Ellis Peters - George Felse 10 - The Knocker On Death's Door (3 page)

“You
devil
!” whispered Dinah.

Hugh didn’t even trouble to warn her to silence; he knew she disapproved, or at the very best withheld her approval, but he also knew she wouldn’t do anything to spoil the game, if it amused him.

“I didn’t even know there
was
another son,” admitted the oldest reporter, and looked round the assembled and now oddly quiet company for confirmation. Heads nodded and voices murmured; there was another son.

“Oh, yes, he exists, all right,” Hugh said sombrely, handing along the refilled pint-pot to Dave, and passing a pound note back to Nobbie at the bar. He made a brief, impressive pause, and the interested onlookers obligingly provided him with absolute silence, which he knew exactly when to break. “
I’ve seen himl”
he said in a sepulchral whisper; and that was all.

In the electric hush that followed, Nobbie’s sense of mischief got the better of her. She looked round the circle of intense faces, the natives and the strangers, and then deliberately smacked down a handful of silver and coppers on the bar.

“Your change, Mr. Macsen-Martel!”

The awful pause felt like a year, but was actually no more than a couple of seconds. Then, with exquisite tact, everyone not directly involved turned, formed new and casual groups, and began to talk abut the weather and football. It was done, and seen to be done, not in order to bury the shock for ever, but merely to keep it on ice while the victims were given a chance to slip away, so that their discomfiture could be properly and privately enjoyed by those who belonged here. And slip away they did, scarlet and speechless and hideously embarrassed. The youngest one, without so much as a word to anyone, simply picked up his coat and slunk out, the other two made a pitiful attempt to carry it off with forced smiles and a sudden pretence that they had just noticed how late it was. The big photographer, who had said least and committed himself least, took his time about withdrawing, and looked round the room defiantly before he went. In particular he looked with fixed interest at Hugh, who had not moved a muscle or said a word to ease the situation.

“You know, I
thought
you looked a bit like the old lady.”

It was an artificial exit line, and Hugh could quite well have said: “Liar!” Instead, and just as devastatingly, he said: “God forbid!” which shook the photographer considerably more.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said uneasily. “Fine, straight old lady for her age. Must be seventy, I suppose?” His eye flickered round the bar once again. “Very interesting evening! And a very interesting door!” he added with recovered assurance, and walked out with a curious private smile on his face.

The inhabitants stirred, sighed, cautiously stretched, expanding to fill the quitted space.

“Did you
have
to do that?” Hugh asked Nobbie reproachfully.

“Did
you
have to?” murmured Dinah resignedly.

“Coming to something,” marvelled Willie the Twig, “when those boys get hypersensitive.”

Saul put back his teeth, and ordered one of Ellie Crouch’s pork pies. And Nobbie, patting her blonde kiss-curl into place, said complacently. “I reckon I won, anyhow. And
they
won’t be back in a hurry.” For so far from inviting alien custom, “The Sitting Duck” was constantly compelled to protect its limited supplies of home-brewed in the interests of its regulars.

Nevertheless, within ten days one of the strangers did come back. And this time to stay.

THE photographer from Birmingham reappeared in Mottisham unexpectedly on a Tuesday morning of mid-October, shortly before noon. It was the first foggy day of the autumn, in a month which tended to be productive of thick mists in the deep, river-threaded cleft of Middlehope; but it was not the low visibility that brought the stranger crawling into the forecourt of Cressett and Martel at approximately fifteen miles an hour, and caused him to heave a sigh of relief at his safe arrival. Somewhere along the road from Comerbourne he had hit a stray stone, probably shed from a lorry, and his steering had begun to afflict him at the most inconvenient moments with a terrifying judder. He had no intention of driving a car with that sort of handicap any farther than he had to on a foggy day, and Dave’s was the first garage at the Comerbourne side of the village. The driver clambered out thankfully, and Dave came out from the workshop to serve him.

He recognised the shock-head of straw-coloured hair and the slightly racy clothes at once. “Oh, hullo, back again? What’s the trouble?”

The photographer was willing to talk. His name was Gerry Bracewell, he lived in Edgbaston—he produced a business card to prove it—and he had just driven over to take one more look at that church door, and maybe the house it came from, too. Very interesting thing, that, he said with a sly, self-satisfied smile. And now his steering had practically packed it in on him, and could Dave do anything about it by this evening? Or tomorrow morning, if necessary, he might be staying overnight in any case.

“Taking photographs in this weather?” Dave couldn’t refrain from asking him casually.

Bracewell grinned. He had an amiable, cocky, knowing smile that belonged to the city. “Haven’t even brought a camera along this time. No, just interested. You never know where there may be a story lurking, do you? Pictures I can get later if there’s anything in it.” He prowled the yard while Dave looked at the sick Morris, and for the first time his eye fell upon the two names above the entrance. “
Martel
? Is that the same one?”

“It’s all right,” said Dave from the driving-seat, “he’s gone into Comerbourne with a respray job. Yes, it’s the same one. He’s my partner.”

“One of the Macsen-Martels? That lot that gave the door back to the church?”

