Nobbie came and leaned her fair head and impudently pretty face across the bar towards Brian. “D’you know they’ve been grilling all of us, everybody who was in last night, about this Bristow fellow? In case some of the boys set up some sort of a fright for him in the night. But they never! Well, you know, don’t you? It is true, isn’t it, that you saw something? Go on, do tell us! You know what they’re saying? They’re saying when the door was moved back again, the abbot came with it! It was something like a monk you saw, wasn’t it? Go on, you can tell me,” she coaxed, her voice sinking to a confidential whisper. “I won’t say a word to a soul, honest, if you don’t want me to.”
Ellie Crouch materialised as if by magic, and tapped her daughter smartly on the shoulder. “Come on, are you serving here or not? Can’t you see Mr. Swayne’s waiting for a refill?”
Nobbie withdrew to her duty with a toss of her blonde head. Brian had always wondered why Mrs. Crouch had to shove her oar in every time Nobbie spoke civilly to him. Not that it mattered, because he was not in the least interested in Nobbie, he thought her fat and fair, and he liked his girls active and dark. Still, he wondered what the old lady (Ellie was a year older than his own mother and nearly as pretty!) had against a likely lad like him.
“You don’t want to let young Brian Jennings get too familiar with you,” said Ellie confidentially to her daughter, after Brian had departed. “After all, they haven’t solved this affair, have they, and he was in the middle of it this time, you can’t be too careful.” Her conscience pricked; she couldn’t really believe that the police suspected the Jennings boy, any more man she did, but all means are fair means in a crisis. “You can do better than a verger’s son,” she concluded, again doing herself less than justice, for in fact the distinct possibilities and attractions of the verger’s son were the chief cause of her disquiet.
“Him?” said Nobbie, astonished. “Oh, Mom! Why, he used to sit next to me nearly all through school. Me go overboard for Brian? It’d feel like necking with me own brother!”
Sometimes Ellie Crouch’s family, in their forthright innocence, came out with things that made her blood run cold.
The office telephone rang at about eleven o’clock on Monday morning, and Dinah went to answer it in the certainty that it would be Hugh with the final placings.
“It’s too early,” Dave warned her. “They won’t have all their sums done for hours yet, and what’s the good of reporting a provisional result?”
Dinah came back from the telephone with a thoughtful look on her face, and a small spark of curiosity in her eye as she looked at her brother. “It’s for you. It’s a girl. Name of Alix Trent.” It was a name she had never heard, but she carefully kept the question out of her voice. Dave could not even be sure why he had not told Dinah about Alix; perhaps out of the lingering fear that after all nothing might come of it.
His face gave nothing away as he went to the telephone; hut certainly he went with alacrity.
“I know you told me to get in touch with the police,” said the creamy voice of Alix over the line, without preamble, “but I needed to confirm something with you first. I couldn’t be sure whether to trust my memory or not. It was almost the last thing you said to me on Friday, unless I’m making a mistake. You said ‘anything you think of about the door or the knocker.’ You did say ‘knocker,’ didn’t you?”
Yes, that’s right.“ But he couldn’t see where she was leading him.
‘Good, so I wasn’t imagining things. It was the only time you mentioned a knocker, as far as I remember, so I wanted to make sure of my ground before I started anything.”
“You mean you’ve remembered something odd about the knocker?”
“Very odd,” agreed Alix. There was one instant of curious and speculative silence on the line. “There wasn’t any knocker!”
CHAPTER 7
« ^ »
It was the simplest discrepancy possible, and it had never for one moment occurred to him. He couldn’t help reacting with: “Are you sure?” though the last thing he had intended was to cast any doubts on anything for which Alix vouched with such certainty.
“Absolutely sure. I couldn’t tell you any details of the carving now, but I do know it was just a great carved door, with nothing whatever stuck on it, except the big iron latch and lock that fastened it.”
“But why?” he wondered blankly. “Why, in that case, should anyone have put a knocker on it now?”
“I can think of one good reason,” said Alix sensibly. “It had one originally, which for some reason was taken off, and when they gave the door back to the church they simply restored the knocker, too.”
“Yes. That makes sense.” But it was plain from the tone of his voice that he was not satisfied. If Bracewell had been mistakenly pursuing a mystery which was no mystery, and a scoop which was no story at all, why should anyone want to kill him? Why knock the second inquisitive stranger on the head? “I can think of one not so good one, too. To hide something queer about that part of the door.”
“Yes,” she agreed after a startled pause, “that’s also possible.”
Bracewell had had a camera with him on his second visit, though he had denied carrying one. Everyone knew Brian had found it in the waste dump in the churchyard, minus the film. According to a witness, Bracewell had been photographing details of the oldest carving in the church. Checking whether everything matched, the period, the workmanship, the type of iron, the decorative style? Or if not actually checking on these things for himself, compiling a file of evidence for someone who could?
“You never mentioned to Bracewell about there being no knocker?”
“It never arose. If you hadn’t spoken the word I should never have thought about it.” And she added reasonably: “But he had his own memories of that trip, he may well have hit on the same point in the end. He went back to investigate on the spot, anyhow.”
He had, and look where it got him!
“Alix, the police ought to hear this from you, and as soon as possible. Are you free, if I come along and collect you now?”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “How soon can you be here?”
“In about an hour and a quarter.”
“Good, I’ll be waiting.”
Opportunity dazzled him, suddenly turning the tragedies of Mottisham bright side out. “And then come home and meet my sister. Have tea with us. You needn’t hurry back, need you?”
“No,” said Alix, “I needn’t hurry back.”
It was somewhat after three o’clock that afternoon when Alix and Dave left the temporary police office at the vicarage. Sergeant Moon closed the door upon them reverently, and let out a great breath of mingled wonder, elation and achievement.
“The door! I always said it was the door! As simple as that! Who says we never get any luck? A very nice little witness, that!”
Detective Constable Reynolds, who had taken down Alix’s brief and brisk statement at her dictation, and was now watching her furtively through the window out of the corner of his eye, as she walked away with Dave down the vicarage drive, also thought her a very nice little witness, but reflected sadly that she seemed to be already booked. She had certainly tossed a fire-cracker into the workings of the case.
“Well, do we get the thing off?” asked Sergeant Moon practically.
“We do, and right away,” said George. “We also get a check on the question of whether it does or doesn’t belong where it is.” He lifted the telephone and dialled the forensic laboratory. “Your young Crowe is the man of his hands around here, Jack, isn’t he? Get hold of him and tell him what the job is, and he’ll tell us what tools he wants.”