The Knocker on Death's Door gfaf-10

by Ellis Peters

  Who or what filled in that gap? Alix Trent? The author of the series might well possess prints of all the pictures concerned, but apparently she hadn’t storage space, either. And the picture wasn’t her work, only an illustration by someone else, she had no copyright in it, why keep it?

  All he had to do was get off the bus and make his way to New Street station, and go home. And so he would have done, if the editorial offices of The Midland Scene had not been so close to the city centre, and he had not had at least half an hour to wait for a train.

  The office was in a new glass and concrete block, smart, sterile and cold, with a fountain and the pillars of Baalbek in the hall; but two floors up, where The Midland Scene lived, the premises had settled down into a practical workaday scale and style. A minute front office housed only a receptionist and a telephonist. Dave asked after Alix Trent, and where he could contact her in connection with one of her articles. The receptionist willingly explained that Miss Trent was not on the magazine’s pay-roll, but was a freelance who often did work for them, and the office would naturally forward any communications to her. Dave was duly grateful for the information, but had thought of getting in touch with Miss Trent personally while he was here in town—if, of course, she lived in Birmingham. The receptionist examined him sternly through her iris-tinted butterfly glasses, and pondered whether he looked a proper person to be given Miss Trent’s address. She was a nice girl, about eighteen and a half by the look of her, with a head of smooth blue-black hair like a well-groomed rook, and the scimitar points of her raven wings stabbed her pink cheeks and made hollows there. She looked over her glasses, because she could see better that way. On the whole, she thought he looked a harmless creature; and Miss Trent was known to be capable of dealing with most eventualities.

  “It’s in Handsworth, close to the park, I’ll write it down for you.” Which she did, earnestly.

  Dave thanked her, and hesitated. “Look, would you mind telling me—are you on here regularly?”

  “Yes, days,” she said, and took off her glasses altogether, the better to consider him.

  “Do you know if anyone inquired after Miss Trent here last week? I believe a friend of mine may have called in on the same errand.”

  He must have sounded casual enough and innocent enough. She pondered, visibly turning back the pages of her memory.

  “Well, yes, one person did—but I don’t think that could be the one you’re thinking of, it was one of the photographers who sometimes works for us. He used to work with Miss Trent quite a lot, so I’m told, a few years back. They told me it was O.K. to tell him.” She looked momentarily anxious, but not because death had leaned over her shoulder. She was young, she had something better to do in her spare time than read the crime news.

  “No, that wouldn’t be my man. Never mind, thanks, anyhow.”

  “He didn’t come just for that, actually,” the girl said, “he came to go through our library pictures for something he wanted, but I don’t think he found it. We don’t keep material that hasn’t been used for publication, you see, not for more than a year or so—not unless it’s of exceptional interest.”

  “No, of course not. I suppose space is always a problem.”

  “These new places,” she told him with conviction, “look huge, but you try working in them! There isn’t room to swing a cat, let alone a camera.”

  Dave went out and took a bus towards Handsworth from the nearest bus-stop.

  At something after ten o’clock, Alix Trent opened the door of her Edwardian semi wide, as only large-minded people do, and looked at her unexpected visitor with mild inquiry. As she stood on her three-inch doorstep, her eyes were exactly on a level with his.

  She was the brownest girl Dave had ever seen. Her hair was a weighty long bob, the colour of good tan shoe-polish, and glossy as conkers, her lashes and brows were the same tint with an added relish of red, her forehead and cheeks were matt brown in an indescribable shade, flushed with rose and fading into ivory. She wore a shirt-dress in a tint very like her own complexion, saddle-stitched with dark brown, and in the collar she had a gossamer scarf in bright apricot. Her shoes were tan, coffee and cream in a series of fragile straps. Her features were wry and friendly, not at all beautiful, apart from the deep-brown, luminous eyes, which so far remained distantly grave though her large, generous mouth smiled at him.