“The one that got away,” said Dave. “He’s been working here with me nearly four years. It’s what he likes doing, and what he’s good at.”

“Well, bully for him! A bit of a card, isn’t he?”

“That leg-pull in the ‘Duck’? They like their fun. I wouldn’t take too much notice, if I were you.”

Bracewell came closer. “He fall out with his folks, or something? I mean, it’s a bit unusual to find somebody like him cutting loose like this and working with his hands, isn’t it?”

“Not particularly. Inevitable, I should say. Feudal families are living in changed circumstances these days. All the land that went with the house is gone long ago, there never was much money. Robert works in an office, Hugh works here. They have to live.”

Not a talkative chap, Bracewell thought. Dave had told him nothing he couldn’t have got from anyone in the village. “This National Trust business. You think they’ll take the place on?”

“I think they will. It’s more or less agreed, I believe.” He himself did not think all that highly of the Abbey as an architectural monument; just a stark grey stone house with a single vast expanse of roof, and blunt, massive chimneys; but apparently there were those who did. Parts of it dated from Edward the Fourth, so they said, notably the vaulted cellars, but Dave was as little impressed by mere age as was Hugh himself. But the urgent fact was that there was no money to maintain the property, the roof, according to Hugh, leaked in half a dozen places, and something had to be done about it quickly. Either sell it—which would probably mean selling it for demolition and redevelopment—or else get the National Trust to take it over, help to maintain it, and permit the former owners to continue in residence on condition that they showed it perhaps once a week. Well, that was about as good a deal as Robert was likely to get.

“But what’s the door got to do with it? Why move a door?” Bracewell’s tone had sunk to a confidential level. “Won’t the National Trust people object, anyhow?”

“Not if it didn’t belong there, why should they? They’ll want to take over something as authentic as possible.” He slid out of the car again, and wiped his hands. “All right, leave her with me, and I’ll see what I can do. I don’t think it’s so bad. I’ll try and have it ready for you this evening, barring emergencies.”

“Fine! How late are you on the job?”

“Six, officially, but I’ll be here.” He nodded towards the house, solid and stolid in pleasant, mottled brick beyond the yard and the pumps.

“Right, but if I’m not here before six, I’ll probably be staying over, so don’t wait around for me. If I don’t show tonight, I’ll be in pretty early tomorrow. O.K.?” He fished a plump and elderly briefcase out of the back of the Morris, and departed with a confident and springy step towards the village.

Dave Cressett had run the garage for twelve years, ever since his father’s early death. He was thirty-four now, and a highly responsible, taciturn and resolute thirty-four into the bargain, having assumed mature cares early. His stature was small, his manner neat, unobtrusive and workmanlike, and his appearance nondescript, with a set of pleasant, good-natured features that seemed to be made up of oddments until he smiled, when everything fell beautifully into place. He didn’t smile too often, because he was by inclination a serious soul; but it was worth waiting for. Not a firework display like Hugh’s dazzling laughter, which he shed so prodigally all around him, but the comforting and dependable radiance of. a good fire. Everything about him was equally reliable; which was why business had prospered for Cressett and Martel. Hugh tuned and raced the firm’s cars, with dash and success, but it was on Dave that the clients depended.

Dave had known Hugh since school days, though there were five years between them. He had known Robert, too, for he was within a year of Robert’s age; but nobody had ever really known Robert, sunk as he had been beneath the weight of being the heir, even if there was precious little to inherit, and threatened to be progressively less, and ultimately nothing at all, barring a monstrous minus of debts, if his father lived much longer. Hugh was different. Hugh was carefree, did what he liked and asked afterwards, mixed with whatever company he pleased and never asked at all, got his face dirty and his nails broken playing around with motors when he should have been accumulating O and A levels, and didn’t give a damn for his Norman blood or his aristocratic status. In fact, he was so like his delightful, unpredictable, eighteenth-century anachronism of a father that there was no mistaking the implications. They represented, between them, a late burst of demoniac energy in a line practically burned out. You had only to look at the mother— seven years older than her husband, and his first cousin; they always interbred—and the elder brother to see what had happened to the race, long since bled into debility, overtaken and left standing by history. Tenacious stock, time had shown that, but exhausted at last. Somebody had to break out, marry fresh blood, get fresh heirs and plunge into fresh activities. The ghost of the name would take some laying, but Hugh already stood clear of it, neutral as a clinical observer from outer space. After all, the crude reality was that the name meant nothing now; the doctor and the hotel-keeper ranked higher in importance than the attenuated representatives of past glory, and the vigorous incomers from the towns far higher. Hugh was the one who took the realities as they came, and did not feel his powers and possibilities in any way limited.

For Dave all these considerations were very relevant indeed, because Hugh had worked himself into a partnership nearly four years ago, and the tacit understanding between him and Dinah had been growing and proliferating ever since. It wasn’t even a question of waiting for a concrete proposal; people like Dinah and Hugh didn’t function in that way, they simply grew together without words, and some day, still without words and without question, got married. If Dave knew his sister and his partner, that day was creeping up on them fast.

