and its other main job was the gun. Brice just might have enough manpower to search the whole house for it before night; he had begun already before George left. It was more than dubious whether they would find it, of course, there had been some years to dispose of it, but they must at least make sure it was not in the Abbey. Hugh, questioned as to whether there had ever been a gun in the house, had candidly listed the good sporting guns which had quit the walls one by one as the money ran out, and had had vague recollections that his father had brought back some sort of minor souvenir from North Africa at the end of the war, but had not the least idea what had happened to it—probably that had been sold, too, if it had any cash value—and didn’t remember seeing it for years. It was typical of Robert, senior, that he had had a very dashing war record indeed, though too picaresque and irregular to raise him higher than major; and also typical, and one of the better things about him, that he had shed the “major” as soon as he shed his uniform, and refused to acknowledge such a form of address ever after.

As for Robert, junior, careworn and remote, withdrawn for much of the time into his mother’s bedroom, he had declined to answer questions about guns as he had declined to answer questions about bodies in the cellar. His eyes and his manner said that he knew everything; but his tongue stated monotonously that he had nothing to say.

So there was George, heading north through Cheshire and thanking God for the motorways which had enabled the police, as well as the criminals, to cover long distances with the minimum of effort; while at the back of his mind lingered the anxieties Sergeant Brice had to deal with in his absence. All the men now on duty in the Abbey had been working without respite for more than twenty-four hours, and would be clocking up several hours more before they could go home and sleep. So we quit the Abbey this evening, George had ordered. Seal the cellar, find the gun if you can, ask any questions that may occur to you, but at the end of the day send the lot of them home to get a proper break. Nobody’s going to run, not while the old lady is so ill. And we have enough fresh men to mount a watch on the front and rear approaches to the house, which is all that should be necessary.

In the meantime—he was sweeping past the exit for the Keele service area at the time, and wondering about another coffee and a ’phone call home—there was the ghost of Robert, senior, whispering all the time at his shoulder. People had loved and admired that Robert—not having to live with him, of course, but just seeing him stride across the horizon in his own decorative fashion, safely at a distance. People had also hated him, people who had suffered from him or for him, people who had been forced to come to close quarters, instead of idolising from a distance. What was the truth about him? And why, above all, why should the unknown man from the cellar be carrying, safely secreted with his most precious possessions, a notice of this Midshire squire’s death? Clearly this had somehow come to his notice—no great wonder, for the Echo covered a third of England and two-thirds of Wales—and had brought him to the Abbey. Plus, don’t forget, a substantial sum of money, a large suitcase full of clothes, and a valid passport, brand-new just as Robert, senior, staged his spectacular death. A little man, discreetly on the run with what he had. And showing up at the Abbey in the hope of more? But on what grounds? What hold could an obituary give him over Robert’s heirs? And did he know how little there actually was for them to inherit?

It became more and more clear to him, as he pulsed steadily northwards through the monstrous landscape of the M6, in some stretches of which new bridges produced the only glimpses of beauty, that the date of that obituary— which Sergeant Collins might at this very moment be checking—could not be far removed from the date