Ellis Peters - George Felse 10 - The Knocker On Death's Door (21 page)

“She was not a lovable person, my mother,” he said at length, choosing his words with scrupulous care, “and I wasn’t very attached to her, any more than she was to me. But I respected and admired her. She had standards I shared. And she loved Hugh. And she didn’t deserve
that
! What else could I have done?”

He needed no answer from George, and George offered none. And in a moment Robert resumed strongly:

“I’d tried at first to get the bullet out, but it was impossible without doing much more damage, so I left it alone and just plugged the hole and varnished over it. But you wouldn’t credit how visible that spot still was to me. It seemed to get more obvious every time I looked at it, and I looked often. Touching it up only seemed to make it worse. I thought of a knocker, as one way of hiding it for good. I had to hunt round for some months before I found one from much the same period, at an antique shop in Brighton. My mother never went into the cellar, or I should have had to tell her some story to account for it, and that would have been awkward, because later I had to concoct another story to cover a much wider field, and I doubt if I should have had the luck to make all the details fit. But she didn’t go, and she didn’t see it, and there wasn’t any problem, not then.

“Only the time came when we simply couldn’t carry the burden of the house any longer. We had to get a grant, or something of the kind, and these negotiations with the National Trust began, and then I saw that the door would have to go. I never could get the flags back properly, it would have given everything away. We were going to be dealing with meticulous experts, and if they had a fine original door there, then it would have to be put into as near perfect order as possible. I was afraid they might want to relay the flags. So all I could think of was to make up that tale about the south porch of the church, and if there wasn’t much evidence for it, there wasn’t any to disprove it. When it came to the point, my mother wasn’t any problem. I had only to tell her that my father had once told me the story as a family tradition—the sort of thing he laughed about, but might occasionally trot out to amuse the children—and she accepted it as gospel, as she always did everything that came from him, however false. I said we’d happened on the knocker once among a lot of junk in what used to be the tack-room in the stable block, and he’d told me it belonged to this door, and said in his casual way that it—door, knocker and all—ought to be in the church porch if everybody had his rights, and some day he’d put it back there. That was enough for her. Whatever
he
had suggested, however frivolously, was sacred law to her.”

“And the other story, ”said George, “the one about the monk found dead, burned by the sanctuary knocker—you made that up, too, didn’t you? Hoping Miss Cressett would pass it on, as she did.”

“I had to. I knew someone else was going to be found dead there very soon. Hugh had just told me. He had a car to deliver that evening, and when he doubled back on foot through the churchyard he found this photographer… Hugh was always quick to grasp the immediate implications… and crazily quick to act. He never looked beyond.”

“And you, as usual, were supposed to provide cover for him,” George said. “And for your mother’s sake you tried.”

The pale lips tightened painfully. Robert was averse to any appearance of making excuses. “I’m sorry I put it like that. What I’ve done I’ve done, and I prefer to pay. It makes me even more ashamed that I made use of Dinah. I told you, I blame myself, no one else. But I was at the end of my tether then, to think it was all repeating itself, and all my fault.”

“All, Robert?”

“I was responsible—I mean a responsible person. He was not.”

It seemed as good a division of humanity into two significant halves as any other, George thought, but it was hard on those who located themselves in the half that carries the burdens. He looked down soberly at the pale, drained face on the pillow, and totted up in his own mind the number of chargés he could bring, if he so chose, against this responsible person who would never deny one count out of all the possible counts with which society could accuse him. Concealing a death, accessory after the fact of murder, harbouring—why go on? There was a scapegoat handy who could save society a good deal of money and scandal, and Robert a prolonged refinement of suffering. Hugh had killed, let Hugh bury the dead, too, Hugh who had never lifted anyone else’s load in his life. It might count almost as virtue to him if after death he was made to bear Robert’s share of this as well as his own.

“You’ll want an official statement from me,” said Robert, “about all this. I’ll make it whenever you think fit.”

George thought fit that some judicious editing should be done on the story before it took any official form, but he did not say so. There is such a thing as a justice which dispenses with law—when it has the rare chance that hurts nobody and benefits many. In any case, Robert was going to spend weeks, probably months, under orthopaedic treatment.

“I shall need only a short statement to include in my report. I’ll prepare a text and read it to you—in a few days, there’s no hurry now. Obviously there isn’t going to be any trial, you see. You needn’t worry about anything. I hope I haven’t tired you out too much—”

“Not at all, Chief Inspector,” said the incorrigibly polite, dutiful, obstinate lips, pale with strain.

“Good, then I think as Sister hasn’t been after my blood so far, I might venture to send her in for a few minutes. You’ve got another visitor waiting.”