As far as Dave could see, it wasn’t going to have much to do with him, when it came to the point. Dinah was ten years his junior, and he had had to be father and mother to her, as well as brother, but she was twenty-four years old now, and a remarkably self-sufficient young woman, who ran the house, did the firm’s books and occasionally relieved Jenny Pelsall in the office, with apparent ease. She had all the equipment she needed, a heart, a head, a chin and a backbone. She was a pocket edition, like her brother, but good stuff lies in little compass. He wasn’t worried about Dinah, she’d find her own way, and if she chose Hugh, she wouldn’t be choosing him just for a blinding smile and a light hand on a gear-lever.

He’d got her as far as consenting to go and spend this particular evening with his people at the Abbey; the first formal encounter, this would be, but no amount of Norman blood—or blood of the princes of Powis, either, for that matter—could intimidate Dinah. And, as Hugh said, what the hell, we’re not tied to the place, we don’t have to stick around here if we don’t want to. Admittedly it’s a bit of an ordeal, Robert’s pretty dreary, to say the least of it, and the old girl’s virtually petrified in her devotion to her sacred line. But don’t let it throw you, we don’t have to see much of them when we’re married. And Dinah had said thoughtfully that she supposed they had to get it over sooner or later. Just so long, she had said, as you bring me home before I blow my top. We may not have to live in the same village afterwards, but we do have to live in the same world. And he had promised gaily, all the more readily because bringing Dinah home gave him the best excuse possible for not sleeping overnight at the Abbey. He retained his room there to please his mother, and slept in it when he had to, but he much preferred the free life in the flatlet they’d made for him over the workshop in the yard. Grooms, he said, ought to live above the stable.

Sometimes he sounded, sometimes he even looked, like his dead father, who had come head-over-heels off a horse at an impossible fence five winters ago, when the Middlehope hounds drew the shoulder of Callow, and everyone else diverged cravenly towards the gate. He had fallen on his head and shoulders and broken his neck, and there went the last survivor of the eighteenth century in these borders, trailing his comet’s-tail of heroic stories, amorous, bibulous and equestrian. For years he’d arrived and departed as unpredictably as hurricane weather, vanishing whenever he got too far into debt or into difficulties, or too many local girls were in full cry after him with paternity suits, reappearing after his wife and son had got things under control again, and always finding a warm welcome waiting. Hugh had his fierce good looks and sudden disarming moods of sweetness and hilarity; but Hugh didn’t run after women or plunge head-down into debt. He doted on cars, raced them, doctored them, made respectable money out of them. And Dinah was his only girl.

The fog thickened a little again towards evening, and Hugh was late getting back from Comerbourne. The resprayed car had to be delivered to one of the new houses on the other side of the village, which meant a ten-minute walk back from there; and Dinah was ready and waiting some time before the back door crashed open in the usual headlong style, to indicate that the junior partner was home. He came in wreathed in chilly mist and glowing apologies, six feet of tightly strung nervous energy even at the end of the working day.

Dinah rose and picked up her coat. She was wearing a plain, long-sleeved shift in a delirious orange-and-olive print, that stopped short five inches above her knees.

“You’ll shake the old lady rigid,” Dave observed, eyeing her impartially.

“From all accounts she already is rigid, anyhow. Begin as you mean to go on, I say. After all, she knows her darling boy, she wouldn’t expect him to come around with a nun.”

Hugh took the wheel as of right. It was rare for him to consent to be a passenger. She thought his touch a little edgy, though as assured as ever. Very revealing, that, Dinah considered. It looked as if he was a little more worked up about this confrontation than he pretended, and certainly more than she was.

“You won’t like it,” he said, confirming her speculations as to his state of mind. It was as near an apology for his family as he was ever likely to get.

“You never know, I might. I’m contra-suggestible. I might even like your folks, it has been known to happen in these cases.”

He gave a hollow laugh. “That’ll be the day! Still, we needn’t even stay within range, when we’re married. We could go abroad, if you’d like it. I bet you and I could do well in Canada. Did you ever think about it?—clearing out and starting fresh somewhere else?”

“No,” said Dinah comfortably, “I never did. And you never did, either, until tonight. Anyhow, who said we were going to be married? Relax, boy, it won’t be that bad!”

He relaxed a little. They were feeling their way steadily along the misty green lane behind the hotel, watching for the open gate that led into the Abbey drive. The entrance was narrow and dark, shrouded in trees. Nothing was left of the monastic buildings that had once stretched clean across the centre of the present village, except the lumpy bases of walls just breaking the ground in two places in the shrubberies. Only the abbot’s lodging remained. They saw the long level of the high roof faintly against a clearing sky, the thick column of the chimneys. Only two lighted windows broke the murky dimness. The house looked dank, dilapidated and cold.

“Look, Dinah, once we’re installed, I’ll take Robert away for a bit—don’t you think?—and let you get down to it in earnest with Mother. You won’t mind, will you? We won’t stay away long. But I’m betting on it that once you’ve broken the ice she’ll be eating out of your hand.” He rolled the car to a halt before the crumbling porch, and turned and gave her a slightly strained smile. “After all, that’s the way you affected
me
, isn’t it?”