  “Miss Trent?” Dave inquired, and his tone was almost incredulous, so far removed did this girl seem from the racy rival Bobbie Bracewell had been imagining, and so extremely unlikely ever to have had any but business connections with Gerry Bracewell.

  “Yes, I’m Alix Trent.”

  Her voice was low-pitched, brisk and pleasant, with a note of good-humoured patience in it. He had interrupted her at work, but he didn’t look the type to do so without reason.

  “If you could spare me just a few minutes I should be very much obliged. My name’s Cressett. I’m not the police or the press or anything official, and I haven’t any standing, but it’s about Gerry Bracewell’s death.” He saw by her face that she did read the papers, and that she would never be able to feel completely disinterested about the murder of someone she had known and worked with. “I got involved,” he said, “whether I wanted to or not. I found him. And I’ve just come from his widow.”

  That struck two notes at once with her, her face was mobile and expressive, she was sorry for Bobbie Bracewell, but also she knew how she herself had been regarded in that quarter, and his coming from the widow could mean several very different things.

  “There’s a matter of a feature article you and he handled together,” Dave said carefully, “which seems to be connected in some way with his death. Or at least the house in it does. I believe he came to see you before he was killed.”

  “Yes,” she said readily and coolly, “he did come to see me.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me—you, his visit to you—this has nothing to do with the case. Only the matter about which he wanted to see you, this is relevant. At least, I think so.”

  “But you are not the police,” she said reasonably, and for the first time almost smiled at him with her eyes as well as her lips.

  “This is something the police don’t yet know, but will as soon as I get back today. His widow gave me this to take back to them.” He held out the magazine for her to see, and her understanding was candid, neutral and detached. “I thought I might, with luck, be able to take more at the same time. Will you help me?”

  “Forgive me,” she said, aware that her smile was getting a little out of hand, “but you do appear such an improbable amateur detective.”

  “I’m not one,” he said shortly, “I don’t want to be one, I never shall be one. I’m just the man who found the body, and I happen to belong—I mean belong—to the small, closed community where it happened. I don’t like a man being wiped out anywhere, and especially not in our village. And I don’t like unpaid debts hanging round the necks of innocent people. I want right done, that’s all.”

  A long time afterwards, when they knew each other very much better, she told him that what had impressed her most of all, and made up her mind for her there and then about more matters than one, was that the word he used was not “justice,” but “right.” A distinction so narrow and so profound.

  “Come in!” said Alix, and set the door wide.

  She listened to everything he had to say, and he said much more than he had realised was necessary, because she was a good listener, intent, responsive, with the patience to wait for a slower but possibly more powerful and accurate mind than her own to find the words it needed without prompting. She kept very still while he talked, and she thought deeply and talked openly when it was her turn. Once she had made up her mind there were no half-measures.

  “Yes, you’re right, of course, he did come to me. After he’d found nothing in the archives, I suppose. He wanted to know if I’d kept any of the unused pictures from that country house series. He didn’t say which one
he was interested in at first, and if I’d had anything to show him I don’t think he’d have committed himself any further, but I don’t keep past material, except file copies of my own work. And it hadn’t seemed likely that there’d be any future sales in that particular set, they were commissioned, and nobody else was going to show interest. As I remember it, all the houses were much the same—after all, the major ones are too well known, it was the small stuff we were concerned with. These tumbledown dumps miles from anywhere, with arthritis in every flagstone—So when it was clear I had nothing to show, then he did begin to probe in another way. That was the first time he actually mentioned Mottisham Abbey. I read the papers, I knew about the door being put back into the church porch, it didn’t take much guessing to decide that he’d been covering the ceremony. He started reminding me of what the house was like, and asking how much I remembered. In the end it came down to what he really wanted. How well did I remember the wine-cellar door.”

  She looked up at Dave, across her plain, practical, uncluttered workroom, and smiled. Smiling made her mouth slightly oblique, one corner flicking engagingly upwards.

  It sounded hopeless. One house in a series of at least five, one minor feature in the house, one visit… “It was expecting a lot,” Dave owned ruefully.

