“He’s already got all the tools there are,” said Sergeant Moon.
“That’s the style!” He turned to the telephone as the distant voice hailed him. “Hullo, Joe? George Felse here. Can you get hold of Professor Grazier for me, and get him out here as soon as possible? If he’s not available, find me somebody else who knows about ironwork—especially medieval ironwork. And I mean knows! Somebody who can date things within a quarter of a century, and locate them by district, school, master, or whatever goes for iron. If he knows as much about stone and wood carving of the same period, all the better. Make it urgent.” He cradled the receiver. “Get some of your boys on the gates, Jack, and ward off all witnesses for the present. This is one even the grapevine may miss if nobody actually sees it. This bunch of yours—you know this?—work mainly by intelligent deduction. Sometimes I think we ought to recruit the bar of the ‘Duck’ en masse into the force. But who’s to deduce a silly, simple move like taking the knocker off a door?”
It took the expert an hour and a half to get out to Mottisham, but it took Constable Crowe, that solid, silent, deft-handed countryman, just about as long to detach the four heavy bolts that secured the knocker to the door. Their heads were buried among the burgeoning leaves that sprouted from the mane of the mythical beast, and spread out into a round plaque flattened against the oak. Crowe dealt with them one by one, delicately and slowly, reluctant to deface even the black paint with which—surely misguidedly?—they had been coated along with the knocker. Evidence was evidence; and besides, they might find nothing beneath, and be faced with the necessity of restoring what they had displaced. The first minor revelation came when he had removed two of them, and the whole mass of iron submitted to being moved slightly in its place, to reveal a frilled edge of thick, soiled varnish beneath. The knocker had not been disturbed when the door was cleaned. Therefore the knocker had not been restored to its place only when the move to the church was contemplated, and the necessary cleaning begun, but at some previous time and for some other reason. After Alix Trent’s visit; yet before the transfer to the National Trust was contemplated.
The third bolt came away with a slight, grating protest, and was laid aside on a sheet of newspaper beside the other two. The beast’s head, sanctuary ring and all, could now be turned in a half-circle before it jarred and stuck, and Crowe turned it gently back again.
The fourth bolt was tenacious, but subject to manipulation because it was the last. Crowe withdrew it, laid it beside its fellows, and used both hands reverently to dislodge and lift away the entire weighty mass of the knocker, beast, ring, leaves and all. It left the wood with an audible sucking sigh, and he placed it upon the extended sheet of polythene set to receive it.
Shoulder-high to a man of medium height, chest-high to a man a little taller, the irregular, rounded blot of old varnish darkened like a wen against the pale, scoured oak. At first glance that blank, uncleaned surface appeared to be all they had uncovered; on closer inspection there was one minute freckle on its smoothness, a little to the left of centre, a round mole where the glancing light clotted, as though the varnish had been applied over an oblique knothole. Only this knothole was not darker, but faintly paler than the surrounding wood.
“Touched up,” said Crowe, and gouged delicately at the spot. The varnish flaked. He scraped a few shreds of dry matter into his palm. “Plastic wood. Somebody filled up—a hole.” He didn’t want to name it more exactly, not yet. No one else wasted words on it, either. It was plain that this had been done some time before the restoration was undertaken. “Want me to drill it out?”
“Do that,” said George, “and go carefully.”
Busy as a terrier at a rat-hole, the drill kicked back pale, powdery shreds of plastic wood, and buried itself deeper and deeper into the mass of the door. What can you hide in a door? George had asked earlier. And where? There it is, a slab of wood with two sides, everything about it visible to the naked eye. No, not quite everything.
In a very short time they had a deep, narrow hole, disappearing obliquely into more than five inches of hard, ancient oak, but not emerging on the inner side. A very minute, staring hole, the significance of which there was no mistaking. The drill changed its tune, emitted a brief, indignant whine, and was halted on the instant. Crowe looked at George, and slowly withdrew the drill in a fine flurry of dust.
“We’ve got something besides wood in here, sir.”
George selected a long, slender screwdriver from among the tools, and probed gingerly down into the tunnel. A faint, metallic scratching jarred through his fingers like an electric shock.
The expert on medieval iron had slipped his car into the vicarage drive unnoticed while they were all concentrating on the job in hand, and been directed to the porch by a lurking constable. He came up behind George silently, a thin, stringy individual with mild, shrewd eyes. They had met before, though not over medieval iron; the whole art of the period was his province, and he had once given judgement on a forged lime-wood Madonna ten inches high, in a very different case.
“What you need, George, my boy,” said the expert kindly, “isn’t a medievalist, it’s a ballistics expert. If that isn’t a bullet-hole, then I’ve never seen one.”
“Thank you,” said George gravely, “thank you very much. I’d just come to the same conclusion, only I can take it a stage further. This isn’t merely a bullet-hole—-it’s complete with bullet as well.”
“To be fair,” pronounced Professor Brazier critically, hefting the iron mass in both hands to turn it to the light, “it’s a very creditable shot at a match. Even the style of the local carving and ironwork here do appear to be much the same. A layman would never question it. But actually the knocker is at least a hundred years newer than the latch and lock on the door. That needn’t preclude the knocker having been made for the door, of course, but in fact this iron can be placed pretty accurately in Sussex, and the possibility of its being made there expressly for use here is negligible. It isn’t even likely that it should find its way up here by chance. Nobody’d go far afield for what he wanted, this district had its own smiths, and they knew their business. But I’ll tell you something, George—if somebody did hunt round and buy this piece specifically to cover that bullet-hole, then it was somebody who knows his stuff a good deal better than average. And he probably had to hunt a good long time before he found what he was looking for. You might trace it through the antique trade. Somebody must have sold it to him.”
“Thanks,” said George, “but why go through the entire antique trade? There are thousands of them—there’s only one of him.”
They had to wait two hours more for the report on the recovered bullet. Sergeant Moon had been dispatched home for a well-earned rest and a brief look at his more regular responsibilities, and it was Detective Sergeant Brice who answered the telephone and handed the receiver across the table. “Here’s ballistics on the line, sir.”
“Hullo, what have you got for us?”
“It’s what you had for us,” corrected the cheerful, enthusiastic voice of the distant expert. “We don’t get many fired bullets in that sort of condition. Whoever fired it might have been deep-freezing it for posterity. What did you say it was in?”
“About six inches of medieval oak,” said George.
“Yes—splendid! If you were buried in that, George, you’d be there in good condition to hear the crack of doom and bob up fresh as a daisy. Well, this little job ought to penetrate about three inches of soft pine board at fifteen feet, which makes it pretty clear that it was fired from closer than that in this case—say not more than six to eight feet from the door. It’s a .25 ACP—6.35 millimeters—and fired from an automatic pistol. I think it ought to be good enough to identify the gun, with luck, supposing you ever find the right one out of the thousands there must be running around loose with this type of ammo in—even this long after the war!”