The Knocker on Death's Door

“Are they still there?” asked Dinah at length. The open gate of the Abbey drive was just coming into sight.

“No, they’ve packed it in for the day, seemingly. They’ve closed up the cellar and taken everything away. It’s dead quiet in the house now, but I expect they’ll be back in the morning. The chief inspector went off just before noon, but his sergeant’s been probing all round the place ever since.”

“Looking for what, do you think?”

“A gun, I suppose—at least, they’ve been asking all sorts of questions about whether there ever was a gun in the house, so I take it that’s what they’re after.”

She thought about that for a moment in sombre silence. Bracewell had been battered to death with a stone, the unfortunate psychic researcher, now conscious but still disoriented in hospital at Comerbourne, had also been attacked with a stone. So if the police were looking for a gun, it could only be in connection with the body they had found here in the Abbey. This one must have died by shooting. Dinah had good reason to be able to guess where the body had been found, under the flags of the cellar floor, which had lain level and unmarked when Alix had first seen it, six years ago, and now was scarred from the movement of the door. What could it be the police had found when they removed the knocker from that door, the knocker that Alix said didn’t belong there? Oh yes, all Mottisham knew that they had removed it, the grapevine had not been foiled for long! The knocker must have been put there to hide something, and whatever the something was, it had sent the police hotfoot to the Abbey to continue their investigations on the spot. They had known where to look, and had had a very good idea of what they were looking for. A dead man. A shot man. Bullets that killed sometimes passed clean through their victims and lodged in a wall or a tree or the earth beyond. Had this one lodged in the door? That could be one more reason for removing the thing from a site where it betrayed too much, to the safe, calm place in the south porch of the church. But the primary reason, of course, was the way it dragged on the flagstones, and called attention to their irregularity.

“Hugh, I’m so sorry! All this is terrible for you.” She would have liked to find something more helpful to say, but what was the use of being optimistic and pretending to believe that a burden like this would simply go away, like a passing illness?

“Terrible for me? What do you think it is for Robert? Oh, they haven’t charged him, but I know he’s expecting them to every moment. They showed him something of his they’d found in the cellar— well, they didn’t say they’d found it in the cellar, it was Rob who said that—he was sure that’s where they’d got it from. The cap off a gold pencil he used to have. They seemed to think it means something pretty grim…”

“But why! I mean, when we don’t even know who this person was, or anything that could possibly connect him with your brother? Why should he want to… What motive can they possibly think he had? And in any case, a cap from a pencil could have been dropped in the cellar any time, it wouldn’t mean a thing.”

“No, not if it was just on the floor somewhere, of course, but if it was… Oh, God, Dinah, I just don’t know! I don’t know anything! Only that if it was a question of protecting Mother, Rob might do anything…”

The gravel of the drive, long since more loam than gravel, sputtered dully under the wheels, and they pulled up before the closed door.

When they entered the blue-curtained bedroom on the first floor, Robert was sitting beside his mother’s bed. There was a dressing-room ensuite, with a single bed in it, ideal, Dinah thought, for the nurse when she came. With the connecting door wide open she would hear every breath from the sick woman’s bed. In the main bedroom itself Robert had laid and lit a modest fire, and the glow it gave was light enough to see by. It cast an unusual warmth on his pale, attenuated face, underlined the hypersensitive line of his mouth, and outlined his lofty eyelids with deep shadows. He had one hand cupped behind his mother’s pillow, and with the other was holding to her lips a teaspoonful of liquid from the cup he had beside him on a small table. He heard them come, but he did not look up. The old lady appeared to be unconscious, with closed eyes and drawn cheeks, yet when the spoon touched her lips they parted a little, accepting the offered drink.

When the spoon was empty, Robert laid it in the saucer and looked up; his face was reserved, resigned, not troubled by any deep personal tenderness. Only when he met Dinah’s eyes did he smile very faintly.

“Brandy and water. He says it can’t hurt her now, and may still help her.” His voice was low and level, just above the disturbing sibilance of a whisper. He got up and came round the bed towards them. “It was very good of you to come, Dinah. In the circumstances, especially.” His eyes held hers; it appeared to be a half-apology for yesterday.

“I’m glad to be some use. You can leave her with me,” said Dinah in the same muted tone. “You ought to try and get some sleep.”

They left her alone with her patient. Hugh did not go far, she knew, only as far as his own room, a mere hotel room now as far as he was concerned, to empty his case on the bed and strip thankfully for a bath, for she heard the bath running very soon after he had left her. What Robert would do she did not try to guess. How do you sleep when the police are merely waiting at leisure to complete their case against you, and the warrant for your arrest on a charge of murder may be issued at any moment? Poor Robert! Extraordinary Robert, so impregnably patient, distant and proud, the pelican of politeness, the patrician to end patricians! Hugh is right, she thought, in defence of his clan he’d do anything—anything! Kill? Well, it would be a kind of duty, wouldn’t it? If there was a threat to the Macsen-Martel name and reputation, everything and everybody outside the magic circle would be expendable.

It was very quiet and still in the main bedroom after the men had gone away. The huge silence of the night came down, and she could feel all about her the immense solidity and force of this ancient house, where even the internal walls were a foot thick, and of native stone.

She refilled a hot water bottle and placed it beside the old woman’s bony feet, and then for a long time she sat beside the bed, and did not more than record what she felt and saw. The bed was a double one, no doubt the patient’s marriage bed long ago. There were no four posts and canopy, yet the frame seemed to have been converted from something belonging to the eighteenth century, broad, bold and sensuous, covered now with faded folkweave, and grinding its castered feet into a threadbare Persian carpet. The fire made the room warm and human, but it must have seemed large, bare and cheerless when the grate was empty. The furniture was on a grand scale, as everywhere in the house, but not outstanding of its kind, only elephantine.

Dinah sat beside the bed and looked at her patient. The old woman’s grey hair, unbraided, spread over the pillows in a silvery cloud, unexpectedly beautiful in its gossamer fineness. Against that silken veil the haughty face, elongated still further by the rigidity of unconsciousness, lay staring starkly upwards through large, closed eyelids, thin nostrils spread, thin mouth drawn down in distaste, the very image of Bishop Wolfhart Roth of Augsburg, with the bad smell under his nose. She was a tomb figure already, except that she breathed, and when Dinah put a