  “As it happens, I had some reason to remember it, though not enough to be much use to him, apparently. I do remember it was a nice piece of carving, though very dark and coated with a rather nasty varnish…”

  “They’ve removed that,” said Dave.

  “Good for them! It did look well worth cleaning up. But nobody said a word, about any legends attaching to it, not to us, at any rate. Of course, it was the old man himself who showed us round, and he wasn’t the kind to retail legends, from what we saw of him. He scoffed at the whole thing. I was slightly offended, to tell the truth, after all I was twenty-three then, and took my job very seriously, and I expected patrician elderly gentlemen to take their historic houses seriously, too. He didn’t. He told me exactly what he thought of old, cold, insanitary stone houses, and said if my rag thought so highly of the place they could have it, he was only waiting for a reasonable offer. He was a character. And handsome, too. Not to say oncoming! What I chiefly remember about the wine-cellar is that he contrived to close the door—or partially close it—with himself and me inside, while Gerry was making some shots of the outside.”

  “Then he did photograph the door?” Dave interrupted quickly.

  “Oh, yes, both he and I were quite sure of that, that’s why he was hunting for the prints, but none of us had kept them—they weren’t used, as you’ve seen. And when we were alone inside there, not to make a long story of it, old Mr. Martel made a very debonair but very determined pass at me, and I had to whip the door open pretty smartly and make a discreet getaway. The things I know about that door are not so much visual, consequently. What I remember most is how surprised I was, considering its size, at the sweet way it swung. Whoever hung it knew his business. It balanced beautifully, even though it wasn’t all that well cared for, and creaked a little in motion.”

  It sounded absolutely authentic. Given the late Robert’s reputation, it would have been unthinkable for him to be shut in a cellar with an attractive twenty-three-year-old girl and not make a pass at her. He would have considered it an opportunity wasted, almost a dereliction of duty.

  “But nothing else strikes you about the door as you remember it?—the door or the knocker?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry! If only I knew what sort of something, even!”

  “If only I could tell you,” he agreed ruefully. “Well, thanks, anyhow. I shall have to pass on all this to the police. You won’t mind?”

  The heavy, smooth cap of russet hair swung again. “I don’t mind. I’ll keep thinking about it. Something might occur to me.”

  He knew he had interrupted her in the middle of a job, there was paper in the typewriter on the desk at the window, and a sheaf of loose pages beside it to be copied. He knew he ought to go, and was even aware that he would be well advised to go now, if he intended ever to come this way again. The time for knowing her better was not yet; but it would come.

  “Yes, do keep it in mind. If you think of anything that even may be significant, would you let the Midshire C.I.D. know about it?” He had the wit not to ask her to regard him as the natural intermediary, and send her afterthoughts to him.

  She had risen with him, to accompany him to the door. She had a long, free, self-reliant step, and when she gave him her hand it was significant, the seal on an agreement. At the last moment, before he turned towards the gate and she closed the door, she said with deliberation: “A photograph might help, if your local paper carried one. Look in, when you’re in town again, and if you’ve got a picture, bring it with you.”

  It was the measure of her impact that there was no echo at all. Bobbie Bracewell might never have existed. All he felt was that simple and exhilarating lift of the heart assuring him that he would see Alix Trent again, that it was she who was making the approach easy for him.

  “I will,” he said, and walked away from her down the path with The Midland Scene under his arm, and a sense of sudden achievement flooding his senses, as though the sun had come out.

  CHAPTER 5

  « ^ »

  George Felse stood under the arching trees that shadowed the south porch of St. Eata’s, in the first fine drizzle of rain, and stared at the wreath of wilted, greyish-green herbage that sagged on the sanctuary knocker. The head of the mythical beast, inanely grinning, jutted out of the tired greenery like a clown from a wilted muslin ruff, obscenely mocking the gravity of the beholders. Withdrawn, the village moved about stealthily in circles, eyes slanted always towards the profaned place of death, feet always directed assiduously somewhere else. There wasn’t a soul for two miles round who didn’t know.

