Ellis Peters - George Felse 10 - The Knocker On Death's Door (16 page)

“New,” said Sergeant Moon with admirable brevity, thumbing earth away from the corner of blue. “Bought for his last trip.”

The clothes, however, were not new. The underclothes were mended, the shirts had slightly frayed collars. Shaving tackle, handkerchiefs, sweaters—some of the things bore laundry marks, some makers’ tabs.

“Whoever put him there thought that was the last of him,” said George, “or they’d have had all these off. Still…” He cast a glance at the impregnable cellar, the massive flags of the floor. “Yes, you can see their point. They’d hardly expect him to get out of there again.”

“But no papers,” pointed out the sergeant.

There was not a letter, not a personal document of any kind, anywhere in the case.

“Nothing in the coat, either.” Nor had there been any wallet in the pockets of the rotting jacket; if there had been any leather or plastic object there, something would still have remained of it. “No, somebody cleaned him out of all identification—the quick ways, anyhow.”

George lifted out, layer after layer, the contents of the case, and ran his fingers into the pleated pockets in the back. Nothing there. Well-padded pockets, though. The strong elastication that held the mouths of the compartments closed had still a little spring left in it, and the tough plastic had pulled the cloth lining away from the frame at its outer corners, the adhesive being long ago denatured by damp. Something showed between lining and outer covering, the edge of a wad of paper and a thin rim of black, like the spine of a notebook. George was sliding his finger delicately along the sticky, folded hem of beige cloth to enlarge the opening, when Sergeant Moon leaned down from the hall to announce that Dr. Goodwin was on the line from the hospital mortuary with a preliminary report. George abandoned the suitcase, and went up to take the call.

“I won’t go into clinical details now, George, you’ll be getting the lot in writing as soon as I can get it to you. But in a nutshell—what you’ve got here is an adult male about five feet seven tall, rather lightly built, one or two medical points that may help an identification—a finger-bone in his left middle finger broken at some time, probably before he was fully grown. And his teeth are his own, and show some dental work that could be a clincher if you get a lead on his locality and can trace the right dentist. I’d say somewhere in his late thirties—not above forty. How long dead? That’s rather a hard one, but at least three years. But the upper limit could be as much as eight or nine. There are contradictory factors—or ambiguous ones, anyhow—there always are in these long-distance cases. I may be able to improve on that estimate, though, when I’ve finished with him.”

“And the cause of death?”

“Your sergeant has it in a neat little pillbox, signed and sealed and headed for ballistics. A bullet in the brain, my boy. Entered through the left temple, probably at close range—a few feet at the most. Looks like a .25 to me, one of the vest pocket jobs.”

“Yes,” said George, “that sounds right. The first shot missed him and buried itself in the door, the second, fired at shorter ranger still, took its time and got him. He couldn’t get away, not from there. There wasn’t any way out—it only looked as if there was.”

“Thanks very much for that instalment, George. Tell me the whole thrilling story some time over a bottle.”

“Certainly,” said George, “if you’re paying.”

“On my derisory fee?”

Dr. Goodwin rang off with his usual aplomb; and George returned, not elated but encouraged, to his cellar. Sergeant Moon had scrupulously refrained from touching the lining behind the pockets in the case.

“You could have gone ahead,” said George, raising the clammy blue lid again. And in answer to Moon’s look of inquiry: “He was shot. Seemingly with the same type of cartridge by the same gun and at the same time. He was the reason for the hole in the door, for the floor being taken up and refusing to lie down properly again, for the knocker being put on to cover the hole, and for the door being moved in the hope of avoiding any investigation into why it dragged. A very, very important man. I really wonder why! What made him so important?”

“And how long does Goodwin reckon he’s been here?” asked Sergeant Moon, watching George’s probing finger slide into the gap where the adhesive had perished, and ease its way along the back of the pocket.

“Anything from three to eight or nine years, on present estimate. Which could put him right back into old Robert’s time, of course…”

Gummily the lining parted from the frame, and now there was not mistaking what the victim had secreted there. Behind the twin pockets were aligned two damp and odorous wads of paper, engraved in steely blue. Not a fortune, but still quite a respectable little nest-egg in five-pound notes. And behind them a thin, dark-blue book with a coat of arm in gilt, and two little oval windows, the upper of which presented them with a still perfectly legible name in a printed hand:

“Mr. T.J. CLAYBOURNE.”

“Well, well!” said Sergeant Moon reverently. “Somebody who put him here got rid of every direct identification they knew about, but they didn’t know about this. Pretty cagey, wasn’t he? He had his passport with him, and he had his savings, and it looks as it he was heading for somewhere healthier, only not fast enough.” He peered curiously at the cover. “L. Issued at Liverpool. Pity passports don’t actually carry the owner’s address anywhere, but we can soon get it from Liverpool. Better than a dental chart, any day.”

George was carefully parting the bluish pages, spotted with mildew and limper than originally, but still capable of being turned cleanly, and still retaining their text. “Profession! Sales representative. Covers a multitude of sins and virtues both. Place and date of birth: Kirkheal Moor, Lancashire, September 15th, 1931. Height: 5 feet 1/2 inches. Description— what do we want with a description, there he is!”

And there he was, in the two by one-and-a-half inch photograph opposite, a small-featured, oval, slightly ferrety face topped with wavy dark hair worn short and parted on the left. Rather startled eyes stared wildly, as usual in passport pictures, but their colour seemed also to be dark, and their setting well-shaped and spacious. George turned the page. “Yes, here we are—the Liverpool stamp. He was alive in February 1965, at any rate. That’s when this was issued.”

“If we can prove it belongs to our corpse,” Brice pointed out diffidently. “Maybe we do need that dental chart, after all.”

