The Knocker on Death's Door

churchyard, I give you that. How can we be so sure it was your mother?”

“But, hell, Dinah, you just found it hidden in her room…”

“Yes… the one place in the house, you tell me, that hasn’t been searched. The best place to hide something. I wonder,” said Dinah, “if the gun’s there, too? She wouldn’t know, would she? For two days now she’s been either asleep or more or less in a coma. Anybody could have hidden the coat there.”

A gust of incredulous laughter shook him. “Anybody, the girl says! For God’s sake, how many people were there in the house?”

“There was one extra last Saturday night,” said Dinah. “There was you!”

He took two or three hasty steps towards her, as though he wanted to use his hands, the brusque persuasion of his body, to recall her to herself and put an end to this grotesque nightmare of distrust and misunderstanding. She did not move to meet him, nor to recoil from him, but kept her place, the brass table solidly between them.

“Dinah, you don’t know what you’re saying. You can’t mean this!”

“I know what I’m saying. You slept in this house on Saturday night. I drove you over here, as you just reminded me. Who else belonging to this house knew there was going to be a watcher prying round the church porch all night? Had your mother been in the bar listening? Had Robert? But you had! You knew! ‘If the monks don’t get you, the devil will,’ you said. And you had a fine monk’s robe all waiting for you here by the garden door. You’d be surprised, Hugh,” she said, “how many details a girl notices when she’s paying her first visit to people who may be going to be her in-laws. I saw the worn rugs in the hall, the old coats in the lobby. The kind of old coats most houses keep, pensioned off, just for running out in the rain when you’ve forgotten to shut the garage door—or popping out to feed the chickens, if you keep chickens. I remember that old camel coat very well. It could make a fine monk out of anyone in the dark, man or woman, and it wasn’t in your mother’s wardrobe then.”

“But, by God, all you’re saying is that any of us could have put it on. Because I told them all about that fool of a ghost-hunter, when I came in, that night—they may not have been there to hear it for themselves, but they knew, all right. How could I know she’d get up in the small hours and go blundering out there to catch her death?”

She stared steadily into his face, and everything about him seemed to her a kind of charade, expertly played, the warmth of his voice, full of indignant innocence, the hurt anger of his eyes, that could meet hers even now without evasion and without blinking; but all wasted, because she knew the answer before the charade was played.

“And what about her shoes, Hugh? If she went out in the wet grass on Saturday night, where are the shoes she wore? Every pair she had in her wardrobe is dry and polished. Who cleaned them and put them away for her? By the next morning she was too ill to get up.”

He opened his lips to answer that, too, with the same assurance and the same indignation, without a pause, never at a loss; but she raised her voice abruptly, and rode over him.

“No, don’t bother to think up any more lies, it wouldn’t alter anything. Do you know what I found in the pocket of the coat? It was intelligent of you to pull it off and put it in your pocket, if it was hanging loose, because if it had dropped off in the churchyard they’d have found it, for certain. But you really should have remembered to take it out when you got back to the house.”

She leaned towards him across the table, holding it out on the palm of her hand. A small, plain horn button, still tethered to a fine green thread, with a few torn fibres of grey-green wool attached.

“But you didn’t think about it, and now you’ve missed your chance. And it was bad luck, wasn’t it, that I happened to be the one to find it. The one person who couldn’t fail to know it again. The one person who could swear you were wearing it last Saturday night.” She was vibrating like a taut bowstring, not with fear or even shock now, but with the current of knowledge suddenly streaming through her to earth, things she had always known and never acknowledged before. “I knitted the cardigan. I stitched these buttons on. How many men do I knit for? I hardly know how to knit, beyond plain and purl! It was an aberration, even when I did it for you.”

She hardly knew who this could be, talking with her voice, through her throat, still quietly but now with a kind of ferocity of which she had not known she was capable. But the man facing her she knew, through and through she knew him, and there was no longer anything he could say or do that would fool her. He was still smiling, baffled, hurt, shaking his head over her, opening his mouth to protest once again, to breathe sweet reason and blow even this away. And he could do it better than anyone she had ever known but never again well enough to take her in.

“No, don’t tell me Robert borrowed your clothes! Make up your mind which of them you want to frame, and stick to it! You took whatever you fancied of his, I can see that now, but never the other way round. Like that gold pencil you were telling me about—the cap that turned up in the cellar It hadn’t been there long, had it? Before all this began, about three weeks ago, I remember you signing for a parcel in the office with a gold pencil—that wouldn’t be the same one, would it, Hugh? The one Robert lost a long time ago? Did they let you into the cellar where they were digging, Hugh? Mightn’t they have done that purposely, just to see what turned up afterwards, where nothing was before? You’re not the only clever one! Did you ever think of that?”

He had not. She saw the thought sharpen the brightness of his eyes into the bleak grey of steel, while his appalled, compassionate smile for her unaccountable madness remained fixed.

“Oh, yes, all kinds of things come back to me now. Who escaped from this house and left the others holding the baby? You did! Who relied on Robert’s determination to protect your mother and keep your name clean? You did! Who landed him in this hell and left him to cope with it alone? You did! Who’s been busy planting evidence to saddle him with the murder, now that it can’t be hushed up any longer? You have! And who’s willing now to switch from his brother to his mother for scapegoat if it looks a better bet? You are!”

“Dinah!” he said, quite softly.

“I don’t know who that man was, or why you shot him, but I know you did,” she said with absolute finality.

“Do you, Dinah? And the photographer, too? And that idiot of a psychic researcher on Saturday night? What, all of them, Dinah?”

“All of them,” said Dinah.