Dinah came to the bedside quietly and gravely, and sat down with a composure which was not maintained without effort and anxiety. She saw, but did not choose to see, the flickering succession of emotions that passed over Robert’s face, astonishment, alarm, dismay, despair, longing, hope, the resolute and heroic rejection of hope. Even when the face closed up on her and sealed itself like a sealed door, she declined to remember anything except the brief glimpse of longing, and the even briefer coruscation of hope, quenched implacably as soon as it was born.

“Hullo!” she said. “They told me I could have just ten minutes. I had to see for myself that you really were going to be all right.” She had insisted on travelling with him in the ambulance that night, though herself, so they told her afterwards, in a mild state of shock, quiet, practical, determined and in nobody’s way, Dinah suddenly grown up in an hour. An experience like that is going to leave its mark; it had left Dinah extended, enlightened, a person completed, mature enough to know all too well that her losses had not been great, and to turn a shrewd, honest, even predatory eye upon her gains. How curious! She had never once hunted Hugh, never for a moment been jealous of him!

“I’m quite all right,” said Robert in a tightly controlled voice, “thank you. It was very kind of you to come.”

He had recovered a little colour from somewhere, his thin face was suffused, even his spiky hair, dry as quills, had acquired a kind of vivacity in her presence, insisted on bristling in an awkward, almost a boyish manner.

“Dave drove me into town,” she said, “they’re waiting for me in the car park.” She had to keep talking, or something would break. “They’ll only let in one person at a time to see you. Dave plans on marrying his Alix next spring. I thought you might like to know that some good came out of all this. In other circumstances he’d never have met her.”

She was busy unwrapping the small parcel she had brought with her, and his eyes, for all their unhappiness, could not help following the movements of her fingers.

“I brought you this—look! I wanted to find something permanent for you, not just flowers. Did I guess right?” She had gone to a lot of trouble to find what she wanted, not even knowing what it would be until she found it. Hospital toys should be special, intensely personal to both the giver and the receiver, and if possible inexhaustible. She had not even realised until now why she was so set on finding the right gift for him, never having considered gifts as a paradoxical mark of proprietorship.

She set the little painted box on the edge of his bed, and lifted the lid, and the minute powdered musician at the minute spinet within began to make jerky little movements to the tinkling strains of an early Mozart minuet, the notes sweet and fine-drawn as spun sugar. It would have gone on playing for three of their ten minutes, but he was too weak to endure it for so long. He quivered feebly in his plaster, and turned his head away. He was not, in his own view, the kind of person she should be approaching, with her charity and youth and candour. The darkness in his own memory, the bitterness in his own experience stood like a vast wall between them.

“You shouldn’t have come,” he said.

“Don’t you like it?” she asked disingenuously. The musical-box continued to spin sparkling strands of sugar. “It isn’t a new one, it’s early nineteenth-century. Don’t you think they did this sort of thing better then?”

He reached a hand out blindly, found the little box and closed the lid upon it, cutting off the end of the minuet. But he did it with a wild tenderness that was very revealing. “You know it’s lovely… you know I…” He waited a full twenty seconds, motionless and rigid with effort, to regain control of his voice; she recognised that relentless patience in him.

“Dinah, you mustn’t come here again. You shouldn’t have come now. Much better for you not to know me, I’ve done you enough harm—I and my family. You must realise that I’m a criminal. There are very serious accounts against me, it’s inevitable that I shall be charged…”

She said not a word about the doubts she held on that score. All she said was: “I don’t mind that. It makes no difference to me.”

“But it does to me. I tried to tell you, that day.. I couldn’t let you go ahead and link your life… I know I gave you a false impression, I was very clumsy. I wanted to warn you not to waste your youth and warmth and goodness on a Macsen-Martel—to steer clear of us as you would of the plague…”

“But you’re
not
a Macsen-Martel,” said Dinah bluntly.

He was shaken out of his resolute despair as rudely as out of his feudal dream of responsibility. It was salutary. He lay in astonished silence and passivity for a long moment, and then he began to laugh. Rather precariously, because his physical state was still very low, but so gently that she felt no need to hush and soothe him out of it. It ran through him like a life-giving pulse.

“Oh, Dinah, I’d forgotten,” he said, quaking with the first pure mirth of years, “I’d quite forgotten I’m a bastard. It’s true, my mother’s maiden name came straight out of the commercial midlands—grandmother was the Martel who married money. Do you know what that makes me now? Plain Robert Smith!”

He laughed himself, predictably, into tears of weakness. She wanted to touch him, to reassure him, to involve him once and for all and drive him farther along the road on which she had already started him; she wanted to open the lid of the musical-box again and set her seal on him as shamelessly as if she had put a ring on his finger, or in his nose. But she did none of these things. The ten minutes were up, and he’d had enough for one day. And she knew how to be patient, too.

“And what’s the matter with Smith for a name?” said Dinah mildly. And she patted his nearer hand—it was clasped very firmly over her gift—and walked confidently out of the ward.

[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]

[A 3S Release— v1, html]

[June 26, 2007]