“Wait a minute, there’s something else here inside the back—a newspaper cutting.” George slid it out and unfolded it, and Sergeant Moon and Brice leaned close to look over his shoulders. It had been cut from the middle of a page, apparently, for it bore no upper margin, but as soon as Brice set eyes on the clear black type and lay-out he said what they were all thinking: “That’s the
Midland Evening Echo
, I’d know that style anywhere.”

Spread out carefully before them, limp but intact, was a two-column heading:

“Obituary: MIDSHIRE LANDOWNER AND

SPORTSMAN KILLED IN

HUNTING FIELD.”

Someone had found more than a thousand words to say about the deceased, more renowned in his death than in the last twenty years or so of his life, or at least renowned in a different and more printable way. It had not, after all, been possible to celebrate his principal local activities without running the risk of a libel action, but his death had been just as colourful and entailed no such dangers.

The very clear photograph, printed web offset in one column, was unmistakably of Robert Macsen-Martel the older, lean, racy and handsome in hunting pink, on top of the ageing horse which had finally broken his neck and its own at an impossible fence on the shoulder of Callow, in February 1965. Only in this picture horse and man shone glossier and younger than on the day of their death. The widow must have given the editor a photograph at least ten years old.

Hugh arrived with a rush and an outcry just as they all three had their heads together over his father’s obituary. They heard voices clashing in the hall above, Hugh’s loud and agitated, demanding to know what the hell was going on here, where the intruders were and what they thought they were doing there, anyhow, Robert’s low but sharp, ordering him with considerable asperity to keep his voice down, which rather surprisingly he suddenly did. George pocketed the passport and the cutting instantly, and Sergeant Moon flicked the folded coat out of sight under the trestle table, and dropped the lid of the suitcase.

“That’s young Hugh home, breathing fire by the sound of it.”

“I’d better have a word with him, too, I suppose. Though from all accounts he managed to break away some time ago—small blame to him.”

“Hasn’t slept in this house oftener than about five or six times a year, for years now,” Sergeant Moon confirmed, “and then only to please the old lady. But blood’s thicker than water, seemingly, when it comes to the point.”

George ran up the stone steps, and collided with Hugh at the top. A vivid, distressed face, still slightly travel-stained from the drive home, glared into his. The young man’s impetuous rush carried them irresistibly a tread or two backwards down the stairs again, and George gave way obligingly and let himself be persuaded. Hugh saw below him the open dark cavern of the cellar doorway, the lights concentrated in one corner, where two men sifted soil patiently into a bucket, and the rectangle of empty blackness cutting between. A look of total shock, blank almost as unconsciousness, dropped like a mask over his face, and melted into scared and agitated humanity again only with painful slowness. He pressed a few steps lower, against the steadying barrier of George’s arm, and looked round at the trestle table and its load, the suitcase closed now, the clothes covered with a piece of sheeting. The heavy, chill odour of disturbed earth hung upon the air and stirred sluggishly at every movement. Hugh’s nostrils dilated and quivered like those of a high-mettled horse.

“It’s true, then,” he said. His tone as unexpectedly flat and practical, as though he had shed his excitement, at any rate for the moment with his uncertainty. “They told me you’d issued a statement—is that right?—that you’d found a body somewhere in the house, Rob said you were down here. I couldn’t believe it—I still can’t. I don’t see how it’s possible. It has to be some grisly mistake—or else it’s a plant…”

“By the police, you mean?” George asked mildly.

“No, I didn’t mean that—but damn it, even if I did, please remember that’s no more incredible to you than your version is to me.” Hugh’s eyes flared again; one of them he had rubbed with fingers lightly soiled by grease, and unwittingly awarded himself a black eye which gave him a curiously youthful and disarming appearance. “I wish to hell I’d been here.”

“I wish you had, but it wouldn’t have altered events at all,” George said reasonably, “apart from being a comfort and encouragement to your family, of course. As for what you call our version, we haven’t one. We’re confronted with a series of realities. The pattern is obscure, and we’re not in the habit of jumping to conclusions too soon.”

“Come off it!” said Hugh shortly. “You’ve questioned my brother, you’ve cautioned him, you’ve dug up the floors in his house, and you try to tell me he’s not under suspicion of anything? And I tell you straight, if it’s a choice between believing Robert’s done anything wrong, and believing the police are liars, I know which I’ll take. That’s another for your series of realities! But there could be other people with an interest in planting bodies where they don’t belong…”

“Such as the murderer?”

“Or murderers.”

“And entry to this house is so easy?”

“Criminals manage to get in wherever they want to get in urgently enough, don’t they?” He was arguing fiercely and intelligently now, but there was something in his eyes all the time that said he was fighting a rearguard action, and in his heart knew it very well. “I’ve heard of houses robbed while the whole damn’ family were gawping at the telly. And
out
of anywhere they want to urgently enough, too—like prison, for instance. Don’t tell me nobody could ever, in any circumstances break in here and have the whole night to himself. Just two people sleeping in the house, and walls a foot thick! And as far as I know that cellar was never locked—there was nothing in it, so nobody went there much…”

“Believe it or not,” said George patiently, “we even think of things like that. Also of simple possibilities like lost keys being copied, or houses occasionally being let or loaned while the family is away on holiday. And now you’re here, maybe you’ll be able to help us about things like that. If you’ll wait for about ten minutes, upstairs in the drawing-room, one of us will come and join you, and we’ll examine the outside possibilities.”

They were all watching him, even the two men inside the cellar, all with closed faces but sympathetic eyes. There was nothing he could do but retreat, since nothing which had been found here could now be canceled out. He 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.”