  The dark-green, crinkled leaves drooped despondently, as if they held out very little hope that they would be effective in warding off the obscure evil from outside human experience—which was hypothetically the purpose for which someone had placed them there. It was even something of an achievement to get hold of that much parsley in October, let alone hang it in position in this most exposed of places without being caught in the act. Though a soul benevolent enough to be scheming for the protection of this troubled place against all evil spirits should also have been indifferent to observation. Unless, of course, by demons, whose attentions it would be reasonable enough to avoid if possible.

  “All right,” said George philosophically, “you didn’t see anyone, you don’t know anything. I get it. But you do know what this is for, don’t you? Avaunt, ye spirits of chaos, spawn of darkness, malicious powers, make yourselves scarce! This is no place for you, this is a place protected. All right, you can unhook it now, it’s served its purpose.”

  “I dursen’t, sir,” said Ebenezer Jennings without a blush, and stood by George’s side in full daylight to be surveyed, his face as hard as the building stone they had once quarried from the western slope of Callow, now long overgrown in bracken and furze. “That’s magic, sir. That’s good magic. I don’t meddle with yon. This church is troubled bad, and that garland, that’s blessed. Yes, I do know what virtue’s in these leaves. You leave ’un there, I say. That ain’t no ill, is it? Leave ’un be, and hope!”

  George wondered, in one instant of mental irresponsibility, whether it was the mere fact of the man’s office as verger, or something in his remarkable appearance, that enabled him to get away with that kind of language without being ridiculous. He was almost sure that it was not because of any actual belief he had in these things; on the contrary, the whole delivery had something of the impressiveness of a first-class theatrical performance, larger than life and double as natural. The office of verger was practically hereditary in Mottisham; and this was the role that went with it, the trappings, the privilege.

  Eb Jennings the Fifth was a man of medium height and inordinate
dryness, all stout bones and leathery hide without much flesh between. He looked as if the wind might blow him away, but he was as tough as old boots. His head was large, with a lofty, domed skull bristling with long grey hair, his face all forehead, tapering away down a long nose to a narrow, hanging jaw, and his eyes in their gaunt sockets burned with a dark, prophetic fire. He would not have been out of place in the direst books of the Old Testament. Even in ancient flannels blotched with paint and grease, and a washed-out oiled-wool sweater, beginning to unravel at the hem, he was impressive.

  “And how can you be sure it was put there to protect?” George asked curiously, watching the verger’s lantern of a face. “Oh, yes, we know that’s what it means, or what it’s supposed to mean, but what if whoever put it there did it to frighten the whole village half to death, on the principle of ‘the mair mischief of mair sport’? That wouldn’t be much benefit to anybody except the murderer, would it? If he stirred up enough muck he might escape notice in the obscurity. Might even be left free to make his next move, whatever that may be. You live here at the lodge on the corner of the churchyard, don’t you? Right in the danger zone!”

  A boy of about eighteen or nineteen came butting through the gathering rain, shears in hand, and dived into the porch beside them just in time to hear this. George had seen him clipping back the encroaching ivy from the north wall before the shower began.

  “Don’t you waste your time trying to scare this old raven,” he said, punching Jennings lightly in the ribs, and dropping the shears on to the bench inside the porch. “I’d be sorry for the demon that tried tangling with him, I tell you.”

  “You mind your own business,” Eb Jennings told him smartly, “and don’t interrupt your elders and betters.”

  “And don’t let him kid you he takes any stock in this Dracula stuff,” went on the boy, undeterred, nodding a shaggy, light-brown head at the dangling wreath. “He’s got his own recipes.” He sat down beside his shears, and leaned to examine the withering leaves more closely. His lively lips curled in tolerant disdain. “You know there’s a couple of London cranks from some psychic research gang booked in the ‘Arms’ last night? And a folklore collector from Birmingham? As well as a few national press folks. Somebody slipped the word out there were devils loose up here.”