The Knocker on Death's Door

photograph as centre-piece.

“Him I blame,” she said, flashing the first dark fire George had seen in her. “If he’d been different, everything would have been different.”

George followed her burning glance to the photograph, and felt the short hairs rise like hackles on his neck. Forty years old if it was a day, that photograph, with the bride in a big picture hat and flounced, low-waisted, garden-party dress, the groom in a dark suit and a silk cravat, and both half-obscured by the lilies and carnations of the bouquet; forty years old, but cherished and kept in the shade, and still unfaded. George went a step or two nearer, to confirm what already needed no confirmation.

The woman was a beauty, cream, roses and jet flushed with joy, without a line of hardness in her face, only a little gawky and a little possessive in the day of her triumph. The man was a different creature, accomplished, exuberant, gay, with a crest of fair hair and a blinding smile. Hardly a photograph of him existed in which he was not laughing, and the laugh was memorable. No wonder even an obituary photograph thirty-five years later had still been recognisable; this was a face that did not change even when it aged.

Mrs. Claybourne’s errant husband was identical with that well-known Midshire landowner and sportsman, deceased in the hunting-field, Robert Macsen-Martel, senior.

George swallowed a hasty sandwich and coffee at a pub, and drove back down the M6 in the darkening evening, with all and more than he had come north to find.

No want of motives now, no lack of a link between all these diverse elements.

He had married her! This was the wildest of all. Not just a fast affair, like all the rest, not just a backstairs or coppice seduction, but a cast-iron, unbreakable, unquestionable marriage. George had even gone so far as to confirm it from the church registers, so incredible did it seem. In May 1929, Robert Macsen-Martel had married Rachel Bowman; under a false name, of course, but that did not invalidate the marriage. Mrs. Claybourne and nobody else had been his wife. For this marriage was four years prior to the acknowledged one in Midshire, to his ageing and unattractive cousin with the money, and six years before the birth of the first of his supposedly legitimate sons.

It was a thunderbolt. Why had he done it? Seduce her, yes, inevitably and joyously, but why marry her? He had been younger then, of course, already a roamer and already prodigal with his casual favours. It could even have been when he was in flight from some too importunate Middlehope girl that he had wandered up into these parts under an assumed name, and loitered even after the coast was clear again because of Rachel’s bright eyes. But she couldn’t have been such a completely new experience to him, why go so far as to marry her? Why get caught? The answer, of course, was there plain to be seen. Rachel had been the one he couldn’t get any other way. No marriage, no Rachel. She had had a highly moral upbringing, was as religious as her churchwarden father, and as narrow; and more, she had her affections under control, and was not going to be swept off her moral course by love. Robert had wanted her, what Robert wanted Robert must have, and as quickly as possible, and there was only one way of getting Rachel. She had indeed been remarkably beautiful, maybe he had been genuinely in love at the time. Maybe he had always been genuinely in love—at the time! But there was that streak of ignoble caution even in this act of his—he had been careful to retain the protection of his assumed name, and keep a back door open into his real identity, into which he could escape at need. As he had done, after he had exhausted the possibilities of pleasure with her, and begun to discover the drawbacks. Probably he had never thought of it as a permanent thing at all, just an interlude for which he had to pay slightly more than for most of its kind.

And she, seemingly, had by then begun to discover the drawbacks in him, too, for when he had finally walked quietly out on her she had been relieved, if anything, to be rid of him. Too proud to follow or look for him she might have been, but she had also been too comfortable. Her father had died within the first year of her marriage, the shop was hers, and a better breadwinner than ever Robert had shown signs of being. And above all, unlike her son, she was one of those who have deep roots and do not drag them up merely for an unreliable man.

None of which altered the fact that she had been his legal wife, and was now his legal widow.

And after the wandering husband, the wandering son, taking after his father, coming home when he wanted something, or when he had made some other place too hot to hold him. And just when it was apparently most urgent that he should get out of the country, just when he was trying to borrow or beg more money from his mother to supplement what he had already managed to scrape together, Robert senior broke his neck in the hunting-field, and rated an obituary and a picture in the Echo, in an issue which his son happened to see. What a weapon he must have thought he’d acquired. Here was he, prior to those two sons there in Midshire, and there they were just coming into their father’s property, ripe and ready to be milked. So he had gone to Mottisham Abbey, armed with his proofs, either to claim his rights or to extort money. In view of his circumstances, probably to extort money to help him overseas. And he had gone unobtrusively, because he was not anxious to be noticed by the police; so unobtrusively that he had been able to vanish without raising a ripple or being missed by a living soul. How could he know how little there was to claim? The obituary made the Abbey sound imposing, the family old, prominent and respected. And in fact wealth is relative, and impoverished though the Macsen-Martels might be by their own standards, what was left still represented more than many people have to bless themselves with. People have been killed for less—to get it or to keep it.

But there was more to preserve in this case than mere inheritance. He couldn’t know into what a hornets’ nest he was venturing. All that pride of place and blood, and then suddenly this unthinkably bitter and comic revelation at the end of it, and the boys bastards! A word almost meaningless in these days, yes—but not to such people as Mrs. Macsen-Martel.

Claybourne had said nothing to his mother about his discovery. Why stir up old mud just when what he wanted most was to get quietly away? No, much better leave her in ignorance. George had said nothing to her, either. The first essential now was to get back to Mottisham as fast as possible, and do what was necessary. Explanations could come afterward.

CHAPTER 12

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SERGEANT Brice withdrew his team from the cellar as soon as the last of the soil had been sieved, leaving it still piled against the rear wall. None had been returned to the trench since the fragment of gold pencil had been found, in case the site of the discovery should be significant. All the finds had now been removed; the flagstones were left propped in the antechamber, neatly in order, and the cellar door closed and sealed. So much for that part of the job in hand.

But they had not found the gun.

“There’s the old lady’s room,” said Reynolds. “But we can’t touch that, not now. The doctor’s been again. She’s bad. We can’t possibly disturb her.”

They had looked everywhere else but there, creeping quietly about the first floor in order not to be heard in the sick-room. Robert, going in and out with the doctor, had passed by them in the corridors as if they did not exist, intent only on his own responsibilities. When he was cornered and made to acknowledge the solidity of Brice, below in the hall after the doctor’s car had departed, he was seen to drag himself out of his exclusive preoccupation with a